THREAD: There’s a lot to unwrap here. Basically in 2003 during the SARS outbreak there was a elder home in British Columbia which had an outbreak of a coronavirus. 1/ ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…
Because of the SARS outbreak in Asia they did RT-PCR testing for SARS-CoV on the residents of a nursing home and they came back positive. Remember I have explained before that RT-PCR testing has limitations, it detects viral particles, and can also return a positive if... 2/
...another virus is present like in this instance. This was frightening because that could decimate a nursing home, and be in the community at large which could also be undesirable. The illness though, wasn’t displaying the exact characteristics of SARS infection 3/
This had them baffled. So they sent the specimens for further testing and they came back as actually being OC43, a coronavirus which currently is considered just a “common cold.” But It’s took several layers of testing to figure this out. 4/
Meanwhile a coronavirus which for the vast majority of people, including the staff at the home, was basically just a cold like virus m, but for the frail this virus proved to be deadly. 5/
OC43 was studied in 2003 because of this outbreak, and was found to have a CFR of 8.4% in just the residents. That means that this coronavirus killed numbers in a nursing home on par with what we have seen present day with SARS-CoV2. 6/
Nursing homes sadly house the most frail among us. When what would be considered a “bad cold” in the community can kill 8.4% of people infected in a nursing home, that’s very sad. This also highlights the need to move beyond RT-PCR testing for the current epidemic. 7/
Other coronaviruses have not vanished. There is a possibility that people being tested currently have another coronavirus like OC43 and they are getting a positive for SARS-Cov2. 8/
As a society we are not paying enough attention because we have forgotten that other viruses still exist and aren’t going away. We must not conflate and pretend that other viruses don’t still exist. 9/end
