My family is spread across the US - In past few weeks, every single house has had multiple people w COVID
It's a bumpy road and we're taking a particularly rough path with a lot of casualties
But we are building up the layers of immunity to grow out of this virus' grip on us.
Regarding building "Layers of Immunity"
Think about immunity like studying for a test
Read a textbook. Each time, you reinforce formed memory & you see something new too! Some small but useful detail
Immune memory can be considered simply - very much like regular memory
Even though the vaccines aren't stopping transmission (they were never meant to. Herd immunity shouldn't have been seen as an option) the vaccines ARE working to do EXACTLY what they were meant to do - stop disease
@awyllie13 Numerous reports show saliva comes up earlier and w Omicron there have been MANY anecdotes that throat swabs (which interact with saliva!) are turning positive BEFORE nasal swabs
And this pre-print suggests people are infectious when saliva turns positive
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Importantly, people are becoming symptomatic really fast too! As this study suggests
So we can use this to our GREAT advantage...
If beginning to feel Symptomatic - ASSUME positive, ASSUME infectious
Its finally dawning on me that there is an endless supply of ppl - many in public health & medicine - who will not understand science of testing & how to interpret the sea of (poorly performed) studies (including by CDC)
This is a failure of messaging by Federal government
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Confusion around rapid tests is becoming immensely harmful at local levels as every small town and city has their own decision makers trying to wade through a mix of confusing and often conflicting messages, with no guidance and no idea who or what to trust.
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The frustrating thing is that this doesn’t need to be hard!
The science and biology of rapid Ag tests is extremely simple/straightforward if we allow their formal evaluation to be towards why we take the tests: answering “Am I infectious” or “Do I need to isolate still?”
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