Leave it to loony Los Angeles and their activist teachers’ union to come up with a ridiculous back-to-school regimen. The powers that be have decided to test all 600,000 students and 75,000 employees for COVID-19 before going back to school. The Guardian refers to this move by the Los Angeles Unified School District as “unprecedented.” It should be called insane.
First of all, current COVID-19 testing is an uncomfortable thing. Why anyone would suggest doing this to children as young as four, who are free from symptoms, is a mystery, primarily because there is not a single documented case in the world of a child under ten passing the virus to an adult.
A review published by the NIH cannot definitively tie the transfer of the virus to children. However, genetic studies in Iceland were definitive in demonstrating transmission always went from adult to child. They also noted that children younger than ten were not likely to contract the illness.
“Children under 10 are less likely to get infected than adults and if they get infected, they are less likely to get seriously ill,” Stefansson said in an interview with Highfield later posted to the Science Museum Group’s website. “What is interesting is that even if children do get infected, they are less likely to transmit the disease to others than adults. We have not found a single instance of a child infecting parents.”
Even the South Korea study that asserted children could pass the virus said that might have happened with children ages 0-9 in a small number of cases of household transmission. Yet they could not definitively identify the index case in these instances. Iceland did the genetic analysis and found none.
Next, there are limitations to the current PCR test. The CDC reports that viral debris incapable of replication can be detected up to 90 days after a patient is recovered. This fact implies that the same viral RNA debris could be amplified in a child who had mild symptoms up to three months ago. Testing at a point in time without verifying that the virus is capable of replicating and infecting another person is useless. This additional step does not happen in the routine testing of the public. Frankly, understanding the limits of the current test makes testing in the absence of symptoms seem like an exercise in futility.
The Politicization of COVID-19 Science Is Dangerous and Inexcusable
This information is why framing all positive tests as “cases” is disingenuous and feeds panic porn. There is every reason to believe, given what we are learning about T-cell reactivity and the number of asymptomatic individuals, that the test is often picking up pieces of the virus that cannot replicate and cause an infection. Dr. Beda Stadler, the former director of the Institute of Immunology at University of Bern, first published on this in June after noting the T-cell immunity studies:
So if we do a PCR corona test on an immune person, it is not a virus that is detected, but a small shattered part of the viral genome. The test comes back positive for as long as there are tiny shattered parts of the virus left. Correct: Even if the infectious viruses are long dead, a corona test can come back positive, because the PCR method multiplies even a tiny fraction of the viral genetic material enough [to be detected]. That’s exactly what happened, when there was the global news, even shared by the WHO, that 200 Koreans who already went through Covid-19 were infected a second time and that there was therefore probably no immunity against this virus. The explanation of what really happened and an apology came only later, when it was clear that the immune Koreans were perfectly healthy and only had a short battle with the virus. The crux was that the virus debris registered with the overly sensitive test and therefore came back as “positive”. It is likely that a large number of the daily reported infection numbers are purely due to viral debris.
Early in the pandemic, Dr. Deborah Birx did discuss surveillance testing for high-risk populations. These included nursing homes and other convalescent care or group housing facilities. Schools were never mentioned as a site to monitor. Additionally, the death rates from COVID-19 for the vast majority of teachers and all students are lower than those for influenza.
Even the WHO has documented that there have been no documented cases of transmission from people that are asymptomatic to others. And the CDC has changed isolation guidelines for people with a positive PCR test and no symptoms from 14 days to 10, but you see no public policy that reflects this.
Testing in the absence of symptoms is wearing. In Georgia, where school reopening was aggressive, testing in the absence of symptoms is being done routinely. When I talk to parents and teachers, very few who test positive are developing symptoms of COVID-19, and there is no documented transmission from school to home at this point. All these tests are doing is keeping our “case” rate up artificially. Parents are openly questioning the validity of the tests.
Our Health Experts™ should weigh in sooner rather than later on the need to test children, especially those under 10, in the absence of symptoms. While administrations seem to take pride in the number of tests completed, results may be leading to an unnecessary level of panic and even suspicion about the accuracy of the test.
The COVID-19 Misinformation About Lockdowns, Testing, and Spread Continues
The city of Stockholm changed its testing protocol back in March. They only tested at-risk patients who were hospitalized. The public health officials gave the message to everyone else, even those with symptoms, to stay home until symptoms resolved or they were sick enough to come to the hospital. They also communicated that if individuals were otherwise young and healthy, they would be fine. Ultimately, Sweden’s results to date have not been significantly worse than in other countries. In many cases, its results are better than in other countries.
It is high time we get to some rational public policy in the United States. We have significant global and research data indicating COVID-19 is not fundamentally different for those under 65 than other viruses we are familiar with. Our Health Experts™ need to begin acting like this is the case and reduce the level of panic and unnecessary barriers to returning to more normal levels of activity.
Los Angeles Teachers Union Demands Money and Political Action to Reopen Schools
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