THE POSITIVE PROFESSOR
SOCIAL media’s voice of calm Karol Sikora has been signed up by the Daily Express. Readers can now enjoy his soothing advice in these troubled times that has won him hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter. If you need reassuring everything’s going to be all right read Professor Positivity.
THIS crisis has thrown up so many problems that nobody could ever have anticipated.
One in particular that has caught my attention is the story of the three young Britons stuck in an Italian “quarantine facility” for almost two months.
The conditions are pretty grim, locked up in a single room with dreadful food. They have every right to be pretty ticked off.
Time and time again they have tested positive over the seven- week period, so they stay locked up.
The test is presumably picking up fragments of dead virus which have remained in their systems.
They won’t be infectious and haven’t been for some time, but the inaccuracies of the test mean that they are still testing positive. Everyone is using the tests differently with a different number of “cycles” of amplification.
To look for tiny amounts of virus, the number of cycles is increased to 30 or 40. This can make the test oversensitive.
That sounds like a good thing, but as we’ve seen with these young men that can mean the tests are finding people who were actually infectious some time ago.
I honestly don’t know the scale of the problem, but the story from these men highlights what it can mean in reality.
It was labelled a conspiracy theory just a few months ago, but it’s clear that using hundreds of thousands of tests a day will lead to issues.
The kits aren’t perfect which is really worrying as those numbers seem to be governing the country at the moment.
Other countries have reassessed the conclusions they draw from test results, especially in people with no symptoms whatsoever.
Perhaps we should now do the same.