Two options: quarantine bubble failure or incubation longer than .. 15 days?
Both are possible, though the former is more likely. 5 day intervals for incubation seem too short for 100% safety. I believe omicron has some data points of longer incubation already.
Third option: flawed hypothesis. Swabbing the nose or throat and performing subsequent RT-PCR analysis is not an infallable indicator of whether or not someone is free from the virus SARS-CoV-2 or infected with or likely to become infected with the respiratory disease COVID-19. Before 2020 such tests were typically only used as a part of a diagnosis by a medical professional upon consultation, typically also alongside symptoms. The limitations of testing were well understood before 2020 but somehow that all got lost in the panic.
Another point is that there are animal reservoirs for SARS-CoV-2. We've known this since well before the zero-covid debacle, making such a plan was doomed to fail, as it did. It's likely that the virus can live in intestinal tracts of animals, including humans, for long periods without being detected and destroyed by the host's immune system. This makes the use of negative nose/throat swab tests as a guarantee of no subsequent infection a fallacy.
The way we deal with COVID is to stop testing asymptomatic people and use the plethora of effective early treatment protocols we've developed since as early as December 2019 to vastly reduce the need for hospital treatment in those that do develop symptoms.
> Nose swabs reveal whether you're shedding the particles and thus infectious. It doesn't matter if you're infected if you're not shedding the virus.
No, they really don't. Swabbing for RNA picks up gene fragments that may or may not be from infectious virus -- it's why we see positive tests for months after infection in some people.
Swabbing for viral protein is debatably more likely to detect the thing of interest (the virus itself, in some semblance of functioning order), but these tests also have a high false-negative rate (around 10% for the better tests I've seen; I have never heard of a test with a sub-percent FN rate, as you claim). You can be shedding live virus and these tests won't pick it up, either because you're not shedding enough, or because the antibodies in the test don't bind to the protein in your sample for whatever reason.
Either way, you're measuring a proxy for what you really care about. A true test of infection involves taking a sample and incubating in cell culture. Nobody does this, except to validate the original tests and provide clear positive and negative samples. It's slow and orders of magnitude more expensive than even PCR testing. But this is the direct test for infectious virus. Everything else is an approximation.
(Let me be clear, though: I wholeheartedly support the use of antigen tests -- even ones with low sensitivity -- over the insanity we're doing now in the US. It's just bad to misrepresent what they're actually doing.)
Agree with all of this. PCR literally involves amplifying segments of genetic material so it can be detected. All you need is a segment of genetic material, not the whole virus.
However, I’m not sure the value in antigen testing? Sure, when you’re traveling or have to into a higher risk situation.
But Singapore decided to freely give out antigen tests and what happened was people who tested positive showed up at the ER. And the antigen tests weren’t reliable, so PCR had to confirm. And they have a high vaccination rate so after all that testing the answer was “go home and if you get really sick, come back”.
It finally dawned on them that could just be the message anyways - if you don’t feel bad, don’t worry. If you do, you can test but don’t seek medical care unless you have severe symptoms.
The value of cheap, ubiquitous antigen testing is that you can be pretty sure that you don't have the virus, which allows scared people to have some sense of control. Even though these tests have a high false-positive rate, it's pretty unlikely that you'll test negative on multiple independent tests, so the cheap and ubiquitous part is important. Scared people can fixate their fear on a metric that actually correlates with transmission. Negative test? No need to freak out about going to the store.
That said, your point is well-taken that people can be idiots about testing positive. We do need to get over this fear and accept that the virus is endemic, and that vaccines work to prevent serious illness. We're now talking about miniscule risks that we would have rightfully shrugged off in any previous year, but folks have been terrorized, and they're desperately looking for control. Any tool that can calm that fear is a good tool.
> Nose swabs reveal whether you're shedding the particles and thus infectious.
On the "shedding" point, not necessarily. The virus can be present in but contained by the immune response from the mucosae of the upper respiratory tract in such a way that it is unable to spread into the lungs and cause COVID-19, yet not shed in large enough quantities to infect others. Given time, a healthy immune system will deal with the virus in the nose and throat, often without the host even noticing. Such a situation would set off a PCR or rapid test but not present a meaningful COVID-19 infection risk to the others. (In fact, one hypothesis for why positive cases rise soon after vaccination and booster campaigns start is because of the well understood phenomenon of reduced immune response for a short time after vaccination, giving such virus already present in the upper respiratory tract at time of vaccination the edge it needs to get into the lungs.)
And the cycle thresholds on PCR tests are often set nonsensically high making them sensitive to quantities of virus and viral debris far lower than the quantity required to meaningfully infect either the host or someone else via shedding. They can also trigger positive on not just virus but viral debris for months after recovery from COVID-19 infection. (A test can be too sensitive, especially when used as the only evidence to force someone and their contacts to isolate and in some cases not earn an income for weeks.)
> It doesn't matter if you're infected if you're not shedding the virus.
I agree, but I'm not sure if the Belgian authorities, who seem to use PCR positives as a COVID-19 diagnosis, and PCR negatives as a guarantee of safety from infection risk to others, would. The article does what most articles these days do, conflating presence of SARS-CoV-2 debris on a swab with COVID-19 disease diagnosis. It incorrectly claims 2/3rds of the 25 staff have COVID-19, when given that none seem to have symptoms of the disease it's likely a case of oversensitive tests. Let's not also forget that these tests are mostly (at least all the ones I've seen) called COVID-19 tests.
> Given time, a healthy immune system will deal with the virus in the nose and throat, often without the host even noticing.
Ah ok, so that might explain why there's a significant number of people who say that they had covid without difficulty, at least of they didn't test false positive.
Thanks for explaining the nuance - I've heard a lot of this before but it's refreshing how succinctly you captured it.
It's not clear where the heavy metals are coming from. One possibility mentioned in the article is the soil itself. I wonder if even potting soil is tested for heavy metals? If heavy metals get through whatever food testing is done by the FDA, McCormick, etc., I don't have great confidence that soil testing is any better. That said, I would think growing your own is safer.
> If heavy metals get through whatever food testing is done by the FDA
About that...
> In addition, the limited testing the FDA has done on spices has been focused on harmful bacteria, such as salmonella, not heavy metals, Ronholm says.
The reason for these is probabaly the extreme depths from which water is pumped. The normal shallow ground waters arent this bad with arsenic I would assume.
I wonder if hydroponically grown herbs would lack them. Could be a business opportunity, if people care enough (or the government steps in to regulate).
To be really certain you'd have to test your soil.
I don't think you could test seeds without destroying them. But if your soil was clean then you could grow a plant from potentially contaminated seeds and that plants seeds would be far less contaminated.
Probably the only reasonable way of guaranteeing clean plant food sources is to use hydroponics, and to manufacture fertilizer yourself. Distilling water is easy, and buying the chemicals for fertilizer seems doable. But you'll want to make your own hdpe containers, and silicone tubing, so you don't get unlisted phthalates or plasticizer. GRAS and "food safe" classifications are fine, for things that are actually looked for, but mistakes are made, and most failures seem to favor producers, not consumers.
The question boils down to the actual harms you're mitigating and what constitutes the appropriate response.
Firewalls can do two things, mainly. Block inbound connections, block outbound connections. The macOS firewall is mainly intended for the former. Many folks want to prevent the latter (e.g. blocking phone home connections).
This. I factory reset my Vizio a couple months ago because it was crashing a lot and I didn’t bother giving it any Internet access this time around. There are also no other WiFi networks nearby.
What kills me about Windows Backup is that they introduced a good "disk image" backup solution in Windows 7 and they're deprecating it!
The current backup is basically just user data, and is not guaranteed to capture all of it.
The old backup protects 100% of the disk, even including recovery partitions and other special volumes.
Oh, and it produces a VHDX file that is directly bootable, either on bare metal or as a virtual machine.
I've used the disk image to recover entire machines in minutes and get back to work. I back up to an external SSD and if the main work machine dies, I just plug the SSD into another machine and use Hyper-V to boot it. I can be back up and running 100x faster than it would have taken to copy the files back.
Oh, and of course, you can take a snapshot before you start up the backup image so that you won't accidentally corrupt a known-good backup!
Yea, it appears to address that, but the new cable doesn’t seem user replaceable/fixable and it doesn’t appear possible to extend it, as the original cable was (albeit with difficulty).
Unless I'm misunderstanding their online shop (which annoyingly requires a login to view) shows replacement cables of 75 foot or 150 foot length (for $60 and $85 respectively). The gen 1 dish had a 100 foot cable that wasn't made to be (easily) user replaceable.
Less suitable than empty air 10 feet above the ground?
How is vertical farming powered by solar panels better than building the same artificial growing environment at ground-level and powering it with sunlight?
Because you can put the solar panels above a parking lot. You can't directly compare land area for growing with land area for solar panels, qualitatively, they are two very different lands. We have more of the latter.
