COVID19 Update - Day 263

US Tests: 164,804,756*

US Cases: 13,053,244*

US Deaths: 257,106*

Worldwide Cases: 62,094,127*

Worldwide Deaths: 1,449,709*

* - Numbers are a lower bound.  True numbers are being suppressed by the Trump administration

The virus strikes close to home again.  About six weeks ago, I posted an email from my son, who's in his sophomore year of college, about a number of #TrumpVirus cases on his campus.  Like most college campuses, the virus found many welcoming hosts on his.

Ultimately, one of his roommates tested positive and moved into quarantine.  Amazingly, my son and his other roommate both tested negative.  So although my ex-wife and I both encouraged them to shelter in place (and we drove supplies up to them), they never formally quarantined.

On Wednesday, he cam home for Thanksgiving.  And we decided to bite the bullet and allow him back into our bubble without any kind of quarantine and so forth.  This may have been a mistake.

Yesterday --- the Friday after Thanksgiving --- we discovered that his OTHER roommate has tested positive.  Obviously, this meant our son would need another test.  Since he is on his mothers' insurance --- and since his mother and I are divorced --- she arranged the test without consulting me.  And it turns out the test she arranged for him is one of those 'rapid' #TrumpVirus tests.  It came back negative.

The negative result is somewhat reassuring, but --- as I discovered with a bit of research --- probably meaningless.  The reason is that my son is showing no symptoms of any kind:

The three tests are authorized for the most straightforward cases: people with COVID-19 symptoms in the first week of symptoms. That’s how they were validated. They produced virtually no false positives that way and were 84% to 97% as sensitive as lab tests, meaning they caught that range of the samples deemed positive by PCR.

Yet HHS allowed their use for large-scale asymptomatic screening without fully exploring the consequences, Pettengill said.

A recent study, not yet peer reviewed, found the Quidel test detected over 80% of cases when used on symptomatic people and those with known exposures to the virus, but only 32% among people without symptoms, The New York Times reported.

So there's a good chance his test was a false negative.  On the other hand, since he's asymptomatic, it's not clear that a more accurate PCR test would have returned a positive result (if he's infected).  It's my understanding that it takes about 5 days from exposure for tests to detect infection, and since he's asymptomatic, we have no idea about exactly when he was exposed.

For the sake of everyone's safety, I'm don't plan to be around anyone other than immediate family (all of whom have been exposed to my son) until at least 10 days after I was first exposed to him.  I think it's almost certain that one of us (out of three) will show symptoms during that time if he was infected and passed it along to us.

So --- the pandemic keeps life interesting.