(2022-01-05) Tufekci The Cdc Is Hoping Youll Figure Covid Out On Your Own

Zeynep Tufekci: The C.D.C. Is Hoping You’ll Figure Covid-19 Out on Your Own. While Omicron’s mutations make it exceptionally good at causing breakthrough cases even in people who have been vaccinated or previously infected, they also render it less able to effectively infect the lower lungs... it’s just luck that this highly transmissible variant appears to be less dangerous than other variants to those with prior immunity. If it had been more deadly — as Delta has been — the U.S. government’s haphazard and disorganized response would have put the whole country much more at risk.

Even with this more moderate threat, the highest-ranking public health officials are making statements that seem more aimed at covering up or making excuses for ongoing failures, rather than leveling with the public.

Nowhere are these issues more apparent than on the confusing and zigzag messaging around rapid antigen tests and N95 masks, both of which are important weapons in our arsenal.

With a barrage of cases threatening vital services, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced on Dec. 29 that people could return to work, masked, five days after they first learned they were infected

*It’s not unreasonable to shorten quarantine for some, especially if they are vaccinated. Other countries have allowed infected people to isolate for a shorter time with the added precaution that they take rapid antigen tests to show they are negative two days in a row.

Why doesn’t the C.D.C. call for that added measure of safety?*

“We opted not to have the rapid test for isolation because we actually don’t know how our rapid tests perform and how well they predict whether you’re transmissible during the end of disease,” Walensky said on Dec. 29. “The F.D.A. has not authorized them for that use.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the president’s chief medical adviser, argued the same, also on Dec. 29.

Rochelle Walensky, circa 2020, who was then on the faculty of the Harvard Medical School and chief of the division of infectious diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital, was a co-author of a paper in September 2020 that declared that the “P.C.R.-based nasal swab your caregiver uses in the hospital does a great job determining if you are infected but it does a rotten job of zooming in on whether you are infectious.”

So what did 2020 Walensky recommend? “The antigen test is ideally suited to yield positive results precisely when the infected individual is maximally infectious,” she and her co-author concluded.

Rapid tests do have their own considerations. Since you can become infectious even a day or two after getting a negative result on a rapid test, the Walensky of September 2020 noted that rapid tests are most useful if they are used frequently

It’s hard not to worry that officials may be denigrating rapid tests now for the same reason they denigrated the use of masks early in the pandemic — we don’t have enough of them.

We’re also hearing the same paternalistic argument about the tests that officials once used to explain why people shouldn’t wear masks — that it would provide them with a false sense of security that would lead them to abandon other necessary precautions.

The threat of a “false sense of security” has been used against everything from seatbelts to teaching young kids how to swim (because that would supposedly encourage parents to stop watching their children in the water!).

Now, about those masks: The C.D.C. still says that some N95s should be reserved for health care workers, even though they provide better protection for the wearer and the public than cloth or surgical masks, and even though there is no longer a shortage of them.

According to Walensky, N95s “are very hard to breathe in” and “are very hard to tolerate” so she worries that “if we suggest or require that people wear an N95, they won’t wear them all the time.”

Even my own doctor complained that he wasn’t sure which ones being sold were counterfeit — baffling that this is still a problem, even two years in. Why hasn’t the government organized a system to guide people to buy real N95s?

We also need to stop asking that people who test positive on an antigen test confirm it with a P.C.R. test, as many workplaces still do.

Which brings me to another important question: Why aren’t we rushing to do studies to gauge the infectious period for Omicron variant? Why didn’t we start in late November when it became clear it would be causing many breakthroughs and a rapid increase in cases?

it’s so disappointing to enter 2022 with 2020 vibes, scouring for supplies, trying to make sense of official declarations that don’t cohere and doubting, and wondering what to do.