Confirmed PCR cases (can someone from France confirm or disprove this? Is the government only using swabs + PCR?) are a problem, because they keep on piling but you lose track of who's infectious.<p>You have very large, almost inflated case numbers, but (in the absence of symptoms) you don't know if those people are still spreading the virus or had it and are recovering.<p>That's because, if you are positive at a PCR test and without any symptom you may:<p>- Have not yet developed symptoms, and are infectious<p>- Have no symptoms, and are infectious<p>- Have cleared the virus, and are no longer infectious<p>Viral RNA can last in the throat for weeks in some cases (and it's not unique to this virus). That is why you can't detect the virus just with this test in absence of anything else (and the British Medical Journal wrote about this recently: advice to the doctors on how to interpret tests).<p>The New England Journal of Medicine argued for far more frequent antigen testing as a way to keep track of cases that are important to isolate, that is, the ones that are infectious[1].<p>My country did the same mistake (also using serological tests to assess positivity and infectiousness, a stupid mistake that just increased the backlog of tests) and of course tracing blew up.<p>EDIT: You can voice your disagreement instead of downvoting.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2025631" rel="nofollow">https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2025631</a>
What's striking is that we are now having about 6x the number of daily cases than during the first wave in France, the number of deaths is 5-6x lower.
a) During the early stages of the pandemic there was serious under-testing, non-serious cases were not counted<p>b) A treatment protocol has been established, dexamethasone, Vitamin D and antihistaminics like cimetidine are actually helpful<p>c) Death is a lagging indicator, it takes about a week to become symptomatic, another week to see if you need to be hospizalized, and another week to see if you will likely die, If you are meant to die you die around the end of week 4.
What do you think about the effectiveness of masks in France?<p><a href="https://i.redd.it/vfij6vxnobu51.png" rel="nofollow">https://i.redd.it/vfij6vxnobu51.png</a>