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Fox dismisses health experts, declares America is ready to reopen
Health experts say much more widespread diagnostic testing and contact tracing is needed before it's safe to reopen
Written by Zachary Pleat
Published
As the coronavirus pandemic continues to kill more than 1,000 Americans daily, Fox News personalities are dismissing the steps that health experts say are necessary to safely reopen America, insisting there is no need to expand contact tracing or diagnostic testing, and pointing to unreliable antibody test results to say COVID-19 is less dangerous than experts say.
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- As coronavirus deaths have climbed into the tens of thousands, Fox hosts have declared America is ready to reopen
- Health experts say massive contact tracing of coronavirus cases needs to be in place before America can safely reopen
- Instead of supporting contact tracing, Fox personalities dismissed the need for it, fearmongered, and attacked it as unrealistic
- Health experts also say America needs much more widespread diagnostic testing
- But Fox hosts have also dismissed the need for more widespread coronavirus testing, suggesting there has been enough
- Experts warn tests for coronavirus antibodies are unreliable and shouldnât be used to guide policy on reopening, determining immunity, or questioning the lethality of COVID-19
- Yet Fox personalities have said these unreliable antibody tests show coronavirus is less dangerous than believed
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As coronavirus deaths have climbed into the tens of thousands, Fox hosts have declared America is ready to reopen
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More than 1,000 Americans have died daily of COVID-19 since early April. A daily tracker of coronavirus deaths in America from NBC News shows that over 1,000 Americans have died of COVID-19 every day since early April, with the reported death toll topping 2,000 several days and more than 3,000 at least once. The U.S. is on track to soon lose more Americans to COVID-19 in just a few months than in 20 years of the Vietnam War. [NBC News, accessed 4/28/20; The Intercept, 4/27/20]
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Fox host Sean Hannity: âWe don't have to wait until May 1â to reopen most states.Â
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Fox host Steve Hilton called for reopening without adequate levels of coronavirus testing: âWe can't hide from it, we must learn to live with it.â
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Fox host Laura Ingraham: âIf we wait for Dr. Fauci's seal of approval to reopen America, we may not have an America to reopen.â
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Health experts say massive contact tracing of coronavirus cases needs to be in place before America can safely reopen
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NBC News: Health experts say both testing and contact tracing needs to be hugely scaled up to even partially reopen the economy.
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Before stay-at-home restrictions can be loosened and states and cities can begin the fragile process of emerging from isolation, public health experts warn that more people must be tested and then isolated through contact tracing to further diminish the virus's spread, while tracking who is healthy enough to go out.
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Crystal Watson, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and one of the lead authors of the report, told NBC News on Friday that public health departments of states and territories should be the ones determining how large of a contact tracing workforce will be needed and where it should be focused. And those states, such as New York and Massachusetts, with larger numbers of COVID-19 cases, will need to scale up accordingly.
Public health officials recognize that testing for the coronavirus has been woefully inadequate, and some public health experts have said that testing must be at least doubled or tripled from its current levels to allow for even a partial reopening of America's economy.
Watson said that those discussions for contact tracing need to happen and be implemented first before the reopening of the larger economy. But President Donald Trump has been pressing states with lower cases of the virus to reconsider reopening sooner, and on Thursday unveiled federal guidelines for âthe next front in our war, which is called opening up America again.â
âI do think we need to buckle down. Right now, our attention is all over the place,â Watson said. âIf we put concerted effort into building [contact tracing] capacity for states, that is what allows us to transition to the next phase to reopen our economy. Without that, we're flying blind.â [NBC News, 4/16/20]
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A bipartisan group of 16 health experts wrote to Congress explaining that at least 180,000 contact tracers are necessary to safely reopen the economy.
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A group of leading health experts on Monday sent a letter to Congress calling for $46.5 billion to expand contact tracing and isolation of infected people in order to safely reopen the economy.Â
âWe are writing to propose Congress take swift action in upcoming legislation to give states the funding necessary to scale up our nationâs contact tracing ability and support voluntary self-isolation of infected and exposed individuals,â write the 16 health experts, who include former Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Scott Gottlieb and former acting administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Andy Slavitt. âThis is fundamental to our ability to begin to reopen our economy while continuing to safeguard American lives.â
The letter asks for $12 billion to hire 180,000 new workers who would conduct contact tracing, meaning interviewing infected people to find out who they have been in contact with and then notifying those people so they can self-isolate for 14 days. The experts say this is important until a vaccine is developed.
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The experts who have signed onto the letter come from both sides of the aisle.
Gottlieb served under President Trump and Slavitt under President Obama. Additional signers include former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.); Mark McClellan, who was head of FDA and CMS under President George W. Bush; Atul Gawande, a prominent health expert and CEO of a joint health venture from Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JP Morgan Chase; and Tom Inglesby, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. [The Hill, 4/27/20]
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Epidemiologist Keren Landman: âContact tracing can feel like drudgery, but in an outbreak, itâs vital to public health.â
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The country will need to implement a ârobust and comprehensive systemâ of contact tracing to return Americans to work, reopen schools and ease social distancing guidelines, Johns Hopkins University experts say.
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Keren Landman, an epidemiologist and journalist, wrote for NPR that she helped a contact tracing effort by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during a mumps outbreak in the Midwest, cold-calling residents potentially exposed to the disease with a scripted list of questions from a cubicle office in Atlanta.
âContact tracing can feel like drudgery, but in an outbreak, itâs vital to public health,â Landman wrote. âDuring events like the current COVID-19 outbreak, it helps make possible early diagnosis and getting care to people who need it.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is increasing the number of people who can contact trace in the U.S. to carry out a âvery aggressiveâ plan to track coroanvirus, CDC Director Robert Redfield told NPR.
âWe are going to need a substantial expansion of public health fieldworkers,â Redfield told NPR.
In an ideal world, that would mean â100,000 new contact tracers,â Anita Cicero, deputy director at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told The Verge. [The Sacramento Bee, 4/13/20]
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Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, on contact tracing: âWe have to have something in place that is efficient and that we can rely on, and we're not there yet.â
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The Trump administration's top health officials have voiced support for tracing and tracking symptomatic individuals. Dr. Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control, told NPR the plan to begin reopening the country will have to rely on âvery aggressiveâ contact tracing.
And in an interview with the Associated Press, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, echoed some of the cautions about reopening the country before systems are in place to identify and isolate infected individuals and their contacts.
âWe have to have something in place that is efficient and that we can rely on,â Fauci said, âand we're not there yet.â [ABC News, 4/14/20]
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Emily Toth Martin, University of Michigan School of Public Health professor of epidemiology, said: âThe scale at which [contact tracing] is required far supersedes what is available right now at public health departments.â
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In lieu of a vaccine, which might not be widely available for at least a year, and mass testing, public health experts say tracking down sick people and those they might have exposed to the virus will be critical in allowing the public to work, shop and gather in groups again without sparking more outbreaks.
The more restrictions are eased, these experts say, the more contact-tracing workers will be needed.
âThe scale at which that is required far supersedes what is available right now at public health departments,â said Emily Toth Martin, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. [The Wall Street Journal, 4/20/20]
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Instead of supporting contact tracing, Fox personalities dismissed the need for it, fearmongered, and attacked it as unrealistic
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Fox contributor Lisa Boothe: âThe media,â not lack of testing or contact tracing, is âthe biggest barrier we have to reopening.â
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Boothe: Demanding contact tracing before reopening represents âa shifting of the goalposts.â
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Fox host Laura Ingraham fearmongered about contact tracing and the involvement of the Gates Foundation: âA new threat to our rights on the horizon.â
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Fox Business anchor Melissa Francis: âSomething makes me feel a little Big Brother about this.â
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Jeanine Pirro declared, âDonât you even think about tracing or tracking or giving me a card. It ain't happening.â
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Steve Hilton: âThe idea that you can test them all, trace their contacts, isolate everyone who has the virus, is totally ridiculous.âÂ
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Hilton: âWe don't need the costly, complicated, technocratic nightmare of testing and contact tracing.â
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Health experts also say America needs much more widespread diagnostic testing
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NY Times: Estimates by Harvard Global Health Institute say the U.S. needs to be conducting between 500,000-700,000 tests per day to safely reopen by mid-May.
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As some governors consider easing social distancing restrictions, new estimates by researchers at Harvard University suggest that the United States cannot safely reopen unless it conducts more than three times the number of coronavirus tests it is currently administering over the next month.
An average of 146,000 people per day have been tested for the coronavirus nationally so far this month, according to the COVID Tracking Project, which on Friday reported 3.6 million total tests across the country. To reopen the United States by mid-May, the number of tests performed every day should be 500,000 to 700,000, according to the Harvard estimates, which is a daily minimum of about 152 tests per 100,000 people.
That level of testing is necessary to identify the majority of people who are infected and isolate them from people who are healthy, according to the researchers. About 20 percent of those tested so far were positive for the virus, a rate that the researchers say is too high.
âIf you have a very high positive rate, it means that there are probably a good number of people out there who have the disease who you havenât tested,â said Ashish Jha, the director of the Harvard Global Health Institute. âYou want to drive the positive rate down, because the fundamental element of keeping our economy open is making sure youâre identifying as many infected people as possible and isolating them.â
The researchers said that expanded testing could reduce the rate to 10 percent, which is the maximum rate recommended by the World Health Organization. In Germany, that number is 7 percent, and in South Korea, it is closer to 3 percent. [The New York Times, 4/17/20]
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NBC News: Public health experts estimate millions of tests are needed daily or weekly to safely end social distancing restrictions.
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One of the keys to reopening the economy is having enough tests to diagnose coronavirus infections, with the goal being to quickly identify new cases, isolate them, and track down others who may have been exposed.
âWeâve done such a good job of social distancing that we expect the rate of immunity to be quite low, which means we would expect there to be, over the course of the next several months, periodic outbreaks of the disease,â said Dr. Christopher Woods, a professor of medicine and infectious diseases at Duke University. âBut now we hope to have the diagnostic tools and the public health tools to contain those outbreaks as they occur.â
Coronavirus testing in the United States has been slow from the start and weâre still only testing roughly a million people a week. Though President Donald Trump said Thursday that weâre doing a âgreat jobâ on testing, public health experts have said the number of people tested should be far higher before social distancing eases up â anywhere from 3 million to 30 million a week, to 20 million or more a day. [NBC News, 4/26/20]
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Dr. Anthony Fauci: âWe are not in a situation where we can say we are exactly where we want to be with regard to testing.â
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Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, says âwe are not in a situation where we can say we are exactly where we want to be with regard to testingâ capacity for COVID-19 in the U.S.
Fauci, in a discussion for TIME 100 Talks: Finding Hope on Thursday, says that the U.S. needs to not only increase the number of tests, which is happening as commercial testing companies increase production and the Food and Drug Administration continues to clear tests using different types of samples (including ones from the nose and saliva, as well as blood). But, he says, we also need to make sure tests can actually be run the way they should.
âWe need to significantly ramp up not only the number of tests, but the capacity to perform them, so that you donât have a situation where you have a test but it canât be done because there isnât a swab, or because there isnât extraction media, or not the right vial,â says Fauci. âI am not overly confident right now at all that we have what it takes to do that. We are doing better, and I think we are going to get there, but we are not there yet.â [Time, 4/23/20]
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Infectious disease specialist Dr. Tom Moore: âTo avoid a second wave of viral spread you have to do what South Korea and other countries, including Germany, have done. You have to have testing in place, and aggressive testing.â
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Health experts also say the country needs a related and equally robust program to trace the people who have had contact with infected people, to avoid seeing those contacts themselves spread the coronavirus to others.
There are only about 120,000 samples or so being tested each day for the coronavirus in the United States, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Experts say that millions of people will have to be tested each day, even as many as 20 million to 30 million people, before the nation can return to a semblance of economic normality.
That is much more than the number of tests even projected to be produced by some major manufacturers by June.
âTo avoid a second wave of viral spread you have to do what South Korea and other countries, including Germany, have done. You have to have testing in place, and aggressive testing,â said Dr. Tom Moore, an infectious disease specialist in Wichita, Kansas.
âWe donât have to test everybody, but we definitely need to test a significant portion of the community,â said Moore, a former board member of the Infectious Diseases Society of America.
âThis is a Herculean task,â he said. âI donât know how itâs going to be solved in the immediate future, but it needs to be.â
Moore and other experts say that a second or third wave of Covid-19 infections could end up killing more people than the first wave, lead to another series of shutdowns of businesses, and ultimately end up doing greater economic damage than has been seen to date from the pandemic. [CNBC, 4/16/20]
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NPR: Health experts say a safe benchmark for reopening is 10% or less of coronavirus tests returning positive, but U.S. is at about twice that rate.
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But how much testing is enough?
There's no exact number to aim for, but here's a guiding principle: You want a low percentage of your tests to come back positive, around 10% or even lower, says William Hanage, an epidemiologist at Harvard.
That 10% benchmark is based on recommendations from the World Health Organization. Why should positives be low? If a high percentage of tests come back positive, it's clear there's not enough testing to capture all of the infected people in the community. "The lower the percentage of tests you're doing that come back positive, the better," Hanage says.
Some countries that have done extensive testing have positive rates near this 10% benchmark, or lower. South Korea is "testing so many people that only 3% of them are positive," said Rochelle Walensky, an infectious disease specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital, during a livestream hosted by the medical journal JAMA.
But, so far the U.S. appears to fall short of this benchmark. Nationally, according to CDC data, about 18% of tests have been positive to date, and 21% were positive in the week ending April 11.
The U.S. has one of the highest percentages of confirmed cases versus tests conducted globally, according to Our World In Data, an online platform published by Oxford University. [NPR, 4/22/20]
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But Fox hosts have also dismissed the need for more widespread coronavirus testing, suggesting there has been enough
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Melissa Francis dismissed a comment by Fauci about the need for more testing, comparing it to wearing a helmet if there's snow on the ground.
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Sean Hannity: The U.S. is âleading the world on testing, no country even close. It has tested more of its citizens than any other country -- many countries combined as a matter of fact.â
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Laura Ingraham mocked the suggestion from experts that millions of tests per day are needed: âOh, thatâs realistic.â
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Ingraham urged Trump to push propaganda about his record on testing instead of expanding it.
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Fox & Friends co-host Steve Doocy suggested a California antibody study meant there was no need for widespread coronavirus testing in order to ease restrictions.Â
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Experts warn tests for coronavirus antibodies are unreliable and shouldnât be used to guide policy on reopening, determining immunity, or questioning the lethality of COVID-19
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NY Times: The World Health Organization warned against relying on antibody tests to make policy decisions or to determine immunity.
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Few scientists ever imagined that these tests would become an instrument of public policy â and many are uncomfortable with the idea. Antibody tests, which show who has been infected, are often inaccurate, recent research suggests, and it is not clear whether a positive result actually signals immunity to the coronavirus.
On Friday, the World Health Organization warned against relying on these tests for policy decisions. While countries such as Italy have even floated the idea of âimmunity passportsâ for people who test positive, W.H.O. officials noted that it is not known to what extent people carrying antibodies are immune to the virus.
(The W.H.O. on Saturday backed off an earlier assertion that people with antibodies may not be immune at all.) [The New York Times, 4/26/20]
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Infectious disease experts told the NY Times antibody tests used in recent surveys were too unreliable.
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The shortcomings of antibody testing were on vivid display in two other recent surveys, one in Santa Clara County and the other in Los Angeles County.
Both drew sharp criticism from scientists, who said the tests had a rate of false positives too high to be used in places the virus has left largely untouched and therefore may have few true positives.Â
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âWeâre kind of heavily leaning on these tests when theyâre not perfect,â said Saskia Popescu, an epidemiologist at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va.
âAnd we still have a lot of people susceptible, so itâs a dangerous thing to heavily rely on them right now.â
[Dr. Michael Osterholm, an infectious diseases expert at the University of Minnesota] said an antibody survey, because it provides âhistorical dataâ on who was infected, is like a smoke alarm that gives out a report once a month.
âIt doesnât work very well if you have a fire right now,â he said.
Diagnostic tests for the virus offer a better snapshot of the current picture, he added, and states should focus on acquiring accurate diagnostic tests that can provide timely data on the rise or fall in the number of infections.
âThat should be the data we use to judge opening or not openingâ the economy, Dr. Osterholm said. [The New York Times, 4/26/20]
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Politico: FDA allowed over 100 types of antibody tests to be sold without reviewing them and is now âdealing with a flood of inaccurate coronavirus antibody tests.â
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The Food and Drug Administration is dealing with a flood of inaccurate coronavirus antibody tests after it allowed more than 120 manufacturers and labs to bring the tests to market without an agency review.
The tests, which look for antibodies that indicate whether a person has been exposed to the virus, have been eyed as a tool to help reopen the country by identifying people who may have immunity. Antibody data could also help determine the true extent of the U.S. outbreak by finding cases that were never formally diagnosed.
Normally, the FDA does its own quality check before allowing tests on the market. Agency leaders have said they tried to create more flexibility for makers of antibody tests to help inform discussions about when people can safely return to work and school, and to identify survivors whose antibody-rich blood could help treat the sick.
But many of the tests available now arenât accurate enough for such purposes. Some are giving too many false positive results, which could mislead people into thinking they have already been infected.
The problem has gotten so bad that the New York City Health Department warned health providers last week against using the tests to determine whether someone is infected with the coronavirus or has developed immunity through exposure.
Public health experts say the FDA shouldnât have waived its reviews of antibody tests and are calling on it to crack down. To date, the FDA has granted a formal emergency use authorization, in which it reviews data from manufacturers, to just seven of the tests.
âWe're facing a public health epidemic," David Kessler, who led the FDA under Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton and is now advising former Vice President Joe Biden on the coronavirus, told POLITICO. âIf FDA is not looking at validation studies, then FDA is not doing its job."
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Scott Becker, the CEO of the Association of Public Health Laboratories, has criticized the FDA for allowing âcrappyâ antibody tests onto the market without adequate review. "Ideally they would scrap the current policy and start over, but I don't think that's practical given this crisis,â he said. âThe best we can hope for is a rigorous and expansive evaluation." [Politico, 4/27/20]
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Dr. Greg Poland, director of the Mayo Clinic's Vaccine Research Group, expressed concern about inaccurate antibody tests being used.
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âThereâs even more concern there. Theyâve had even less regulatory control," said Dr. Greg Poland, director of the Mayo Clinic's Vaccine Research Group. âHow are manufacturers testing these? Are they rushing these out prematurely? That economic motive is what requires regulatory oversight."
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âNobodyâs done what I would call a thorough head-to-head comparison with a validated gold standard," Poland said. âIâm actually surprised that some of these kits can be used clinically."
Poland said he's concerned about the tests giving false positives.
âOne of the things Iâm afraid of is that people are going to go to drive-thru testing who have not had (the) disease and are going to be told that theyâre protected" because the test shows they have antibodies. âAnd theyâre going to act and react according to that misinformation. Thatâs a problem." [USA Today, 4/24/20]
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Other health experts shared warnings with ABC News about relying on the antibody tests.
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Amid the haste to develop antibody testing, we may be setting ourselves up for disaster.
âTesting is not a panacea. Testing is a tool and no test is perfect. What people are looking for does not exist," said Dr. Alan Wells, executive vice chairman of the section of Laboratory Medicine at University of Pittsburgh Medicine.
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Some scientists, however, say that beyond companies knowingly scamming consumers, even the antibody tests manufactured by larger companies with fairly reputable histories overpromise and underdeliver.
âThere is just so much variety in these assays out there, and we too have seen some tests to have a very high level of false positive results using samples that were collected prior to the outbreak," said Eliza Theel, Ph.D., director of Mayo Clinic Infectious Diseases Serology laboratory testing.
Another major issue experts cite is the lack of standardized validation protocols. "You can cherry pick what your controls are," said Wells.
Validating tests with the right samples is essential in order to minimize the potential of false positives and negatives.
âFalse positive means that the antibody reaction detected an antibody, but from some other coronavirus or some other related infection," according to Dave Koch, Ph.D., director of clinical chemistry, toxicology and point-of-care testing at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta. âThere is also possibility of a false negative: I actually have the virus but the antibody hasn't shown up yet or hasn't gotten to the detection limits in the bloodstream yet." [ABC News, 4/26/20]
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WSJ: Health experts warn the presence of antibodies doesnât confer immunity to coronavirus.
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Q: If I have antibodies to the virus that causes Covid-19, does that mean Iâm protected from getting it again? If so, for how long?
A: We donât know. âJust because people have an antibody response to this virus does not mean that they are protected against being reinfected,â says [Dr. David Walt, professor of pathology at Harvard Medical School].
Marc Jenkins, director of the Center for Immunology at the University of Minnesota Medical School, says the assumption is that the presence of antibodies provides some level of protection and could last a few years. The question is, how many antibodies do you need? Different people make different amounts of antibodies based on their genetics and other factors, including how intense their viral infection was. It is possible that people with milder infectionsâor who are asymptomaticâmay not develop as many antibodies and may have less protection from the next infection, he says.
âMost likely, people who have recovered from Covid-19 with antibodies in their bloodstream will be immune for months or one to two years,â says David Reich, president of Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. âBut this is unknown currently, and we have to study that over time.â
Meanwhile, some experts say itâs possible that people with antibodies may not be immune. Gregory Storch, a professor of pediatrics at Washington University in St. Louis, says for most viruses, the presence of antibodies corresponds to immunity, but there are exceptions, such as HIV and hepatitis C. âPeople may have antibodies in their blood at the same time they are actively infected with those viruses,â he says. With respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), a common respiratory virus in babies, children can have an antibody response but still become infected a second time, he says. [The Wall Street Journal, 4/23/20]
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Kelly Wroblewski, director of infectious disease programs at the Association of Public Health Laboratories: âHaving many inaccurate tests is worse than having no tests at all.â
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The emergence of dozens of tests never reviewed by the FDA â many of which are being aggressively marketed â could confuse doctors, hospitals, employers and consumers clamoring for the products, according to critics who say the agencyâs oversight of the tests has been lax. The questions are taking on special importance as federal and state officials debate strategies, including using serological testing, to help determine when they can end state and local lockdowns.
âA test is only as good as its results,â said Kelly Wroblewski, director of infectious disease programs at the Association of Public Health Laboratories, which has been urging the FDA to take a closer look at the unapproved tests. âHaving many inaccurate tests is worse than having no tests at all.â [The Washington Post, 4/19/20]
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Dr. Carl Bergstrom, University of Washington infectious disease expert, said efforts to spin antibody test surveys to suggest COVID-19 is less lethal âare irresponsible.â
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The results in New York State offer an early glimpse of the promise and pitfalls of widespread antibody testing.
Public health officials tested 3,000 residents at grocery stores and big-box retailers throughout the state. In New York City, about 21 percent of participants were found to carry coronavirus antibodies.
The rate was about 17 percent on Long Island, nearly 12 percent in Westchester County and Rockland County, and less than 4 percent in the rest of the state.
New Yorkâs survey was reasonably well designed and the results largely credible, experts said. But unlike Mr. Cuomo, few saw happy news in the numbers.
âI just donât see any way to put a silver lining on any of these results,â said Carl Bergstrom, an infectious diseases expert at the University of Washington in Seattle. âI think that the efforts to spin it that way are irresponsible.â
If one in five residents in hard-hit New York City has been exposed to the virus, he and others said, then four in five are still vulnerable â and that underscores how far we are from the pandemicâs end.
New Yorkâs results suggested a death rate of between 0.5 and 1 percent, figures some conservative commentators have argued are too low to justify statewide lockdowns.
Public health experts like Dr. Bergstrom took the opposite view. âIf the mortality rate is 1 percent, weâre looking at 2 million deaths, which is unprecedented in our nationâs history and unimaginable,â he said.
âAnyone talking about the death rate as âonly 1 percent and so we should not worry about itâ has an extraordinarily callous view.â
The New York survey confirms what experts have long believed: that because of the lack of tests, the state has undercounted the true number of infections by about a factor of 10.
Reopening society with such a huge vulnerable population, and without careful consideration, could be disastrous, allowing the virus to sweep through the country, Dr. Bergstrom and others said. [The New York Times, 4/26/20]
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Yet Fox personalities have said these unreliable antibody tests show coronavirus is less dangerous than believed
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Fox host Tucker Carlson: âIn New York, that rate went from 7.4%, which is devastating to .5% which is not.â
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Fox chief breaking news correspondent Trace Gallagher: Antibody study shows death rate for COVID-19 is âabout 0.1%, drastically lower than previous estimates.â
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Fox medical contributor Dr. Marc Siegel: âThis means that the hospitalization rate and the death rate, especially, is way much lower than what we thought it was.â
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Dr. Mehmet Oz on Fox & Friends: âYou've got a mortality that's more like half percent versus what we had been facing.â
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Sean Hannity: âIf those numbers hold and are accurate, the coronavirus death rate in New York would be ... 0.58%.â
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Fox Business host Lou Dobbs: New York antibody study means âthe death rate appears to be 0.5%.â
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