3 ms·

There's a test and trace system that is supposed to phone everyone with a positive test result and get details of all their close contacts (people they sat in a

by adwww 6y ago

There's a test and trace system that is supposed to phone everyone with a positive test result and get details of all their close contacts (people they sat in an office with, restaurants they visited, etc), who are in turn contacted. A delay in the test results means the contact tracing could not happen, and people will have been going around spreading the virus they caught off the original, known cases. Also, the whole test and trace system has been in the news a lot recently here for various failings, and things like this will just further knock people's confidence in it.

visarga 6y ago
> A delay in the test results means the contact tracing could not happen, and people will have been going around spreading the virus they caught off the original, known cases. A recent piece in The Atlantic argues that we got it all wrong, we should test backwards (who infected the current patient) instead of forwards. This particularity is caused by the dispersion factor K which is a metric hidden (conflated) by the R0, meaning that the same R0 would be handled differently depending on the K factor. A related suggestion was that we should focus more on super-spreaders as COVID doesn't spread uniformly. That's why the probability of finding a cluster is higher looking back than forward - most people don't get to actually spread the virus. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/09/k-overlooked-variable-driving-pandemic/616548/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/09/k-overloo...