You’re saying the professor of public health and medicine lied? I guess it’s possible, but seems highly unlikely to me. Odd thing to risk your professional reputation on. I’d agree there’s debate as to how prevalent it is (extremely rare IMHO), but it’s not a completely made up urban legend.
The professor is saying that drive up testing sites use positional identification, which leads to people being given the wrong results when somebody leaves early. If that is true, then it is not a conspiracy to increase the number of positive results, but complete and total incompetence by the people running the testing sites.
We’re in agreement, I think it’s probably happened and I think the Professor interviewed in your link has given a reasonable mechanism for how it could happen, but whatever rare instances of it happening have spread like an urban legend through the “Coronavirus is scam” crowd in the form of “this exact thing happened” to “my cousin’s friend” or “my buddy’s wife”.
Even if it were true, it wouldn’t increase the count, it would just misidentify who was positive and who was negative. So, the coronavirus scam people remain idiots.
That’s if you believe the Professor’s explanation about positional testing. Clearly the hoaxers are just making up positive results for… reasons, because they’re evil geniuses, but they’ve also massively screwed up by calling people who were never tested and letting the cat out of the bag. Ooops!
There are non-invasive devices to test hemoglobin called Orsense. You may have been checked with that, or, they may have known that the amount of blood loss was inconsequential and were trying to reassure you without performing an unnecessary test.
They told me my blood test came back normal, and that they had drawn blood for it. I asked if they could have gotten that result without drawing blood. They assured me they drew blood.
They did not draw blood for it.
Also, they didn’t know how much blood I lost, because a lot of the blood I lost was after the actual delivery. I asked about it because I’d been alarmed by catching a clot that completely filled my cupped hands. (I was sort of holding myself closed while using the toilet at the time) I’ve never seen such a huge clot before or after. I also lost a lot of unclotted blood into the sanitary napkins they provided.
It was kind of moot, because this was not far from the peak of the AIDS epidemic, so they weren’t going to give me a transfusion unless I was actively dying from blood loss. And while I was extremely weak and tired after that delivery (I believe due to low red count) I was no longer bleeding quickly at the time of the discussion, and clearly wasn’t at death’s door. So there was no compelling reason to pursue it.
It’s just evidence that sometimes medical establishments make mistakes in testing people. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t mistaken about it, but you aren’t me, you weren’t there, and you don’t have to believe my story, of course.
I’ve had a fair number of medical tests and procedures that I find this hard to believe. Because the protocol seems to be that every single person I come into contact with during the course of the procedure asks me for my name and date of birth. I have a problem with believing that the person taking the swabs didn’t ask this of every person right before they swabbed them.
Maybe they asked each patient to confirm their name, but it my understanding that this is considered bad protocol because some people just say yes without listening.
I believe that they may do some sort of positional organizing, but I still don’t believe that that they’d take a swab without confirming ID at the moment the swab was taken. So, I guess I do think this public health professor lied. There are a lot of people with degrees and credentials that have been lying their asses off for political reasons.
Did this person get a letter telling them they’d tested positive? I have trouble believIng they are giving results by phone only, especially positive results. I would think that a positive result would be accompanied by a set of very specific instructions for quarantining and that those instructions would be transmitted in writing.
If I saw a copy of a letter received by the woman saying she tested positive, I’d move closer to belief. But the story sounds off.
I heard this story several weeks ago from my very conservative Trump-supporting friend.
It didn’t happen to them; it was someone they heard about.
My wife was tested by the county at a drive-thru site. Her positive result was given by phone only. She called back and requested a printout. I’m not sure if she ever got one.
Then after she had recovered a couple weeks, we sent in a home collection kit that we bought on the internet. That result (still positive) came by email, and also by phone I think.
I was tested at an urgent care clinic. I got my positive result by phone a few days later. It was basically, “Hello. I hope you’re feeling better. Your COVID-19 test is positive. Please continue to self-quarantine, and go to the hospital if you can’t breath. Thanks-bye.”
And then I got swabbed at the county. Two weeks later, they called with a negative result.
I worked Info Tech support for a few years, and if that isn’t happening all the time I’ll eat my hat.
And that’s just the people who aren’t paying attention. When you include the people who are a little deaf and aren’t wearing their reading glasses, that’s a system which is designed for failure.
If it’s important, you tag the patient and the identity is independently verified by a third person both when the tag is applied and when the tag is read.
I would hope that the system designers would be a little smarter than what’s been described, but I have to deal with big systems from time to time. The system designers typically aren’t any smarter than that.
I’ve had a couple of people tell me similar stories, always about someone at work whose cousin’s neighbor’s sister had it happen.
Me, too. And yet I’m certain the result of a test I didn’t take was tagged to me.
I am by no means saying it’s a common problem, or that it has any impact on the collective numbers. But did it happen to somebody, once, who told a lot of friends? Honestly, that seems likely to me.
Three times last week I heard people on the jobsite talk about a friend or family member of theirs choosing to leave a test site due to the waiting times, after which they received a notification of a positive test result. In researching this apparent phenomenon I only found one article (linked earlier in this thread).
Also hearing a lot of claims that COVID-19 prevalence is inflated because “they” get money for every positive result. “They” is never fully detailed but seems to be either hospitals or government health agencies.
When my mom got her result, they sent her an envelope with 2 documents. One was her test result, and the other was a generic form letter that covers what to do if you have a positive or negative result.
She read the second letter first and believed she had a positive test result (until I re-read it to her). She is now telling people that she got an invalid test result and it could happen to anybody. She’s not stupid, she’s just not as sharp as she used to be, and has no intellectual defense whatsoever against the motivated reasoning that comes into her TV and colors most of her thinking.