Talk:COVID-19 testing

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The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for speedy deletion: You can see the reason for deletion at the file description page linked above. —Community Tech bot (talk) 15:07, 19 January 2022 (UTC)
 * Drive-thru-testing-delhi.jpg

Testing after vaccination
It's my understanding that the Covid-19 vaccine works by producing antibodies and that (some?) covid tests test for the presence of antibodies. If this is the case, it would seem logical that someone who has been vaccinated should not take the covid-detection tests that test for antibodies because such tests will always yield positive results. If my rationale is correct, then this point should be included in the article, shouldn't it? Mercy11 (talk) 00:31, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

Distortion of comments from Dr. Anthony Fauci
Currently the article includes the following sentence:

"On July 16, 2020, Dr. Anthony Fauci of the US CDC indicated that positive results obtained from RT-PCR tests run at more than 35 cycles were almost always 'just dead nucleotides'."

This is a dangerous misinterpretation of what Fauci actually said. As one can verify by going back to the source, his actual words were (taken from YouTube automated transcript, condensed and punctuated for clarity):

"what is now sort of, uh, evolving into a bit of a standard, that if you get a cycle threshold of 35 or more that the chances of it being replication competent are minuscule … somebody comes in and they repeat their PCR and it's like 37 cycle threshold but … you almost never can culture virus from a 37 threshold cycle, so I think if somebody does come in with 37, 38, even 36, you got to say, you know, it's just, it's just dead nucleotides, period."

Fauci is clearly talking about results you might get when you perform the PCR test. A cycle threshold is a PCR result. If you get a cycle threshold of 38 (it doesn’t finish until the 38th cycle) that’s a very weak positive result.

The sentence currently in the article, however, incorrectly implies that some method of performing the PCR test sets it up for failure. There’s actually no such thing as “running PCR at N cycles”, but the current phrasing falsely suggests there is, and furthermore that it’s a method prone to generating false positives (as opposed to knowing when you get results which are only weakly positive, those are the ones likeliest to be false positives.)

This is dangerous misinformation, as it feeds into conspiracy narratives about “elites” instituting testing that they know is faulty for nefarious purposes. Again, Fauci says nothing in the cited source which reflects on the testing method; he is clearly saying that certain results that may be obtained indicate probable false positives - and note what he says about it “evolving” (present tense) into a standard. There’s nothing to support the idea that it could have been known beforehand “don’t bother continuing if you don’t have a result in 35 cycles because then it will be dead nucleotides.” - 209.6.11.210 (talk) 04:42, 15 April 2022 (UTC)


 * When is this going to be corrected? Fauci was talking about cycle threshold, not cycles so the text as it is now is wrong.
 * Also missing the fact Fauci was talking about retesting someone who already tested positive earier and he doesn't say his remark was about Ct>35 in general. Noef101 (talk) 22:40, 11 July 2023 (UTC)

Swabbing throat as well as nose for rapid tests?
There was a meme about using the swab on your throat before running it through both sides of your nose when collecting a sample for testing. This supposedly improved the false negative rate for Omicron infections. Here's an official recommended method from Ontario Health, which is still the current recommendation. However, there was little or weak evidence for this, and as far as I know, nobody ever actually confirmed whether this improves test accuracy or not. Does somebody know more, and can they add it to the article? -- Gnuish (talk) 18:30, 12 June 2022 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: Technical and Scientific Communication
— Assignment last updated by Cailinharris (talk) 14:34, 21 September 2022 (UTC)

I added some more information about imaging testing for COVID-19 for my wikiedu assignment. Something I think that can be added would be a "other" option for the covid testing in the contents box. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Cailinharris (talk • contribs) 14:26, 3 October 2022 (UTC)