Check the Context

When I started this blog I thought I would be keeping track of all the changes my daily life, not debunking claims on social media, but here we go again with another one...

Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash

I've seen lots of people, especially in the last week or so, posting screenshots of or even links to this page on the CDC web site about antibody testing. Notably, they are pulling out of context the quote that says that if you test positive, there's a chance it means you were infected with another virus from the coronavirus family, other than SARS-CoV-2 that causes COVID-19. And then they say something like, "So why are we bothering to test anyone?! All tests are fake!"

So to clarify: this quote is related to antibody testing (did you have it in the past), not testing for a current infection. It's not 100% accurate and doesn't really tell us a lot about the current situation, it's just useful to see the past spread of the disease in people who never got tested while they were ill or infectious, and to answer questions about whether someone may have actually had COVID-19 but didn't confirm with a test. It's still important to test and isolate patients while the virus is active, i.e. through a viral test.

While posts like these are attention-grabbing, please take the time to look at the context of the information before you rush to judgement. And be especially wary of posts that are just a screenshot of a web page, even if it's a reputable site like the CDC, as information has been changing and updating (because that's what science does), and sometimes posts circulating now are passing off months-old screenshots as if they're current. (Going back to the reason I started this blog - we all know how quickly regulations and recommendations have changed over the past several months.) I always recommend going to the source site yourself and seeing what the current page says now.