Let’s not get it wrong: I’m a fan of many aspects of Elon Musk’s business, but if I could, I’d cut his Twitter off. This time, my favorite eccentric billionaire probably contributed to another coronavirus pandemic conspiracy theory.
And it was like this: Musk began by informing the public (on Twitter, of course) that he saw the common cold symptoms, which are obviously very similar to those of COVID-19. And since we have a pandemic, Musk decided to additionally do a coronavirus test. Actually, these are four tests, because who will forbid the rich?
And here the problem started
Musk informed (on Twitter, of course) that two tests were positive and two negative. All the tests were done on the same day, so our eccentric genius found the whole thing suspicious. And of course he did not fail to say (on Twitter) that the results were suspicious. This, of course, triggered an avalanche of Internet entries containing all sorts of conspiracy theories related to the pandemic.
Meanwhile, the explanation is quite simple: Coronavirus antigen tests are not very accurate
These four tests performed by Musk are antigen tests which due to your inaccuracy they have only recently been approved by the WHO as a preliminary screening test. The WHO also recommends that each antigen test result should be additionally verified with an RT-PCR test. To put it as simply as possible: the results of antigen tests are inaccurate.
They detect (as the name suggests) antigens of the SARS-CoV-2 virus (most often in nasopharyngeal swabs), which is to be equivalent to the presence of virions themselves in the body of the examined person. However, it is impossible to give any percentage number describing the effectiveness (or accuracy) of such tests, as there are at least several types of them (we do not know what tests were used on Elon). To make matters worse, the result itself largely depends on the method of taking and testing the sample, which in the meantime may become, for example, contaminated
If Elon had waited those 24 hours for the RT-PCR test results, that wouldn’t be the whole thing. Well, you had to post something on Twitter.
–
