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A comment on CDC declined to test new coronavirus patient for days, California hospital says. Parent comment

Re:CDC declined to test new coronavirus patient for days, Ca... by surge on Thursday February 27, 2020 @01:54PM (#22436476)
They're worried about false negatives, if you test someone before they're showing severe symptoms, its best to go ahead and quarantine them, but we've seen to many cases where we clear people as negative and turns out they had it the whole time. The viral load needs to be high enough for the test to work.
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Re:CDC declined to test new coronavirus patient for days, Ca... by nomel on Thursday February 27, 2020 @03:44PM (#22437614)
> They're worried about false negatives,

Could you explain this logic a little more? Unless the false negative is something very high (do we know what it is?), I don't understand why identifying none is better than identifying some some, especially with an exponential spread.

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Re:CDC declined to test new coronavirus patient for days, Ca... by dwild on Thursday February 27, 2020 @05:24PM (#22438608)
He said this:

> its best to go ahead and quarantine them,

In an ideal world, you wouldn't let them go. A test only allow to send people out of a quarantine.

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