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Re:Vaccines and our return to office plans by a_conservative on Wednesday July 28, 2021 @01:53PM (#27986977)
That figure seems questionable.

1) high cycle PCR tests tend to produce false positives. [0]

2) recently (maybe now?) the CDC was recommending that the cycle count be lowered for vaccinated individuals (break through cases). [1]

If unvaccinated individuals are being tested to a different standard, that would seem to muddy the waters, wouldn't it?

[0] https://medicine.yale.edu/labmed/sections/virology/COVID-19%...

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20210623005911/https://www.cdc.g...

Re:Vaccines and our return to office plans by nullc on Wednesday July 28, 2021 @02:36PM (#27987764)
I'm not the downvoters but:

I followed your link [1] and read the entire page multiple times and I can find no content which supports "recommending that the cycle count be lowered for vaccinated individuals".

It says that samples submitted for sequencing should be positive when CT<=28 or are detected as positive by another modality.

Re:Vaccines and our return to office plans by a_conservative on Wednesday July 28, 2021 @03:25PM (#27988511)
I wish I could find a "slam dunk" source that stated what the current threshold recommended by the CDC, but I can't quite find it. I've personally read many sources that talked about using cycle counts above 30 over the past year.

Some more discussion on this topic was on HN yesterday [0]

also, from last August:

  One solution would be to adjust the cycle threshold used now to decide that a patient is infected. Most tests set the limit at 40, a few at 37. This means that you are positive for the coronavirus if the test process required up to 40 cycles, or 37, to detect the virus. [1]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27972195

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/29/health/coronavirus-testin...

Re:Vaccines and our return to office plans by a_conservative on Wednesday July 28, 2021 @02:12PM (#27987361)
I posted this comment in good faith. I would appreciate feedback rather than downvotes.