Journalists, with each new variant there is an opportunity for you to help the public to understand that as long as people get COVID-19 infected, it gives the virus another “host” — another place to hide out and keep adapting to vaccines and immunities. That is why it is important to do everything you can to prevent getting infected. As long as we keep getting infected, the virus keeps hanging around.
Symptomatic people say their home COVID-19 tests keep turning up negative
A friend told me he was certain he had COVID-19 after attending the IRE journalism conference in June. Several other attendees reported testing positive. He said had all of the telltale COVID-19 symptoms including a burning sore throat, extreme fatigue and so on. But home COVID-19 test after test turned up negative. And that is becoming a common experience.
Experts are wondering if the BA.5 version of COVID-19 is doing an end-run around the home tests. If so, a lot of infected people may be walking around spreading the virus unknowingly.
CNBC reports that the newest variant may take longer to show up on tests than previous versions:
Cases of BA.5 and BA.4, are taking a little bit longer to appear positive with antigen testing for some folks, according to Esther Babady, chief of the clinical microbiology service at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York.
“As mutation occurs, it may somehow change the structure of these different proteins, which may result in a decrease in detection by the antigen testing,” says Babady. “It can also be that earlier in the infection by BA.4 and BA.5, you don’t produce enough of the SARS-CoV-2 protein.”
The companies that make approved antigen tests say they have not seen a problem with the tests detecting the most recent variants.
But at this time, infectious disease experts have not concluded that antigen testing cannot detect BA.5, and it is too early to make that claim, according to Mohamed Z. Satti, an infectious disease specialist and faculty member in the division of public health at Michigan State University.
Satti believes that people should still use at-home antigen tests if they’re experiencing symptoms or have been exposed to someone with Covid. “Until now, from all the data I’m seeing, the home testing is still working and sensitive enough to depend on,” Satti says. “People should still continue to do at-home testing.”
Cnet added this explanation:
"Positive results remain highly accurate for these tests, though there still can be false negatives," Shaili Gandhi, vice president of pharmacy at SingleCare, said in an email. This is because it takes a higher amount of virus to test positive on a rapid test than the highly sensitive PCR or lab-based tests. Someone who's fully vaccinated and boosted, for example, may have a very low viral load (smaller amount of virus) and that may mean they test negative even if they do have COVID-19. If that's the case, you might need a lab-based PCR test before COVID-19 is confirmed.
So, as Cnet explains, the newest variants might not show up as well for people who do not have symptoms.
You're most likely to test positive for COVID-19 when you have symptoms. Similarly, asymptomatic people or someone with mild symptoms might be more likely to have a false negative result than someone who has a lot of symptoms.
"Under these conditions, at-home tests are as effective at detecting omicron as with other variants," Sandra Adams, a professor of biology and virologist at Montclair State University, told New Jersey Advance Media.
Record numbers of users are monitoring FlightTracker and FlightRadar24 websites
A record number of users are watching airplane tracking websites these days as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi flew to Taiwan and others track celebrities and politicians across the globe. Sports fans try to figure out what a team’s airplane movement means to soccer league recruiting and trades.
The Guardian reported that so many people were watching the thousands of little airplane icons glide across the map that the website had problems maintaining the traffic:
Ian Petchenik, the head of communications for Flightradar24, said the site had seen “unprecedented sustained interest” over Pelosi’s flight, and at its peak, a record 708,000 people were simultaneously watching the little red icon representing the House speaker’s Boeing C-40C – callsign SPAR19 – as it looped around the Philippines to bypass Chinese bases in the South China Sea, then soared across the Luzon Strait, reportedly under the watchful cover of a trio of US aircraft carriers, and arced across Taiwan’s mountain ranges before touching down in Taipei.
While some flight tracking systems shield the identity of some aircraft including military and some private aircraft , ADS-B Exchange is uncensored. ADS-B explains its unfiltered network can be valuable to journalists:
DS-B Exchange does not participate in the filtering performed by most other flight tracking websites which do not share data on military or certain private aircraft. Because ADS-B Exchange does not use any FAA data there are no FAA BARR/LADD, military, or other “filters” preventing you from seeing the data you collected. ADS-B Exchange simply does not accept payment or requests to remove aircraft from public tracking!
What is causing track and field race records to shatter so fast?
Is there some kind of pent up COVID-19 pandemic energy that is behind athletes picking off track and field world records at an astonishing pace this year? Last week Sydney McLaughlin shattered her own 400-meter hurdles world record. It is her fourth world record in two years.
The New York Times reported:
We are in what some have referred to as a golden age of people running fast, with records across the spectrum being broken, and more people than ever — from elite professionals down to high schoolers — running times that would have previously been unheard-of.
One small example: At last summer’s Tokyo Olympics, Rai Benjamin of the United States ran the 400 hurdles in 46.17 seconds, which was faster than any man had run before. Unfortunately for Benjamin, Karsten Warholm of Norway, in the lane next to him, had finished 0.23 of a second faster, setting a world record that still stands.
You can ascribe some of the record setting runs to great training, great nutrition — and then there are the shoes. A specific kind of shoe designed by Nike and then copied by others came to market just around the same time that so many track and field records began to fall one after another.
In 2017, Nike released its Zoom Vaporfly 4%, a road running shoe with a carbon-fiber plate in the midsole that acts as a catapult, more efficiently returning energy to its wearer. A New York Times analysis found that runners wearing these and similar shoes ran 4 to 5 percent faster than runners wearing an average shoe.
After a brief period of exclusivity, competing brands have all come out with their own version of a shoe with carbon-fiber plates amid a springy midsole, and now track spikes incorporate versions of this technology, too. Perhaps not coincidentally, there have been new world records in the men’s and women’s marathons since the introduction of these shoes, and many of the fastest times ever were set in the last few years.
Sporttechie points out that some of the most recent records were also while using technology called Lightwave, which helps runners set their pace.
