News & Politics
Our whole public response on COVID is based on the presumption that we are all walking petri dishes of this virus. Some say that we carry it and can make others very sick even though we may not have a single symptom. Early in the summer, an expert at the National Institutes of Health stated asymptomatic spread is unlikely. It got out in the media, and then she walked it back. A study in Nature, which took a closer look at 300 asymptomatic positive cases in China, could not find any presence of the virus that would be transmittable. The researchers then followed 1,200 close contacts of the asymptomatic people and found none of them got sick. Is this proof that you cannot spread the virus if you don’t show symptoms? Erwin Haas, M.D. joins the show to talk about the increased PCR testing for COVID-19 and how this may be giving the public a skewed picture of spread. Haas says Florida has the right idea in demanding labs reveal the “cycle threshold” numbers of sample processing, as there is belief that this practice could be revealing more false positive results. Anthony Fauci will be heading Biden’s COVID team. Haas talks about Fauci’s career as a government administrator and why individuals who are on the front lines of actually treating COVID-19 might offer a more realistic response.