Come to find out that even though we've known since January that the only way to diagnose Covid pneumonia is via CT because it doesn't show up on x-ray unless there's also a bacterial infection, the US still not doing CT scans on everyone. Not even suspected false negatives.

How many of these supposedly asymptomatic covid cases in the US actually have pneumonia and don't know it because the US isn't isn't CT scans as a first line diagnostic tool like they do in Wuhan?

This is absolutely a massive public health danger because a lot of essential employees are only getting allowed to stay home with sick pay if they've got a covid diagnosis. So yeah, your cashier might have Covid and be told that they don't based on a false-negative test.

People who have a regular primary doctor probably have a better shot of getting a doctor's note to stay home, but most service industry people who are considered essential don't have primary doctors, so if the swab comes back negative, they'll have to either work or go hungry.

BTW, I posted about the covid x-ray thing to Facebook and almost immediately heard from someone whose good friend wasn't even tested for covid and told he didn't have it because his x-ray was clear. So yes, the misinformation is leading to decisions that could increase spread.

The reason I keep tweeting about things like this, or about asthma not actually being a risk factor, is because so much that's actually been known for months isn't filtering down to the general public, and I keep hearing from people who aren't getting tested because of bad info.

Or, in the case of the misinformation about asthma, people with asthma, especially Black people with asthma, are at higher risk of not getting a ventilator because of the misinformation claiming asthma is a risk factor for complications when it's not.

I've heard from so many people who couldn't get tested for covid even though they were symptomatic because they never had a fever above 99.5, even though it's been known for months that a lot of people don't actually get any fever at all, much less one above 99.5.

The very first Covid death in Pasco County was a woman who was repeatedly told by her doctor over the phone that it she didn't have Covid because she didn't have a fever. By the time she listened to her sister and called an ambulance, she was developing ARDS.

The story hit the English language media yesterday that some otherwise asymptomatic young people's first symptom is what looks like frostbite on their toes. According to Europeans on Reddit, that's been common knowledge in Europe for weeks.

It's the same thing with masks, where we've known since pretty early on in Wuhan that asymptomatic transmission he a thing, which was confirmed by Iceland testing everybody, but the CDC kept insisting no masks and then pretended asymptomatic transmission was a new discovery.

I don't know if it's the fault of the CDC or what, but there are an awful lot of things that were discovered in Wuhan, confirmed in Italy, and yet people are still out here thinking that people can't have Covid pneumonia if the x-ray is clear, along with other misinformation.

There are things that genuinely are new discoveries, like how it's attacking blood vessels, but too much of what's passing for new information is things that have been known for months but people were too prejudiced against Chinese doctors to listen.

I could go on a whole rant too about how too much of the Western world didn't believe the death rates in Wuhan were the real death rates because they assumed the medical system must be backwards.

The supposedly backwards Wuhan medical system where each hospital was doing 200+ CT scans a day, which I've been assured is completely impossible and couldn't possibly be attempted in the US, so hey, let's just risk sending false negatives out into the world to infect everybody.