This makes RTW protocols cheaper and promotes reopening, it isn’t a tool of the panicmongers. So this makes a lot of sense actually. It’s a much cheaper way of testing when you are doing routine testing for populations in a hospital or school or nursing home or whatever.
You don’t record 4 positives, you go back and re-test the 4 people or whatever in the pool individually. Bc most pools won’t have even 1 positive, you save a lot of money on test processing.
Going back and testing out the 4 individual samples is what they should do, it doesn’t mean they’ll do it, and not count all 4 samples as positive. I just don’t trust them. Falsifying test results is just okie dokie if it’s for the cause, don’tcha know.
“You don’t record 4 positives, you go back and re-test the 4 people”
“Don’t”, should be written as shouldn’t”.
Systematic over counting/double counting has been a widespread problem. This is another opportunity. Just report that the four samples were tested positive, then another day report the one positive on the re-test. Voila! Five new cases in the total.
Lots of double counting has been occurring, like when cases are admitted to facilities near the border in California (and reported), and then evacuated to different facilities in the middle of the State (who of course, separately report their totals, in a different County).
There has been counting of contacts as “cases”, without testing them. There has been widespread counting of antibody positives as cases, even though they are not infectious and pose no load on the health care system. There have been many incidents of simply fraudulent cases reported, to bilk medical payments from the Government.
And clearly, some harbor a political motive to jack up the number of cases, and actively seek out such methods - which is likely why consolidation of reporting, recently had to be taken out of the hands of the clique of bureaucrats at the CDC, who were systematically over-reporting.