Originally Posted by
Lloyd Braun
My rebuttal source initially was myself but you don’t seem to like that source either. I explained it just like the article does I linked. You don’t understand how a covid or flu test works, and that’s ok, but don’t pretend you know how it works and then refute the reason to which your opinion is wrong.
So I will summarize it once again for you in my own terms. When we do a covid PCR test, we test for covid nucleic acid, aka presence of that particular virus. When we do a flu test, we test for nucleic acid from the influenza virus, usually influenza A and influenza B. These are typically ran separately, though there are tests that detect ALL of them which we have been using since April of 2020. These are called multiplex tests. Most covid tests are not done to also detect flu, so it’s possible someone can test positive for both if they were done together. But a positive covid test DOES distinguish between the flu because it is specifically testing for covid. The CDC is giving preference to the multiplex test because it tests for covid AND the flu. This does not imply that the covid tests alone cannot distinguish between the two as you have implied. It implies that it is better to test for all 3.