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I thought I'd couched my comments with enough speculative terms to make it obvious that it was my opinion and not fact. "very likely", "in my opinion", "very good chance", etc.
You also said it's "quite bonkers" for people to leave isolation after 10 days without a negative. So your terms were clearly loaded in multiple ways. I think it's fair to call them out.
The source I linked to says the correlation (however strong it is) is between viral load and infectiousness.
There is obviously a correlation between viral load and being infectious at some point. You cannot be one without the other. The question is about causation. I.e., is there a causal relationship between a positive test after 10 days and being contagious.
How long you've been at that stage doesn't seem to come into it.
Right. And that was the claim I wanted info on.
Do you think it's a good idea that people still blowing positive on a LFD after 10 days of isolation following a confirmatory positive PCR test should be allowed to end isolation and go back to commuting/work/socialising/etc?
Yes, because that's what, as far as I can tell, the science has said should happen. That is, there is not a clear link between a 10 day positive and being contagious. In fact, the link that does exist is between 10 days post first symptoms/positive test and not being contagious. This is probably why these are the rules that are in place in pretty much every country I know of (with some variations in amount of time). The only time tests seem to play a role is when one can exit isolation early.
(I don't think it's a good idea, but that's just my opinion, I know of no evidence to support/challenge this.)
It's funny how some opinions without evidence on here are a-okay (usually opinions about people being locked up in flats for long periods of time), but others are not. @amey made a good point on this a couple of weeks ago that was pretty much ignored.
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Fair enough, opinions and arseholes and all that.
But I think the "isolate for 10 days" rule is just a product of a need for simplicity that is a cultural limitation of the UK population[1]. Anything more complex than that is unlikely to be as effective due to people getting confused, ignoring things or just coming up with another reason why they think it doesn't apply to them. I personally think it still lets quite a few people out into the world who are still infectious (it's unlikely to be zero, and no-one here would be able to quantify whether it is just a handful or many more than that so there's little merit in any debate on the magnitude of the problem).
My point is, I don't doubt that "isolate for 10 days" is a high effective strategy, as evidenced by the fact that many many countries follow the same rules, but more effective strategies are just too complex and could quite possibly just lead to lower overall compliance (and therefore be a retrograde step).
- Some countries are a bit more flexible in some respects. See France and the different speed limits on Autoroutes depending on the weather.
- Some countries are a bit more flexible in some respects. See France and the different speed limits on Autoroutes depending on the weather.
Greenbank
I thought I'd couched my comments with enough speculative terms to make it obvious that it was my opinion and not fact. "very likely", "in my opinion", "very good chance", etc.
The source I linked to says the correlation (however strong it is) is between viral load and infectiousness. How long you've been at that stage doesn't seem to come into it.
Do you think it's a good idea that people still blowing positive on a LFD after 10 days of isolation following a confirmatory positive PCR test should be allowed to end isolation and go back to commuting/work/socialising/etc?
(I don't think it's a good idea, but that's just my opinion, I know of no evidence to support/challenge this.)