Dr. Shervin Naderi explains how PCR and antibody tests work for COVID-19, their false negative rates, and why accuracy matters for reopening safely. He warns against conspiracy theories and stresses the need to understand a new virus while balancing health and economic concerns.
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Good morning, everybody. There's a lot of information out there on the news, on social media, friends, family, relatives, blogs about this virus shutting down the country. When the country can open back up, when we can get back to business. What's safe, what's not safe, why were we even quarantined? And what's really changed in the last month and a half that we were quarantined? And a lot of that comes down to testing. And there's a lot of misinformation about testing as well. I just recently saw a video on Instagram by an injector who misunderstood the test that she was offering. And the conclusion she drew from the results of the test was incorrect. So let's clarify some things. The virus corona or COVID 19 is an RNA virus. There's two types of testing that can be done. One is the most common thing that you saw at the beginning, which is pcr. And the PCR essentially looks for a piece of the virus. So you have to be infected, you have to have the virus inside you to be able to get a piece of it, a sample of it, and be able to see it. Now, it's labor intensive. You've seen the swabbing of the nose or the mouth. That's done. You've seen how it takes sometimes days, up to 10 days to get the results in some, some labs. And there can be lots of errors. During this test, there can be up to 30% false negative, meaning you may have the virus. And test comes back and says that you're all clear. So it's, it's good to confirm if it says that you have it, it has about up to 85% specificity, which says that, okay, you may have the virus, you may be infected, but just because it came back negative, it doesn't mean that you have the all clear. And you've seen this happen time and time again in the news where somebody gets the test done, comes back negative, then they get it done again, and the second time comes back positive. So what happened? Well, sure, they may have gotten infected between the two tests, or due to the false negative rate of the PCR test, they may just never have gotten a good enough sample from the swab or during the lab process, just didn't get the proper lab test back. So again, the PCR checks for the antigen, which is the virus. Now the other test is the antibody test. The antibody test or a serology test looks for your body's immune response to the virus. There's two types of antibodies, IgG and IgM and they form at different times when you're infected. You could be infected with anything, bacteria, viruses, anything. And your immune system, if you're not immunocompromised, forms a response. They basically attack the antigen, which was the virus, with antibodies. So if the serology comes back and shows that you have antibodies to that specific antigen, and this time it's the COVID 19 or the coronavirus, then that tells you that you have been exposed to this virus at some point. Now, you may be currently infected, depending on the antibody that comes back, or you may have had it in the past, you may have had it two weeks ago, two months ago, whatever it is. And the goal of this type of test is to be able to show that, hey, you've got antibodies, which are the immune system's way of fighting an infection. So hopefully, you've already had the virus, you're not sick, you're not showing symptoms, you look healthy, you should have antibodies. So hopefully, theoretically, you should be immune. Meaning you can probably go back to work, go back to your business, go back to your supermarket, and you probably won't be at risk compared to somebody who doesn't have the antibodies. So that's the hope. Now, again, there have been reports of people that have had the infection recovered and then test positive again. So again, this is a new virus. We're just learning about it. It's been less than six months that this thing's been out there. So it's a process of learning and going from there. Now, as we open up the country, as we get things back opened up again, it's going to depend on testing. Back in March, we were told, stay home, quarantine. Okay, we stayed home, we quarantined, and guess what? Back in March, had you been walking around, you were less likely to run into somebody with corona because the numbers were low. March went by April, and we're approaching May now, and the numbers are astronomical. There are so many more people, thousands more people that have the virus than they had back in March. Especially in the United States. In the United States, one country, we are responsible for one fifth of the cases in the entire globe. It's crazy. I mean, it's astronomical that one country can have 20% of the cases of the entire world. Now, we're not even testing everybody. If we're testing everybody, who knows, maybe we're 1/4 or 1/3 of the cases, but at the very least, we have a huge number of people out there, citizens walking around with corona. What makes it worse is we are not able to screen properly. I mean, you've all heard or walked into a hospital or walked into a building and they're scanning your temperature to see if you have a fever. That's the best we can do. Do you have a fever? Yes. Okay, let's test you. But guess what? 60% of people that have this virus and are infected actively don't have a fever. They don't have any symptoms. They're perfectly fine. They'll shed the virus, they'll get people infected with it, but they have no symptoms, including fever. So if you have a business, if you're a doctor's office, if you're a baker, if you're a restaurant, if you have any kind of business and you want to let your staff, your clients in, how are you going to test for it? You can't say, I'm going to check people that have fevers and not let them in, because guess what, 60% of people that are infected may walk into your business and not have a fever and look perfectly fine. So testing, testing, testing, testing, that becomes the most important. And you can't test people and tell them, I'm going to get back to you in two, five, ten days later. That's not going to work. No business can function that way. So the key becomes rapid testing. If you can rapidly test your clients and your staff within five to 15 minutes and tell them with a fair amount of certainty. And again, we talk about false negative, false positives. You know, false negative is a test, and we talked about it with the pcr, where a test comes back and says you're negative, you don't have it, but it was false, you actually do have it. False positive is the other way, where somebody comes back and says you're infected, but you're really not infected. Well, I think it's a little bit more dangerous to have false negatives in a pandemic. And then the specificity and the sensitivity of the test, also things that you hear about are two other really important factors with any kind of test in this situation. Is the test specific for this virus or is it gonna just pick up all sorts of viruses, or is it also sensitive? How can delicately can it pick it up? Do you need a ton of virus for it to pick it up, or can it pick it up with just a little bit of virus and tell you, or antibody or anything? So these are important factors. And there's a lot of tests flying out there, and I'm sure there's going to be a lot of vaccines flying out there. The efficacy and how good these tests are is important. Just because you have a test doesn't mean that it's going to be the final answer and everything's going to get better. Depends on the test. Depends on even when vaccines become available, which ones are effective. So going back to the business, how can we get back and open up? The country really comes down to, can we test people, can we test our staff, can we test our patients, can we test our clients? Can we test our customers before they enter the premise and say, okay, just wait five minutes, I'll have their answer for you. And if the answer is you have antibodies, so you've had the virus in the past and you're immune to it, or better yet, you don't have the antigen right now, so you're not actively infected right now, then come on in. Happy to have you. But that's really gonna depend on this. I mean, if you can't do this, how can we open the country? What have we really done in the last month, month and a half, other than just trying to flatten the curve? Because the numbers of infected people are much, much more significantly out there. And with most of these pandemics in the past with sars, with the Spanish flu, there's always been a second bump, and the second bump is sometimes even larger than the first bump in numbers. But again, the politicians that are running the show are really concerned more about the economy, which is important. Economy is extremely important. But the scientists and the doctors have a whole different set of criteria and priorities that they're dealing with. Again, I hope this video helps. Please do more research. Don't just take the word of politicians and news and journalists and just also don't believe all the conspiracy theories. There's a lot of conspiracies going out there. Please, please, please. Corona has nothing to do with 5G radiation. That's a whole different problem. Yes, 5G radiation is not safe. Even 4G is not safe. Any cell phone radiation is not safe, but it's not related to Corona. And whether this thing came from a Chinese lab or from a bat or anywhere else is irrelevant. It's here right now. We have to deal with it. So let's focus on the issues that are important and we're trying to save lives here and get back to normal as soon as possible. I appreciate it. I hope that everybody stays safe. And God bless.
