AFTER THEY'VE TRIED EVERYTHING ELSE, THEY'LL TRY LOGIC.

In October 2020, before vaccinations, when the Wuhan coronavirus got into the White House, and gave Donald Trump a scare, I suggested, "Yes, there's a comprehensive quick-testing routine for anyone coming into the Executive Mansion, but tests can yield false positives (not infected, show a positive level of a coronavirus, you're not going in today) and false negatives (infected, but it doesn't show up on your test, in you go and it's in the wind.)"  The tests have pretty good power against both types of error, but even so, with as much testing as there is going on, there are going to be a lot of infected-but-not-detected people sharing their germs, as well as a lot of people hunkering down until their next test comes up accurate.  In my monthly assessments of the failure of the strict corona regime in Illinois, of late I've been asking, "How many people walking around with 'asymptomatic infections' ought properly be understood as 'false positives?'"

Ask, and ye shall receive.

Up to 40% of people infected with COVID-19 globally experience no symptoms early in their illness, a study published Tuesday by JAMA Network Open found.

However, these asymptomatic individuals still may be susceptible to "long-haul" COVID-19 complications, such as severe chronic fatigue, and also may pass the virus to others unknowingly, the researchers said.

In the analysis of data from 95 studies that collectively included 30 million participants, 0.25% of those tested for the virus were positive but reported no symptoms, the data showed.

That could be both bad news and good news.

The findings highlight the importance of widespread, comprehensive testing, as asymptomatic infections should also be isolated and undergo contact tracing, [study co-author Min Liu, an epidemiologist in China] said.

Research published in January also suggested that as many as 40% of COVID-19 cases are asymptomatic.

This may mean that case totals are underestimated, perhaps by as much as 80%, the January study indicates.

Is it not then time to start thinking that more people have gotten through this virus than Our Political Masters would like to admit, or that a positive test is not a death sentence, let alone a spur to worry about being chronically ill?

That is, think along the lines Kevin "Healthy Skeptic" Roche is thinking.

Despite extremely high vaccination rates across [basketball, football, and hockey] these sports, teams are having high numbers of players and staff test positive and be quarantined and are then testing other players and staff and quarantining them and so on. Almost all these “cases” are asymptomatic. I simply don’t have a big enough audience, because I explain repeatedly, and this is just common sense, that if you keep using PCR tests the way we have been, we are going to keep finding non-case “cases”. And that is what is happening in professional sports. The only solution is to stop any testing of asymptomatic persons. Period. And to take positive tests of symptomatic persons and retest them immediately, regularly culture a random sample of positives, and define an infectiousness threshold that only isolates persons who are actually likely to be infectious. And quarantining asymptomatic persons is similarly dumb policy, especially if the person is vaccinated. We have to stop this, and maybe because professional sports is big business, they can draw some attention to how stupid these policies are, as we watch fifth string quarterbacks play in meaningful games.

Put another way, quarantining "asymptomatic persons" has a lot of quarantining of what we ought understand as "healthy persons" and absent an infectiousness threshold those fifth string quarterbacks and those kids eating their school lunches outside are a lot of casualties of bad faith.  Perhaps spelling out an infectiousness threshold is something constructive that public health officials could do, rather than just chant, like a bunch of priests, maskem omnibus, injectus infinitus.  National Review's Philip Klein suggests there's a "public health mafia," but doesn't this description sound more like something a clergyman, particularly an unimaginative one, might say.  "When the policies that they propose do not produce the promised results, and as one variant after another surfaces, the response is to argue that we have shown insufficient respect to them and that we need to make amends by being more loyal to their guidance."

I must credit radio talker Ben Shapiro for that final argument, as it was he who reminded his listeners that bad stuff happened to Job despite Job following all of God's requests, and that it was the pagan priests who would scold the tribe for not rain-dancing enthusiastically enough or otherwise not doing enough to propitiate the gods.  It was never bad advice from the elders, no, never.