You can get sick during a pandemic

Who knew you could still get sick during a pandemic from something other than COVID?

I’ve got a lung infection at the moment - have had for the past two weeks actually. It’s made me realise that I’m not invincible. It’s also made me realise that the medical system is imperfect

While I am immunocompromised, and have a lung disease, the medical system really isn’t geared up to deal with it at all.

They are geared up to deal with pandemic related problems - and what’s worse they see everything as a pandemic related problem.

I was admitted to hospital via emergeny - mainly because I needed to go through emergency to be assessed for COVID.

The assessment included a rapid test and a PCR test.

What happened?

What happened was interesting, but also somewhat annoying.

I ended up allegedly “testing positive” for covid, even though I didn’t have symptoms, nor did I have any other problems.

I was shuttled to a room, without explanation where I was summarily locked up. There was no way I could open the door or get out of the room.

Such is life in the place where I live.

Subsequent problems

Subsequently, after speaking with my specialist and the consulting doctor, they believed that it was extremely unlikely that I was covid positive.

The main reason for this is that as someone with interstitial lung disease, covid presents a massive problem to me. It presents such a problem that every doctor I’ve spoken to says that I would likely be dead if I had have had covid.

Batch Testing

So when hospitals and other institutions do testing of covid samples, they perform what is known as batch testing. This is where (allegedly) engineering principles are used to determine whether or not a problem exists. In the case of covid, testing, what happens is a batch of samples are combined together and tested all at once. If this agregated sample returns negative, then all samples are negative.

If this agregated sample returns positive, then all samples are individually tested.

What happened?

I had a posotive result - was moved to a loke room and told not to leave.

I requested a retest. This retest, confirmed that I was not positive. A second retest confimred the same result.

The clinical notes in the hospital pointed to a “mix up”.