You aren't legally allowed to know which variant gave you COVID-19 in the US, even if it's Delta

[MisterNiceKitty]

Last edited Tue Aug 24, 2021, 04:29 PM - Edit history (1)

https://www.businessinsider.com/covid-patients-cant-know-which-variant-infected-them-delta-2021-8
Aria Bendix Aug 23, 2021

"Sam Reider, a musician from San Francisco, got a call from the California Department of Public Health in June. Though fully vaccinated, Reider had recently tested positive for COVID-19 after teaching music at a summer camp. The health department asked him to take a second test at a local Kaiser Permanente.

Reider assumed it was because authorities wanted to find out whether he had a Delta infection. He, too, was curious — but when he got the test results back, he was surprised to learn that doctors couldn't give him any information about his variant.

"When I got the follow-up from Kaiser, they said it's positive, but they didn't have any of the sequencing information," Reider told Insider. That "felt odd to me," he said.

Several legal barriers prevented Reider and his doctors — as well as nearly all Americans who have tested positive for the coronavirus — from knowing which variant was to blame.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Service (CMS), which oversees the regulatory process for US labs, requires genome-sequencing tests to be federally approved before their results can be disclosed to doctors or patients. These are the tests that pick up on variants, but right now, there's little incentive for the labs to do the work to validate those tests.

"I don't think there's a lot of motivation, quite honestly, to get that done," Kelly Wroblewski, director of infectious diseases at the Association of Public Health Laboratories, told Insider.

[sakabatou]

1. In other words, there's not enough money to be made to either do the tests or inform people

[intrepidity]

2. It's entirely possible that many tests don't distinguish

The headline is misleading and provocative, imho.

[marybourg]

4. I agree with your ho.

[iemanja]

5. but public health officials know

or they wouldn't be able to say x% of cases are the delta variant.

[marybourg]

6. But the degree to which the tests are reliable is not known.

[intrepidity]

7. When they say that, they are likely referring to stats of

tests that *do* check specificity. Clearly they won't include data from tests that aren't specific.

Our "health care system" is so fragmented and dysfunctional that there's no way all the data is being streamlined into one big database where accurate stats can be produced. We must look to other countries with eg, national health care sytems, for that data. IMHO, of course.

[Pobeka]

8. Both could be true. They may only genetically test a small number of samples.

So they can know the breakout of % cases caused by each variant from the sample.

But they wouldn't know the variant for all samples.

I'm assuming genetic testing is more expensive and takes more time, which would be a good reason to limit the number of tests that get genetic testing.

[GopherGal]

11. And also, the testing for ID of variant may occur stripped of patient's identifying info.

Likely it's traceable, but I could imagine it's possible that some randomized subset of samples is sent for the full variant ID testing without patient ID info included, since so much of that health information is held under "need-to-know" basis.

There's value in knowing epidemiologically speaking what % of cases are due to which variant(s). I'm not sure how valuable it is to know for an individual which variant they have...

[getagrip_already]

10. Not every test is sequenced.....

For some results, there is no sequence info in our state db, for others, there is.

Not every test is sequenced. Period.

So yes, the state likely knows. But they don't release that level of info.

[LeftInTX]

13. At home tests won't tell you!

They are the same rapid tests that are done at Walgreens etc.

The delta numbers are probably based on sampling....
I have no idea if PCR tests can tell the variant or not....

It's pretty safe to say that delta is about 90% of cases right now....

[Blues Heron]

3. with 93 percent of US cases Delta, assume it's Delta

You are legally allowed to know, they just can't tell you until that particular test is approved. That's different than "You aren't legally allowed to know"

[ZonkerHarris]

9. a few patient lawsuits should do the trick here.

[elleng]

12. 'legally allowed to know,' or

REQUIRED to be told?

Words matter.

[relayerbob]

14. Doubtful they test for variant with every test

Not a lot of point to that, and there are a lot more than two variants. They do surveys of some percentage of positive tests to determine how prevalent strain X is vs strain Y, etc.

Genetic sequencing is alot more expensive and time-sinsuming, and TBH, provides the average person almost no benefit.

This last idea idea, that one would react differently to sifferent strains is, frankly, dumb. If one chooses to do their own contact conversations, the variant really doesn't matter ... both spread wide and fast, esp among unvaxxed people. In any case, the vast majority of the cases here (, in the surveys done, are Delta (>93%), so just make that assumption.

The headline is very misleading, also. And this "Some patients, however, feel they're being denied access to their own health information." is just more conspiracy theory-mongering, and needs to stop.

[MineralMan]

15. Very misleading title from a publication that uses such titles all the time.

In reality, the tests people routinely take for COVID DO NOT determine which variant you have. That requires additional testing. There's no law restricting that information. It's just that the run-of-the-mill COVID tests do not determine the variant at all. You are either positive for COVID-19 or you are not.

Bottom line is that it is not significant to the patient which variant he or she has. It's only relevant to epidemiologists who are tracking variant spreading.

It's not "illegal." It just wasn't done in this case, or in the vast majority of such tests. The tests cannot even say which variant is present. They don't test for that.

[Xoan]

16. Nonsense