Quote:
Originally Posted by Dasher0928
A recent Covid-19 patient asked his doctor if his case of Covid was the Delta variant, and the doctor replied he couldn’t know because there is no test for the Delta variant. The are guessing it is.
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Your post is partly right and partly wrong, but extremely misleading. Of course there is a test for Delta. But it is not the simple five minute nasal swab available at the drug store. Analyzing the RNA of the virus is a more complex test which everyone is familiar with from crime shows. Some hospitals, universities and State and Federal labs and large national lab companies [think Quest] have the equipment to analyze or sequence the RNA. Your routine nasal swab just says yes or no to is Covid present.
If the doctor really said there is no test for Delta Covid, get a new doctor. More likely the doctor said that the test the patient had did not specifically test for Delta vs other variants. Right now the chance the patient had Delta is about 80%. You as a patient or the doctor AFAIK cannot order genomic sequencing on your sample but I may be wrong.
Quest and Labcorp has been sequencing some of their positive tests randomly and with the patient ID stripped in cooperation with CDC's ongoing surveillance. Perhaps others are as well.
More testing is needed to see what particular variant is involved. This advanced testing is done to determine which variants are circulating in the community. Both state and national labs do this sequencing to detect shifts in what variants are out there. So now over 80% of the samples being sequenced are Delta
For more information the CDC explains the process and reasoning.. if you accept that the CDC is not some evil organization manipulating the population to create a new world order enforced by black helicopters and Facebook
HERE
and more in depth
HERE
and for in depth information on the variants, go
HERE