AP Photo/David Goldman, File
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is doing little to inspire confidence these days. To its two years of changing stories about masks, school safety and other topics, it’s now adding two more: It got the percentage of COVID infections due to Omicron badly wrong, and it says the PCR test can show positive results for as many as 12 weeks, meaning they’re not practical for releasing patients from isolation.
These are serious problems for an agency that’s regarded as the keeper of official “science.”
On Tuesday, the CDC said that for the week ending Dec. 18, just 22.5 percent of new infections were caused by Omicron, not 73 percent, as it originally reported. That’s a mistake of a whopping 50 percentage points. As of Dec. 25, Omicron accounted for 59 percent of new COVID cases, it said.
On top of that, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky now says PCR tests, billed as the gold standard, can stay positive for up to 12 weeks — i.e., long after a person is actually no longer contagious.
Yet many officials continue to rely on negative results: Mayor Bill de Blasio’s new school rules, for example, require kids to show negative test results to attend in-person classes. So if a child gets a positive reading, a PCR test result might keep him or her out of school for 12 weeks unnecessarily.
The CDC is sowing more confusion and distrust, and that’s after its other screw-ups. Recall how the agency sent out faulty COVID tests across the country at the beginning of the pandemic. Or how, for weeks, the bureaucracy told Americans that only those who are sick should wear masks — only to change course later and recommend them for everyone.
In March, Walensky said CDC data show the vaccinated “do not get sick” and “do not carry the virus.” Oops: We now know vaccinated people can carry COVID.
True, not much was known about COVID-19 when it first struck, so the agency deserved a little slack. But that was nearly two years ago. And Americans have been basing huge decisions on its guidance — from lockdowns to school closures to social gatherings. It’s got to do better.
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