"(T)he voice of reason"? You drop an unnecessary piece of anti-scientific disinformation in a thread about the head coach's health, and then declare inappropriate any response to your disinformation. That's a lot of things, but it is most certainly
not being "the voice of reason."
I'm trying to respect
@UK_Seahawk's warning here, so I'm just going to address facts about testing for viruses. I will avoid the political weeds of how best to deal with COVID-19 and flu outbreaks, and things like vaccination and COVID-19 treatments.
First, just a brief thought about it leads to the obvious conclusion that an assertion like "the covid test can't tell the difference between covid and the flu" is false for multiple reasons.
First among those, there is no "
the" COVID-19 test. There are multiple kinds of tests. That immediately makes the assertion very suspicious and very likely to be nonsense (spoiler: it
is nonsense).
Then, when we think about the tests, it's clear that there's no way any kind of test currently in use could confuse the two viruses.
The viruses are completely unrelated. They're in different phyla, basically the same taxonomic "distance" as human beings from sponges. The genetics is so different that the viruses use their genetic material (RNA in both cases) in completely different ways, SARS-CoV-2's RNA being positive-sense, that is, able to code proteins directly, and that of influenza viruses being negative-sense, that is, having sequences of
complements of codons for amino acids and needing an RNA polymerase to transcribe the virus's RNA to positive-sense RNA that can then code proteins.
The antigens presented by the two viruses are completely unrelated and dissimilar. As a result, the antibodies that bind to them are also dissimilar. This is why a flu shot or a case of the flu doesn't protect against COVID-19 and a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine or a case of COVID-19 doesn't protect against the flu.
The PCR test looks for SARS-CoV-2 genetic material. The rapid tests look for SARS-CoV-2 antigens. And even antibody tests, not relevant here because Coach Carroll wouldn't have taken one of those to determine if he currently had a SARS-CoV-2 infection (a case of COVID-19) or not, look for antibodies specific to one virus. So there's just no way any of the tests currently in use, even the irrelevant-to-this-discussion ones, could confuse the two viruses.
So if the White House said COVID-19 tests couldn't distinguish between SARS-CoV-2 and flu viruses, the White House was wrong. Is there a (non-social-media) reference to the White House saying that the tests can't distinguish between flu viruses and SARS-CoV-2? I didn't find any.
What I suspect the White House actually announced was the new (well, it was new last year) guidance from the CDC, which is to use tests that can detect not only SARS-CoV-2, but also flu viruses. The CDC pulled the temporary EUA for SARS-CoV-2-only PCR tests last year, recommending instead the use of multiplexed methods capable of testing simultaneously for multiple possible viral infections. So it wasn't a matter of the old tests not being able to distinguish, but of them working as designed in detecting only SARS-CoV-2 genetic material (and if the CDC had said anything about antigen or antibody tests, those too, but as I said above, an antibody test doesn't by itself say anything about currently active SARS-CoV-2 infections), but in doing so, leaving the possibility of a flu infection untested.
Any test can have false positives and false negatives, and the SARS-CoV-2 tests currently in use are not exceptions. Since the rapid tests for COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2 antigen tests) have some pretty high false-negative rates later in an infection, anyone at high risk for a severe case or close to such a person, and with symptoms that could be COVID-19, should probably take a second test after getting a negative result on a rapid test. A PCR test is more reliable than an antigen test, so getting one of those instead of an antigen test is even better, tho' it requires more-complex logistics and takes longer.
But in any case, SARS-CoV-2 tests do
not confuse SARS-CoV-2 and flu viruses.