dramatically that we ll have a hard time keeping everyday life operating. already we are seeing it in our healthcare settings where we can lose our healthcare workers who are not available to work. we are seeing that right now in critical infrastructure area where people can t come to work. to me, ideally you would like to have more time to allow people to clear the virus and not potentially be transmitting it. at the same time we got to have people who are there everyday who are doing the work. how can you provide the safest environment. i support what they are doing. i think it s not perfect. it won t be perfect and what we have come before us the next few weeks is hardly going to allow for a perfect response. one of the things that raised our eye brows yesterday, dr. wallensky, when i asked her should you show a negative test after five days and not just put a mask when you go back to school. she says well a lot of those tests will show you positive
test. there will be so many people who want to be tested but you don t have a test. how can you have a recommendation to say get tested but you can t find one. i was walking home from work and they have those mobile vans to test people. long lines on the block and when you get to the front of the line, due to volume, it s a 72 hour return time. for those three days, do you stay-at-home or do the test mean anything after three days? the at-home test, these rapid tests that so many are relying on if we can get our hands-on them. it s difficult to get the pcr appointment, you don t trust those necessarily, the rapid test. i don t. we need more information. if fda really has let us down in those areas, we need more information about how often are they correct. we have many, many examples of people who two and three days into their illness are testing
negative but turned out positive by pcr. again, they may be helpful but at the same time how helpful and we need to let consumers know when you use these tests, this is a chance finding it when you are infected and being told you are not. the test says i am negative, i can go do this and that. we need much better information than we have. dr. osterholm, the scarcity of the test may have influenced the cdc s decision to get rid of the require to test negative before entering everyday life because people can t get their hands on it. there is the definition of fully vaccinated change?
results for weeks and weeks so you will be quarantining for weeks and weeks. does that mean the test we have are not doing much good? number one you have to distinguish between the pcr test as theover the counter test. i have concerns of how accurate theover the counter test is picking up infections and we are missing them and people are making decisions about do i go to family events where people at high risk when i tested negative but really i am positive. that s the first thing. the pcr is a definitive test and we can get that. that can be positive for sometimes basically weeks after infection because you have what we call viral debris, the virus is not there but you arepicking up the remanence of the virus. the third thing which is the most important is another two weeks is going to be good to
have to consider this a time out as you may say with this virus and not assuming it will last for months and months with omicron. i think the next month is going to be unparallel in the kind of decisions we have to make and schools will be one of them. dr. osterholm, heading to the new year, people want to have some hopes, what do they do? we find these rapid tests and we waited in line at the walgreens, okay, we got the test and we are negative, you are not alone in saying the rapid tests are not accurate enough. i don t have time to get a pcr test, i can t get an appointment. what do americans do the next couple of weeks? are we back to april 2020 days? march 2020 days in your mind where to stay-at-home and wait out a few weeks. there is not a big appetite for