The Journalistic Harm of Superficial, Dumbed-Down Reporting

How should journalist report on the complexity of an issue? It appears journalist often either don't do the research necessary to dig into a rigorous in-depth understanding or they believe they must dumb down their understanding and writing to appeal to an elementary level reader. What should be a clear, concise explication of a challenging issue often is an over-simplified, folksy story-telling kind of writing.

Let's look an example from the August 6 Washington Post. It is an opinion piece on choosing testing for Covid-19: "What type of covid-19 test should you use? It depends."

Largely, the reporter gives misleading facts as to the two testing choices and confuses the Covid-19 disease with having the SARS CoV-2 virus (its RNA present in the body). Detecting RNA fragments of the CoV-2 virus by the highly sensitive RT—PCR does not mean the person is going to get sick or that they are transmissible unless the viral load is high enough that they are sick and transmissable. A few people detected with low viral loads might by chance be tested in the short window of time (a matter of hours) prior to exponential viral growth but most people, around 90%, who are carrying RNA fragments detected by very sensitive RT—PCR testing are not pre-disease but post-infection. These are people who already had either a mild or undetectable symptoms with strong immune systems and who are not and will not be trasnsmissable.

The virus takes off exponentially in newly infected people, and in a matter of hours goes from almost undetectable to a high viral load so there is almost no chance to test at the right time to predict the disease before it takes off. But even crappy testing can very reliably (95%) detect high viral loads in people that have reached the transmissibility threshold but who do not yet have symptoms of the disease. But highly sensitive testing largely identifies people after they have had the disease when these people are not transmissible, not before. So if we use a crappy test to could detect high viral loads with frequent testing to detect when people are infected and reached the transmissible level but miss people with small viral loads left over after the disease and are not transmissable, that is good because we shouldn’t quarantine those people who are non-transmissible. In other words, the small detection rate the CDC reports, 10%, won’t stop the transmission since it cannot be done frequently enough to hit the time of viral load in a person on the way to the level of transmissibility in a person.

The issue is the choice between the FDA approved, high quality, gold standard sensitivity of RT—PCR testing or the lower sensitivity (but high reliability) paper antigen tests not approved by the FDA. It is not between the two choices the reporter stated but between her two choices and the third, dramatically different choice. Here’s the proper testing comparison:

 

Available only at central location	Available to every home
Administered only by medical personnel	Administered by anyone
At best 4 hour, usually more results	Results in 10 minutes
Expensive, $100	Cheap, $1
Highly sensitive to any traces of virus	Sensitive to only viral loads that are infectious
Detects everyone who has any trace of virus	Detects people who are infectious
Indiscriminately quarantines infectious and non-infectious people	Identifies and self-quarantines only infectious people
Single individual at a time	Household can be pooled in a single test
Requires trackers and tracking	No tracking or trackers are required
Cannot lower R rate to stop spread	Immediately lowers R rate to stop spread
Only tests a limited number of people	Everyone, everyday, anywhere can test themselves

So the reporters limited grasp of transmission and testing meant the reporter could not see the more complex and deeper issue; so aside from the reporter's mis-statements which suggest her lack of understanding of level of viral load and transmissibility and even the difference between the virus and the disease it causes, the reporter could not raise the question of why it is that we don’t have decentralized, cheap, self-administered testing universally available. The reporter could have described what empowering citizens with rapid, immediate, cheap testing would do for people’s lives. Imagine your interactions if you and your guests could detect, on the spot, whether anyone was infectious and transmissible. Imagine schooling if every morning every child or even every family could test themselves and immediately determine if anyone was infectious and transmissible. Imagine society if the infection rate dropped dramatically and the virus could not spread. She missed all this because of her initial notion restricted her view of what is possible. All those implications were lost in the reporting.

If all this true (and like a good reporter, you may want to find confirmation), the reporter should have asked why and how the public is prevented from having access to these simple Covid-19 antigen tests. If it is clear that the prevention of public access to these tests is greatly harming the public does that not raises moral and ethical issues as to who exactly is responsible and why they don’t act? If our current policies and public health measures are unable to stop the spread the spread of the virus, and we continue losing thousands of lives (we are above 160,000), should we continue to so greatly harm people’s lives, jobs, well-being, by needlessly quarantine huge numbers of people who are not infectious? Should we continue to harm our children’s education when it very possibly appears to be needless? Why do we not want to empower every citizen with cheap, fast testing to stop the SARS CoV-2 virus dead in its tracks? Should we empower citizens with testing or lockdown everyone? Should we not choose testing frequency over testing sensitivity? Why exactly does the FDA let the perfect be the enemy of the good? That’s the issue we need reporters to investigate.