With COVID-19, is it better to stop isolation early and incur additional COVID-19 deaths?

If isolation stops early before there are effective treatments then we are back to the same exponential spread. The problem is we don’t have good monitoring and we aren’t able to detect patients who are asymptomatic and highly contagious. We won’t be back to anywhere near normal until we have reliable and readily available testing and good protocols for continued habits to avoid spreading the virus. We won’t be out of the woods completely until we have a good vaccine. It’s going to be a long time before nursing homes prisons and other group settings will be back to normal. one of the problems with rapidly evolving and newly brought to market screening tests is there may be both false negatives and false positives. I suspect at least some people who show recurrent virus after testing negative may be because of a false negative by the previous test; this could be either because the sample didn’t pick up virus, because it was at a much lower level, (sampling error), or an inherent problem with the test itself. it may be that confirmatory tests on sequential days could be required. It’s my belief that once the virus is truly cleared that it will cease to be present altogether, and that most of these recurrences are a result of sampling or analytical error

Particularly for new screening tests I don’t think we have the experience to adequately define the parameters under which they work and do not work, confounding factors, negative and positive predictive values.

False positives can also occur if other benign corona viruses, of which there are many circulating, causing common colds, cross-react with the test.

By rushing these tests to market I doubt whether they have been thoroughly tested along these lines, and bad data are only a little better than no data “note – are sounds funny with this but the singular is datum the plural form is data”(James Gideon)