mleku on Nostr: the thing you are missing in your understanding is they are searching for a marker, ...

the thing you are missing in your understanding is they are searching for a marker, not the whole chemical signature of the virus, and many markers that are specific to something are found in enough of an amount in almost every sample that at best it indicates you were around someone recently, maybe, who was shedding the virus, which can also be because of having taken a vaccine

it is not a reliable method of detecting infections because it's indistriminate, it's like taking an audio sample where the signal is at most like 6 or 7 magnitude and then trying to make out speech from that level of imprecision

it's very useful for the original thing it was devised to do - extract DNA from stingy sources like hair or fossils, it's useless at finding positive signs of infection