Some asked on social media, why do those doing Covid-19 testing not have to quarantine after coming in to contact with persons who then test positive?

USA Today “Fact Checks” this question with a seriously incomplete answer:

But the post ignores two key factors in virus spread – how medical personnel are shielded by personal protective equipment while administering the tests and how it only takes a few seconds to administer a test.

“People fail to understand how medical PPE works and protects them from infection,” Erin Bromage, who teaches about infection and immunology at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, told USA TODAY in an email.

The potential exposure mentioned in the Facebook posts is considered low-risk by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention since it lasts only a few seconds, so the chances of transmission are low. That’s why most workers administering COVID-19 tests won’t quarantine, a spokesperson told USA TODAY.

Source: Fact check: No quarantine for some health workers after COVID exposure

1. Medical PPE protects medical workers – you, however, would not be granted the same courtesy if you were using an N95 mask, gloves and following the same protocols.
2. Second, “it only takes a few seconds” – times a hundred people per day. Total exposure during the day is not “a few seconds” but is multiplied by the many potential contacts undertaken during the day during testing (and of course other contacts with others during the remainder of the day).

Note – as of this past week, California requires triple vaxxed individuals who may have been in contact with a positive test recipient, even if wearing PPE, to quarantine for 14 days, even if the fully vaxxed individual tests negative multiple times, and on return to work, these fully vaxxed individuals are required to wear a “mask” (generic) and remain six feet from all others. But a person testing dozens or more sick individuals every day does not have to quarantine even though they may have similar cumulative exposures times, fully vaxxed and wearing same PPE as members of the public.

This fact check fails to provide a consistent, non-contradictory and coherent explanation for these issues.

Fact checks have become a new form of propaganda messaging used by the media to shut down inconvenient questions or concerns about everything. Fact checks become a form of censorship via cherry picking, missing logic and so on.

We rate this USA Today “Fact Check” as incomplete, missing context and failing to address obvious issues.

UPDATE: Here is another “Fact Check” that rates a separate item as “False”. But it does so by creating a fictitious question, effectively their own straw man, which they then refute:

Was the video of Elizabeth Warren deboarding a private plane taken recently?

In terms of the point of the post they were “Fact checking” it was irrelevant that the photo was taken 21 months ago. The point of the post was that Elizabeth Warren was an elite individual who also uses private jets. It does not matter if this photo was taken in 2021, 2020 or 2019.

Fact Checks are themselves so abused by the media that they cannot be trusted as self-appointed arbiters of truth.