CBS News reports that 44 Cal football players "tested positive" for COVID on Wednesday, after undergoing mandatory testing.  Their weekend game is postponed.  They were contact-traced after "someone" was infected.  The team is "99.5%" vaccinated, per Cal athletic director Jim Knowlton.

Damage control was immediate.  In the same news report, Dr. Monica Gandhi, UCSF infectious disease expert, said the vaccinated players never should have been tested and that "guidelines" hadn't been updated.  Oops!  Gandhi explained why she was not worried:

"I have zero panic whatsoever as a public health person, as an infectious disease doctor, of 44 healthy people who are fully vaccinated who may have a little virus in their nose on a highly sensitive test," Gandhi told KPIX 5 Wednesday. "It is not an outbreak, it does not mean they got sick, and it does not mean the vaccines don't work. It means that our public health strategy in this case was off and they were doing mass testing of people who didn't need it."

The team, under threat of arrest if they didn't all test, submitted.  I'm sure the "guidelines" will be updated post-haste to avoid this in the future!  For now, the scramble to explain the results is pathetic.

Image: Cal Football by John Martinez Pavliga.  CC BY 2.0.

Gandhi, one of the go-to "experts" on COVID here in the San Francisco Bay Area, had more, very interesting,  things to say about vaccines and testing:

Not only should we not test if we are asymptomatic and vaccinated, so again, that's not even a recommendation but you're [sic] likelihood of spreading it to anyone is very low[.] ... There were essentially 5 contact testing studies. One in Singapore, one in Calcutta, one in Harvard, one in Oxford and one in the summer camps that if you're fully vaccinated and you feel well, you're not spreading it to other people. If we don't have more confidence in the vaccines, we are going to be in a never-ending pandemic. (Emphasis added.)

A study at U.C. Davis, published October 4, directly contradicts Gandhi's statement.  It found "wide variations in viral load within both vaccinated and unvaccinated groups, but not between them.  There was no significant difference in viral load between vaccinated and unvaccinated, or between asymptomatic and symptomatic groups."

Now we have the answer to why they have been testing only the unvaccinated.  Think about it: is this a "pandemic of the unvaccinated," or is it the vaccinated, who may have less symptomatic cases of COVID, who are the super-spreaders?

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