Here’s a little riddle for you. A woman is lying in hospital after just giving birth is told she has been “in contact” with a person who’s tested positive for coronavirus. She is told to self – isolate when she is released. The midwives, however, decide to do a COVID19 test. How many tests do you think is needed to determine whether the woman has COVID19?

This is what happened to my sister. She gave birth to a baby boy on Christmas Eve. When she went into labour, the midwife on shift convinced her she had to have a coronavirus test. I would imagine that most women in labour, who are already in so much pain, don’t have time or energy to think about it and whether they have the right to say no. This is what happened to my wife four weeks ago, when she went into labour. They said it was to determine whether our birth plan could go as we had planed or if we should be placed in a different room and reduce the number of midwives, doctors and nurses interacting with us. The argument of mask wearing by the medical staff is slowly starting to fall apart already. Both my sister and my wife went ahead with the test and the results were negative in both. My wife’s labour didn’t go as planned anyway and we ended up in the same room as we would have if she had refused the test or if it had been positive. During my wife’s labour, it was demanded of me to wear a mask even though such contagious disease would surely get us both or none at all. In other words, if I had it, so would she and her test wouldn’t have been negative.

My wife was already in a lot of pain, the labour was taking too long and eventually ended with forceps – the very last and the most feared option on my wife’s birth plan. So, I had no intention making a scene over a facemask that day. Things for my sister took a different turn. Her labour ended with the caesarean, but apart from a minor infection, both her and the baby were fine.

My sister was already reluctant to take the COVID19 test. Not because she believed it was all a hoax designed to bring about The New World Order, but because she simply wasn’t looking forward to having anything stuck up her nose. She let them do it to her anyway, probably because saying no to a medical staff who speak with authority and are about to deliver your baby sounded like an inappropriate thing to do. I bet that most women think they don’t have much choice in the matter too.

After her son was born, my sister and him were kept in the hospital for two days and given antibiotics for the infection. In those forty – eight hours, she was told that she had been near someone who tested positive for COVID19 and was told she would have to self – isolate when they released her from the hospital. The staff then kept my sister on lockdown in her room and told her to only leave it for essential reasons and with a mask and gloves on.

‘But hey, we are in the hospital, can we not just test her again instead and determine if she has to quarantine or not?’ Something along those lines must have been said that day because they tested my sister not once, not twice. The tests came back negative, so just to make sure they tested her again. Bear in mind that she had already hated the very idea of the test and so far she had had it four times (once in labour and three times after the birth) all in the space of two days. The result of the third test was also negative. You’d think that after three negative tests she would be told not to worry about the quarantine, but this wasn’t the case.

The nurses told her that the virus might still reveal itself which, in other words, means the tests aren’t as reliable as we are told. What was the point, in that case, of testing her three times on the same day? Another question I have is that, given they insist on testing all pregnant women before providing their services, how did someone who tested positive ended up in close proximity to my sister and her new born baby? A baby who has no immune system yet? Wouldn’t you think they would make sure these people don’t cross paths?

It poses even more questions if it was a member of staff who tested positive. For example, why panic if everyone is wearing PPE? COVID19 stands no chance against an army of people in masks, shields, gloves, plastic gowns and sanitising stations. No chance. Isn’t it how the argument goes – the medical staff wear masks to stop getting others sick? Isn’t it what every BBC watching sheep has said in a facemask argument hoping to win the debate? Just think about it. COVID19 seemed to have found a way to sneak into the most sterile environment on the planet, but people still think wearing a piece of cloth on their face when shopping in Tesco will make any change? On top of that, medical staff do not wear masks to stop others getting sick. That is not the purpose of facemasks and never was. Not until 2020 at least when science started to change to fit what politicians say. You can find this and other commonly used arguments for facemasks debunked here: Unmasking COVID19 Logic – Deserts of Mars (wordpress.com).

Just a couple of final points. These tests are what decisions about your life are based on. You’d think that a test that has the power to kill the economy, close your business, stop you from working and prevent parents from seeing their kids on Christmas and for the better part of 2020 would be more reliable, wouldn’t you? Also, if facemasks are so great at stopping this virus, how did it find its way into this maternity ward? In fact, how does the virus find it possible to infect people in places where facemasks are mandatory and where people largely obey this rule – like shops and trains? Gyms for example have no mandate to wear masks and the cases are almost non – existent. Here we have a hospital – one of the most sterile places in the world right now, and COVID19 managed to find its way in.

Finally, just before releasing her, they tested my sister the fifth time. This time she is told to wait for the result. Ask yourself, if my sister “must” quarantine after four negative tests, which means she can’t have our mom over to help her with the baby, why would you ever rely on that test at all? Why would you ever self – isolate after testing positive once and having no symptoms. Why would you ever not self – isolate if you tested negative knowing that the virus may still reveal itself? Why would you ever let politicians use this test to scare you with growing cases and in turn put you into lockdown after lockdown? They recently used this test to determine whether thousands of lorry drivers stuck in Kent were allowed to go to their home countries for Christmas. Drivers that weren’t even the citizens of the UK. They were not allowed out of this country unless they tested negative using this unreliable test that even when performed four times is not trusted by the medical staff themselves.

Even if we ignore how coronavirus found its way into that maternity ward, we still are left with the problem of tests and their accuracy and reliability. If we ignore the accuracy of tests we are left with reliability of facemasks against COVID19. Regardless of what you think, these things continue to affect us all and the worst thing is, the experts seem to have learned so much about the virus that they developed a vaccine in a record time, but the government is still using the same approach as they did when they knew nothing about it at all. What do you think about it?