Not sure why this would surprise you, since the Times has had consistently strong scientific journalism on COVID. This is an excellent article and dovetails with what I posted last night, including a link to one of Mina's commentaries on the need for a fast, cheap screening test, even if it's not as accurate as the current PCR test, since we need to be finding people who are infectious or soon to be infectious and isolating them. Been talking about this need since early April and thought we would have had something by June.
I like Mina's commentary better than his comments on this article though. For now (until we've deployed the far better antigen screening tests), I'd rather keep the number of amplification cycles, but simply include that with an assessment of that person's infectiousness. I still think such people should quarantine, since it's impossible to know at the point of the test if someone is going to remain asymptomatic (less infectious usually) or if they're on their way to becoming symptomatic (and usually quite infectious 1-2 days before symptoms).
What I'd rather do, though, is follow his recommendation of rolling out these cheap fast tests ASAP as screening tests, only reserving the more sensitive/accurate PCR tests for confirmation testing. When the antigen tests are positive (since less sensitive) it normally means that person is likely infectious and in risky environments, like schools and public-facing occupations, where distancing is hard, use these tests every other day or so, so that we "catch" when people are infectious and quarantine them immediately, instead of getting a very accurate, but largely useless PCR result 5 days after the test. Even if a few folks aren't "caught," when infectious, tons more will be found in a timely manner, greatly reducing transmission rates globally.
I don't think any of this changes anything about the inherent transmissibility or impact/likelihood of death from the virus - it just means we've been finding far more people at the asymptomatic or very early stages of eventual symptomatic infections that we did early on when we were only testing people with symptoms. The issue is we want to find out the results for these people in 15 minutes as opposed to 5 days, so we can take action. The testing Holy Grail would be if we had a fast and extremely sensitive test, so that the tests could be used with confidence for allowing people to attend any event/occasion with confidence they don't have the virus - and if it were tied to a smart phone database, that day's result would probably give one a "pass" to attend any event (or work or school) that day, at least.