You are either dense or just , well nevermind. He meant the folks going to get tested are doing so out of anxiety but 70 to 80% perhaps do not need to be there. See the difference. Facts not Fiction.
Toronto Public Health admitted that covid deaths are inflated
- Thread starter canada-man
- Start date
Growing Research Indicates Many COVID-19 Cases Might Not be Infectious at All
Elevated ‘cycle thresholds’ may be detecting virus long after it is past the point of infection.
A growing body of research suggests that a significant number of confirmed COVID-19 infections in the U.S. — perhaps as many as 9 out of every 10 — may not be infectious at all, with much of the country’s testing equipment possibly picking up mere fragments of the disease rather than full-blown infections.
Confirmed cases of the disease have been the focal point of public health authorities and governments worldwide for many months, with countries across the globe working frantically to shore up their testing infrastructure and ensure that most citizens who want a COVID-19 test can obtain one with relative ease.
Many politicians, meanwhile — including most state governors in the U.S. — have tied reopening policies to the number of cases detected in the local community, with regions and localities often being permitted to reopen in staggered “phases” only when they have reached successively lower benchmarks of average new daily cases in the area.
Numerous institutions, meanwhile, have adopted testing protocols in an attempt to preempt the spread of the virus. American colleges and universities, for instance, have turned to mass testing in order to closely monitor incidences of the disease among students, particularly residential students living on campus.
Yet a burgeoning line of scientific inquiry suggests that many confirmed infections of COVID-19 may actually be just residual traces of the virus itself, a contention that — if true — may suggest both that current high levels of positive viruses are clinically insignificant and that the mitigation measures used to suppress them may be excessive.
tennesseestar.com
Elevated ‘cycle thresholds’ may be detecting virus long after it is past the point of infection.
A growing body of research suggests that a significant number of confirmed COVID-19 infections in the U.S. — perhaps as many as 9 out of every 10 — may not be infectious at all, with much of the country’s testing equipment possibly picking up mere fragments of the disease rather than full-blown infections.
Confirmed cases of the disease have been the focal point of public health authorities and governments worldwide for many months, with countries across the globe working frantically to shore up their testing infrastructure and ensure that most citizens who want a COVID-19 test can obtain one with relative ease.
Many politicians, meanwhile — including most state governors in the U.S. — have tied reopening policies to the number of cases detected in the local community, with regions and localities often being permitted to reopen in staggered “phases” only when they have reached successively lower benchmarks of average new daily cases in the area.
Numerous institutions, meanwhile, have adopted testing protocols in an attempt to preempt the spread of the virus. American colleges and universities, for instance, have turned to mass testing in order to closely monitor incidences of the disease among students, particularly residential students living on campus.
Yet a burgeoning line of scientific inquiry suggests that many confirmed infections of COVID-19 may actually be just residual traces of the virus itself, a contention that — if true — may suggest both that current high levels of positive viruses are clinically insignificant and that the mitigation measures used to suppress them may be excessive.
19 Attorneys General Urge Supreme Court to Uphold Ruling Ordering Full Reinstatement of 'Remain in Mexico' Policy - Tennessee Star
Nineteen attorneys general, led by Indiana, have filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in support of a lawsuit filed by Texas and Missouri against the Biden administration.
tennesseestar.com
From the legitimate media not the likely Russians - this is from early Sept and impossible to do contact tracing on all but these have been specifically traced to the Sturgis bikers. Contrary to Russian propaganda the specific COVID-19 virus is easy to identify genetically. Even its mutations are showing up especially in the huge surge of college students getting infected. Some of the latest genetic modifications seem to make the virus even easier to transmit but less deadly. But zillions of long term serious medical problems long after the virus itself has been destroyed after being weeks or months in the hospital.
Most recently huge surge in cases from Univ of Minnesota students as reported in Mpls Star/Tribune a rather conservative paper (my home city before moving to Pheonix)
On Sturgis:
More than two weeks after nearly half a million bikers flocked to South Dakota, the tally of coronavirus infections traced back to the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally has surpassed 260, an estimate that is growing steadily as more states report cases and at least one death.
At least 12 states have turned up cases linked to the 10-day event.
The greatest share of cases so far have emerged in the rally's home state, South Dakota, which has registered more than 100 cases so far.
A Minnesota man in his 60s who went to the rally was later hospitalized for COVID-19 and died earlier this week, said Kris Ehresmann, head of infectious disease for the Minnesota Department of Health.
Minnesota has counted more than 45 cases tied to the rally, and that only includes people who got tested and then notified state health departments about their possible exposure at Sturgis.
"It's definitely frustrating because we certainly aren't surprised to see cases," said Ehresmann.
Public health experts say the number of cases linked to the event will probably never be clear.
MASKING and social distancing is our only defense. An effective vaccine will not have wide distribution to allow business as usual until at least mid-2021 - at least in the U.S.
Most recently huge surge in cases from Univ of Minnesota students as reported in Mpls Star/Tribune a rather conservative paper (my home city before moving to Pheonix)
On Sturgis:
More than two weeks after nearly half a million bikers flocked to South Dakota, the tally of coronavirus infections traced back to the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally has surpassed 260, an estimate that is growing steadily as more states report cases and at least one death.
At least 12 states have turned up cases linked to the 10-day event.
The greatest share of cases so far have emerged in the rally's home state, South Dakota, which has registered more than 100 cases so far.
A Minnesota man in his 60s who went to the rally was later hospitalized for COVID-19 and died earlier this week, said Kris Ehresmann, head of infectious disease for the Minnesota Department of Health.
Minnesota has counted more than 45 cases tied to the rally, and that only includes people who got tested and then notified state health departments about their possible exposure at Sturgis.
"It's definitely frustrating because we certainly aren't surprised to see cases," said Ehresmann.
Public health experts say the number of cases linked to the event will probably never be clear.
MASKING and social distancing is our only defense. An effective vaccine will not have wide distribution to allow business as usual until at least mid-2021 - at least in the U.S.
British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab says the "challenge" with testing for #COVID19 in airports is 'the very high false positive rate' and adds 'only 7% of tests will be successful in identifying those who have the virus'.
“COVID-19 PCR Tests Are Scientifically Meaningless” Says Bulgarian Pathology Association
Though the whole world relies on RT-PCR to “diagnose” Sars-Cov-2 infection, the science is clear: they are not fit for purpose
From Torsten Engelbrecht and Konstantin Demeter
Lockdowns and hygienic measures around the world are based on numbers of cases and mortality rates created by the so-called SARS-CoV-2 RT-PCR tests used to identify “positive” patients, whereby “positive” is usually equated with “infected.”
But looking closely at the facts, the conclusion is that these PCR tests are meaningless as a diagnostic tool to determine an alleged infection by a supposedly new virus called SARS-CoV-2.
UNFOUNDED “TEST, TEST, TEST,…” MANTRA
At the media briefing on COVID-19 on March 16, 2020, the WHO Director General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said:
Still on the 3 of May, the moderator of the heute journal — one of the most important news magazines on German television— was passing the mantra of the corona dogma on to his audience with the admonishing words:
But it is well known that religions are about faith and not about scientific facts. And as Walter Lippmann, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and perhaps the most influential journalist of the 20th century said: “Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.”
So to start, it is very remarkable that Kary Mullis himself, the inventor of the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) technology, did not think alike. His invention got him the Nobel prize in chemistry in 1993.
Unfortunately, Mullis passed away last year at the age of 74, but there is no doubt that the biochemist regarded the PCR as inappropriate to detect a viral infection.
The reason is that the intended use of the PCR was, and still is, to apply it as a manufacturing technique, being able to replicate DNA sequences millions and billions of times, and not as a diagnostic tool to detect viruses.
How declaring virus pandemics based on PCR tests can end in disaster was described by Gina Kolata in her 2007 New York Times article Faith in Quick Test Leads to Epidemic That Wasn’t.
LACK OF A VALID GOLD STANDARD
Moreover, it is worth mentioning that the PCR tests used to identify so-called COVID-19 patients presumably infected by what is called SARS-CoV-2 do not have a valid gold standard to compare them with.
This is a fundamental point. Tests need to be evaluated to determine their preciseness — strictly speaking their “sensitivity”[1] and “specificity” — by comparison with a “gold standard,” meaning the most accurate method available.
As an example, for a pregnancy test the gold standard would be the pregnancy itself. But as Australian infectious diseases specialist Sanjaya Senanayake, for example, stated in an ABC TV interview in an answer to the question “How accurate is the [COVID-19] testing?”:
But instead of classifying the tests as unsuitable for SARS-CoV-2 detection and COVID-19 diagnosis, or instead of pointing out that only a virus, proven through isolation and purification, can be a solid gold standard, Watson claims in all seriousness that, “pragmatically” COVID-19 diagnosis itself, remarkably including PCR testing itself, “may be the best available ‘gold standard’.” But this is not scientifically sound.
Apart from the fact that it is downright absurd to take the PCR test itself as part of the gold standard to evaluate the PCR test, there are no distinctive specific symptoms for COVID-19, as even people such as Thomas Löscher, former head of the Department of Infection and Tropical Medicine at the University of Munich and member of the Federal Association of German Internists, conceded to us[2].
And if there are no distinctive specific symptoms for COVID-19, COVID-19 diagnosis — contrary to Watson’s statement — cannot be suitable for serving as a valid gold standard.
In addition, “experts” such as Watson overlook the fact that only virus isolation, i.e. an unequivocal virus proof, can be the gold standard.
That is why I asked Watson how COVID-19 diagnosis “may be the best available gold standard,” if there are no distinctive specific symptoms for COVID-19, and also whether the virus itself, that is virus isolation, wouldn’t be the best available/possible gold standard. But she hasn’t answered these questions yet – despite multiple requests. And she has not yet responded to our rapid response post on her article in which we address exactly the same points, either, though she wrote us on June 2nd: “I will try to post a reply later this week when I have a chance.”
NO PROOF FOR THE RNA BEING OF VIRAL ORIGIN
Now the question is: What is required first for virus isolation/proof? We need to know where the RNA for which the PCR tests are calibrated comes from.
As textbooks (e.g., White/Fenner. Medical Virology, 1986, p. 9) as well as leading virus researchers such as Luc Montagnier or Dominic Dwyer state, particle purification — i.e. the separation of an object from everything else that is not that object, as for instance Nobel laureate Marie Curie purified 100 mg of radium chloride in 1898 by extracting it from tons of pitchblende — is an essential pre-requisite for proving the existence of a virus, and thus to prove that the RNA from the particle in question comes from a new virus.
The reason for this is that PCR is extremely sensitive, which means it can detect even the smallest pieces of DNA or RNA — but it cannot determine where these particles came from. That has to be determined beforehand.
And because the PCR tests are calibrated for gene sequences (in this case RNA sequences because SARS-CoV-2 is believed to be a RNA virus), we have to know that these gene snippets are part of the looked-for virus. And to know that, correct isolation and purification of the presumed virus has to be executed.
Hence, we have asked the science teams of the relevant papers which are referred to in the context of SARS-CoV-2 for proof whether the electron-microscopic shots depicted in their in vitro experiments show purified viruses.
But not a single team could answer that question with “yes” — and NB., nobody said purification was not a necessary step. We only got answers like “No, we did not obtain an electron micrograph showing the degree of purification” (see below).
Study 1: Leo L. M. Poon; Malik Peiris. “Emergence of a novel human coronavirus threatening human health” Nature Medicine, March 2020
Replying Author: Malik Peiris
Date: May 12, 2020
Answer: “The image is the virus budding from an infected cell. It is not purified virus.”
Study 2: Myung-Guk Han et al. “Identification of Coronavirus Isolated from a Patient in Korea with COVID-19”, Osong Public Health and Research Perspectives, February 2020
Replying Author: Myung-Guk Han
Date: May 6, 2020
Answer: “We could not estimate the degree of purification because we do not purify and concentrate the virus cultured in cells.”
Study 3: Wan Beom Park et al. “Virus Isolation from the First Patient with SARS-CoV-2 in Korea”, Journal of Korean Medical Science, February 24, 2020
Replying Author: Wan Beom Park
Date: March 19, 2020
Answer: “We did not obtain an electron micrograph showing the degree of purification.”
Study 4: Na Zhu et al., “A Novel Coronavirus from Patients with Pneumonia in China”, 2019, New England Journal of Medicine, February 20, 2020
Replying Author: Wenjie Tan
Date: March 18, 2020
Answer: “[We show] an image of sedimented virus particles, not purified ones.”
For more read the article here.
“COVID-19 PCR Tests Are Scientifically Meaningless” Says Bulgarian Pathology Association
Though the whole world relies on RT-PCR to “diagnose” Sars-Cov-2 infection, the science is clear: they are not fit for purpose
From Torsten Engelbrecht and Konstantin Demeter
Lockdowns and hygienic measures around the world are based on numbers of cases and mortality rates created by the so-called SARS-CoV-2 RT-PCR tests used to identify “positive” patients, whereby “positive” is usually equated with “infected.”
But looking closely at the facts, the conclusion is that these PCR tests are meaningless as a diagnostic tool to determine an alleged infection by a supposedly new virus called SARS-CoV-2.
UNFOUNDED “TEST, TEST, TEST,…” MANTRA
At the media briefing on COVID-19 on March 16, 2020, the WHO Director General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said:
The message was spread through headlines around the world, for instance by Reuters and the BBC.
Still on the 3 of May, the moderator of the heute journal — one of the most important news magazines on German television— was passing the mantra of the corona dogma on to his audience with the admonishing words:
This indicates that the belief in the validity of the PCR tests is so strong that it equals a religion that tolerates virtually no contradiction.
But it is well known that religions are about faith and not about scientific facts. And as Walter Lippmann, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and perhaps the most influential journalist of the 20th century said: “Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.”
So to start, it is very remarkable that Kary Mullis himself, the inventor of the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) technology, did not think alike. His invention got him the Nobel prize in chemistry in 1993.
Unfortunately, Mullis passed away last year at the age of 74, but there is no doubt that the biochemist regarded the PCR as inappropriate to detect a viral infection.
The reason is that the intended use of the PCR was, and still is, to apply it as a manufacturing technique, being able to replicate DNA sequences millions and billions of times, and not as a diagnostic tool to detect viruses.
How declaring virus pandemics based on PCR tests can end in disaster was described by Gina Kolata in her 2007 New York Times article Faith in Quick Test Leads to Epidemic That Wasn’t.
LACK OF A VALID GOLD STANDARD
Moreover, it is worth mentioning that the PCR tests used to identify so-called COVID-19 patients presumably infected by what is called SARS-CoV-2 do not have a valid gold standard to compare them with.
This is a fundamental point. Tests need to be evaluated to determine their preciseness — strictly speaking their “sensitivity”[1] and “specificity” — by comparison with a “gold standard,” meaning the most accurate method available.
As an example, for a pregnancy test the gold standard would be the pregnancy itself. But as Australian infectious diseases specialist Sanjaya Senanayake, for example, stated in an ABC TV interview in an answer to the question “How accurate is the [COVID-19] testing?”:
Jessica C. Watson from Bristol University confirms this. In her paper “Interpreting a COVID-19 test result”, published recently in The British Medical Journal, she writes that there is a “lack of such a clear-cut ‘gold-standard’ for COVID-19 testing.”
But instead of classifying the tests as unsuitable for SARS-CoV-2 detection and COVID-19 diagnosis, or instead of pointing out that only a virus, proven through isolation and purification, can be a solid gold standard, Watson claims in all seriousness that, “pragmatically” COVID-19 diagnosis itself, remarkably including PCR testing itself, “may be the best available ‘gold standard’.” But this is not scientifically sound.
Apart from the fact that it is downright absurd to take the PCR test itself as part of the gold standard to evaluate the PCR test, there are no distinctive specific symptoms for COVID-19, as even people such as Thomas Löscher, former head of the Department of Infection and Tropical Medicine at the University of Munich and member of the Federal Association of German Internists, conceded to us[2].
And if there are no distinctive specific symptoms for COVID-19, COVID-19 diagnosis — contrary to Watson’s statement — cannot be suitable for serving as a valid gold standard.
In addition, “experts” such as Watson overlook the fact that only virus isolation, i.e. an unequivocal virus proof, can be the gold standard.
That is why I asked Watson how COVID-19 diagnosis “may be the best available gold standard,” if there are no distinctive specific symptoms for COVID-19, and also whether the virus itself, that is virus isolation, wouldn’t be the best available/possible gold standard. But she hasn’t answered these questions yet – despite multiple requests. And she has not yet responded to our rapid response post on her article in which we address exactly the same points, either, though she wrote us on June 2nd: “I will try to post a reply later this week when I have a chance.”
NO PROOF FOR THE RNA BEING OF VIRAL ORIGIN
Now the question is: What is required first for virus isolation/proof? We need to know where the RNA for which the PCR tests are calibrated comes from.
As textbooks (e.g., White/Fenner. Medical Virology, 1986, p. 9) as well as leading virus researchers such as Luc Montagnier or Dominic Dwyer state, particle purification — i.e. the separation of an object from everything else that is not that object, as for instance Nobel laureate Marie Curie purified 100 mg of radium chloride in 1898 by extracting it from tons of pitchblende — is an essential pre-requisite for proving the existence of a virus, and thus to prove that the RNA from the particle in question comes from a new virus.
The reason for this is that PCR is extremely sensitive, which means it can detect even the smallest pieces of DNA or RNA — but it cannot determine where these particles came from. That has to be determined beforehand.
And because the PCR tests are calibrated for gene sequences (in this case RNA sequences because SARS-CoV-2 is believed to be a RNA virus), we have to know that these gene snippets are part of the looked-for virus. And to know that, correct isolation and purification of the presumed virus has to be executed.
Hence, we have asked the science teams of the relevant papers which are referred to in the context of SARS-CoV-2 for proof whether the electron-microscopic shots depicted in their in vitro experiments show purified viruses.
But not a single team could answer that question with “yes” — and NB., nobody said purification was not a necessary step. We only got answers like “No, we did not obtain an electron micrograph showing the degree of purification” (see below).
Study 1: Leo L. M. Poon; Malik Peiris. “Emergence of a novel human coronavirus threatening human health” Nature Medicine, March 2020
Replying Author: Malik Peiris
Date: May 12, 2020
Answer: “The image is the virus budding from an infected cell. It is not purified virus.”
Study 2: Myung-Guk Han et al. “Identification of Coronavirus Isolated from a Patient in Korea with COVID-19”, Osong Public Health and Research Perspectives, February 2020
Replying Author: Myung-Guk Han
Date: May 6, 2020
Answer: “We could not estimate the degree of purification because we do not purify and concentrate the virus cultured in cells.”
Study 3: Wan Beom Park et al. “Virus Isolation from the First Patient with SARS-CoV-2 in Korea”, Journal of Korean Medical Science, February 24, 2020
Replying Author: Wan Beom Park
Date: March 19, 2020
Answer: “We did not obtain an electron micrograph showing the degree of purification.”
Study 4: Na Zhu et al., “A Novel Coronavirus from Patients with Pneumonia in China”, 2019, New England Journal of Medicine, February 20, 2020
Replying Author: Wenjie Tan
Date: March 18, 2020
Answer: “[We show] an image of sedimented virus particles, not purified ones.”
For more read the article here.
What Zebra Mussels Can Tell Us About Errors In Coronavirus Tests
During the coronavirus pandemic, many scientists who usually have nothing to do with viruses or infectious disease are turning their attention to COVID-19. For example, one wildlife biologist is raising questions about the accuracy of tests that detect the coronavirus.
In normal times, Andrew Cohen focuses his attention on issues of ecology and conservation, as director of the Center for Research on Aquatic Bioinvasions.
In 2007, the state of California hired him to fight back the invasion of non-native mussels, which had been wreaking havoc on ecosystems in the eastern United States.
"We began getting reports after that of these mussels showing up all across the western U.S.," he says.
Scientists were using a clever technique to find them. They'd take a water sample and then look for the tiniest traces of genetic material from these mussels. They used a test called PCR (short for polymerase chain reaction), which vastly amplifies genetic material to look for mussel DNA. This is the same technology used to diagnose COVID-19.
The studies kept coming up with alarming results, showing signs of invasion by these pests. But Cohen grew suspicious.
"I began to realize that many of these — if not all of these — were false positives, especially when they started being reported in waters that had chemistry that would not allow the mussels to reproduce and establish themselves," he says.
Cohen wanted to understand why these tests were going awry, so he could spread the word to the labs that were using them. "I eventually turned to the medical literature to look at assessments that had been done of medical diagnostic labs that used PCR-based testing in humans."
Cohen discovered that false positives were actually fairly common. The best labs reported few if any, but other labs reported up to 8% of their positive results were false positives. The average was around 2% false positive.
Fast forward to March 2020. Cohen started thinking about this issue of false positives. He was skeptical of reports that people with absolutely no symptoms were nonetheless getting positive PCR test results for the coronavirus.
"I began wondering whether these asymptomatic carriers weren't in large part or in whole part the human counterparts of those false-positive results of quagga and zebra mussels in all those water bodies across the West," he says.
He dug in and found that in previous outbreaks, such as SARS, scientists ran a second PCR test before confirming a case. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention started to do that as well during the earliest days of COVID-19. Labs capable of running their own tests were also told to send a sample to CDC for confirmation. But that system was quickly abandoned as the number of cases grew and the ability to test remained limited.
Cohen, working with physician colleagues in Hawaii, surveyed procedures for coronavirus testing around the world, including the governments of Canada and the U.K., as well as the World Health Organization and the CDC, but found no requirement for retesting positive samples. (The CDC recommends that a patient who has recovered from coronavirus infection in the hospital be tested twice before being discharged, but the concern there is a much more common problem with these tests: falsely negative results).
So, Cohen updated the survey of medical testing he'd done to explore the cause of false positives in wildlife testing. He posted that paper online.
It hasn't been peer reviewed, but Dr. Bobbi Pritt, a clinical microbiologist who chairs the microbiology committee for the College of American Pathologists, says his numbers seem reasonable.
"There's no 100% perfect test," says Pritt, who works at the Mayo Clinic.
The PCR tests, when done perfectly, do boast a very low false-positive rate. But they're not always done perfectly.
Certified labs like hers use procedures to reduce the risk of false test results, since a false-positive test can lead to a medical misdiagnosis. But slip-ups are inevitable.
Most errors are caused by poor sample handling or other errors even before a sample gets to the lab, she says.
And PCR is so incredibly sensitive, contamination is a particular concern. Even the tiniest amount of stray material in a lab can spell trouble, Pritt says.
"That viral material could get into the environment and then contaminate your specimens around you and then cause false positives in those specimens."
That kind of problem is apparently what caused the CDC's own coronavirus test to fail back in February, according to a Washington Post investigation. Labs in Europe also reported contamination issues with some of their coronavirus tests.
Even automated testing machines, like the ones used at the White House, can produce false-positive results. They are designed to use simple plug-in cartridges, but "it doesn't mean that they are foolproof," Pritt says. "We've observed some of these tests and these little cartridges have issues such as leaking — even amplified viral nucleic acid — into the laboratory, which can cause quite a bit of problems."
During the coronavirus pandemic, many scientists who usually have nothing to do with viruses or infectious disease are turning their attention to COVID-19. For example, one wildlife biologist is raising questions about the accuracy of tests that detect the coronavirus.
In normal times, Andrew Cohen focuses his attention on issues of ecology and conservation, as director of the Center for Research on Aquatic Bioinvasions.
In 2007, the state of California hired him to fight back the invasion of non-native mussels, which had been wreaking havoc on ecosystems in the eastern United States.
"We began getting reports after that of these mussels showing up all across the western U.S.," he says.
Scientists were using a clever technique to find them. They'd take a water sample and then look for the tiniest traces of genetic material from these mussels. They used a test called PCR (short for polymerase chain reaction), which vastly amplifies genetic material to look for mussel DNA. This is the same technology used to diagnose COVID-19.
The studies kept coming up with alarming results, showing signs of invasion by these pests. But Cohen grew suspicious.
"I began to realize that many of these — if not all of these — were false positives, especially when they started being reported in waters that had chemistry that would not allow the mussels to reproduce and establish themselves," he says.
Cohen wanted to understand why these tests were going awry, so he could spread the word to the labs that were using them. "I eventually turned to the medical literature to look at assessments that had been done of medical diagnostic labs that used PCR-based testing in humans."
Cohen discovered that false positives were actually fairly common. The best labs reported few if any, but other labs reported up to 8% of their positive results were false positives. The average was around 2% false positive.
Fast forward to March 2020. Cohen started thinking about this issue of false positives. He was skeptical of reports that people with absolutely no symptoms were nonetheless getting positive PCR test results for the coronavirus.
"I began wondering whether these asymptomatic carriers weren't in large part or in whole part the human counterparts of those false-positive results of quagga and zebra mussels in all those water bodies across the West," he says.
He dug in and found that in previous outbreaks, such as SARS, scientists ran a second PCR test before confirming a case. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention started to do that as well during the earliest days of COVID-19. Labs capable of running their own tests were also told to send a sample to CDC for confirmation. But that system was quickly abandoned as the number of cases grew and the ability to test remained limited.
Cohen, working with physician colleagues in Hawaii, surveyed procedures for coronavirus testing around the world, including the governments of Canada and the U.K., as well as the World Health Organization and the CDC, but found no requirement for retesting positive samples. (The CDC recommends that a patient who has recovered from coronavirus infection in the hospital be tested twice before being discharged, but the concern there is a much more common problem with these tests: falsely negative results).
So, Cohen updated the survey of medical testing he'd done to explore the cause of false positives in wildlife testing. He posted that paper online.
It hasn't been peer reviewed, but Dr. Bobbi Pritt, a clinical microbiologist who chairs the microbiology committee for the College of American Pathologists, says his numbers seem reasonable.
"There's no 100% perfect test," says Pritt, who works at the Mayo Clinic.
The PCR tests, when done perfectly, do boast a very low false-positive rate. But they're not always done perfectly.
Certified labs like hers use procedures to reduce the risk of false test results, since a false-positive test can lead to a medical misdiagnosis. But slip-ups are inevitable.
Most errors are caused by poor sample handling or other errors even before a sample gets to the lab, she says.
And PCR is so incredibly sensitive, contamination is a particular concern. Even the tiniest amount of stray material in a lab can spell trouble, Pritt says.
"That viral material could get into the environment and then contaminate your specimens around you and then cause false positives in those specimens."
That kind of problem is apparently what caused the CDC's own coronavirus test to fail back in February, according to a Washington Post investigation. Labs in Europe also reported contamination issues with some of their coronavirus tests.
Even automated testing machines, like the ones used at the White House, can produce false-positive results. They are designed to use simple plug-in cartridges, but "it doesn't mean that they are foolproof," Pritt says. "We've observed some of these tests and these little cartridges have issues such as leaking — even amplified viral nucleic acid — into the laboratory, which can cause quite a bit of problems."
The death cult that wants to suppress humanity has issued their warning: the lockdown of the world in the name of the global scamdemic is not the end of this madness. It is only the beginning. Join James for this week's edition of #PropagandaWatch as he dissects the latest attempt to leverage the climate scam on the back of the COVID scam, and how both of these distractions are being used to indoctrinate the public into the death cult.
Do you have a life outside posting rubbish here?
The thing I can’t get around is the amount of tests. Why are people getting tested in such large numbers?
Are they sick? Is that why they’re being tested?
If you have symptoms and you test positive, I’d be hesitant to blow that off as an over sensitive test result, however, if otherwise healthy people are making up the bulk of the 400+ new infections everyday, I’d have to wonder why they’re getting tested in the first place.
Are they sick? Is that why they’re being tested?
If you have symptoms and you test positive, I’d be hesitant to blow that off as an over sensitive test result, however, if otherwise healthy people are making up the bulk of the 400+ new infections everyday, I’d have to wonder why they’re getting tested in the first place.
Yeah right! The little sheep that lives in fear of a little white mask. Besides scouring the web for ridiculous conspiracy theories and right-wing propaganda you have no life. LMAO
Very simple zillions of folks have COVID-19 but have no idea they do because they have no symptoms yet proven they can spread it to others. We need massive testing so those that test positive can be quarntened for 14 days and then retested. The latest mutation spreads even easier it seems although less deadly. Massive uptrends in the US both positive tests and hospitalizations.
The only defense we have is masking and distancing sadly till maybe mid 2021.
That doesn’t answer the question of why you’d get tested if you had no symptoms.
For example, I don’t have symptoms, and I haven’t been tested.
Yes, that's whole point of going to the doctor and why men should get prostate cancer checked for amongst other things, why women check for breast cancers and why we run blood work
Same thing with going to the dentist and getting an evaluation as well
Do you only take your car in when it breaks down? Lol
"Asked why he would require Victorians to wear masks when there is no health purpose, Mr Andrews dismissed the question. "That's an esoteric debate, isn't it? Maybe there will be a time when we have the luxury of having those debates." Just obscene
www.afr.com
Mask crackdown mad, health experts warn
Health experts say there is a much greater chance of being hit by lightning in Melbourne than contracting the virus in the community.
