We don’t know what the percent of “false positives” is.
We need to get our definitions straight. Someone who has the virus in their body should be differentiated from people that becomes symptomatic. They currently call all these people cases. Meanwhile influenza “cases” are people that present at emergency rooms with extreme symptoms of influenza who test positive. So comparing case fatality rate of covid and influenza is meaningless.
I don’t think the number of covid fatalities has been inflated. Total deaths in america is up by 10 or 15 percent and that number is comparable to the reported numer of covid deaths.
People who don’t know any old people or don’t live in a hard hit area might be inclined to think no one is dying because it hasn’t happened to anyone they know. But in urban areas a lot of people are dying.
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/507937-covid-pcr-test-fail/
>Four German holidaymakers who were illegally quarantined in Portugal after one was judged to be positive for Covid-19 have won their case, in a verdict that condemns the widely-used PCR test as being up to 97-percent unreliable.
Ill say it again. We need to get our definitions straight.
What is your definition of “false positive”? If you think this test is generating 97% of positive results due to random error, you are wrong. That’s not what they are saying.
People on both sides of the argument are just parroting bullshit stats back and forth with no understanding of what they really mean.
The study in question cultured test swabs which were also used with the PCR test. They tried to grow the virus in a petri dish with human cell medium.
For swabs that tested positive at 25 cycles of the PCR test, 70% had enough virus to infect the cells in the petri dish. At 30 cycles, only 20% of the positive swabs had enough virus to infect the cells. At 35 cycles (standard) that number was 3%.
This percentage would not necessarily directly indicate the percentage of tested subjects that are capable of being infectious. But it would correlate to it.
So this could be an indication that a PCR test using 35 cycles is testing positive for people that have the virus but are very unlikely to pass it on or ever develop and infection.
But in this case your are actually testing for contagiousness. Not presence of the virus.
So know your fucking definitions.
https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid/ciaa1491/5912603
Well false positive is quite self explanatory, false positive as in "the test returned a false positive result"
Even the inventor of the PCR test says it's totally not suited to diagnose covid19, especially with the way it's done
https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/who-finally-admits-pcr-tests-create-false-positives
>Dr Kary Mullis, who won the Nobel Prize for inventing the PCR process, was clear that it wasn’t meant as a diagnostic tool, saying:
>with PCR, if you do it well, you can find almost anything in anybody.”
>And, commenting on cycle thresholds, once said:
>If you have to go more than 40 cycles to amplify a single-copy gene, there is something seriously wrong with your PCR.”
>This has all been public knowledge since the beginning of the lockdown. The Australian government’s own website admitted the tests were flawed, and a court in Portugal ruled they were not fit for purpose.
>Even Dr Anthony Fauci has publicly admitted that a cycle threshold over 35 is going to be detecting “dead nucleotides”, not a living virus.
>Despite all this, it is known that many labs around the world have been using PCR tests with CT values over 35, even into the low 40s.
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