It's like doomsday predictions for global warming: if it's real, why do "experts" have to lie about it?

Run away!

THE’RE AT IT AGAIN:

CT: follow COVID rules or we’re going to lockdown again.

Daily COVID positivity tests reach nearly 7% [!!!!]

But here’s the dirty secret the Coronaporn scribes don’t want you to know: Most people testing positive for the disease aren’t contagious, and in fact, often were never infected to begin with.

As long ago as July, Saint Fauci admitted that a PCR test at 35 cycle or above was actually detecting only dead nucleotides “with only a minuscule possibility of replicating”. Worse, or better, depending on whether you hate Trump, these tests are scooping up remnants of antibodies that were produced by a previous coronavirus, like the common cold, but not COVID.

On August 29, the NYT reported that the tests were flawed and in fact, 90% of positive tests were false: “Your Coronavirus test was positive? Maybe it shouldn’t be”.

Your Coronavirus Test Is Positive. Maybe It Shouldn’t Be.

The usual diagnostic tests may simply be too sensitive and too slow to contain the spread of the virus

By Apoorva Mandavilli | The New York Times | August 29, 2020

THE NEW YORK TIMES -- Some of the nation’s leading public health experts are raising a new concern in the endless debate over coronavirus testing in the United States: The standard tests are diagnosing huge numbers of people who may be carrying relatively insignificant amounts of the virus.

Most of these people are not likely to be contagious, and identifying them may contribute to bottlenecks that prevent those who are contagious from being found in time. But researchers say the solution is not to test less, or to skip testing people without symptoms, as recently suggested by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Instead, new data underscore the need for more widespread use of rapid tests, even if they are less sensitive.

“The decision not to test asymptomatic people is just really backward,” said Dr. Michael Mina, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, referring to the C.D.C. recommendation.

“In fact, we should be ramping up testing of all different people,” he said, “but we have to do it through whole different mechanisms.”

In what may be a step in this direction, the Trump administration announced on Thursday that it would purchase 150 million rapid tests.

The most widely used diagnostic test for the new coronavirus, called a PCR test, provides a simple yes-no answer to the question of whether a patient is infected.

But similar PCR tests for other viruses do offer some sense of how contagious an infected patient may be: The results may include a rough estimate of the amount of virus in the patient’s body.

“We’ve been using one type of data for everything, and that is just plus or minus — that’s all,” Dr. Mina said. “We’re using that for clinical diagnostics, for public health, for policy decision-making.”

But yes-no isn’t good enough, he added. It’s the amount of virus that should dictate the infected patient’s next steps. “It’s really irresponsible, I think, to forgo the recognition that this is a quantitative issue,” Dr. Mina said.

The PCR test amplifies genetic matter from the virus in cycles; the fewer cycles required, the greater the amount of virus, or viral load, in the sample. The greater the viral load, the more likely the patient is to be contagious.

This number of amplification cycles needed to find the virus, called the cycle threshold, is never included in the results sent to doctors and coronavirus patients, although it could tell them how infectious the patients are.

In three sets of testing data that include cycle thresholds, compiled by officials in Massachusetts, New York and Nevada, up to 90 percent of people testing positive carried barely any virus, a review by The Times found.

On Thursday, the United States recorded 45,604 new coronavirus cases, according to a database maintained by The Times. If the rates of contagiousness in Massachusetts and New York were to apply nationwide, then perhaps only 4,500 of those people may actually need to isolate and submit to contact tracing.

One solution would be to adjust the cycle threshold used now to decide that a patient is infected. Most tests set the limit at 40, a few at 37. This means that you are positive for the coronavirus if the test process required up to 40 cycles, or 37, to detect the virus.

Tests with thresholds so high may detect not just live virus but also genetic fragments, leftovers from infection that pose no particular risk — akin to finding a hair in a room long after a person has left, Dr. Mina said.

Any test with a cycle threshold above 35 is too sensitive, agreed Juliet Morrison, a virologist at the University of California, Riverside. “I’m shocked that people would think that 40 could represent a positive,” she said.

A more reasonable cutoff would be 30 to 35, she added. Dr. Mina said he would set the figure at 30, or even less. Those changes would mean the amount of genetic material in a patient’s sample would have to be 100-fold to 1,000-fold that of the current standard for the test to return a positive result — at least, one worth acting on.

So why are health authorities and the press lying about this, why do they conflate positive COVID test results with active “COVID cases”? Control, for one: this flu is a formerly-powerless public health bureaucrat’s wet dream, one shared by certain governors and mayors. As for the press, one can certainly attribute much of its confusion to simple ignorance; next to teachers, is there a less-informed, lower IQ occupation? But you can’t rule out the possibility that some of these hysterics are whooping up the frenzy deliberately, with full knowledge of what they’re doing. For them, the explanation is Trump: watch for a revised test reporting system to be quietly implemented once the Biden Coronavirus Task Force is installed, and the number of actually infectious cases to magically plummet.