The Covid Cult/Con continues in spite of all the science...
The COVID Case Con ContinuesBy Brian C. Joondeph, M.D.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/11/the_covid_case_con_continues.htmlAs many Americans recover from their “virtual Thanksgiving,” sharing prayers and turkey across the internet, the media is pushing their November propaganda narrative, that Dementia Joe really won the presidential election and that COVID cases are once again surging across America.
The Washington Post claims that Wuhan coronavirus cases are “skyrocketing” while the New York Times wails that “It has hit us with a vengeance.” Yet the media is oblivious, either ignorantly or deliberately, to the reality that positive tests are not the same thing as cases.
A “case” has a very specific definition, apparently beyond the intellectual realm of Wolf Blitzer or Neil Cavuto. The CDC provides a specific “case definition.” A case is not just a positive test. Instead, what is needed is "presumptive laboratory evidence AND either clinical criteria OR epidemiologic evidence." Notice the AND, meaning not simply a positive test.
[Note the significance of this, since, according research published last week, no infections were caused, per contact tracing, by 1174 asymptomatic persons who tested positive on RT-PCR tests and were followed up. Why won't the state of Hawaii release the data on how many of those who test positive are asymptomatic? Why won't they reveal the level of amplification/cycles of the tests they run? Even Fauci says that anything above 34 cycles is prone to false positive results, and most labs appear to be using 35-40 cycles. I call bullshit.]
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Here's an absolute must read for anyone wanting to understand the inaccuracy of the testing and how it leads to the claims of a casedemic, thus justifying continued overriding of citizens' rights.
https://sebastianrushworth.com/2020/11/06/how-accurate-are-the-covid-tests/Sebastian Rushworth M.D.
Health and medical information grounded in science
How accurate are the covid tests?Covid PCR test and antibody test accuracy
One of the most frequent questions I’ve been getting recently is how accurate I think the covid tests are, and in particular the PCR tests. As it happens, a systematic review has recently been published in Evidence Based Medicine that looks at the covid tests (both PCR and antibody), so I thought it would be interesting to look in to the evidence together. This article gets a bit technical and math-heavy in places, so please bear with me. I think the payoff is worth it.
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Let’s do one final thought experiment to illustrate this. Say the disease is now very rare, and only one in a thousand tested people actually has covid. If you test 1,000 people, you will get back 61 positive results. Of those, one will be a true positive, and 60 will be false positives. So, even though the prevalence of true disease has again decreased by a factor of ten, the number of positive results has only decreased slightly, from 68 to 61 (of which 60 are false positives!). So by looking just at positive PCR tests, you can easily be convinced that the disease is continuing to be roughly as prevalent in the population, even as it goes from being present in one in a hundred people to only being present in one in a thousand. The rarer the disease becomes in reality, the less likely you are to notice any difference in the number of tests returning positive results.
I want to restate this again, in a slightly different way, to make sure the message sinks in. As the disease drops enormously, by a factor of 100, from affecting one in ten to one in a thousand tested people, there is little more than a halving in PCR positive results, from 142 to 61. So a huge reduction in real infections only causes a small reduction in PCR confirmed “cases”. In fact, the disease could vanish from the face of the Earth, and you would still be getting 60 positive results for every 1,000 tests carried out!
The same trend is seen even if the PCR test were to have a much better specificity than we are estimating here, of say 99% . Here’s a quick illustration, since I don’t want to tire you with too many more numbers. If one in ten has the disease and you test 1,000 people, you will get back 97 positive results, of which 88 will be true positives and 9 will be false positives. If one in 100 has the disease, you will get back 19 positive results, of which 9 will be true positives and ten will be false positives. If one in 1,000 has the disease, you will get back 12 positive results, of which 11 will be false positives.
So, even if the test has a very high specificity of 99%, when the virus stops being present at pandemic levels in the population and starts to decrease to more endemic levels, you quickly get to a point where most positive results are false positives, and where the disease seems to be much more prevalent than it really is.
As you can see, the less prevalent the disease is in reality, the more likely the test is to generate a false positive result, and the less useful the test is as a method for figuring out who actually has covid. And the less prevalent the disease is, the more prevalent it will seem to be in relation to reality. If decisions about covid continue to be made largely based on what PCR tests show, we might never be able to call off the pandemic!
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why PCR positive cases are a very poor indicator of how prevalent covid is in the population, and why we should instead be basing decisions on the rates of hospitalization, ICU admission, and death. If we just look at the PCR tests, we will continue to believe that the disease is widespread in the population indefinitely, even as it becomes less and less common in reality. And that is assuming the rate of testing doesn’t increase. If we combine this built-in problem with accuracy, with a massive increase in testing (as has happened in most countries over the course of the pandemic), then we can create the impression of a disease that is continuing to spread wildly through a population, even when it isn’t.