Earlier I posted a lengthy detailed article by Dr. Rushworth re the false positive testing issues and cycle thresholds. Here's a simpler version without all the math. No one in Hawaii (gov, lt. gov, mayor, DOH, Civil Defense, etc.) will respond to my questions, which includes "What percentage of RT-PCR tests were performed at each cycle threshold? Or, at the very least, what percentage of tests used a cycle threshold greater than 34?" Simple question, why no response? [The "rumor' is that most labs are using 40 amplification cycles.]
State health departments across country failing to collect critical COVID-19 pandemic data"Cycle threshold" information for COVID tests remains largely absent from state data.
https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/coronavirus/state-health-departments-across-country-are-failing-collect-criticalExcerpt:
State health departments across the country are by-and-large failing to collect critical data related to COVID-19 tests, omitting from state data a key metric by which officials and the public might judge the severity of the pandemic in the U.S.
For months, testing has been viewed by leaders and medical officials worldwide as an indispensable tool for addressing the coronavirus pandemic. COVID-19 tests have been cited as both a way to determine the disease's prevalence in a given region and as a way for individuals who have previously tested positive for the virus to confirm that they are no longer infected.
The National Institutes of Health in September referred to testing as "the key to getting back to normal," stating that "testing as many people as possible" is a highly important feature of "control[ling] the COVID-19 pandemic."
Yet the broad reliability and/or relevance of those tests has over the course of the pandemic been brought under scrutiny by media reports and comments from health officials and experts. Investigations by both Just the News and the New York Times have revealed that many of the "positive" test results recorded throughout the country may actually denote nothing more than fragments of dead COVID virus picked up by overly sensitive testing equipment.
The issue hinges on the method by which many COVID-19 tests detect the viral load within a sample taken from a patient. Polymerase chain reaction — or PCR — tests are among the most popular diagnostic tools to detect the COVID-19 virus. They work by amplifying DNA from a viral sample to the point that an antigen can be detected and classified.
The "cycle threshold" is the number of amplification cycles a PCR test goes through before it determines the presence of a virus. The lower the cycle, the higher the viral load from the original sample; a higher cycle, on the other hand, means that the machine had to work longer and harder to detect a scant amount of virus in the original sample.
Higher-cycle "positive" tests potentially indicate that a patient is non-infectious and at little health risk from the virus; those results may also indicate that a patient need not subject himself to strict quarantine measures, given the potential lack of infectivity.
This factor is well-known among infectious disease experts. In July, for instance, Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases — admitted during a podcast that "if [a patient gets] a cycle threshold of 35 or more ... the chances of it being replication-confident are minuscule."
"If somebody does come in with 37, 38, even 36, you got to say, you know, it's just dead nucleotides, period," Fauci said during the interview.
It is not clear to what extent positive COVID-19 tests in the U.S. represent non-infectious cases or mere fragments of coronavirus. The New York Times in its August investigation determined that based on a review of test data from three different states, "up to 90 percent of people testing positive carried barely any virus."