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How do we know this spike in cases isn’t from cold cases that just read like COVID cases?

We don't know that, aside from this not really being cold season. Yes, you can get a cold all year, but those guys usually spike in late fall / winter. I have no clue is those guys can stay dormant in your system for all year or what. I mean, every season they gotta come from somewhere, right? And technically, CoViD is short for "Coronavirus Disease", which would include any common colds from a coronavirus. CoViD-19 is the disease specific to that caused by the ChinaVirus, SARS-CoV-2. And, medically speaking, these aren't "cases". A positive test only becomes a case if that person is under medical care. But I would guess most of the spike is from a couple things:

- viral fragments (the coronavirus PCR can pop hot for 2-3 months after your infection is gone), and this likely includes common cold coronaviri.
- False positives. Many of the tests aren't highly accurate, and since any positive is assumed to be correct, there's a bunch of positives that actually weren't. Something like 30% of old positives were likely wrong, and I don't know how accurate current testing is.
- Fake positives. There's way too many stories of people signing up to get tested, then not showing up or leaving before they actually submit a sample, and still getting a letter/phone call a couple days later that they tested positive. People/nurses submitting animal samples, unused swabs, etc. that came back positive. Too many stories for there to not be some truth to them.
- Government idiots. Many are including probable, or symptom-based diagnosis as positive cases. Texas subtracted 3300 cases from their count a couple days ago because of one or two counties including non-test-confirmed people in their counts. Now do that for every county... And a big part of this is FedGov throwing $$ at hospitals for positive cases. If they have to shutdown all their cosmetic/non-essential surgeries, the onyl way they can make money is to claim as many ChinaVirus case as they possibly can.
- Time delays. Many of the deaths/positives are from a week or two ago, but many media/other places count them on they day they are informed, not the actual date of death or test confirmation. So one day the lab spends an hour doing their books for the week, now there's a big spike every Friday.
- More testing. This is the big one, as more people are tested, you start finding the asymptomatic people that would otherwise never be counted. And, more tests means more chances for the above stuff to happen.
And finally
- Media. Much of the spike is due to media NOT accounting for the numbers being lower, and doing their best to paint the situation as bad as possible. Did you even know several States had lowered their official case counts, because of lax standards on what constitutes a ChinaVirus positive?