COVID-19 cases overstated by one hundred percent because of indiscriminate testing

American Thinker ^ | 07/21/2020 | By Erwin Haas, M.D.

[SeekAndFind]

Brief Note: It is a well known principle in statistics that all tests will have some biologic false positives that unfortunately label individuals as being diseased but who are not afflicted. The corona viral dna tests have a reported 4% false positive rate that, when applied to the nearly 50 million tests done so far result in 2 million falsely labelled as having COVID-19.

 

For some weeks I have been watching the COVID-19 scene with some distress. Brian Joondeph,  a physician and one of the smartest people that I read vaguely hinted at the solution yesterday but didn't really nail it. So, I'm going to make my addition to this article here:

Link

All tests in medicine have a certain number of false positives, meaning that the test is positive but that the patient does not have the disease.  I found only one published false positive rate for the COVID-19 PCR test. Four percent of tests are thought to be positive but the patients do not have the virus. I find this number to be low but it will do.

 

COVID-19 News reports that 48.3 million tests have been done in the United States as of Monday. Four percent, or over 1.93 million are false positives. These patients are not infected. The same publication  alleges that about 3.9 million Americans have been infected with COVID-19. They did not subtract the nearly 2 million false positives. Fewer than 2 million Americans have truly positive tests for COVID-19 (but it’s not always certain which ones.) 

 

Link, VirusNCov.com

[Sergio]

bkmk

[Oatka]

They are counting people who don’t stick around for the test as positive.

HERE's a FR post on that

[exDemMom]

Problem is, the common cold coronavirus will trip a covid test positive.

So, need to factor out the common colds.

That depends on the type of test.

I will admit, I have not personally compared the RNA sequences of SARS-CoV2 and other coronaviruses. However, it is typical for the nucleic acid sequences to show more variability than the protein sequences between closely related organisms. So I expect rtPCR tests to be the most reliable for detecting Covid-19.

On the other hand, I don't expect antibody tests to be able to differentiate between Covid-19 and other coronaviruses because antibodies only recognize very short pieces of proteins, just 6 amino acids long. It is very common for antibodies to cross-react between related viruses. So all of those antibody (serology) tests that purport to show that vast numbers of people have had Covid-19 during cold and flu season are just plain faulty. We can't even use statistical data to filter out positive serology results, since we don't keep track of how many people catch coronavirus colds.

In any case, it is just as bad to inflate the number of Covid-19 cases with dubious serology tests or modeling as it is to dismiss cases on the basis that tests always have false positive and false negative rates. In my opinion, it's best to just stick with the confirmed numbers and keep collecting data. We can only beat this if we have an accurate understanding of how the virus transmits and who is actually sick with it.