Posted on 11/30/2020 5:58:15 AM PST by SeekAndFind
As 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 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.
The current COVID surges are positive tests, and even those are suspect, without regard to whether those who test positive are actually sick or not. I was curious about drive-by testing and last weekend gave it a whirl. It only took about 20 minutes and was free, meaning I got what I paid for. Results were promised within three days but took just over seven days to find out I was virus free.
Given the sensitivity of the COVID PCR test, it is likely that some of those being tested, without any symptoms or exposure, will be reported as test positive and added to the case tickers running constantly on Fox News and CNN.
Saying someone with a positive COVID test is a “case” is fraudulent. For comparison, blood glucose has an upper test limit of 140. Is everyone above that number a diabetic? Even if they just ate a doughnut or ice cream cone before testing?
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
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.
The amplification cycle is the problem.
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.
With too high an amplification cycle, the PCR test is hyper-sensitive. Most commercial tests set this threshold at 40, whereas it would be more clinical meaningful if much lower, say at 30. Otherwise as the NY Times notes,
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.
Every time I hear cases are up I always ask the same question to the air: Define “case”. If you can’t do that, the news is irrelevant.
*I know a number of people who clearly had covid symptoms and had numerous negative tests and then hit a positive days into the illness.
*I know a number of people with zero symptoms who tested positive for covid.
*I know someone who was sick at home for a week with it, recovered, had 2 negative tests, had a seizure type event weeks after recovering from covid, went to the ER and tested positive for covid.
The tests are unreliable.
We don’t know what we don’t know, but during FLU season, it is always good to keep all common surfaces wiped with disinfectant, wear masks when you are in close quarters with strangers, gargle with antiseptic, and WASH HANDS well and frequently. Hopefully these measures will keep FLU at bay and covid as well.
The true measure of covid is in the hospitalization reports. But you get odd numbers on any of the web stats. It’s never clear if the numbers represent present hospitalizations due to covid, patients who are in the hospital for some other reason and then test positive, total hospitalizations due to ANY reason.
Those covid tickers will miraculously disappear the day Biden takes office (if God forbid, Trump loses all court cases).
I have made this point numerous times both here and elsewhere. Many people just simply don’t get it largely because the media and agenda-driven “experts” have been maliciously misleading in reporting the difference between a positive test and an actual case. It’s extremely frustrating that those of us who do get it can’t do anything about it.
And “positive” tests are not always positive. Journalists (who are journalists precisely because even third grade math is beyond their mental capacities) appear to have no idea of Bayes rule - which requires that we allow for false positives so as to correct the real positive rate.
But, journalism was created by that God to allow such slow folks to have some kind of employment.
It’s not just about cycle threshold.
NYS counts repeat positives of the same patient as new cases.
And with the massive increase in testing, especially mandatory testing, counting repeat positives will really jack the stats.
The stats are crap and always have been.
bttt
A couple of months ago my son was scheduled for a medical procedure and had a positive rapid test. He had no symptoms and immediately got a PCR test which was negative. He needed a second negative test before they would allow the procedure...that was negative as well.
I’m convinced they are reporting false positives and not reconciling the subsequent negatives to clean up the stats...every positive is reported but false positives aren’t being backed out of the numbers.
Gave me a nice chuckle. Comparing Cavuto to Blitzer. My how the mighty have fallen. Both no more than activist shills.
Phucck-shi himself set the cycle threshold at 30-35.
He’s still evil, though.
Good info, thanks for posting it.
I don’t think I’ll ever be able to understand how so many people can live in utter fear of a virus that has a 99%-plus survival rate. If it was Ebola with its 30%-90% mortality rate (correct me if those figures are incorrect), then yeah, I could see the panic.
a positive COVID test is probably the same as a positive Mantoux test for TB. Just because you get a positive reading on a Mantoux test it doesn’t mean you have TB, just that you may have been exposed to it at some point in time.
Otherwise, where are all of the hospitals that are crammed to the limit with sick covid patients? Where are all of the morgues overflowing with dead covid bodies? There are none around here in the county I live in.
When the CDC admits that all deaths in the country have been coded as covid deaths and that the overall death rate in the country has not gone up this year, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to do the math. We're being lied to.
The CDC reports 99 covid deaths in this county since February. Based on the CDC's own admission of 6% of those were deaths from strictly the corona virus, that's less that 6 deaths since February. Hardly enough to sneeze at, let alone close down the economy in the county.
Personally, I have never met or know of anybody who has this so-called deadly virus. I don't even know anybody who has been tested, positive or otherwise. Why is that? With all of these "new cases" being reported daily, you'd think just by chance, I'd have someone in my circle of family, friends and acquaintances who have come down with covid. But none. Zero. Zippo.
And as someone in my mid-70s, never having worn a mask or practiced social distancing, you'd think I'd be dead by now. The CDC would have you believe that. That's why I believe we've been lied to for political and financial gain purposes. The handling and reporting of this virus pandemic has little-to-nothing to do with the well being of the people of this country.
Just like the fake news MSM, I don't believe a thing coming out of Fauci or Birx mouths or the CDC at all. Not a word.
As far as I am concerned, there is no pandemic. And if there ever was one to begin with, its over with now. The veil has been lifted and we can see that the Wizard of Oz is not really a wizard at all but a sad old man.
See my other comments in #15 on this same thread.
The CDC reported 1.1M new cases in the last week.
That's over 4 times the number in mid-August.
Whatever definition of case you use you can't deny the trend.
RE: That’s over 4 times the number in mid-August.
Did we have more or less or the same testing in August than we have now?
Less. We're doing about 3.5M tests per week now vs about 2.5M in August.
Nowhere near the 4x increase in cases.
That, right there, is the problem. You make no distinction between a positive test and a case. This is not your fault. There is a very real and important difference between a test result and a case, but agenda-driven "experts" and the majority of media do not make that distinction clear for the general public, resulting in the viewpoint you stated. Simply put, a positive test only means you have been exposed to the virus. A case is when someone is actually sick from the virus. When the media and other agenda-driven parties report that "cases" are rising, what they are doing is conflating positive tests with the far smaller number of people who are actually ill from the virus.
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