Not that I have any confidence in PCR tests,,,, but let’s clarify exactly what the CDC is admitting.
I don’t think they are saying the test has too many false positives up front. I think they are saying that after recovery from the virus, the test keeps producing false positives for too long because it picks up bits of evidence of the virus well after you are recovered.
That’s what they’re trying to say, but the truth is, the PCR picks up the fragments that aren’t enough to get you sick on the front end, too.
A young friend of ours was working at a restaurant last year, summer of 2020. One person was sick so they tested him, and that person was positive for CoVid. So they had all of the workers tested, and our young friend tested positive but was never ever sick with any symptoms. His wife didn’t get it either. I think he was a false positive.
Exactly. And we've been using the test as a proxy for determining who is actually contagious. That's what we really need to know (assuming the goal is to stop it from spreading).
I don’t read your interpretation in that at all, frankly. On the one hand, Fauci says the famous ‘what we thought people would tolerate....’ (wrt to PCR tests and cutting quarantine times) and on the other it’s the CDC now just saying that it wasn’t that but the lingering potential for a false positive? Which is it? Fauci and whatshername not reading the same page? THEY’RE in charge and we get this?
And I don’t think any of this really gets down to the brass tack that the tests DON’T identify Delta, Omicron or any of the like, yet we see MSM and government attributing recent rises in their ‘cases’ reports to exactly that.
The term “false positive” is being thrown around without defining it.
The SARS CoV 2 signal on the PCR isn’t “false”, it’s perfectly real. What’s “false” is the inference that all true positive SARS CoV 2 results indicate active infection, or maybe more exactly indicate infectiousness.
So, a positive PCR 20 days after a new infection is “true” in the sense that SARS CoV 2 RNA is really still there, but it’s usually “false” in the sense that the person is no longer contagious.
Antigen testing (Binax, Quidel, etc etc) may be the way forward for this but as with everything else COVID there are massive conflicts in the bureaucracy - CDC became committed to PCR because it’s “better” (more sensitive) and can be positive when an antigen test is negative, without investigating the possibility that the less sensitive antigen test was a better indicator of infectiousness, which is, after all, what we need the tests to tell us.
They won’t give in (yet) on a switch to antigen testing because the US has produced fewer antigen tests, at higher cost and less surge capacity than most other first world countries, and if the announced a switch we could not create an infrastructure fast enough to replace PCR and, worst of all, Brandon might be made to look bad by white supremacist terrorists who have so far managed to avoid arrest.