Free Republic

High-level members of the state Department of Health were directed last year by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and Health Commissioner Dr. Howard Zucker to conduct prioritized coronavirus testing on the governor's relatives as well as influential people with ties to the administration, according to three people with direct knowledge of the matter. Members of Cuomo's family including his brother, his mother and at least one of his sisters were also tested by top health department officials — some several times, the sources said. The medical officials enlisted to do the testing, which often took place at private residences, included Dr....

Concerns have been raised that rapid response Covid-19 tests are providing too many false positives, therefore 'ruining' the return of students to UK schools. It has been reported that pupils are testing positive with on-the-spot Covid tests, isolating, and then testing negative with more reliable lab tests. The Royal Statistical Society has said that more of the new positive cases recorded in schools by rapid testing methods could be inacurate than accurate. It is believed this is the case because infection rates are currently low. Meanwhile, the Government has released a new analysis reassuring the public that lateral flow tests...

NYC has seen vending machines for engagement rings and Brooks Brothers shirts, as well as PPE like gloves and sanitizing wipes, but this new Manhattan machine is really testing the limits. Since January, a storefront at 225 W. 34th St. — formerly home to a Lane Bryant — has hosted two of health company Wellness 4 Humanity’s new vending machines, which sell DIY at-home COVID tests instead of snacks or sodas. For $149 — credit or debit cards only, no cash — you can pick up a PCR saliva test, use it at your leisure, mail it to one of...

The number of new coronavirus cases is in steep decline, both in the U.S. and the UK. Here at home, the number of new reported cases per day is below 100,000 — down from almost three times that many early in the year. The daily number of new cases is about what it was in mid-to-late October, before the weather got cold. (All numbers cited are from Worldometer.)Unfortunately, the number of deaths per day attributed to the virus hasn’t declined as sharply. New deaths are averaging a little below 3,000, down from a peak of more than 4,000 in mid-January....

Leaders of several major U.S. airlines met online Friday with White House officials to press their case against requiring coronavirus tests for passengers on domestic flights, saying it would undermine the already fragile industry. White House press secretary Jen Psaki downplayed speculation that the Biden administration could soon impose a requirement that passengers on domestic flights first pass a COVID-19 test. But she stopped short of taking the idea off the table. “Reports that there is an intention to put in place new requirements such as testing are not accurate,” Psaki said. She described the meeting with CEOs as “brief.”...

In the setting of COVID-19, almost every country in the world closed its borders, locked down its citizens, and forced businesses to close. Today, most governments still restrict travel, economic activity, and social gatherings.The justification for these unprecedented measures has been a growing number of COVID-19 cases. This has unleashed an epidemic of COVID testing - with PCR and rapid antigen tests as the means of identifying positive COVID cases. Our very own Dr. John Hunt examines the science behind COVID testing, whether the testing paradigms are effective, and the rationality behind government response to the virus.What COVID tests mean...

Willie Lewis Brown Jr., San Francisco’s mayor from 1996 to 2004, says that he has a solution for San Francisco’s struggling restaurants: Require diners to take a COVID-19 test within 72 hours before they sit down to eat. Implementing a rule like this “would do a lot to bring people back,” Brown says, adding that the program would make dining out “risk-free.” Brown argues that restaurants across the city could bring in more diners if they would “advertise that your store, your restaurant or your public space is available only to people who had a negative test in the past...

As you can see, the less prevalent the disease is in reality, the more likely the test is to generate a false positive result, and the less useful the test is as a method for figuring out who actually has covid. And the less prevalent the disease is, the more prevalent it will seem to be in relation to reality. If decisions about covid continue to be made largely based on what PCR tests show, we might never be able to call off the pandemic! And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why PCR positive cases are a very poor indicator...

Concordia University in California said more than 50 rapid COVID-19 tests offered to asymptomatic students and faculty came back with false positive results — sparking fears of a potential outbreak on campus. [cut] President Michael Thomas thought an outbreak was on the rise when he ordered the tests. “We wanted to protect families so we offered the rapid, antigen test here at Concordia out of abundance of caution,” he told the Orange County Register. “It was the right thing to do for our students and their families.” On Saturday, 48 students and 16 staff members tested positive in the last...

halts alcohol sales day before Thanksgiving Fauci predicts more than 300,000 COVID-19 deaths by end of year Employers start sending workers shopping for health coverage Facebook reportedly plans COVID-19 vaccine push to win over Biden Wealthy New Yorkers are shelling out big bucks to professional line waiters so they won’t have to sit in hours-long COVID-19 testing queues ahead of Thanksgiving. Cash-strapped locals who offer their line-sitting services on freelance marketplace TaskRabbit told The Post they’ve been charging up to $80 an hour for the service — and people are paying. “I’ve already done this about five times already,” said...

Elon Musk raised a rather important question on Twitter, saying he’d been tested four times for the Wuhan coronavirus. What mystified him was that two times it came back positive and two times it came back negative. Something extremely bogus is going on. Was tested for covid four times today. Two tests came back negative, two came back positive. Same machine, same test, same nurse. Rapid antigen test from BD.— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 13, 2020 This of course raises a lot of questions. Why? And how is that possible? What’s going on when you get results like that? Is...

Multiple incidents of people using counterfeit tests results to work around coronavirus restrictions laid out by various countries have been reported in recent weeks. Last week, French police arrested six men and one woman who were selling falsified negative test results at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris. All seven were charged with forgery, use of forgery and complicity in fraud. The fake testing certificates showing a negative coronavirus diagnosis were allegedly going for about $180 to $360 a piece.

President-elect Joe Biden named Ron Klain, a lawyer and former President Barack Obama’s “Ebola czar,” to serve as his White House chief of staff. “Ron has been invaluable to me over the many years that we have worked together, including as we rescued the American economy from one of the worst downturns in our history in 2009 and later overcame a daunting public health emergency in 2014,” Biden said in a Wednesday statement distributed by his transition team. ... Klain has additionally been extremely critical of President Donald Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic. In March, he gave the federal...

Levin contrasted the coronavirus pandemic with the Obama-Biden response to the 2009 swine flu epidemic, especially their decision to stop testing, on his national radio show “The Mark Levin Show” Thursday. Levin replayed a C-Span clip from May 2019 in which Ron Klain, a former chief of staff for Biden, says that the Obama-Biden response team “did every possible thing wrong.” We had a bunch of really talented, really good people working on it and we did every possible thing wrong and 60 million Americans got H1N1 in that period of time.” "Well, why didn’t they prevent it?" Levin asked....

One of the most frustrating aspects of COVID-19 coverage has been the emphasis on “cases,” reinforced by the Mendacious Midget™, Dr. Anthony Fauci. In fact, he was wringing his hands about rising “case” numbers on CNN in early October. These numbers are actually positive tests. The New York Times and several experts admitted in late August that up to 90% of positive PCR tests were not indicative of the active illness that could be transmitted to others. As it turns out, Dr. Anthony Fauci expressed a similar opinion in July. As I have reported several times before, the cycle threshold...

Are we having buyer’s remorse about Joe Biden? For one former Clinton adviser, that appears to be the case. Dr. Naomi Wolf, who helped the Clinton-Gore ticket improve their outreach to female voters in the 1990s, isn’t really happy about the whole lockdown stuff regarding COVID. Today, Joe Biden announced his coronavirus advisory board. And uh, let’s just say the intention of this panel included the possibility of a lockdown... The U.S. can expect increased Covid-19 testing, a national mask policy and the possibility of nationwide lockdowns ... “If I’d known Biden was open to ‘lockdowns’ as he now states,...

While some of us who value thinking and science above politics have long known it, it seems that even the New York Times (and, by implication, all who equate its pronouncements with the Gospel) are beginning to realize that the much vaunted PCR test is essentially worthless.   At the very least—and this is putting it undoubtedly too generously—it is anything but “the gold standard” of COVID-19 determiners that we have been led to believe it is.  In fact, it’s not even “the divining rod” that my martial arts instructor and USMC Lieutenant-Colonel Al Ridenhour, who has some experience working...

NAEP's changes might cause better test results, but they fundamentally alter the meaning of reading comprehension, which would hurt students. Much like the SAT adding an adversity score and the ACT allowing specific subject retakes, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also known as the “nation’s report card,” is easing its standards to improve its numbers. As with the SAT and ACT, these changes carry significant implications for the way English is taught in American schools. This year, the NAEP’s governing board plans to change testing to “optimize the performance of the widest possible population of students in the...

Despite the seismic implications of the president of the US contracting a deadly and highly infectious disease with no cure, the White House is still providing very little basic information about President Donald Trump's coronavirus status. Aside from his positive-test announcement on Friday — which led to him being hospitalized with COVID-19 for three nights — the last time Trump was on the record talking about taking a test was in May, when he said, "I tested positively toward negative." Between Trump's "positively toward negative" disclosure on May 21 and the tweet confirming he had tested positive for COVID-19 on...

At my place of work we have had four people out of 30 get a case of the covid and run home as if its the end of the world. One out of four tested positive and she will be back in a few days after being gone for a week. Guy in accounting said he is insulted that he has to come to the office and work and would rather be home because its spreading like wild fire in the office. I for one am tired of all this. I am even scared a bit to get sick for...