less than 3% of positive PCR tests for covid were actually viable virus even at a 35 Ct.

97% could not be cultured/were not live. these people were not sick nor contagious.

this test is seriously over-sensitive.

fun fact: the 40Ct used in the US is 32X this sensitive. https://twitter.com/andrewbostom/status/1312007699073294336

the authors focus on a literature survey that indicates that 25-30 Ct would be the proper threshold to assess actual clinical disease.

30 = 1/1,000th the sensitivity currently used in the us.

25 = 1/32,000th

for those still unclear on just what Ct means and why we should care, primer here: https://twitter.com/boriquagato/status/1299748997041500163?s=20

if you want to end this casedemic and stop mistaking "death with a trace of covid" for "death from covid" you could do it tomorrow.

all you need to do is change the cycle threshold on the tests to a reasonable level and to add symptoms (as has been done in vaccine trials)

yet we do not do this.

why? what possible rationale could exist to over-report infection this massively?

it's purely political at this point, egged on by the covid-industrial complex and the federal gravy train of payments.

the incentives have become perverse.

the US is up to 900k tests a day. that's $112 million/day. $40bn/year.

hospitals and cities and states are all trying to get snouts in the trough of federal swill that is flowing like a river.

we're literally paying to have this done to us.

it's a national scale plundering.

hundreds of billions are pouring into pharma and testing companies and to hospitals through the CARES act.

cities and states are looking to plug and erase long term holes by calling everything covid and squalling for a mulligan on decades of bad policy.

it's a free for all.

we've savaged the economy and will likely ring up $5 trillion in debt before this is done. that's 25% of US annual economic output. in debt. in less than a year.

i keep waiting to wake up and find this is a nightmare from eating triple anchovy pizza right before bed.

how have we managed to slip into this seeming even remotely permissible, much less OK or even "normal"?

this is not normal.

this is absurd.

if you had written this as a dystopian novel last year it would have been dismissed as implausible.

what began as a panic has persisted as one of the great grifts in human history all wrapped up in a generation scale cautionary tale on perverse incentives and authoritarian impulses.

and it's time to wake up and take the world back.

stop letting them lie to you.