anyone still presuming that a + PCR test is showing a covid case needs to read this v carefully:

even 25 cycles of amplification, 70% of "positives" are not "cases." virus cannot be cultured. it's dead.

by 35: 97% non-clinical.

the US runs at 40, 32X the amplification of 35.

a lot of people still seem to not understand what this means, so let's lay that out for a minute.

PCR tests look for RNA. there is too little in your swab. so they amplify it using a primer based heating and annealing process.

each cycle of this process doubles the material.

the US (and much of the world) is using a 40 Ct (cycle threshold). so, 40 doublings, 1 trillion X amplification.

this is absurdly high.

the way that we know this is by running this test, seeing the Ct to find the RNA, and then using the same sample to try to culture virus.

if you cannot culture the virus, then the virus is "dead." it's inert. if it cannot replicate, it cannot infect you or others. it's just traces of virus, remnants, fragments etc

PCR is not testing for disease, it's testing for a specific RNA pattern

and this is the key pivot

when you crank it up to 25, 70% of the positive results are not really "positives" in any clinical sense.

i hesitate to call it a "false positive" because it's really not. it did find RNA.

but that RNA is not clinically relevant. it cannot make you or anyone else sick

so let's call this a non-clinical positive (NCP).

if 70% of positives are NCP's at 25, imagine what 40 looks like. 35 is 1000X as sensitive.

this study found only 3% live at 35

40 Ct is 32X 35, 32,000X 25

no one can culture live virus past about 34 https://twitter.com/boriquagato/status/1243644503807815680?s=20

and we have known this since march. yet no one has adjusted these tests.

this is more very strong data refuting the idea that you can trust a PCR+ as a clinical indicator. that is NOT what it's meant for. at all.

using them to do real time epidemiology is absurd.

the FDA would never do it. the drug companies doing vaccine trials would never do it.

it's because it's nonsense.

and this same test is used for "hospitalizations" and "death with covid" (itself a weirdly over inclusive metric) https://twitter.com/boriquagato/status/1308451578869809152?s=20

PCR testing is not the answer, it's the problem.

it's not how to get control of an epidemic, it's how to completely lose control of your data picture and wind up with gibberish.

and we have done this to ourselves before. https://twitter.com/ClareCraigPath/status/1328296774449192960?s=20

a quick word what this data does and does not mean.

saying "a sample requiring 35 Ct to test + has a 3% real clinical positive rate" does not mean "97% of + tests run at 35 Ct are NCP's"

people seem to get confused on this, so lets explain:

most tests are just amplified and run. they don't test every cycle as these academics do. that would make the test slow and expensive.

so you just run 40 cycles then test.

obviously, a real clinical positive (RCP) that would have been + at 20 is still + at 40.

but when you run the tests each cycle as the academics do, that test would already have dropped out.

so saying that only 3% at 35 are RCP really means that 3% of those samples not PCR + at 34 were PCR and RCP + at 35.

this lets us infer little about overall NCP/RCP rate.

so we cannot say "at 25 Ct, we have a 70 NCP rate." in fact, it's hard to say much of anything. it depends entirely on what the source material coming in looks like.

you cannot even compare like to like.

this is what i mean by "the data is gibberish"

today at 40 Ct, 7% PCR positive rate could be 1% RCP prevalence when that same thing meant 6% RCP prev in april.

if there is lots more trace virus around, more people who have recovered and have fragments left over, etc this test could be finding virus you killed 4 months ago.

so if we consider RCP rate/PCR+ rate, we would expect that number to drop sharply late in an epidemic because there is more dead virus around for PCR to find.

but we have no idea what that ratio is or how it changes.

this spills over in to deaths, reported hospitalization etc.

testing is being made out to be like the high beams on a car. but when it's snowing like hell at night, that is the LAST thing you want.

it is not illuminating our way, it's blinding us.

a bad inaccurate map is much worse than no map at all.

and this is a world class bad map.

we're basing policy that is affecting billions of humans on data that is uninterpretable gibberish.

it's a deranged technocrat's wet dream, but for those of us along for the ride, it's a nightmare.

testing is not the solution, it's the problem.

poison is being peddled as cure.

any technocrat or scientist that does not know this by now is either unfit for their job or has decided that they just don't care and prefer power to morality.

this is, of curse, precisely the kind of person who winds up running a gov't agency.

oopsie.

the head of the NIH is not the best scientist, it's the best politician.

all this wild and reckless government policy has never been about the science.

it's politics and panic.

you can read the whole paper here:

https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid/ciaa1491/5912603