COVID testing is a huge business and people are making fortunes from performing the tests. But, any information that can be gleaned from testing is practically useless. Unfortunately, politicians use that faulty, and misleading data to make decisions that impact everyone.
Politicians are using the number of positive tests to justify destroying people’s livelihoods, keeping people locked down and destroying the economy. The more positive results there are, the more draconian their response. But, not only are the tests themselves potentially too sensitive to produce accurate results, they may be telling us the exact opposite of what’s actually happening.
Continue reading to learn more…
COVID testing is used to determine if a person either has the virus or doesn’t have the virus. But neither result should be used to make a decision.
Test results: Negative
A negative COVID test can tell you one thing. It can tell you whether or not you had the virus at the exact moment that the test sample was taken. Turn around-time for a PCR (nasal swab) test might be as much as a week. When you get the results, you’ll know if you tested positive a week ago, but not if you’re infected right now. You could get your nose swabbed for the test and get infected on your way home. Even if the test results came back immediately, you’d still only know your status at that single instance in time.
So, using a negative COVID for anything doesn’t really work.
Test results: Positive
The most-used test today is the PCR test. That’s where a technician swabs the inside of your nose to gather whatever is lurking up in there. After you’ve had your nasal swab, that swab is sent to a lab for analysis. But, the testing systems can’t detect the virus at the level that is on the swab. So, they amplify (grow more of) the virus using whatever they find on your swab.
Each amplification cycle approximately doubles the amount of virus from the previous cycle. So, after 10 cycles there would be about 1,000 times more virus than you started with. After 20 cycles, it’s a little more than a million times. The CDC recommends that labs use 40 cycles which generates just over a trillion times the amount of virus they started with.
But when they amplify that many times, they’re counting people with even a tiny amount of the virus in their swab as positive.
According to a study performed by The New York Times in late August, as many as 90% of the positive PCR tests are the result of over amplifying the samples.
Why is this significant? Because the test results don’t take into account the number of times the sample is amplified. The Times quoted Juliet Morrison, a virologist from UC-Riverside as saying she believes any test using more than 35 cycles is too sensitive. According to Ms. Morrison, the tests using more than 35 cycles will often show positive results for people who don’t have enough of the virus in their system to be contagious.
But wait, there’s even more:
I found this little nugget of information in the CDC publication: CDC-006-00019, Revision: 05:
“Positive and negative predictive values are highly dependent on prevalence. False-negative test results are more likely when prevalence of disease is high. False-positive test results are more likely when prevalence is moderate to low.”
According to this, the less the disease exists in a population, the more likely the tests are to result in a false-positive. This means that areas where few people are infected are likely to produce more false-positive results. I know, that sounds counter-intuitive but it comes straight from the CDC.
In summary:
The lockdowns and other measures are being justified by the number of positive test results, but the testing data is not giving us the whole picture. Even worse, sometimes it completely distorts the picture. Local and state governments are using incorrect data to make bad decisions that force their constituents to take actions that are destroying people’s lives.
