News that will not please COVID Cultists

[Legion]

[Legion]

[Darth Omar]

They’re even sketchier than I realized.

[Legion]

SCIENCE!

Some of the nation’s leading public health experts are raising a new concern in the endless debate over coronavirus testing in the United States: The standard tests are diagnosing huge numbers of people who may be carrying relatively insignificant amounts of the virus.

The most widely used diagnostic test for the new coronavirus, called a PCR test, provides a simple yes-no answer to the question of whether a patient is infected.

But similar PCR tests for other viruses do offer some sense of how contagious an infected patient may be: The results may include a rough estimate of the amount of virus in the patient’s body.

“We’ve been using one type of data for everything, and that is just plus or minus — that’s all,” said Dr. Michael Mina, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “We’re using that for clinical diagnostics, for public health, for policy decision-making.”

But yes-no isn’t good enough, he added. It’s the amount of virus that should dictate the infected patient’s next steps. “It’s really irresponsible, I think, to forgo the recognition that this is a quantitative issue,” Dr. Mina said.

The PCR test amplifies genetic matter from the virus in cycles; the fewer cycles required, the greater the amount of virus, or viral load, in the sample. The greater the viral load, the more likely the patient is to be contagious.

This number of amplification cycles needed to find the virus, called the cycle threshold, is never included in the results sent to doctors and coronavirus patients, although it could tell them how infectious the patients are.

In three sets of testing data that include cycle thresholds, compiled by officials in Massachusetts, New York and Nevada, up to 90 percent of people testing positive carried barely any virus, a review by The Times found.

One solution would be to adjust the cycle threshold used now to decide that a patient is infected. Most tests set the limit at 40, a few at 37. This means that you are positive for the coronavirus if the test process required up to 40 cycles, or 37, to detect the virus.

Tests with thresholds so high may detect not just live virus but also genetic fragments, leftovers from infection that pose no particular risk — akin to finding a hair in a room long after a person has left, Dr. Mina said.

Any test with a cycle threshold above 35 is too sensitive, agreed Juliet Morrison, a virologist at the University of California. “I’m shocked that people would think that 40 could represent a positive,” she said.

A more reasonable cutoff would be 30 to 35, she added. Dr. Mina said he would set the figure at 30, or even less. Those changes would mean the amount of genetic material in a patient’s sample would have to be 100-fold to 1,000-fold that of the current standard for the test to return a positive result — at least, one worth acting on.

The Food and Drug Administration said in an emailed statement that it does not specify the cycle threshold ranges used to determine who is positive, and that “commercial manufacturers and laboratories set their own.”

“It’s just kind of mind-blowing to me that people are not recording the C.T. values from all these tests — that they’re just returning a positive or a negative,” said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Columbia University in New York.

“It would be useful information to know if somebody’s positive, whether they have a high viral load or a low viral load,” she added.

Officials at the Wadsworth Center, New York’s state lab, have access to C.T. values from tests they have processed, and analyzed their numbers at The Times’s request. The lab identified 872 positive tests, based on a threshold of 40 cycles.

With a cutoff of 35, about 43 percent of those tests would no longer qualify as positive. About 63 percent would no longer be judged positive if the cycles were limited to 30.

In Massachusetts, from 85 to 90 percent of people who tested positive with a cycle threshold of 40 would have been deemed negative if the threshold were 30 cycles, Dr. Mina said.

The number of people with positive results who aren’t infectious is particularly concerning, said Scott Becker, executive director of the Association of Public Health Laboratories. “That worries me a lot, just because it’s so high,” he said.

But with 20 percent or more of people testing positive for the virus in some parts of the country, Dr. Mina and other researchers are questioning the use of PCR tests as a frontline diagnostic tool.







https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/29/health/coronavirus-testing.html

[Legion]

They’re even sketchier than I realized.

The great majority of COVID-19 tests are PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) tests. And you may have heard that there are potential problems with interpreting the results of these tests.

New data obtained from a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request confirms that there is much more information contained in PCR testing than a simple “positive/negative for COVID” result.

Originally developed to detect the presence of DNA and RNA in biological samples, even its Nobel Prize-winning inventor Kary Mullis declared that PCR was never intended to diagnose a disease.

It simply detects the presence of specific genetic material, which may or may not indicate infection.

With every other disease, clinical symptoms are required for diagnosis. Yet we are running millions of PCR tests worldwide on asymptomatic folks and quarantining them (this includes essential health care workers) if they test “positive” – no symptoms required.

As Dr. Mullis put it, the PCR technique can find almost anything in anybody.

The PCR test uses amplification cycles to find viral RNA. The sample is repeatedly chemically amplified to increase the RNA copies until they can be detected. Each “cycle” of amplification doubles the number of molecules in a sample.

If you run enough cycles, you can effectively find a single molecule of any substance.

But is this clinically significant?

Not according to many studies that confirm PCR results by culturing virus from the samples (a technique not practical for wide-spread testing).

These studies indicate that if the machine must run more than 25 to 35 cycles to get the sample to the test’s Limit of Detection, there isn’t enough virus in the sample to matter clinically – i.e., no live virus can be cultured.

Yet data we have obtained indicates that most labs run more than 35 cycles, and some run as many as 45.

Since each cycle doubles the RNA copies, 40 cycles means one trillion-fold amplification (2 to the 40th power).

The number of cycles required for the machine to flag the sample positive, known as the cycle threshold or CT, is proportional to the original viral load in the sample.

Higher viral load = more infection. Fewer cycles required to detect the virus (Lower CT) = more infection. Once you get to ~30+ cycles, the likelihood that the subject is infectious becomes very small.



https://rationalground.com/covid-19-pcr-testing-cycle-threshold-values-are-the-missing-piece-of-the-pandemic-puzzle-until-now/

[Tinker]

The whole covid thing is coming apart.

Trump was right again.

[Darth Omar]

The whole covid thing is coming apart.

Trump was right again.

The data has been falling apart for some time but it doesn’t get much attention.

The NYT piece about the ‘up to 90% false positive’ rate came out in July. I thought it would be big news because that calls into question every bit of data derived from PCR tests. Including, the mortality data.

In fact, it’s laughable to suggest the death numbers are under inflated when the numbers are derived from a diagnostic tool with up to a 90%[!?] false positive rate.

But since that goes against the ‘approved’ COVID narrative to the Memory Hole it goes.

[archives]

Appears “copy and paste” has found another Dr Stella Immanuel

”New Zealand doctor makes misleading claims about the country’s PCR testing regime in widely shared YouTube video”
https://factcheck.afp.com/new-zealan...shared-youtube

”Experts slam Christchurch doctor's claims Covid-19 tests are unreliable”
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/hea...are-unreliable

”Doctor ...... found to have spread 'misleading' information about COVID-19 “
https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-z...-covid-19.html

[Trumpet]

Legion, you wouldn't happen to be spreading disinformation; now would you????????????????

[Hoosier Daddy]

it is so odd how anybody can discount what 99% of the experts say to believe the tiny percentage who disagree. illogical as hell.

[Legion]

Appears “copy and paste” has found another Dr Stella Immanuel ”New Zealand doctor makes misleading claims about the country’s PCR testing regime in widely shared YouTube video” https://factcheck.afp.com/new-zealan...shared-youtube ”Experts slam Christchurch doctor's claims Covid-19 tests are unreliable” https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/hea...are-unreliable ”Doctor ...... found to have spread 'misleading' information about COVID-19 “ https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-z...-covid-19.html

Are you for real, anyone can ping pong supposed "expert's" views forever, ain't that hard to find one that will support your point of view, especially when they don't have any skin in the game"

Anchovies copied and pasted some headlines & URLs...

What did Dr. Bailey say that is supposedly "misleading", Anchovies?

What did Kary Mullis say that is supposedly "misleading", Anchovies?

What did Dr. Michael Mina say that is supposedly "misleading", Anchovies?

What did Juliet Morrison say that is supposedly "misleading", Anchovies?

I'll understand if you don't know, of course.

What did Scott Becker say that is supposedly "misleading", Anchovies?

[Tinker]

The data has been falling apart for some time but it doesn’t get much attention.

The NYT piece about the ‘up to 90% false positive’ rate came out in July. I thought it would be big news because that calls into question every bit of data derived from PCR tests. Including, the mortality data.

In fact, it’s laughable to suggest the death numbers are under inflated when the numbers are derived from a diagnostic tool with up to a 90%[!?] false positive rate.

But since that goes against the ‘approved’ COVID narrative to the Memory Hole it goes.

The democrats need covid to blame Trump for and it worked.

[Jerome]

Anchovies copied and pasted some headlines & URLs...

What did Dr. Bailey say that is supposedly "misleading", Anchovies?

What did Kary Mullis say that is supposedly "misleading", Anchovies?

What did Dr. Michael Mina say that is supposedly "misleading", Anchovies?

What did Juliet Morrison say that is supposedly "misleading", Anchovies?

I'll understand if you don't know, of course.

What did Scott Becker say that is supposedly "misleading", Anchovies?

You might have to actually read what experts say, stupid. Shouting into a message forum ain't THE best way to get medical data.

[AProudLefty]

What's the point of posting them here on JPP? It will not have any effect.

[Legion]

You might have to actually read what experts say, stupid. Shouting into a message forum ain't THE best way to get medical data.

Let me know what you supposedly read that disproves anything I posted.

I'll understand if you can't, of course.