Big News About COVID-19 Testing

According to the October 16 edition of The Washington Post, new coronavirus cases are spiking in the United States and Europe, with 13 states reporting record-setting numbers of infections over the past week. That sounds scary. But, of course, what they didn’t report is the data on the fact that matters: deaths. And the fact is that deaths from the virus have NOT increased since the beginning of September – either worldwide or in the US. Here’s something else they should be reporting on… The conventional wisdom regarding testing is that if you get a positive result, you have the virus, you are contagious, and you should self-quarantine until you are tested again to determine that the infection is gone. But according to a study reported on in the NYT (of all places) on August 29, and then reported again by OANN, that may not be true. In fact, it’s possible that 85% to 90% of the tests done this year in the US were faulty. The problem was with the PCR test – the one we are all familiar with. The swab up the nose. If you’ve ever had this test, you know that the result comes back as positive or negative. Simple and clear. But it’s not simple. Or clear. Here’s why: Virologists have always known that the danger of both getting sick from a virus and also spreading it to others depends not on if you have the virus in you, but on how much of it you have. I’ve suggested this in several past issues of the blog. (Check them out HERE, HERE, and HERE.) But since no one else was talking about it, I figured it was unimportant or I was wrong. But it looks like I was right. And it is important. It means that the protocol of quarantining everyone that tested positive was wrong. We should have quarantined only those whose level was above a certain threshold. We didn’t because we were operating on the assumption that any amount of coronavirus in a person was life-threatening. We weren’t measuring levels of the virus. It was a yes-no test, with a mistake built into it. The mistake was this. Labs typically amplify the samples they get in order to reach a level where they can be detected. Standard practice is 30 amplifications. But in 85% to 90% of the PCR tests done this year, the amplifications were at 40, not 30. Which means it’s possible that 85% to 90% of people that tested positive were neither contagious nor at risk of getting severely sick and dying. Here’s a link to the NYT article.  

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