Up to 90 percent of the people who receive a positive test are carrying so little virus that they probably aren’t contagious.
This is because testing used something called a PCR test.
In this test, a test sample is run through a machine that amplifies any DNA particles found in it. Each time you run the sample through the machine you amplify the DNA a bit more.
•In the current PCR testing, they run that sample through 40 times.
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.
On Thursday, the United States recorded 45,604 new coronavirus cases, according to a database maintained by
The Times.
If the rates of contagiousness in Massachusetts and New York were to apply nationwide, then perhaps only 4,500 of those people may actually need to isolate and submit to contact tracing.
• The standard for these tests is 30-35 cycles.
•By cycling to 40 times, it means we have positive infection counts that are about 10 times higher than they really are.
Any test with a cycle threshold above 35 is too sensitive, agreed Juliet Morrison, a virologist at the University of California, Riverside. “
I’m shocked that people would think that 40 could represent a positive,” she said
Epidemiologist Dr. Michael Mina from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health told
The Times that a proper cutoff would be somewhere between 30-35 cycles. That would mean
the amount of viral DNA in the sample would have to be 100 to 1,000 times higher to generate a positive result.
So this is, let's go with the vernacular, part of the "hoax".
We've been fed data that infectious cases are currently at 6.04 million when, because of the way this test is being done, may actually only be a little over 600,000.
But it may be even lower:
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.
In July, the lab identified 794 positive tests, based on a threshold of 40 cycles.
With a cutoff of 35, about half of those tests would no longer qualify as positive. About 70 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 in July with a cycle threshold of 40 would have been deemed negative if the threshold were 30 cycles, Dr. Mina said. “I would say that none of those people should be contact-traced, not one,” he said.
Other experts informed of these numbers were stunned.
The virus is most definitely real. The actual case count ... not so much.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/29/health/coronavirus-testing.html
Loser.