Tuesday - July 21, 2020

For Better AND Worse

At This Point, I’m Just Throwing Up My Hands (Don’t Shoot!!), SMH, And Walking Away

The current CDC nucleic acid test kits for SARS-CoV-2 generate 30% false-positive and 20% false-negative results in the best state public health laboratory, Dr. Sin Hang Lee reported in a peer-reviewed article published in the International Journal of Geriatrics and Rehabilitation, an online journal based in Japan, on July 17, 2020.

Sin Hang Lee, MD, director of Milford Molecular Diagnostics Laboratory, the author of the article, re-tested 20 reference samples provided by the Connecticut State Department of Public Health Microbiology Laboratory Division to arrive at this conclusion, according to the published article. These reference samples were tested by the State Microbiology Laboratory with the CDC test kit and used as the standard reference to guide local laboratories to develop their own tests for SARS-CoV-2 in clinical specimens from suspected COVID-19 patients, according to the published article titled “Testing for SARS-CoV-2 in cellular components by routine nested RT-PCR followed by DNA sequencing.”

Dr. Lee is the first scientist developing a protocol to test the cellular components, instead of the cell-free fluid sample of a swab rinse, for SARS-CoV-2 genomic RNA.

1. Is Dr. Lee trashing the “gold standard” test used around the world in order to corner the market for his own upcoming cellular test so he can make billions? 

OR

2. Is the “gold standard” test just rough crap, and has been since the beginning? WTH, it was designed by the CDC, who can’t seem to do much of anything properly. We’ve already seen that the antibody tests aren’t useful for much of anything at this point. We did see several random bulk public uses of them that implied the infection rate was a helluva lot larger than was thought though.

BUT MAYBE

3. His testing sample is stupidly small. Run your research with 1,000 or 100,000 or 10,000,000 samples and we’ll listen harder. With just 20 samples, you fall in the “merely anecdotal” category.

While some may think that a 30% false positive rate is awesome, because it shows that the number of actual positives is far lower than reported, you can’t ignore the false negatives.

And if the overall testing effort is returning anything less than a 40% positive test rate, this mean that the adjusted number of cases is more than you thought it was.

When the percentage of positive results is fairly low, then using a test with a “30/20” error factor gives you a TON more actual cases.


Example:

1000 people are tested
100 tests come back positive ... therefore ...
900 tests come back negative

If the test has a 30% positive error rate, then take away 30% of those 100 positives. This leaves you with 70. Awesome!!
If the test has a 20% negative error rate, then 20% of those people are actually infected. So add in 20% of those 900. That’s 180.

Now add 70 and 180, and you get 250. That’s 2.5X as bad as you thought it was. Ruh Roh!!

As the rate of positive results goes down, the overall multiplier goes up. Inverse proportional.
At 8% positive testing, the error rate is 3X. At 9% it’s 2.7X. At 13.34% it’s 2X.




According to the CDC today, the USA is currently showing a 7.867% positive test rate, giving us 3,819,139 cases. If the PCR test does have that 30/20 issue, then 7.867% has an net error rate of 3.04X, which means the actual number of infected people is 11.6 million, not 3.8 million.

On the other hand, the number of people hospitalized, in ICU, intubated and dead (regardless of how you count the dead) has not changed. Shitloads more cases, same number of dead. This means the virus is not even a third as fatal as we’ve been told.

Whether this report is valid or not, I can’t say. I have read before that doctors are throwing around a “70% accurate” concept for this PCR test, which is kind of the same thing, so maybe it is valid. Whether this is by design or by hurried development, I can’t say.

~~~~~~~~



RELATED: CDC says infection rate much higher than realized

< a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-21/coronavirus-infections-far-exceed-reported-cases-cdc-estimates"Far more people were infected with the novel coronavirus than previously reported in several corners of the U.S., according to data released Tuesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The agency conducted a survey looking at antibodies to the virus in 10 U.S. regions. It found prevalence was highly variable from one region to the next, but far higher than the reported number of cases across the board. The presence of antibodies in the blood is evidence that a person’s body had mounted an immune response to the coronavirus.

Yeah, but only recent immune response. Antibodies don’t stick around, but the cells in your body somehow remember, and can create new antibodies if the infectious agent shows up again. With several million things to get sick from out there, if all the antibodies stuck around forever, your blood would be thicker than asphalt.

And this from the CDC is based on the antibody test, which is only known to be ... not precise enough.

Bottom line: nobody really knows a damn thing about how many people actually have or have had this crap. And none of us on the outside can trust the death numbers. And nobody anywhere can really trust any of the tests. But wear your worthless mask and keep your business shuttered, because THAT helps.

Riiight.

Posted by Drew458     on 07/21/2020 at 04:49 PM   
Filed Under: • pandemic and epidemic diseases •  
• Comments (0) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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