A suspiciously
high number of laboratories in Florida are reporting 100% of COVID-19
viral tests as positive. It appears many labs may be submitting positive
results only, omitting negative results altogether
In Florida,
while each positive test result is counted as a “case,” a single person
may have two or more test results. So, one infected individual can be
counted as two “cases”
Some states
have also excluded negative test results from their reporting, thereby
giving us an incomplete and misleading picture of the spread of the
disease across the country
If the
prevalence of infection in the community is 1%, and you have a test
that’s only 99% specific, then about 50% of all positive tests will be
false positives
The BD
SARS-CoV-2 Reagents for the BD Max System test has a 3% false positive
rate. The Cellex antibody test, which has a reported sensitivity of 94%
and specificity of 96%, delivers unacceptably high rates of false
positives
The only consistent thing about
COVID-19 testing and reporting so far is their inconsistency.
Head-scratching "errors" have plagued us from the get-go, and it sure
doesn't seem to be getting any better. I guess it just goes to show
that even with access to incredible data-crunching technology, human
ineptitude will ensure no one becomes the wiser. Faulty or contaminated tests
have been used and reporting guidelines have been changed and updated
multiple times, virtually eliminating any possibility of accurately
tracking infected cases and deaths.
Most recently, a July 17, 2020, study1,2
in the International Journal of Geriatrics and Rehabilitation concluded
half of all nucleic acid coronavirus tests distributed by the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention provided inaccurate results — 30%
being false positives and 20% false negatives.
Suspicions that many were dying with SARS-CoV-2 infection rather
than from COVID-19 have circulated for many weeks, and now Florida has
admitted a young man listed as a COVID-19 death actually died in a
motorcycle accident.3 It just so happens he tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 infection. Things like that surely do not inspire public trust.
Mainstream Media Distortion of the Testing Truth
Perhaps the most egregious misrepresentation of reality is the
media's conflating a positive test result with the actual disease,
COVID-19. These tests only test for the virus directly (PCR tests) or
antibodies to the virus. COVID-19 is NOT a positive test; it is a
clinical diagnosis of someone infected with SARS-COV-2 exhibiting
severe respiratory illness characterized by fever, coughing and
shortness of breath.
The media is intentionally confusing a positive test result with
COVID-19 to deliberately mislead the public into believing the disease
is far more serious than it is. They know better but consciously choose
this despicable practice. A recent example would be CNN's article,
"Florida Has More COVID-19 Than Most Countries in the World."4
They refer to the positive test as a "case." This is beyond stretching
reality to suit their nefarious purposes. A case is NOT a positive test
result but, rather, a person that has a positive test result and is
seriously ill. But you would never know it by reading their article.
Further down in their fear-mongering article is a subhead, "Florida Has
Surpassed Italy in COVID-19 Cases, Too." But at the very end of the
article they finally admit the truth: Even though Florida surpassed
Italy in "cases," they had nearly 90% FEWER deaths — the metric that
really counts, unless your goal is to perpetuate needless fear into the
population.
Some Labs Appear to Only Report Positive Results
One of the latest scandals was highlighted in a July 11, 2020, Twitter post5 by a user named Rebel A. Cole. A suspiciously high number of laboratories in Florida are reporting6,7
100% of tests as positive. Cole wonders whether this means many labs
are now only submitting positive results, omitting negatives
altogether.
Cole points out that the results from labs reporting only positives
account for 34% of the 10,360 new cases on July 11. "Without these,
today's 'percent positive' would fall from 12.6% to 8.7%" Cole said.
The same anomalous trend was also reported in the Alachua Chronicle, July 7, 2020:8
"It looks like North Florida Regional and Shands are reporting at
least some negatives, but we now know that UF is not reporting
negatives in employee testing to the state.
By law, all test results by physicians, hospitals, and laboratories
are required to be reported to the state, but the list of labs
reporting 100% positives indicates that's not happening — or perhaps
tests performed by an employer are not covered by the order …
If negative tests aren't reported, they aren't added to the total
number of tests. That makes the reported positivity rate higher than the
actual positive percentage of all tests performed. This can easily be
seen when you look at the hospitals reporting 100% positive tests.
If they reported 50 positives with 100% positive tests, for
example, the number of tests reported to the state is 50. If they did
500 tests to get those 50 positives, 450 tests were not reported to the
state and were not added to the total number of tests reported by the
state."
Confusing matters further, the Florida testing report9 states that "A person can be tested by more than one laboratory and can have both positive and negative results."
In other words, while each positive test result is counted as a "case,"
a single person may actually have two or more test results. Let's say
one individual tests positive twice or even three or four times.
They're now counted as two or more "cases" when in fact it's just one
person.
Add to that the fact that in many areas, "assumed" cases — obtained
through contact tracing — are counted as "positive cases" as well (or
have been in the past), even without laboratory confirmed testing.10
After a local Fox News affiliate contacted several of the Florida labs
reporting 100% positive test results, some of them confirmed "major
errors" in their reporting. And they're no small errors. Orlando Health
confirmed its positivity rate was not 98%, as reported to the state,
but rather 9.4%. Similarly, Orlando Veteran's Medical Center corrected
its positivity rate from the reported 76% down to 6%.11
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Several States Report Only Positive Results
KHN.org actually reported12
this problem all the way back on March 25, 2020, warning that some
states had chosen to exclude negative test results from their
reporting, thereby giving us an incomplete and misleading picture of
the spread of the disease across the country.
"Several states are reporting only positive COVID-19 test results
from private labs, a practice that paints a misleading picture of how
fast the disease is spreading," KHN wrote.
"Maryland, Ohio and others are posting the numbers of new positive
tests and deaths, for instance, but don't report the negative results,
which would help show how many people were tested overall.
'This matters because it gives you a false sense of what is going
on in a particular location,' said Dr. Eric Topol, director of the
Scripps Research Translational Institute.
He said states should be required to report both positive and
negative results for review by public health experts. 'They should all
be pulled together,' Topol said. 'It should be automatic.'"
Tests Are Reliably Unreliable
Aside from single individuals being counted as multiple "cases" if
they have more than one positive test, the accuracy of the tests
themselves have also come under question numerous times. For example,
in June, Texas noticed an abnormal number of positive test results,
which threw the accuracy of the tests into question.
As reported by Dallas News:13
"The state is no longer using a laboratory that has tested 14,000
Texans for the coronavirus, after it turned up an abnormal number of
positive results during state-ordered testing at nursing homes and in
community surveillance …
It is not clear whether all the lab's test results will be thrown
out from state tallies or just a portion. A spokeswoman for HHSC
declined to name the lab, saying only that it was a private one."
Low Prevalence = Higher False Positive Rate
As explained by Dr. Deborah Birx during an April White House
Coronavirus Task Force briefing, COVID-19 tests are "not 100% sensitive
or specific," and that when prevalence is low in the community, the
false positive rate will be high.
"If you have 1% of your population infected, and you have a test that's only 99% specific, that means that when you find a positive, 50% of the time will be a real positive and 50% of the time it won't be," Birx said.
In other words, if the prevalence of infection in the community is
1%, about half of all positive tests will be false positives. Depending
on the manufacturer, the test may return even higher rates of false
results.
Some Tests Have High False Positive Rates, Others Negative
July 6, 2020, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration warned14
clinical laboratory staff and health care providers using the BD
SARS-CoV-2 Reagents for the BD Max System test that the test had an
increased risk of false positives.
The test is designed to detect viral nucleic acid from the
SARS-CoV-2 virus in nasal swabs, providing results in two to three
hours. "In one study, the manufacturer found approximately three
percent (3%) of results were false positive results," the FDA said.
False negatives occur too, although it appears to be more difficult
to find data on the prevalence of false negative test results. May 14,
2020, the FDA issued a public alert15
warning people that the Abbott ID NOW point-of-care test had a high
false negative rate. The FDA started reviewing the test after receiving
15 adverse event reports.
"The agency has been working with Abbott … on a customer
notification letter to alert users that any negative test results that
are not consistent with a patient's clinical signs and symptoms or
necessary for patient management should be confirmed with another
test," the FDA said.
While there seems to be no reliable way to assess just how many
positive test results are in fact false positives, as testing continues
to climb, it seems clear the number of false results is likely to be
quite high.
Meanwhile, hospitalizations and actual deaths have dramatically
declined. The week of July 4, a grand total of 522 Americans died with
or from COVID-19. The week of July 11, the death toll was down to 181,
and that's for the entire nation.16
Mortality peaked the week of April 18, with 16,897 deaths, and has
dropped by the thousands every week since. At this point, I think it
would be safe to say we're out of the danger zone and should allow life
to return to some semblance of normal.
False Positives Lead to Misuse of Medical Resources
False positives do more than fuel fear-based media rhetoric. In
India, false positives are endangering patients who are actually sick
by taking up much-needed hospital beds. As reported by Times of India:17
"… the dead virus is lingering on in some patients, throwing up
false positive reports in those who have completely recovered and are
in no danger, either to themselves or to others. This is keeping
hospital beds occupied longer than strictly required and denying beds
to patients who genuinely need them …"
While hospitals typically discharge patients once their symptoms have
resolved, many are wary of leaving without proof that they're no longer
infectious, as many family members, neighbors and even some housing
complexes will not allow access to potentially infectious individuals.
"Both RT-PCR and TruNat tests are so sensitive that they can catch
traces of the dead virus protein, causing the false positives, said
Raja Dhar, Fortis Hospital pulmonologist.
'These patients are unlikely to transmit the virus and can safely
be sent home. But they are reluctant because of the social pressure.
Many plead with us to defer release until they test negative,' Dhar
told TOI."18
Antibody Tests Are Equally Unreliable
Antibody tests are also turning out to have their share of quality problems. In a letter to the editor19
published in the July 1, 2020, issue of American Family Physician, Drs.
Mark Ebell, deputy editor for evidence-based medicine for the journal,
and Henry Barry, review some of the available data:
"Cellex, the first antibody test approved by the U.S. Food and Drug
Administration for the virus, has a reported sensitivity of 94% and
specificity of 96% ...
When assessing whether patients had a previous infection and may be
immune, it is important to avoid false-positives so that patients do
not think they are immune when they are not.
Table 1 summarizes the false-positive rates at various population
prevalence for the Cellex test and for a hypothetical test that is 90%
sensitive and 99% specific.
At relatively low population prevalences, which likely reflect
current conditions in the United States and elsewhere, we would argue
that false-positive rates are unacceptably high with the Cellex test."
Ebell and Barry point out that many of the antibody tests that have
provisional approval from the FDA still have not even been evaluated
for accuracy. They also recommend that labs report test results "in a
way that reflects the local population prevalence based on widespread
testing and include the false-positive rate," as this information "is
needed to help family physicians better inform shared decision-making
regarding previous infection and return to work or school."
At present, you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone including that data
in their reporting, and the way things are going, I wouldn't hold my
breath in anticipation of such helpful numbers being included in the
future either.
Viral and Antibody Test Results Have Been Combined
Aside from false positive viral and antibody tests, back in May the
CDC also admitted it had combined test results from the two different
tests in its national reporting.20
Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, told The Atlantic,21
"You've got to be kidding me. How could the CDC make that mistake?
This is a mess." Indeed. Several states were also found to have
comingled results from the two tests for varying amounts of time,
including Pennsylvania, Texas, Georgia, Vermont, Virginia and Maine.22
At the state level, an idiotic error such as this has significant
consequences as states use these data points to determine when it's
"safe" to reopen their economies and allow people back to work.
Common Cold Antibodies Can Trigger False Positive Test
Still, there's more. June 30, 2020, the U.S. Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention admitted that prior exposure to coronaviruses
responsible for the common cold can result in a positive COVID-19
antibody test, even if you've never been exposed to SARS-CoV-2
specifically.23
The saving grace there is that studies24,25,26
suggest antibodies produced following exposure to coronaviruses that
cause the common cold also appear to provide some general and
long-lasting resistance against SARS-CoV-2.
One such study,27,28
published May 14, 2020, in the journal Cell, found 70% of samples from
patients who had recovered from mild cases of COVID-19 had resistance
to SARS-CoV-2 on the T-cell level, but so did 40% to 60% of people who
had not been exposed to SARS-CoV-2.
According to the authors, this suggests there's "cross-reactive
T cell recognition between circulating 'common cold' coronaviruses and
SARS-CoV-2." In other words, if you've recovered from a common cold
caused by a particular coronavirus, your humoral immune system may
activate when you encounter SARS-CoV-2, thus rendering you resistant to
COVID-19.
Another study29
discovered SARS-CoV-2-specific antibodies are only found in the most
severe cases — about 1 in 5. So, a negative antibody test doesn't
necessarily rule out the possibility that you've been infected and
didn't get sick. In fact, this finding suggests COVID-19 may actually
be five times more prevalent than suspected — and five times less deadly
than predicted.
COVID-19 Lethality Has Been Massively Overestimated
Other research supports the hypothesis that COVID-19 lethality has been grossly overestimated. Data from a still-ongoing study30,31
by Wake Forest Baptist Health found that, so far, between 12% and 14%
of people tested in North Carolina — about 1.47 million people — have
antibodies for the coronavirus.
This means they were exposed to the virus, got infected and fought
it off, all while experiencing few or no symptoms. Based on these data,
the overall death rate appears to be around 0.1%.32 John Sanders, chief of infectious diseases at Wake Forest Baptist, told WFAE 90.7:33
"We can … say the death rate is lower than we have estimated.
The severity of symptoms is lower than we estimated and the vast
majority of people who were infected are going to do fine."
An overall mortality rate of 0.1% is right in line with statistics
cited by Stanford University's disease prevention chairman Dr. John
Ioannidis as well, who in a June 27, 2020, interview with Greek Reporter
said:34
"0.05% to 1% is a reasonable range for what the data tell us now
for the infection fatality rate, with a median of about 0.25%. For
people younger than 45, the infection fatality rate is almost 0%. For
45 to 70, it is probably about 0.05-0.3%."35
31% of Tested Florida Children Are Positive for Coronavirus
July 14, 2020, the Florida Sun Sentinel reported that 31% of 54,022
children tested in the state were positive for coronavirus. "The
state's positivity rate for the entire population is about 11%," the
Sentinel said, implying that children in Florida are nearly three times
as likely to be positive for the virus.
But, knowing how unreliable the tests are, how could health officials
and the media possibly take the 31% positivity results seriously —
especially considering that studies are showing that the virus affects
children differently and less severely than it does adults?36
Do Positive Tests Even Matter at This Point?
If the vast majority of people who test positive for COVID-19
infection have no symptoms, don't feel sick and don't look sick, is
COVID-19 really a "deadly" disease? Or, is it more like HPV — a viral
infection that most people have without knowing it, and which 90% are
able to eliminate without treatment?
To highlight just a single case, Texas Rangers outfielder Joey Gallo
has tested positive for COVID-19 twice, yet he never developed any
symptoms. He's also had several negative tests. "It was weird, it was
hard to get real answers on if I really had it or not," he told KSAT.37
"The 26-year-old All-Star slugger missed the first week of the Rangers summer campand isolated from teammates for two weeks after two positive tests that sandwiched a negative result during intake testing," KSAT reports.
"He had two negative tests on his own outside of the MLB testing
program, but wasn't cleared to join the team until consecutive
negative tests under the protocol …
Gallo's positive results were by the saliva test, though he was
negative on a swab test. He said he is 'now on edge' when going through
the testing and gets nervous every time he has to do a saliva test."
Continued Testing Now Merely Drives Irrational Fearmongering
The primary justification for the tyrannical governmental
interventions of COVID-19 was to slow the spread of the infection so
that hospital resources would not be overwhelmed, causing people to die
due to lack of medical care.
These interventions were not about stopping the spread altogether or
even reducing the number of people that would eventually get infected.
They certainly were never meant to prevent all death. Logic dictates
this simply isn't possible, under any circumstance.
The stay-at-home orders and business closings were only intended to
slow down the spread so that, eventually, naturally-acquired herd
immunity — the best kind — would prevent it from reemerging.
Now all of a sudden, the narrative has changed. There's no talk
about flattening the curve anymore. The media rarely even mention the
all-important death statistics. Instead, headlines warn of skyrocketing
"cases," meaning completely healthy people who happen to test positive
and who are unlikely to spend so much as a day in bed feeling poorly.
At the same time, people with simple upper respiratory infections
can legally be classified as COVID-19 cases even without confirmed lab
results,38,39 which artificially inflate the "case" totals even more.
The only rational reason for any of the government interventions is
to continue to erode your personal freedoms and civil liberties and
transfer wealth to those in control. It's all fearmongering based on a
combination of wildly manipulated data and flawed tests. Hopefully,
local and federal leaders will wisen up and start issuing saner
guidance sooner rather than later.
Time will tell if the July 14, 2020, White House Coronavirus Task
Force decision to remove COVID-19 data collection from the CDC will
have any effect. As of July 15, all U.S. hospitals are directed to
bypass the CDC and "send all coronavirus patient information" to a
non-public Health and Human Services database in D.C. instead.40
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