They Are Rigging The Test!

We have been saying this for quite some time, but we do not actually repeat ourselves:

“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. Most of these people are not likely to be contagious…”

“In three sets of testing data…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.”

The thing is, the above quote does not come from tin foil hat central; it’s right out of Saturday’s New York Times!

It means that even the grey lady’s corona-scolds have now admitted that the upwards of 80 million PCR tests that have been administered in the US to date are so sensitive that they pick up inconsequential tiny amounts of virus that couldn’t harm a flea. Yet given the test’s binary modality, they call these trace virus fragments and bits of dead RNA proof “positive” that the tested person has got the Covid and needs to be quarantined, traced and temporarily removed from society as a silent killer-carrier.

So what’s actually happened since March is that the almighty “test”—as in the test, test, test mantra of the Virus Patrol—has been rigged to generate millions of false positives—at least with respect to the common sense identification of people who are actually sick.

Needless to say, the soaring number of resultant “cases” has fueled public hysteria about an invisible disease purportedly lurking everywhere and emanating from everyone—coughing and sneezing or not. In turn, this Big Lie has emboldened the Virus Patrol to wreak havoc with normal social and economic life in the name of stopping the spread of an alleged killer pathogen that, as it turns out, is not spreading nearly as extensively as reported on the 24/7 chyrons of cases and deaths run by the MSM.

The heart of the problem is qualitative versus quantitative test results. To wit, you need a a heavy-duty viral load to get sick with the Covid and become a threat to others, but the test regime says a mere speck will do for purposes of racking up the “cases” score. That Dr. Fauci and his camarilla of malpracticing doctors have not said a word of about this crucial matter should enure to their everlasting shame

The way this happens is that functionally speaking the PCR test is akin to a powerful, programmable magnifying glass. The test operates on cycles and each cycle amplifies genetic matter from the virus, if any, in the sample. Consequently, if someone is really sick with the Covid, they have a high viral load and it only takes a limited number of cycles to detect the virus and get a “positive” result.

But when there is nothing in the sample except tiny RNA fragments from an infection already defeated by the person’s immune system or even left-over bits from another influenza virus, it takes higher magnification via dozens of additional cycles to finally trigger a positive score.

Yet as the NYT story baldly admitted, the most important result of a PCR test—-they number of magnification cycles it took to trigger a positive— is never included in the results sent to doctors and coronavirus patients.

As this narrative-busting piece further noted,

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,  according to Dr. Michael Mina, a leading epidemiologist at Harvard.

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.

A more reasonable cutoff would be 30 to 35, she added. Dr. Mina said he would set the figure at 30, or even less.

But here’s the gravamen of the piece: The magnification cut-off recommended by Dr. Mina (30 cycle or less) means that the amount of genetic material in a patient’s sample would have to be 100X to 1,000X higher than the viral load needed under the current standard for the PCR test to return a positive result.

You truly cannot make this stuff up. It’s a veritable game-changer, yet until August 29 not a hint of this crucial matter was to be found anywhere in the main stream press or in any of mendacious briefings of the White House Coronavirus Task Force.

Indeed, the fact that the crucial viral load metric was being deep-sixed by the current PCR testing methodologies seems to have even shocked many professionals in the field:

“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.

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.

Of course, this explains many mysteries. For instance, in the ballyhooed June-August “second wave” outbreak in the Sun Belt states there has been a preciously small number of new hospitalizations compared to new cases.

This implied that the frenetic, amped up rounds of new testing, which were set off when these states attempted to re-open (employers wanted workers tested before returning to work), were turning up a lot of 40-cycle “positives” among people who were really not sick or contagious at all.

For instance, in the state of Florida during the original outbreak between March 31 and April 30,  there were 27,352 new “cases” reported and this resulted in 4,972 new hospitalizations. That computed to a hospitalization rate of 18.2%.

When the so-called second wave breakout occurred from approximately June 20 through the end of August, the number of new tests soared from 10,625 per day in April to 42,425 per day during the most recent 72 day period.  In turn, this four-fold increase in the testing rate resulted in 529,674 new positive cases, but just 25,715 new hospitalizations.

The math is dispositive. During the so-called second wave, the hospitalization rate dropped from 18.2% of new cases to just 4.8%. That is, a lot of people were taking precautionary PCR tests, and a lot of those tests were reporting positives only because they were being magnified-up by 35 to 40 cycles.

As of August 31, there have been nearly 79 million tests and 6.1 million positive cases reported by the CDC on a nationwide basis. Those are huge numbers and they do fuel the impression of a raging pandemic.

But based on the NYT analysis of a large sample of cases form New York, Massachusetts and Nevada, upwards of 3-5 million of these “cases” may well have been instances of a rigged test finding stray hairs of this or another virus left in the residue, not evidence of a deadly pathogen running rampant through the population.

Nor is the rigged test an aberration within the mainstream narrative. Also, suddenly discovered in recent days is the fact that only 6% of the WITH-Covid deaths reported by the CDC are cases were Covid-19 was the only cause of death listed on the certificate.

Yet this disclaimer has been there all along in the CDC periodic reports on deaths and comorbidities:

Table 3 shows the types of health conditions and contributing causes mentioned in conjunction with deaths involving coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). For 6% of the deaths, COVID-19 was the only cause mentioned. For deaths with conditions or causes in addition to COVID-19, on average, there were 2.6 additional conditions or causes per death. The number of deaths with each condition or cause is shown for all deaths and by age groups

Needless to say, this crucial point—-that most of the WITH-Covid deaths have been among the elderly with weakened immune systems and/or among persons with multiple, life-threatening comorbidities—has been totally ignored by the MSM and the Virus Patrol doctors, governors and mayors who have spread hysteria and made mincemeat of the American economy.

For instance, in a belated effort to diminish the Covid-Hysteria and get American life moving more rapidly back toward normalcy, the Donald has been (rightfully) pushing to resume Big Ten football. Yet here is what the hacks at Bloomberg had to say about a highly symbolic move that would convey exactly the right message:

Trump has increasingly pushed for the country to return to normal despite the continued spread of Covid-19, which has killed more than 183,000 Americans since the start of the year.

C’mon. Have these so-called journalists ever looked at the actual CDC tables which show the number of deaths WITH-Covid, along with much else that contradicts the lazy MSM narrative?

But in the case of college football players, who are all young and almost entirely in tip-top physical health, waving the bloody shirt of Covid deaths couldn’t be more ridiculous. As of August 22, here is the breakout of deaths even under the CDC’s loose definition of “causes”:

Number of WITH-Covid deaths and % of US total:

  • 85 Years & over: 50,867/32%;
  • 75-84 years: 42,587/26%;
  • 65-74 years: 34,334/21%;
  • 0-24 years: 330/0.2%.

That’s right. For the entire under 24 years population from which college football players are perforce drawn, there has been only 330 deaths or a rate of 0.3 per 100,000. By contrast, 80% of the deaths have been among the 65 and older population, where the mortality rate has been 250 per 100,000 or 830X higher.

So what does the national WITH-Covid death rate have to do with playing college football—even if to TV audiences and empty stadiums?

Very simple. America is in the throes of a public hysteria so unhinged that the media can’t even begin to notice something else about the 330 WITH-Covid deaths among the population 24 years and younger.

In a word, they weren’t college football players!

To wit, among the 330 cases of death from the 103.8 million Americans 24 years or younger, there were the following comobidites also listed on the death certificates;

  • Lung and respiratory illnesses: 317;
  • Heart/circulatory diseases: 121;
  • Cancer: 24;
  • Sepsis: 3;
  • Diabetes: 41;
  • Obesity: 79:;
  • Renal failure: 14;
  • Accidents: 36;
  • Other comorbidities: 251.

That’s a total of 914 comorbidities or 2.77 per deceased.

As we said, these weren’t football players and the CDC’s death count overall is not drawn from the overwhelming share of locked-down Americans who are under 65 and even in moderately decent health.

Finally, there’s this. When over 460,000 motorcyclists descended upon Sturgis, South Dakota in the Black Hills for the annual Sturgis motorcycle rally, it was the largest event in the entire country this year – without masks or sacred social distancing protocols.

Yet no epidemic of coronavirus was ignited by this mother of all mass gatherings, contrary to media predictions. As one astute analyst observed,

So where is the monumental imprint on the country? There are zero deaths reported, and I have only seen one hospitalization alleged to be associated with Sturgis attendance. The epidemic generated by the rally was so powerful that they evidently had to conduct mass testing to discover a “CASEdemic” of over 100 casesand all those tested in one city were asymptomatic at the time of testing.

If Sturgis in South Dakota broke every rule of the COVID-19 cult with success, then Peru is the polar opposite. The country used heavy-handed law enforcement to force one of the longest and most draconian shutdowns. In mid-March, President Martín Vizcarra ordered all cars off the road and an 8 p.m. curfew, and residents were only allowed to leave their homes even during the day for food or medical care. Mask-wearing was 100% mandated everywhere. This was imposed for 15 weeks. In other words, everything the media and leftist politicians have asked for.

The result? Peru has now surpassed Belgium as the country with the most deaths per capita in the world. At 871 COVID-19 deaths per 1 million people, Peru has 4.6 times the number of deaths per capita of South Dakota, which had no lockdown or mask mandate.