But even with the established PCR tests and with all the theatre around it, I doubt that this quantity of testing is being performed up to the highest standards and there are a bunch of "entrepreneurs" in this space too who may benefit from little supervision or consequences.
Blood tests have also been around decades and are taught to first year students. The devil is in the details.
In this case the people claiming COVID PCR tests were bogus were right. The US CDC has now admitted it. They recently changed their testing rules to stop PCR testing people at the end of their self isolation period because PCR tests can stay positive for up to 12 weeks whilst being clinical false positives, and thus (Rochelle Walensky's words) "we would have people in isolation for a very long time if we were relying on PCRs" [1]. Nothing changed to prompt this - no new science or discovery or anything like that. They just suddenly noticed something that random bloggers knew in April 2020: that COVID PCR positives don't imply you're infectious. Also note the use of the word "would" and not "did"; apparently she's in denial about what happened here.
There are lots of other issues with them beyond the cold positive problems of course. In theory PCR tests are precise because they triangulate the presence of at least three genes. In the beginning that's what they looked for. Over time that's slipped and they're now routinely reporting PCR tests as positive if they only detect a single gene. I took a PCR last week where the certificate stated outright they only looked for one gene.
This crops up in other ways. To detect Omicron, they were taking PCR tests that failed to trigger on one gene (thus technically should have been classed as negative) and then treated them as positives, being sent for sequencing to determine if they were Omicron or not. But only samples with Ct <= 30 were sent. They use this threshold when normally even 40 is accepted to be a positive (Ct is log scale so 40 is a very tiny level of detection compared to 30) because it turns out any sample that triggers over 30 is so destroyed it's unsequenceable. They can't even find enough viable virus to know what it is. That doesn't stop them classifying such samples as "infectious and must self isolate" normally, though.
And all that's before you even get to the cause/effect confusion the tests represent.
No, COVID PCR testing is a mess. The only reason Holmes is a convict and those guys aren't is that Holmes wanted to be the next Steve Jobs, so she worked entirely in the private sector. If she'd been selling COVID stuff to the government she'd have been fine, even doing the same things.
harha|4 years ago
But even with the established PCR tests and with all the theatre around it, I doubt that this quantity of testing is being performed up to the highest standards and there are a bunch of "entrepreneurs" in this space too who may benefit from little supervision or consequences.
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]
native_samples|4 years ago
In this case the people claiming COVID PCR tests were bogus were right. The US CDC has now admitted it. They recently changed their testing rules to stop PCR testing people at the end of their self isolation period because PCR tests can stay positive for up to 12 weeks whilst being clinical false positives, and thus (Rochelle Walensky's words) "we would have people in isolation for a very long time if we were relying on PCRs" [1]. Nothing changed to prompt this - no new science or discovery or anything like that. They just suddenly noticed something that random bloggers knew in April 2020: that COVID PCR positives don't imply you're infectious. Also note the use of the word "would" and not "did"; apparently she's in denial about what happened here.
There are lots of other issues with them beyond the cold positive problems of course. In theory PCR tests are precise because they triangulate the presence of at least three genes. In the beginning that's what they looked for. Over time that's slipped and they're now routinely reporting PCR tests as positive if they only detect a single gene. I took a PCR last week where the certificate stated outright they only looked for one gene.
This crops up in other ways. To detect Omicron, they were taking PCR tests that failed to trigger on one gene (thus technically should have been classed as negative) and then treated them as positives, being sent for sequencing to determine if they were Omicron or not. But only samples with Ct <= 30 were sent. They use this threshold when normally even 40 is accepted to be a positive (Ct is log scale so 40 is a very tiny level of detection compared to 30) because it turns out any sample that triggers over 30 is so destroyed it's unsequenceable. They can't even find enough viable virus to know what it is. That doesn't stop them classifying such samples as "infectious and must self isolate" normally, though.
And all that's before you even get to the cause/effect confusion the tests represent.
No, COVID PCR testing is a mess. The only reason Holmes is a convict and those guys aren't is that Holmes wanted to be the next Steve Jobs, so she worked entirely in the private sector. If she'd been selling COVID stuff to the government she'd have been fine, even doing the same things.
[1] https://abcnews.go.com/Health/live-updates/coronavirus/?id=8...