5 ms·

unfortunately the false positives with our PCR testing is abysmal - in the US the CDC recommended cycle thresholds of >40 to signify a true positive. That is b

by toolz 5y ago

unfortunately the false positives with our PCR testing is abysmal - in the US the CDC recommended cycle thresholds of >40 to signify a true positive. That is beyond insane - with the flu we recognize false positives are likely after just a CT of 23! Your friends likely got sick twice, maybe once from covid and PCR tested positive twice. This is what the current literature understands - it's not impossible that you'recorrect, but unlikely.

SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
> unfortunately the false positives with our PCR testing is abysmal I keep hearing this argument, but it's unconvincing. Here in Alberta we've seen positive cases and hospitalizations and deaths move in relation to each-other. If the false positive was so high we wouldn't be able to make out that pattern from the noise, but it's incredibly obvious. Also, in the early days we saw case rates much lower than the false positive rates I saw talked about, and so that doesn't hold water either.
- toolz 5y ago
  covid deaths are labeled based on positive test results (and clinical diagnosis) so they will always move together regardless of specificity or sensitivity here's a study showing above CT 32 not a single live virus was able to be cultured [1] [1] https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid/ciaa1579/5937368 https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid... (image from the study) https://i.imgur.com/AaZZIXM.png https://i.imgur.com/AaZZIXM.png
  - SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
    I didn't say just deaths, hospitalizations as well. In Alberta people were until just this week experiencing severe and acute respiratory distress in droves, so much so that our ICU was at the highest capacity ever and specifically 3/4 full of COVID+ patients, and this is sheer coincidence that it matches up with surge in positive test cases from several weeks ago? Our premier actually noted that a large group of cases currently in hospital were in the sub 50 age group as evidence that the vaccination against COVID 19 is working for the above 50's[1], who have had the opportunity to be vaccinated. Given all these facts it suggest to me there is an acute respiratory disease that is running rampant through my province that responds well to the COVID vaccine. How do you explain this? How do you explain record ICU numbers and uncharacteristically large groups of the young being stricken by a respiratory condition in May, long after cold and flu season and matching record COVID case numbers? [1]https://twitter.com/jkenney/status/1396587241087062016 https://twitter.com/jkenney/status/1396587241087062016
    - toolz 5y ago
      Well I don't really feel I have to explain anything? The diligent work put into CT by researchers shows high CT positives are very likely false positives. But I can offer up some explanations regardless, just for the sake of conversation. Any respiratory infection that gets hospitalized with high CT covid tests is capable of being a misdiagnosed CV19 infection. I'm unsure about CA, but in the US there are huge financial incentives to misdiagnose a patient as cv19+ As for record number of patients (I'll take your word for it as in the US the actual ICU numbers are lower for 2020 than 2019 and hospitalizations countrywide 2020 at no point were higher than 2019) - I think that a much more logical conclusion is that people were scared to go to the hosptial - preventative visits/treatments were delayed and now you're dealing with the predictable rise in illness due to disruption to healthcare from government regulations and overall hysteria keeping people from the hospital that would've otherwise been there. Disruptions as small as daylight savings changes is associated with large spikes in heart attacks - it's really not surprising that global disruption will have negative health repercussions.
      - SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
        As far as I'm aware there is zero financial incentive here in Canada, and that argument sounds a lot like they are knowingly faking the cases, which is a much different argument than the diagnostic doesn't work and implies malice. Just to remove doubt, the ICU has been record setting[1]. As an aside, that article even discusses your claim about bad PCR tests. And are you saying that people have delayed their care to the point where they are now in the ICU, just under half of who are sub 50, and all those happen to be because of a respiratory infection? In addition, those peaks of ICU numbers have started to come down. It must be a coincidence that case counts have been dropping for a while here - how does that make sense if it's just people delaying care? It really doesn't meet any sort of sense that the peaks are always linked. Alberta has put together a great data portal[2], complete with tracking case counts and severe cases. It's easy to see, based upon the actual data, how the cases, hospitalizations, and ICU are related. [1]https://calgaryherald.com/news/local-news/alberta-icus-treating-historical-record-high-number-of-patients-due-to-covid-19 https://calgaryherald.com/news/local-news/alberta-icus-treat... [2]https://www.alberta.ca/stats/covid-19-alberta-statistics.htm#severe-outcomes https://www.alberta.ca/stats/covid-19-alberta-statistics.htm...
  - thebruce87m 5y ago
    We also have excess deaths to measure covid deaths against: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-tracker https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-... Some are graphed here: https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/ https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/ You can see that some countries that did lock down, e.g. Norway didn’t have significant excess mortality so this can dispel any myths about lockdowns themselves causing excess mortality. I’m sure some people will argue that the excess deaths in their country were caused by the lockdown, but in my experience it’s not worth your time arguing back at this stage.
    - toolz 5y ago
      norway locked down with less stringency than sweden - you can see that using the only objective measurements of lockdown stringency (that I know of) in the oxford stringency index I'm not sure why you would state something completely incorrect so confidently - if you had in fact been arguing with people over that point I would expect you to have come across the most basic data behind your point. https://i.imgur.com/obQNg3o.png https://i.imgur.com/obQNg3o.png https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-stringency-index?tab=chart&country=SWE~NOR https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-stringency-index?ta...
      - thebruce87m 5y ago
        Your assertions don't fit with the data you shared. The Y axis shows strictness and Norway has peaks that are higher and therefore stricter. I suspect you know this given you tried to double-down on it immediately. If we are playing "No true Scotsman" with the lockdowns and dragging Sweden in, how would you explain Greece vs Sweden? Excess Deaths per 100k [0] Sweden: 102 Greece: 38 There is simply no compelling evidence that “lockdowns doing more harm than good” from an excess mortality point of view. Excess Mortality source: [0] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-tracker https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-... Your favoured metric of lockdown severity: [1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-stringency-index?tab=chart&country=SWE~GRC https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-stringency-index?ta...
jhayward 5y ago
> unfortunately the false positives with our PCR testing is abysmal This is nonsense. The vast, vast majority of positive PCR tests are positive after < 30 cycles.

by toolz 5y ago

SketchySeaBeast 5y ago

> unfortunately the false positives with our PCR testing is abysmal I keep hearing this argument, but it's unconvincing. Here in Alberta we've seen positive cases and hospitalizations and deaths move in relation to each-other. If the false positive was so high we wouldn't be able to make out that pattern from the noise, but it's incredibly obvious. Also, in the early days we saw case rates much lower than the false positive rates I saw talked about, and so that doesn't hold water either.

toolz 5y ago
covid deaths are labeled based on positive test results (and clinical diagnosis) so they will always move together regardless of specificity or sensitivity here's a study showing above CT 32 not a single live virus was able to be cultured [1] [1] https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid/ciaa1579/5937368 https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid... (image from the study) https://i.imgur.com/AaZZIXM.png https://i.imgur.com/AaZZIXM.png
- SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
  I didn't say just deaths, hospitalizations as well. In Alberta people were until just this week experiencing severe and acute respiratory distress in droves, so much so that our ICU was at the highest capacity ever and specifically 3/4 full of COVID+ patients, and this is sheer coincidence that it matches up with surge in positive test cases from several weeks ago? Our premier actually noted that a large group of cases currently in hospital were in the sub 50 age group as evidence that the vaccination against COVID 19 is working for the above 50's[1], who have had the opportunity to be vaccinated. Given all these facts it suggest to me there is an acute respiratory disease that is running rampant through my province that responds well to the COVID vaccine. How do you explain this? How do you explain record ICU numbers and uncharacteristically large groups of the young being stricken by a respiratory condition in May, long after cold and flu season and matching record COVID case numbers? [1]https://twitter.com/jkenney/status/1396587241087062016 https://twitter.com/jkenney/status/1396587241087062016
  - toolz 5y ago
    Well I don't really feel I have to explain anything? The diligent work put into CT by researchers shows high CT positives are very likely false positives. But I can offer up some explanations regardless, just for the sake of conversation. Any respiratory infection that gets hospitalized with high CT covid tests is capable of being a misdiagnosed CV19 infection. I'm unsure about CA, but in the US there are huge financial incentives to misdiagnose a patient as cv19+ As for record number of patients (I'll take your word for it as in the US the actual ICU numbers are lower for 2020 than 2019 and hospitalizations countrywide 2020 at no point were higher than 2019) - I think that a much more logical conclusion is that people were scared to go to the hosptial - preventative visits/treatments were delayed and now you're dealing with the predictable rise in illness due to disruption to healthcare from government regulations and overall hysteria keeping people from the hospital that would've otherwise been there. Disruptions as small as daylight savings changes is associated with large spikes in heart attacks - it's really not surprising that global disruption will have negative health repercussions.
    - SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
      As far as I'm aware there is zero financial incentive here in Canada, and that argument sounds a lot like they are knowingly faking the cases, which is a much different argument than the diagnostic doesn't work and implies malice. Just to remove doubt, the ICU has been record setting[1]. As an aside, that article even discusses your claim about bad PCR tests. And are you saying that people have delayed their care to the point where they are now in the ICU, just under half of who are sub 50, and all those happen to be because of a respiratory infection? In addition, those peaks of ICU numbers have started to come down. It must be a coincidence that case counts have been dropping for a while here - how does that make sense if it's just people delaying care? It really doesn't meet any sort of sense that the peaks are always linked. Alberta has put together a great data portal[2], complete with tracking case counts and severe cases. It's easy to see, based upon the actual data, how the cases, hospitalizations, and ICU are related. [1]https://calgaryherald.com/news/local-news/alberta-icus-treating-historical-record-high-number-of-patients-due-to-covid-19 https://calgaryherald.com/news/local-news/alberta-icus-treat... [2]https://www.alberta.ca/stats/covid-19-alberta-statistics.htm#severe-outcomes https://www.alberta.ca/stats/covid-19-alberta-statistics.htm...
- thebruce87m 5y ago
  We also have excess deaths to measure covid deaths against: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-tracker https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-... Some are graphed here: https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/ https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/ You can see that some countries that did lock down, e.g. Norway didn’t have significant excess mortality so this can dispel any myths about lockdowns themselves causing excess mortality. I’m sure some people will argue that the excess deaths in their country were caused by the lockdown, but in my experience it’s not worth your time arguing back at this stage.
  - toolz 5y ago
    norway locked down with less stringency than sweden - you can see that using the only objective measurements of lockdown stringency (that I know of) in the oxford stringency index I'm not sure why you would state something completely incorrect so confidently - if you had in fact been arguing with people over that point I would expect you to have come across the most basic data behind your point. https://i.imgur.com/obQNg3o.png https://i.imgur.com/obQNg3o.png https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-stringency-index?tab=chart&country=SWE~NOR https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-stringency-index?ta...
    - thebruce87m 5y ago
      Your assertions don't fit with the data you shared. The Y axis shows strictness and Norway has peaks that are higher and therefore stricter. I suspect you know this given you tried to double-down on it immediately. If we are playing "No true Scotsman" with the lockdowns and dragging Sweden in, how would you explain Greece vs Sweden? Excess Deaths per 100k [0] Sweden: 102 Greece: 38 There is simply no compelling evidence that “lockdowns doing more harm than good” from an excess mortality point of view. Excess Mortality source: [0] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-tracker https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-... Your favoured metric of lockdown severity: [1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-stringency-index?tab=chart&country=SWE~GRC https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-stringency-index?ta...

jhayward 5y ago

> unfortunately the false positives with our PCR testing is abysmal This is nonsense. The vast, vast majority of positive PCR tests are positive after < 30 cycles.