"Extremely high false positives"-- no, inability to culture from the specimens, which isn't the same thing as a false positive. Please stop conflating the two.

"Extremely high false positives"-- no, inability to culture from the specimens, which isn't the same thing as a false positive. Please stop conflating the two. It's a sensitivity vs. specificity issue, as I've said before, and I'm willing to listen to arguments on those grounds. As the studies you've cited show, the vast majority of positive samples become so before 30 cycles. Then there's these relatively few "weak positive" results, where the ability to culture live virus is less. There's not enough of these to explain the number of cases, deaths, or overall excess mortality (as you've attempted to say elsewhere here, and others have rightfully corrected you). And these results being considered a positive is arguably a good thing while the virus is very common, as I've attempted to explain to you. > 2nd study shows 34ct is the cutoff for infectivity and that 2nd study also cites a 3rd study that ct>35 decreased to 8% active viruses Yes, but "infective at the moment you took the test" is not a useful metric. You want more people to be positive than this, so you can A) contact trace people who were infectious immediately before, and B) get people who were just infected to stay home -before- they're infectious. Of course, now that we're on a major downslope of cases, this tradeoff is changing...