Reply To: SARS cov2 and Covid 19


Latest News Forums Discussion Forum SARS cov2 and Covid 19 Reply To: SARS cov2 and Covid 19

#63983
SA
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Dave
Thanks for obliging. The reason why I asked you to provide a link is that I can then refute what that link alleges.
In answer to your link here is a specific link that addresses this question. I know it is from the Huffpost but the argument there is pretty solid, using the same statistics provided in your link.

But there are other arguments also to prove the errors of this supposed high false positive rates (FPR) of the PCR in the diagnosis of SARS Cov2. To start with let us agree that the FPR is not known and there is no published data, but we could look at other sources to try and find out what it could be. First of all I would like you to look at this article from a scientist with first hand knowledge of the PCR which explains why the PCR combines both a high sensitivity and a high specificity and done properly with the appropriate internal controls should never give a false positive. Even contamination can be detected by these internal controls. The article does need some sort of general scientific background to understand: The “false-positive PCR” problem is not a problem.

So this is some scientific background, let us try to look at what data may be available to find out the true FPR of the PCR in actual settings. There are several indirect ways, but just to look at this simplistically, then if the test has an FPR of 1% then if you test 1 million individuals you should get 10,000 false positive cases, or if it is 0.1% it would be 1000 false positives. Given this let us look at what the Chinese did (despite being communists). They tested the whole population of Wuhan after the lockdown to see if there were any residual cases. In under two weeks they tested over 9 million people and had only 300 positives, all asymptomatic. So even if these three hundred were all false positives then the FPR would be something like 0.003%.
Other indirect evidence for a low FPR is from countries like New Zealand, Australia and Hong Kong who cintinued mass testing after they suppressed the virus and if the FPR was a constant then you would expect there to be a sort of background positivity due to this.
Another evidence can also be seen from many countries where transmission has been low but with high testing. Here is a chart of all the statistics. and if you filter on the heading ‘Test per million population then you will see that there is no correlation between this and the total number of cases.