Since the COVID death rates rapidly declined in late May, day after day, week after week, month after month, the mainstream media has blasted the headline news of rising virus “cases.”
While they hype the cases, they totally ignore that cases do not equal deaths. Thus, the Presstitutes do not report the recovery rate, which for those aged 1 to 50 years is 99.98 percent.
Also, while pumping case rates, the mainstream media fails to note the largely increased rate of people getting tested. Therefore, in article after article, while they report the rate of rising cases, they rarely note the decline in the virus death rate. When the media does report on the number of those who have died from virus, they don’t list the victims ages and if they had pre-existing health conditions.
Below are just a few examples of virus coverage over the past month that has greeted readers with fear-inducing headlines:
“Coronavirus updates: New U.S. cases surpass 128,000, setting record for third straight day” – Washington Post, 6 November
“COVID-19 news: US cases surge to record 121,000 infections” – New Scientist, 6 November
“Coronavirus Surges: 40 Million Cases Now Reported” – NPR, 19 October
“COVID-19: U.S. Breaks Daily Record with Over 99,000 New Cases as Surge Quickens” – The New York Times, 31 October
Fake Tests?
Yet, the same New York Times that for weeks has been publishing hyper-emotional headlines about a virus “surge” published a revealing article on 29 August which clearly showed how the most common test for identifying people with infectious-level amounts of the virus, known as the PCR test, is significantly flawed and unreliable.
As previously reported in the Trends Journal, the PCR test has been called the “gold standard” by the CDC.
The 29 August NYT article, titled, “Your Coronavirus Test Is Positive. Maybe It Shouldn’t Be” makes the below key points.
PUBLISHER’S NOTE: As described by Dr. Sebastian Rushworth, a practicing physician in Stockholm, Sweden, here is what is meant by “cycle thresholds”:
“The number of times you choose to cycle through the steps of PCR before you decide there was no virus in the sample after all is known as the cycle threshold. The number of cycles used to get a positive result is actually a pretty important number because it tells you how much virus is in the sample. The lower the number of cycles required, the more virus is in the sample. The higher the number of cycles, the more likely that the result is a false positive, caused perhaps by having a tiny amount of inactive virus in the respiratory tract, or by contamination of the sample in the lab.”
- “In three sets of testing data that include cycle thresholds, 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.”
- “On Thursday (27 August), the United States recorded 45,604 new coronavirus cases, according to a database maintained by The Times. If the rates of contagiousness in Massachusetts and New York were to apply nationwide, then perhaps only 4,500 of those people may actually need to isolate and submit to contact tracing.”
- “Most tests set the cycle threshold 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.”
- “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. Michael Mina, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said he would set the figure at 30, or even less. Those changes would mean the amount of genetic material in a patient’s sample would have to be 100-fold to 1,000-fold that of the current standard for the test to return a positive result – at least, one worth acting on.”
On 17 September, the Center for Evidence-Based Medicine (CEBM) published the following critique of the PCR test for identifying those with infectious rates of the coronavirus:
“A PCR test might find the virus it was looking for. This results in a PCR positive, but a crucial question remains: is this virus active, i.e. infectious or virulent? The PCR alone cannot answer this question… if the PCR detects the virus in the human sample, this detection might correspond to a virus that is now incapable of infecting cells and reproducing.
The CEBM also confirms that “Some PCR manufacturers tell us there is ‘cross contamination’ and ‘non-specific’ interference with a list of viruses in their instruction manuals… PCR manufacturers typically remind the users that ‘the detection result of this product is only for clinical reference, and it should not be used as the only evidence for clinical diagnosis and treatment.’”
The CEBM concludes, “It is highly likely these tests are detecting the virus in patients where the virus is no longer capable of infecting.”
Even in California, where Governor Gavin Newsome has been ordering some of the strictest lockdowns in the country, the Los Angeles Public Health Department web site includes the following:
“No tests give a 100% accurate result; tests need to be evaluated to determine their sensitivity and specificity. For COVID-19, there is no clear-cut gold standard which makes the evaluation of test accuracy challenging. No clinical performance data is required for an EUA (emergency use authorization) and there is limited information on how these different COVID-19 tests perform in real world settings. Note: RT-PCR tests may remain persistently positive for prolonged periods (up to 12 weeks) after a patient has recovered.”