In this piece: Your Coronavirus Test Is Positive. Maybe It Shouldn’t Be:
Basically, the type of test being used everywhere is giving a simple yes/no answer to the question of whether someone is infected, regardless of whether the test is being triggered by the live virus or a mere fragment. The tests also cycle the genetic material collected from a person. The more cycles, the greater the odds of a test to come back positive:
“Officials at the Wadsworth Center, New York’s state lab, have access to cycle threshold values from tests they have processed, and analyzed their numbers at The Times’s request. In July, the lab identified 794 positive tests, based on a threshold of 40 cycles.
With a cutoff of 35, about half of those tests would no longer qualify as positive. About 70 percent would no longer be judged positive if the cycles were limited to 30.
In Massachusetts, from 85 to 90 percent of people who tested positive in July with a cycle threshold of 40 would have been deemed negative if the threshold were 30 cycles, Dr. Mina said. “I would say that none of those people should be contact-traced, not one,” he said.
Other experts informed of these numbers were stunned.
“I’m really shocked that it could be that high — the proportion of people with high C.T. value results,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute. “Boy, does it really change the way we need to be thinking about testing.”“
Destructive, authoritarian policy is being enacted based on the results of these faulty tests.
