Rapid Covid tests miss 90% of asymptomatic cases

They have to do this because their ideology is that everything about covid was wrong, the vaccine didn't work, it's all the democrats fault and they invented the problem, so any acknowledgement that it actually killed at least a million americans must be avoided, otherwise they have to admit to themselves that not only are they wrong and the people they listen to lied to them, but they were selfish assholes about it.

It really sucks. We could have had a great unifying cause to rally against. We could have genuinely improved health outcomes in the US. Fuck, even Donald Trump himself eventually realized this was a bad thing and helped get the vaccine going. But half of the republican platform right now is covid denial. They have to invent a magic reality where their ignorance doesn't kill people, and people who have studied stuff for decades don't know anything.

Does that not suggest to you that maybe you were wrong? It's not just the decrease in testing, since test positivity has decreased from the peaks even as total test count plummeted.

There is no evidence that PCR tests greatly overcounted SARS-CoV-2 infections:

1/2. The specificity of commonly-used PCR tests for SARS-CoV-2 is clearly very high, >99.9%, since there have been regions (e.g. Australia) where total positivity was Sloppy lab work could result in false positives by cross-contamination, but contamination has to come from a true positive sample; so this is a problem only when the true positivity is high. Sloppy clerical work could result in any possible incorrect result, but you've presented no evidence that this is a significant problem in aggregate.

Lots of papers studied the relationship between PCR positivity and culturable virus, for example

https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/72/11/e921/5912603?logi...

It's true that at high Ct, the cultures are often negative; but (a) the relationship between Ct and culturable virus may vary dramatically with small changes in PCR protocol, (b) a patient early in their infection may have high Ct now but lower Ct later, and (c) it's not clear whether all naturally infectious patients would be positive by artificial culture anyways. Based on these factors, most public health authorities chose not to use an artificially lower Ct. So a positive PCR test doesn't necessarily mean that a patient is infectious now, but it does mean that they are or were recently (weeks to months) infected.

For emphasis, it is absolutely expected that some samples will be positive by PCR but negative by cell culture--the PCR is testing for any RNA matching the primers, but the culture is testing for replication-competent whole virus. Presence of the latter implies the former, but the converse isn't true. The public messaging on that wasn't very good, and perhaps they initially misinformed you; but no one with any background in molecular biology was confused here.

3. Your idea that the PCR test is simply assumed to be accurate is completely false. The point of papers like the one I linked above is to compare two test methods, find the places where they disagree, and try to judge--from the experimental results and from our understanding of the biochemistry of the test methods--the reasons for those disagreements. They're not assuming either method to be perfect. Based on many such comparisons--against cell culture, against electron microscopy, against antibody tests, against excess mortality once that got big enough to distinguish statistically (which it mostly wasn't by Jul 2020), etc.--public health authorities judged PCR to be the best available gold standard, and good enough for many statistical purposes.

The public messaging was again pretty bad there, and if you looked only to that then I understand why you'd feel misled. The actual scientific literature is there for anyone who wishes to read it, though.

So was Typhoid Mary sick? Is an asymptomatic patient with a positive HIV test? Kary Mullis--the inventor of PCR!--says no:

> A man with gray hair and a goatee raises his hand. He says he's been HIV-positive since 1984, that he took the anti-AIDS drug AZT for a couple years but stopped. Now, he says, his T-cell count -- the number of a kind of white blood cell that is killed by HIV -- has gone way down.

> Mullis interrupts him: "Change doctors!"

> The man continues. His T-cell count is down to 150, which is usually thought of as dangerously low. He asks Mullis for advice.

> "I would say there is no evidence that I can find in the scientific literature that you should worry about HIV or your T-cell count," Mullis tells him. "If you'd stop worrying, maybe you'll be all right. You look pretty healthy to me."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1998/11/03/...

Do you think he gave that patient good advice?