Rapid Covid tests miss 90% of asymptomatic cases

this means that level of endemic infection was reached much sooner than claimed by pretty much all western governments AND it means that case fatality or even just case i'm-not-feeling-well rate is so low that this so called pandemic probably never really was a problem either to begin with or at least since omicron.

That's unfortunately not the case. PCR false positives are a massive problem. Scientists liked to claim during COVID that PCR tests don't have false positive because they use an obscure definition that doesn't match how people normally use the term.

I wrote about this problem back in 2020 when it started becoming apparent that the public health establishment wasn't attempting to stop or even measure COVID PCR test false positives, because they had simply defined the problem out of existence [1]. Yet dig into the literature a bit and you discover that FPs are a well known problem that have occurred many times before.

There are at least three problems and arguably more:

1. Scope limits. Scientists have an extremely myopic view of what counts as an FP somewhat akin to "that's not a bug it's a feature" in the software world. Sample contaminated somewhere along the line from collection to machine? Maybe even when the sample brushed up against the outside of the machine itself, or the skin of a lab worker? Not a false positive in their view, because the PCR test itself is finding the RNA fragment it's looking for. PCR detects virus your immune system already destroyed? Not a false positive, because the test is actually looking for RNA so begins with a lysis stage that breaks open the viral capsid anyway. Results got mixed up in a shoddy IT system? Not a false positive because the "test" is just the machine they operate, not the whole infrastructure the public interacts with.

2. Over-sensitivity. COVID PCR tests were run at thresholds normally considered way too sensitive for normal usage, which is why they were so frequently triggering for weeks after a patient seemed to have fully recovered. Even with CTs ~25 these tests were pre-2020 run in extremely controlled labs with specialized air handling equipment and the like, to try and avoid FPs, but COVID tests were being routinely run in ad-hoc labs with CTs of over 40 and each additional cycle is twice as sensitive as the last!

3. Circular logic. Normally medicine is careful to keep pathogen and disease separate. It's important because some diseases ("collections of symptoms") can be caused by multiple pathogens, or no pathogen, and many people become infected with a pathogen yet never develop disease. In the very early days of COVID the distinction between disease and causative agent was kept properly separated because diagnosis was done by doctors, but this didn't survive contact with the public health establishment. They wanted a mass-scale system in the incorrect belief that they could slow down spread this way (there's no link in the data between testing levels and outcomes). Once mass PCR testing started the definition of COVID became circular: A positive test means you have COVID, but COVID was defined as having a positive test.

It's obvious what happens if you define COVID this way: the tests can by definition never have false positives. On what basis can you dispute the accuracy of the test if the test and not disease is defined to be ground truth? Using this approach, false positives always become "asymptomatic cases" that inconveniently never become sick and thus are not a case under classical medical reasoning. This is what led to bizarre claims coming from health authorities, like the claim that the tests had FP rates of zero. But it's not reality.

As I document in the essay, we know PCR results have FPs because there have been "pseudo-epidemics" in the past where ordinary coughs and colds were mis-diagnosed as outbreaks of dangerous diseases due to bad PCR results, and because lab challenges have often returned failures i.e. labs were submitted samples known to contain just ordinary rhinovirus or whatever and came back with positive SARS-CoV-2 results. There were also cases where reagent mixups caused false results, or where PCR tests returned results that switched between negative and positive then back to negative from samples taken back to back and so on. None of these were ever really investigated or root caused.

And all that's before you get into the systems that surround the labs. I got a PCR certificate for someone else's name at one point, almost certainly a form autofill mistake (I saw workers wrestling with this problem when they lost my wife's results). When I complained I got a new certificate in under 5 minutes for my own name this time but now the results were signed off by a different doctor i.e. the signatures supposedly demonstrating expert supervision of the test were just being randomly picked by software.

[1] https://blog.plan99.net/pseudo-epidemics-7603b2da839

So?

That's not the point. You and I both know that not everyone will be upfront about symptoms. The tests are there to attempt to cut down on this.

> this so called pandemic probably never really was a problem

I guess you missed the part with overwhelmed hospitals and mass burials.

Thankfully the CDC lists those deaths as influenza and pneumonia so that's already accounted for.