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Re:2020, the Year of Everything Fake by jawarner on Tuesday December 29, 2020 @05:37PM (#25575935)
Are you suggesting that COVID tests were widely submitted with kiwi fruit rather than saliva?
Re:2020, the Year of Everything Fake by hnuser847 on Tuesday December 29, 2020 @05:45PM (#25575996)
He's suggesting that the PCR tests are too sensitive to produce meaningful information.

Here's an article that explains how a false-positive rate of 0.5% and an infection rate of 1% can result in 40% of positive results being wrong:

https://www.icd10monitor.com/false-positives-in-pcr-tests-fo...

Re:2020, the Year of Everything Fake by doubleunplussed on Tuesday December 29, 2020 @05:52PM (#25576061)
Victoria, Australia has done maybe 5-15k tests per day and had zero cases in I think 61 days now.

They do get false positives, about one in ten or twenty thousand it seems, but most of them had the virus at some point in the past and the test was still detecting dead virus fragments, so the "completely false" positive rate is even lower.

The false positives are re- tested, and it's almost always concluded that they're false. Hence 61 days with no cases - any false positives in that time have been identified as such, so the process taken as a whole has a very low false positive rate indeed.

But even the raw "one in 10k" false positive rate they see is low enough that almost all positive tests anywhere with an active COVID outbreak are true positives.

Re:2020, the Year of Everything Fake by codemac on Tuesday December 29, 2020 @06:00PM (#25576125)
It could, but it's not showing up in the correlated data that way.

If our rate of tests produced the rate of false positives you claim are possible, what is the reason for the excess deaths across the globe? That occurred simultaneously, and in a delayed rate right along with positive test rates?

Re:2020, the Year of Everything Fake by brasetvik on Tuesday December 29, 2020 @06:01PM (#25576131)