Okay. Take any COVID-19 test kit and see if someone sick with the flu tests positive with them.

There is a simple thing called science. COVID-19 test kits are literally free. It wouldn't even be a hard test to do. EDIT: In fact, most COVID19 test kits come with their documentation, showing how well they test vs the Flu (guess what? Most of them don't detect the flu at all)

See BinaxNow's test kit documentation, page 3: https://www.fda.gov/media/147254/download

> No cross-reactivity or interference was seen with the following microorganisms when tested at the concentration presented in the table below

Meanwhile, Flu type B/Yamagata has gone extinct, proving the point I made earlier.

You should probably investigate how sensitive PCR tests can be. We cranked those things up to 11 so anybody with a spec of the virus got labeled as a Covid case.

Which PCR test?

Be specific. Because each test kit has documentation on how well it has cross-reactivity to other virus strains. I know its complicated with lots of competition here in the USA and lots of different manufacturers.

So I need to know exactly which test kits you were using, and which virus (Influenza type A? H1N1? Adenovirus? Influenza Type C?)

EDIT: For example, Abbot's test kit has the following documentation: https://www.fda.gov/media/136258/download . We can see page 10 how much it cross-reacts with other viruses: which is not at all.

It doesn’t even matter honestly. The data used to justify all our incredibly costly mitigations is a toxic dumpster fire. You could take that data and twist it to justify anything you wanted.

And even then the actual science and data never mattered from a public policy (or even public health) standpoint. It’s been politics, fear-mongering and straight appeals to authority all the way down.

> You could take that data and twist it to justify anything you wanted.

No. My question is if your side has any data at all on the assertions you're making.

Because in my experience, with regards to this debate, one side seems to just be flaunting falsehoods, while the other side has actually done tests and demonstrated their results.

I'm trying to figure out which side you're on. The side with data, or the side without. If you think the data was poor, fine, whatever. Where's your data that supports your viewpoints? Even if you break someone else's argument, it doesn't matter unless you yourself have data that supports your own side.

It’s not my job to prove masks work, lockdowns work, or vaccines work. That isn’t how science works. You can’t prove shit doesn’t work. The hypothesis is these mitigations work and are worth their respective costs. The burden of proof is on the people making these claims and pushing to enact them.

Outside of vaccines I’ve yet to see any convincing evidence that any of our NPI’s worked in a way that justified their incredible costs on society. The fact that we did them without any understanding of their efficacy is astounding to me.

> It’s not my job to prove masks work, lockdowns work, or vaccines work.

Can you stay on topic? This subthread is about a simple discussion. Do COVID19 tests detect the flu?

The answer is no.

Now if you wish to move your goalposts. Feel free to do so. But don't expect me to condone or accept your obvious fallacy. If you're changing the subject so intensely, I more or less take it as a discussion win in my favor at this point.

I think I've readily proven that your earlier discussion point has no data behind it. And I have no reason to believe you have data behind any of the other discussion points you're bringing up.

EDIT: Now if you start posting some data, maybe I'll start to listen again. But I'm not going to take or respect just wanton assertions in this subthread.

>There is a much simpler explanation which is: people with the flu were testing positive for COVID and health authorities were counting flu cases as COVID.

That is if the authorities were stupid. I can't say for the US but where I live there was no reduction in flu tests and there were still barely any cases found.

Not how communicable diseases work.

If enough people in the population take certain precautions, and those precautions limit the spread of disease, then there is some sweet spot between the virus’ contagiousness and number of people who take precautions that will cause the virus to not spread.

Some people wore masks some of the time, varying by seasonality, weighted regionally by the dominant political ideology of the area. My understanding is that masks were more effective against the flu than covid because Covid can spread in finer particles than the flu, which makes masks more effective in fighting the flu.

> people with the flu were testing positive for COVID and health authorities were counting flu cases as COVID.

We know this happens, the critical missing part of your argument is your estimate of frequency. If your theory were true, the precipitous drop in flu cases indicates that almost everyone with the flu also had Covid. That doesn't pass the smell test to me - I feel confident we would have heard if there were that high a correlation, given all the research going on at the time.

That only makes sense if people were wearing masks to combat the flu before covid started and then Republicans stopped wearing them to spite covid mitigation efforts but that's not the case.

From my understanding the flu is less contagious than covid so any efforts we were taking to stamp out covid that were holding covid in check would have stamped out the flu.

>Just line up the number of people who died / got sick of non-COVID19 diseases in 2020

This is _extremely_ difficult to do, as a mix of both incentive structures and poor policy lead to any death with a positive PCR test being counted as a COVID death.

It's practically impossible now to go back and figure out how many were _actually_ "killed by COVID" vs "died _with_ COVID".

> It's practically impossible now to go back and figure out how many were _actually_ "killed by COVID" vs "died _with_ COVID".

Have you ever read a death certificate?

They don't even read "killed by COVID19". The direct cause of death is _NEVER_ COVID19.

https://dphhs.mt.gov/vitalrecords/certificationofcovid-19

COVID19 doesn't even play a role until 2 or 3 lines later. Doctors write down "Killed by X" which was caused by "Y" which was caused by "Z". COVID19 is never "X", its always Y, Z, or later.

---------

Because we have these statistics, we can correlate "X" causes. If "X" is "blunt force trauma to the head", it is unlikely that "Y" or "Z" will be COVID19.

But don't take my word for it. There's plenty of death certificates, and such data has been coallated together.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7014e2.htm

See Table 2 in this list, as an example. You can see that the immediate cause of death for most COVID19 patients is Pneumonia, unspecified (J18.9), followed by Acute respiratory failure (J96.0).

Which of these ICD codes do you think is being misclassified as a COVID19 death? Please be specific. Any such large scale misclassification would be obviously in the data here.

Most people who had covid and died probably wouldn’t have died so quickly if they didn’t have covid.

Why you do the mental gymnastics to pretend this isn’t true is so baffling.

You're right. At one point I read it was as high as 10 years that the average person who died of covid could have otherwise lived on for. I suspect that number has changed a few times over the pandemic, but even a few years more years with a loved one is priceless, losing anything close to a decade would be a massive loss.

I’m sure George Floyd would have lived a little longer if he wasn’t Covid positive when he died.

It doesn’t matter anyway. The data required to support our mitigations stopped mattering a long long time ago. ..Sometime back when the “4% kill rate” predicted by the imperial college paper turned out to be very very wrong and when all those temporary military hospital things got closed because they weren’t being used. That might have been a good time to reevaluate what the fuck we were doing but instead of celebrating the fact that Covid wasn’t nearly as bad as predicted we just doubled down for a year and a half more instead.

Honestly it’s best to just take the numbers at face value and assume any overcount is balanced by undercounts.

> I’m sure George Floyd would have lived a little longer if he wasn’t Covid positive when he died.

George Floyd tested positive for COVID19 before he died, but its not listed in his cause of death.

Is that really the best counterexample you've got of an improper death certificate?

https://storage.googleapis.com/afs-prod/media/711012da318e49...

There's not even any COVID19 listed on here.

I said most, not all.

If 95% of people died from covid, and 5% died with covid, then basically for all intents and purposes and how we use this data, the distinction is irrelevant.

I agree. I just take the numbers at face value. Trying to suggest they are under or over counted is a fools errand. It will take decades of distance from this event for cooler heads to tally up what really happened.

> It's practically impossible now to go back and figure out how many were _actually_ "killed by COVID" vs "died _with_ COVID".

No, it's not. Which is why some health regions are going back and doing exactly this, to reflect the distinction.