Well, sometimes the truth has a way of tricking out, in the unlikeliest of places. The New York Times just ran this headline: “Your Coronavirus Test Is Positive. Maybe It Shouldn’t Be.”
We learn there that as many as 90 percent of positive Covid results are for people who are not contagious, and are therefore being ordered to quarantine and isolate for no reason.
It has to do with the PCR test and something called the “cycle threshold,” which in the United States is set in most labs at a cutoff of around 40 or 37 instead of a more reasonable 30.
Do an internet search for that headline and you’ll have all the details at your fingertips.
Someone drew this analogy: “Imagine a neighborhood on fire. Here, the firefighters have defined even dying embers as a ‘fire’ and are so busy putting those out that they are missing entire homes that are burning down and setting others ablaze.”
So these gigantic “case” numbers, which meant little enough to begin with, mean even less now.
Incidentally, the general problem of numbers without context has panicked people around the world into thinking the virus is worse than it is. We know this is true of the United States thanks to some recent polling data. It’s also true of the U.K., according to The Telegraph, where the average person thinks the death rate from the virus is 100 times greater than it actually is.
Tom Woods