No, the number of COVID-19 cases has not been exaggerated 20x!

goaded

This is a remarkably similar case to my earlier take: No, the number of COVID-19 deaths has not been exaggerated 20x! the propaganda being "scIeNtiSts DoN't kNow wHat theY'Re dOiNg", but some people have been making out that it means that up to 95% of the people testing positive for the virus weren't really cases, which isn't true, and also silly, for reasons I'll get into for a minute.

A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times ran an article about a covid-19 test called a PCR test. (This was at the time there was an outcry about the CDC suggesting that asymptomatic people not be tested at all.) https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/29/health/coronavirus-testing.html

Its done in a lab!
It's done in a lab!

The problem with the PCR test isn't its accuracy, it can detect the virus in a sample with very high accuracy and sensitivity. Everyone with the virus in their system has been infected. As a yes/no answer to the question "has this person been infected?", it's pretty much dead on the money.

The problem pointed out by the article is that the labs are being asked the wrong question. It's useful to know the overall numbers, but if you want to perform contact tracing, you need to know if someone is, has been, or may soon be, highly infectious.

Why is it silly to bring up the supposed false positive rate?

It's because the usual suspects who want to misrepresent the science want to pretend that the disease is no big deal. So, they want to say it hardly kills anyone, and the numbers of infected are far higher than the official numbers. Unfortunately for them, the same number of people are dying every day, so when they complain that the test is 95% false positives (it's not), they're multiplying how deadly the disease is for the people who catch it by 20, rather than dividing it by the same amount, which is what the previous lie claimed.

No, the number of COVID-19 cases has not been exaggerated 20x!
6 Opinion