Must Watch Video... and some interesting data about positive testing from an unlikely source.

1M views in 24hrs on Facebook. People care about this even if politicians & liberal media ignore it! pic.twitter.com/BiZXgD0w8Y

— Liz Wheeler (@Liz_Wheeler) September 5, 2020

Just in case the video disappears from twatter:

 

 Here is the article from, yes, the New Yawk Times...

 

Your Coronavirus Test Is Positive. Maybe It Shouldn’t Be. 

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In the article they do recommend more testing, BUT the current testing seems to be extremely flawed.

The PCR test amplifies genetic matter from the virus in cycles; the fewer cycles required, the greater the amount of virus, or viral load, in the sample. The greater the viral load, the more likely the patient is to be contagious.
This number of amplification cycles needed to find the virus, called the cycle threshold, is never included in the results sent to doctors and coronavirus patients, although it could tell them how infectious the patients are.
In three sets of testing data that include cycle thresholds, compiled by officials in Massachusetts, New York and Nevada, up to 90 percent of people testing positive carried barely any virus, a review by The Times found.
On Thursday, the United States recorded 45,604 new coronavirus cases, according to a database maintained by The Times. If the rates of contagiousness in Massachusetts and New York were to apply nationwide, then perhaps only 4,500 of those people may actually need to isolate and submit to contact tracing.
One solution would be to adjust the cycle threshold used now to decide that a patient is infected. Most tests set the limit at 40, a few at 37. This means that you are positive for the coronavirus if the test process required up to 40 cycles, or 37, to detect the virus.
Tests with thresholds so high may detect not just live virus but also genetic fragments, leftovers from infection that pose no particular risk — akin to finding a hair in a room long after a person has left, Dr. Mina said.

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Any test with a cycle threshold above 35 is too sensitive, agreed Juliet Morrison, a virologist at the University of California, Riverside. “I’m shocked that people would think that 40 could represent a positive,” she said.

/Snip

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said it is examining the use of cycle threshold measures “for policy decisions.” The agency said it would need to collaborate with the F.D.A. and with device manufacturers to ensure the measures “can be used properly and with assurance that we know what they mean.”

The C.D.C.’s own calculations suggest that it is extremely difficult to detect any live virus in a sample above a threshold of 33 cycles. Officials at some state labs said the C.D.C. had not asked them to note threshold values or to share them with contact-tracing organizations.

For example, North Carolina’s state lab uses the Thermo Fisher coronavirus test, which automatically classifies results based on a cutoff of 37 cycles. A spokeswoman for the lab said testers did not have access to the precise numbers.

This amounts to an enormous missed opportunity to learn more about the disease, some experts said.

“It’s just kind of mind-blowing to me that people are not recording the C.T. values from all these tests — that they’re just returning a positive or a negative,” said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Columbia University in New York.

“It would be useful information to know if somebody’s positive, whether they have a high viral load or a low viral load,” she added.

I did some google searching for cycle threshold and testing and the number of cycles for the RT-PCR testing and found this article..From back in May

Correlation between successful isolation of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in cell culture and cycle threshold (Ct) value of quantitative reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) targeting E gene suggests that patients with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) with Ct above 33 to 34 are not contagious and can be discharged from hospital care or strict confinement, according to a brief report published in the European Journal of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases.

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