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U.S. COVID-19 Case and Death Data is
Hopelessly Muddled
By: David Deschesne
Fort Fairfield Journal
August 26, 2020
With the establishment media continually pushing case and death numbers of COVID-19 in the U.S. the public has been buffaloed into believing these numbers are Gospel truth. However, when it comes to counting and compiling the statistics, then presenting them in a coherent way, the U.S. is doing an embarrassingly sloppy, haphazard job compared to other countries in the world.
Some have speculated the over-reporting of case and death numbers, along with the excessive hype that follows, is driven by politics since this is an election year in the U.S. There may be a kernel of truth to that idea since most of the “surges” are coming from predominately left-wing, Democrat-controlled areas.
The primary drivers of the skewed data are; 1.) sketchy PCR tests that were never intended to be used for diagnostic purposes; 2.) deliberate over-counting of cases by at least 18 states; and 3.) deliberate over-counting of deaths attributed to COVID-19.
Nearly all of the data for COVID-19, which future scientific researchers will rely upon to determine infection ratio and case fatality rate, has been so hopelessly muddled that it is unlikely any usable data will ever be gleaned from numbers compiled in the United States.
PCR Tests are Meaningless
PCR tests are meaningless as a diagnostic tool to determine an alleged infection by a supposedly new virus called SARS-CoV-2. Since viruses are too small to detect on their own, the PCR process seeks to “amplify” the RNA in the virus by making millions of copies of it in order to bring its numbers up to levels that are detectable. This amplification process alone is subject to errors that can create false positive results.
Additionally, since the start of the outbreak there have been no isolated, purified and confirmed virus particles for COVID-19 to provide a reference - a “gold standard” - to calibrate these tests to. Each manufacturer is free to create their own standards and criteria due to the US FDA suspending all requirements for quality control and testing the veracity of the test kits’ results.
Kary Mullis, the inventor of the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) technology regarded the PCR as inappropriate to detect a viral infection. The reason is that the intended use of the PCR was, and still is, to apply it as a manufacturing technique to replicate DNA sequences millions and billions of times, and not as a diagnostic tool to detect viruses.
The reason for this is that PCR is extremely sensitive, which means it can detect even the smallest pieces of DNA or RNA — but it cannot determine where these particles came from. That has to be determined beforehand.
In the “CDC 2019-Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) Real-Time RT-PCR Diagnostic Panel” file from March 30, 2020, for example, it says: “Detection of viral RNA may not indicate the presence of infectious virus or that 2019-nCoV is the causative agent for clinical symptom. This test cannot rule out diseases caused by other bacterial or viral pathogens.”
PCR tests have been determined to have a false positive rate as high as 30 to 50 percent so their use as a conclusive diagnostic tool is bound to create extremely high error rates in the final total case numbers. The information inserts in many of the test kits claim they are “not for diagnostic purposes” and “not intended for use as an aid in the diagnosis of coronavirus infection.”
Evidence of the high false positive rate can also be seen in the statistic that nearly 40 percent of COVID-19 positive case patients are classified as “asymptomatic” - that is, after testing positive for COVID-19 with a PCR test, they have no symptoms of the disease at all. This could be due to the fact that the PCR test accidentally triggered “positive” on some other strand of RNA and the person in fact does not have the COVID-19 coronavirus to begin with.
In an article posted online at www.off-guardian.org, Torsten Engelbrecht and Konstantin Demeter pointed out some surprisingly irrational test results when using PCR tests. “For example, already in February the health authority in China’s Guangdong province reported that people have fully recovered from illness blamed on COVID-19, started to test 'negative,' and then tested 'positive' again,” they wrote. “A month later, a paper published in the Journal of Medical Virology showed that 29 out of 610 patients at a hospital in Wuhan had 3 to 6 test results that flipped between 'negative,' 'positive' and 'dubious.' A third example is a study from Singapore in which tests were carried out almost daily on 18 patients and the majority went from “positive” to “negative” back to “positive” at least once, and up to five times in one patient. Even Wang Chen, president of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, conceded in February that the PCR tests are “only 30 to 50 per cent accurate”
“In other words, even if we theoretically assume that these PCR tests can really detect a viral infection, the tests would be practically worthless, and would only cause an unfounded scare among the 'positive' people tested.”
Over-Counting the Cases
While the flawed, error-filled PCR testing method is being used worldwide, and thus adversely affecting the data globally, some of the states in the U.S. have taken measures to muddy the waters even further by counting “positive tests” instead of “positive people.”
According to research on covidtracking.org, as many as 18 states are skewing the numbers of their positive cases much higher than they are in reality. What happens is when a person in one of those states tests positive with a PCR test, then takes another for a second opinion and perhaps another a few weeks later, when all those tests come up positive that one person will be counted as three separate and distinct “cases” in that state’s data. Expanding the view outward, when a hundred thousand people get counted positive twice or three times, it doesn’t take very long for an artificial “surge” in cases to appear in the daily data when in fact there is no real surge in infected people - just a surge in duplicate and triplicate tests being logged into the data chain.
But the shenanigans go even deeper than mere over counting of the same people tested. In some states, there are reports that people who have scheduled for a COVID-19 test, but were unable to keep their appointment, are receiving letters in the mail from the testing center advising them they tested positive for COVID-19 when they never showed up to take the test to begin with. This isn’t just sloppy reporting or jiggling of the numbers, it’s outright fraud.
This noise may never be compensated for in the data since those states may not be keeping track of individual people infected with symptoms of COVID-19 - they are only logging positive test results. They are also not keeping track of the outright phony tests, either. The establishment media is then free to interpret those artificially heightened “case” numbers as if they represented actual people when in fact they do not.
Questionable Death Numbers
From the outset of the pandemic, the U.S. CDC advised hospitals to count every death as a COVID-19 death if a person either tested positive with the PCR test, or even if the doctor considered them as a “probable” COVID-19 case without a lab test. White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator, Deborah Birx continued to reinforce this technique to hospitals throughout March and April, but later in May she began to distance herself from that position. This blatant disregard for fact-based evidence has led to grossly exaggerated death numbers.
For example, if somebody is in an automobile accident and sustains critical internal injuries that ultimately lead to their death, they will be classified as having died from COVID-19 if they test positive with one of those errant, unreliable PCR tests. In Colorado, one man died of alcohol poisoning after consuming too much alcohol. His death was then classified as a COVID-19 death since he tested positive via the PCR test.
Hospitals, which were ordered to stop all procedures not related to COVID-19 in the opening months of the covid mind-game were at a serious loss for income. However, the federal government offered them bonus money for every COVID-19 patient they admitted and even more money if that patient ended up on a ventilator. Ventilators, which were the much presumed cure-all at the outset, turned out to be essentially useless in the treatment of COVID-19.
According to a Gallup study, Americans grossly overestimate the risk that the coronavirus presents, especially to younger people. “Researchers found that the 'gross misperception' of COVID-19 is driven by 'partisanship and misinformation,' both of which are driven by mainstream media,” said G. Edward Griffin, from needtoknow.news. “Americans falsely believe that people aged 55 and older account for just over half of total COVID-19 deaths. The actual figure is 92%. They also believe that 30% of COVID-19 deaths occur in people under 44. The actual figure is 2.7%. Those who get information predominantly from social media have the most distorted perception of risk. The coronavirus is similar to the AIDS ‘epidemic’ that became the best funded disease in America besides cancer, even though it was almost entirely limited to gay men and other recreational dug users.”
While some states have made efforts to fix their death statistics, most have left the errant data as-is. These death numbers, now exceeding 160,000 in the U.S. are filled with “probable” cases where a doctor merely presumes a person to have died from COVID-19 based upon symptoms that at the time of death were still largely unknown. Other deaths due overtly to other causes completely unrelated to respiratory viruses continue to be accounted as COVID-19 deaths even though any rational researcher will conclude that virus had nothing to do with the cause.
But the U.S. isn’t alone. Researchers in the UK suggest England should revise their COVID-19 deaths downward by as much as 65% due to their excessive over counting and misattributing other death causes to COVID-19.
This fiddling with the numbers in order to deliberately overstate and exaggerate the number of COVID-19 deaths is an embarrassment to the scientific community as they have yielded to political trickery instead of objective scientific methods in order to compile important health statistics.
Other Countries Doing Better
Other countries seem to be doing a much better job at tracking their population’s numbers than the U.S. Brazil, for example, has a population of 221 million and lists 3.5 million COVID-19 cases as of August 21. Of those, 2.84 million - or 81% - have already recovered. India, which has a population of 1 billion people - or nearly three times that of the U.S. - lists 2.9 million cases of COVID 19 on August 21, with 2.15 million recovered - or 75%. The U.S., with only a third of the population of India, claims nearly double the cases at 5.5 million - many of which are double- or triple-counted individuals - and only around 2 million recovered, or around 37% - far less than Brazil’s or India’s recoveries. Now, either Brazil and India are much healthier population centers than the U.S., or the U.S. has a problem with its arithmetic.
U.S. Numbers Irrelevant
Since the PCR tests can’t reliably confirm the existence of an actual COVID-19 virus, much less its viral load (how much is in the body) or how it will present (what symptoms will be); nearly half the states in the U.S. are counting people two, three or more times as “positive”; and deaths are being arbitrarily labeled as COVID-19 deaths when that virus obviously had nothing to do with the person’s death, the case and death statistics in the U.S. are both meaningless and irrelevant at this point. They should not be used to set public policy by government officials - many of whom can’t even understand the simple science on face masks, which are not designed to prevent viruses from spreading, but still mandate face masks for public use to stop the COVID-19 virus.
Government agencies in the U.S. have not only taken something simple and made it complicated, they have taken something simple - counting numbers - and made it so convoluted that no meaningful, usable data can ever hope to be derived from their total counts.