Allen53 wrote:
Any positive that required more than 30 cycles should be questioned without good corroborative evidence.
Don't forget that these issues apply to hospitalizations and deaths too. Everybody admitted to hospital is tested so at least some percentage of hospitalizations are false positives and some percentage for non-Covid problems. Thus hospitalizations and deaths MUST be overstated as well.
https://ccforum.biomedcentral.com/track/pdf/10.1186/s13054-020-03244-3
The issue in this study is whether COVID severity correlates with observed viral load in PCR testing. This is a controversy as some studies suggest that COVID severity is not tied to severity (mostly shown with older patients). But others do tie COVID severity to viral load. Nothing in this article suggests that low viral load observed in PCR tests are false positives.
And there are plenty of people who are admitted to the hospital who do not get tested because they die within a short time after admission. In many states, these people never get tested even if they had clear indication of dying from COVID 19. This causes an undercount of COVID deaths.