[djsumdog]

> The number of cases

Please research PCR and the amplification cycles. Right now most tests are using over 40 cycles and it's causing a lot of false positives. Cases should never be the number to use, fatalities should (and even then many people get marked for COVID deaths because they test positive yet die of something unrelated).

The way PCR is being used is insane and a lot of the numbers are just plain misleading to increase the amount of fear.

[JohnCohorn]

Sure cases as a metric has been overemphasized and unnecessarily increases fear. But the fact that that metric isn’t ideally measured or presented shouldn’t take away from the fact that the metrics that are most critical like hospital capacity are getting to frightening levels right now .

[pw201]

> Right now most tests are using over 40 cycles

This is misleading. The number of cycles used is irrelevant. Reference: https://virologydownunder.com/the-false-positive-pcr-problem... (from someone who has actually used PCR in research, as neither you nor I have).

> and it's causing a lot of false positives.

We can get an upper bound on false positives from ONS surveys over the summer, by assuming all their positives were false (prevelance was low then). At https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan... the ONS says "We know the specificity of our test must be very close to 100% as the low number of positive tests in our study means that specificity would be very high even if all positives were false. For example, in the most recent six-week period (31 July to 10 September), 159 of the 208,730 total samples tested positive. Even if all these positives were false, specificity would still be 99.92%." (The false positive rate would then be 100% - 99.92% = 0.08 %). The ONS prevelance surveys are processed at a couple of the Lighthouse Labs which also do the Pillar 2 testing in the UK.

Can you explain why "false positives" go down among vaccinated patients?

> fatalities should (and even then many people get marked for COVID deaths because they test positive yet die of something unrelated)

Evidence for "many"? We have a couple of metrics for UK deaths from COVID: deaths within 28 days of a positive test, and root cause / contributing causes ("of" vs "with") on death certificates. These are imperfect in both directions (for example, some patients who die spend more than 28 days in hospital with COVID, meaning the 28 day metric undercounts them) but agree that the UK has seen around 70000 deaths of COVID.