"0.5% chance of dying", you better check your figures.

[BA Deere]

Sam, you guys are just healthy and probably aren`t as affected as much of the population   🙂    I suppose it`s like colds & flus some people are flat on their back for a couple weeks, others work right through it, not something they think about.   With these viruses, it`s amazing if you just kind of stay in your "personal space" and don`t touch your eyes or nose, you automatically dodge all but 1% of it.   Sometimes that 1% gets ya though   🙂

[sam1wiseone]

Lol BA, I think it was because I played in the dirt a lot as a kid, and had a house full of siblings bombarding each other with germs and dirt clods. 

[man of steel]

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@BA Deere wrote:

Well, before you can have surgery, the covid test is required and that`s the one they hold a long "Q-tip" up your nose for 5 seconds and it takes 3 days for the results.  I`ve had a number of them, as long as it doesn`t break off in your nose it isn`t bad  🙂    But those tests are very accurate.   The rapid tests, especially the home tests that everyone is hoarding are probably like flipping a coin.  

There are a quite a few people out there who won`t get a covid test, even if they have the symptoms because of superstition or fear of results.   And quite a few people are asymptomatic, the fear porn stars don`t want to acknowledge that fact, but they are out there.

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No they are not BA!

They are better now that they are not "over sampling" as much as they were in the first year.

I think the best you can say is if it comes back NEGATIVE it's very doubtful you have covid

False positives are still very much a reality

[r3020]

Wonder how many of those covid deaths were actually people who died from other causes with a false positive.

[sam1wiseone]

Significant numbers, the hospitals had a bounty paid for covid deaths.

[gh2002gh]

NYT actually ran a decent article once about the PCR tests that are ran on the nasopharyngeal swabs.  There is up to a mid to upper 90's% false positive rate.

Hospitals running them on asymptomatic patients are only feeding the false positive rates.  

There is no standardization of cycle counts to even begin to try to discuss the situation.  And when you're amplifying material you're testing, you're talking magnitudes of difference.  Dead nucleotides, and other viral genomes will start showing up as positives.  

There are no valid testing numbers since the start of this BS.  And the BS starts with testing asymptomatic people.  

The link below is a non paywall pdf of the NYT article. 

https://absa.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/NYT-200829-Your-Coronavirus-Test.pdf