From the onset of this pandemic, politicians have gone to great lengths to claim that they are 'only following the science'. Certainly, in the early stages, a good proportion of that science was gleaned from computer models, such as the infamous Imperial College study which led to the initial lock-downs in the Western world.
However, over a year and multi billions of your local currency later, we now have (or could have had) reams of data. In this first piece, I'll examine the statistics around testing and case fatalities.
Statistics
In terms of Covid fatalities, there are some major disparities between different regions of the world. In Western Europe, the average fatality per head of population is 0.13%, in Eastern Europe and the Balkans 0.16%, in the Middle East 0.025%, in the East Mediterranean 0.056% and, to throw a climate shaped spanner in the works, Scandinavia is at 0.042%. And it's not that some countries have barely tested anyone; all the countries included in these calculations have tested extensively and the UK and the US are no slouches. The UK is approaching two tests for every head of population and the US is at 1.2 per person.
As an addendum, the UK and the US are above average at 0.17-0.18%, Canada languishes at 0.06% and Australia and NZ barely trouble the scorers at all.(1) Other interesting number related facts; generally, the more tests, the more positives. Once outliers are excluded, 65-70,000 cases per million seems to be about right.
Unfortunately, there is no uniformity in counting Covid deaths across countries, or even within countries themselves, across any time period. The only figure that could be accorded any trust is that of overall deaths. Even then, however, the waters are muddied. How do we know what the primary cause of death is, given that patients terminally ill with cancer, for instance, who tested 'positive' for coronavirus, will (in some countries) be counted in the Covid column, rather than the cancer column, as they would have been in any other year.
Further, in the UK and the US, a Covid death includes those who've died outside hospital where the patient's doctor merely suspects they were suffering from Covid. No test, no examination required, just a suspicion.
Dr John Lee, a retired professor of pathology and former UK National Health Service (NHS) consultant pathologist, points out that, normally, if someone dies of a respiratory infection in the UK, the specific cause of the infection isn’t recorded unless the illness is a ‘notifiable’ disease. Until coronavirus came along, the vast majority of respiratory deaths in the UK were recorded as due to bronchopneumonia, pneumonia, old age, etc.
“We don’t really test for flu, or other seasonal infections. If the patient has, say, cancer, motor neuron disease or another serious disease, this will be recorded as the cause of death, even if the final illness was a respiratory infection. This means UK certifications normally under-record deaths due to respiratory infections.”(1)
This being the case, the UK doesn't even have a reliable baseline against which to measure. Indeed, in the UK, since Sept 2020, there have been more people dying from Covid than there were people seriously ill with Covid – an impossibility.(2)
Adding to the confusion, in March 2020, the Centre for Disease Control (CDC) changed the ways deaths were recorded in the US, specifically in relation to the presence of co-morbidities.(3) These were no longer to be recorded as the primary cause of death; that role was to be reserved for Covid. This had the effect of greatly inflating the number of deaths recorded as being due to Covid. The previous guidelines remain in place for every other cause of death, just not for Covid.
And they weren't the only ones. In the UK, anybody dying of anything after a positive Covid test, no matter how much time had elapsed, was to be recorded as a Covid death.(4) This was eventually limited to a death within 28 days (and 60 days), which was still a blatantly inaccurate measure, potentially including accidents, suicides and terminal illnesses in the numbers.
In Sweden, which didn't lock-down at all, the case fatality rate is in line with the EU average. In, Florida, a state with the second most senior citizens in the US and which also remained open, the rate was better than California which was among the foremost proponents of draconian measures. So, whilst the overall death count will be accurate, the Covid element is subject to dispute, both in its calculation and with regard to the effectiveness of the preventative measures.
Further, how can we know how many deaths are down to the cure (i.e. lock-downs), rather than the disease? How many serious diseases went untreated and resulted in earlier death? How many more suicides were there? In due course, if we try hard enough, we may be able to find out but common sense dictates that, if treatment becomes more difficult or is cancelled and people are forced to become more isolated, more people will be in harm's way.
Testing
It's not just Covid fatality figures that can't be trusted. It's the testing numbers, too. There have been differing approaches to testing. Most countries got off to a slow start, unsurprisingly, but by October the west was up to speed. And in a completely unexpected development, it transpires that the more tests you do, the more 'cases' you detect. For context, the US is currently testing around the same number of people as it was six months ago. France and Italy are testing at least twice as many more and the UK is testing more than four times as many.
Given that a good proportion of these tests should be on people in clinical settings, you would expect positive test rates to be high, which they are except in the UK; US 6%, France 8%, Italy 6.6%, UK 0.4%.(5) At the time of writing, there are allegedly, 22,142,000 lives cases worldwide of which only 4% are serious.(6) You may think that the word 'testing' denotes one particular process; regrettably not. The word covers at least three differing ways to detect the disease and another couple of ways, at minimum, which may go some way towards establishing whether some form of immunity exists.
So, we have five different kinds of possible tests; PCR, lateral flow, in vitro, serological and T cell. The first two are field tests for virus RNA, in vitro is a lab test that determined whether any captured virus was live and capable of causing infection and the last two procedures would test for immunity, on the B cells and T cells, respectively.
The most widely used test has been the PCR test. However, it is a research tool, used in labs, or a secondary diagnostic tool used by physicians in order to confirm/deny a diagnosis from observed symptoms. What it is not is a community testing kit. It was not designed that way and shouldn't be used in that fashion, as the test cannot discriminate between whole virus and virus fragments or determine infectivity – at least, not in the way it is being deployed. The test doesn't have a unique positive control to specifically identify SARS-CoV-2, nor a negative control to exclude other coronaviruses.
“External peer review of the RTPCR test to detect SARS-CoV-2 reveals 10 major scientific flaws at the molecular and methodological level: consequences for false positive results.”(7) Again, “the test cannot discriminate between a living virus and a strand of RNA which broke into pieces weeks or months ago.”(8)
Once more… “the PCR test...is an exacting tool, prone to invisible errors, especially due to the prodigious amounts of amplification involved in attempting to pick up a strand of viral genetic code.”(9)
The test works by amplifying genetic material from a swab. The number of amplifications required is called the cycle rate. According to Professor Heneghan, the director of the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine (CEBM), if you have to use more than 25 cycles of amplification, you do not have an infectious person. But the cycle threshold is not noted in the result, as given to you – it's a binary choice of positive or negative.
So what cycle rate is being used in the US and the UK to determine a positive test? In the US, either 37 or 40. In the UK and Ireland, 40 to 45. This has inevitably lead to vastly inflated numbers of positive tests, where there is, in fact, insufficient viral load for them to be infectious.
Indeed, in August 2020 , the New York Times did a study on 3 sets of positive COVID testing data and found that 90% of them contained very little virus.(10) In October 2020, the clinical advisor to the HSE (Ireland’s Health body), Dr Colm Henry, said that 80% of the cases in Ireland were mild or asymptomatic.
Aside from using too high a cycle rate as the threshold, what else can cause a false positive? Cross reactions with other genetic material can be a problem as false positives have previously been observed unexpectedly in norovirus assays in patients with enterocolitis, due to unusually high levels of human DNA in samples and, as noted earlier, there is no guarantee that another coronavirus, such as the common cold, isn't also being picked up instead. Contamination during sampling is an ever present danger.
We could make the assumption that this is recent knowledge and excuse earlier blunders. However, this information was known to the UK government from June 2020, at the latest, via a paper sent to them by scientists. As stated,
“unless we understand the operational false positive rate of the UK’s RT-PCR testing system we risk overestimating the COVID-19 incidence, the demand on track and trace, and the extent of asymptomatic infection.”(11)
The diagnostic sensitivity of the test can only be measured in an operational setting, where tests are being conducted, rather than in a pristine laboratory. This has never been done.
In the UK, there are four pillars of testing; Pillar 2 is the general population and Pillar 4 is Office of National Statistics (ONS) random testing, the latter generally regarded as being the most reliable indicator of the spread of the virus as it is not geographically limited and is truly random.
In a sample where, for example, 10% of your testing produces a genuine, positive test and your error rate is 0.8% (which is the best guess of the memo writers quoted above) you do not have a serious problem. You may find that 11% test positive instead, but you're in the right ballpark. When you a prevalence of 0.1% of genuine positive tests, as suggested by ONS data and you have the same error rate of 0.8%, you have a much more obvious problem. It would indicate that getting on for 90% of your positives are false.
There is a way to overcome this. Knowing that the PCR test is unreliable, you could further test a random sample (or indeed, every sample) in a cell culture at the lab and see if it can reproduce and is, therefore, potentially infectious. This has never been done, either.
So, with the PCR test we have major problems and, due to a lack of follow up testing, no idea as to what precise conditions exist in any individual sample. Is the false positive rate connected to:
a) the test cycle rate being too high?
b) the test picking up other coronaviruses or separate diseases?
c) other less than ideal operational conditions?
d) a combination of all three?
Whilst the US has stuck with the flawed PCR tests, the UK increasingly utilized lateral flow tests and, since January 2021, these kits have been used in the majority of testing. These tests are quick, cheap and not sent to a lab. They are also hopelessly inadequate when used in the field and unsuitable for widespread testing. The test is not effective in asymptomatic people (60% detection rate), nor in symptomatic people (72% detection rate).(12)
Initially, they were backed up by a PCR test, but between 27th January and 1st April, this wasn't done even if, as we've seen, it wouldn't have done much good anyway. So we have an unreliable test, not being double checked by another unreliable test. We have figures pre January that are apples and post January that are pears. It would be difficult to make a bigger hash of it than this.
As previously observed, neither the US and UK saw fit to give cell culture testing a genuine role. Given the known unreliability of the primary testing methodology and the obvious potential for obtaining genuine results by so doing, this is negligent at best, criminally incompetent or deliberate at worst. The testing that deals primarily with the detection of an active Covid infection is, therefore, woefully inadequate. Not only that, but
“our impression is that most data for all countries is in agreement with our interpretation, namely, PCR positives do not correlate to deaths in the future and are therefore meaningless, on their own, to interpret the spread of the virus in terms of potential deaths.”(13)
Conclusions
Countries have been using tests in a fashion for which they are not designed. They have failed to correct for possible errors, despite having the opportunities to do so. They have also been counting Covid fatalities in a way that they have never previously employed with any other disease. These practices have the effect of over-counting metrics, almost certainly by enormous amounts.
Why would they do that? From an ‘abundance of caution?’ Because they feel we are not capable of understanding the danger unless they grossly exaggerate it? Or is there another motive in play? We may approach a better understanding when other factors are weighed in the balance, which they will be in upcoming articles. For now, it is indisputable that these demonstrably false statistics have been used as part of the evidence to justify public policies that have been imposed upon citizens in nearly all Western democracies.
Citations
www.spectator.co.uk/articles/the-way-covid-deaths-are-being-counted-is-a-national-scandal
www.lockdownsceptics.org Dr Claire Craig
Covid 19 Data Collection, Comorbidity & Federal Law: A Historical Retrospective, Ealy et al, October 2020
www.gov.uk/government/news/new-uk-wide-methodology-agreed-to-record-covid-19-deaths
Borger et al Eurosurveillance 2020
Prof Carl Heneghan Youtube interview 2020
Dr Michael Yeadon, www.lockdownsceptics.org 20/9/2020
Impact of false-positives and false-negatives in the UK’s COVID-19 RT-PCR testing programme Carl Mayers & Kate Baker, 3rd June 2020 (sent to SAGE)
BMJ 2020; 371:m4787 http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmj.m4787
CEBM 17/9/2020