COVID Media Headlines All Doom and Gloom, Little Science

As we head into what many look forward to as the most joyous season of the year, it's all doom and gloom at The New York Times and other mainstream newspapers that are wringing their journalistic hands over COVID cases. Add these to the eye-dilating COVID-case graphics commanding us to fear and obey at CNN and MSNBC, and you have a recipe for sustained disaster with little relief in sight.

That COVID-19 is a highly virulent virus is not news. Its persistent march across populations has almost completely resisted any attempts to stop it. Masks and lockdowns have proved utter failures at significantly mitigating its transmission – ratified by this recent spike in "cases, cases, cases" after months of lockdowns and 83%-90% of Americans reporting they always wear a mask when out in public.

But what The Times and its ilk either misunderstand or willfully misconstrue for their readership is that positive tests are not the same as cases. The CDC helpfully provides a "case definition" of COVID, and it includes not only a positive test, which they define as "presumptive laboratory evidence," but also "either clinical criteria OR epidemiologic evidence." So just having a positive PCR test -- which utilizes polymerase chain reaction technology to detect the virus’ genetic material on a swab -- does NOT constitute having COVID. Moreover, the vast majority of positive tests come from mostly asymptomatic people.

Is that how it is being reported?

Every once in a while, the law of journalistic averages kicks in, and The Times either reports the truth as a nostalgic homage or simply stumbles into it. Here's the news that was fit to print recently about PCR tests:

"The standard tests are diagnosing huge numbers of people who may be carrying relatively insignificant amounts of the virus. Most of these people are not likely to be contagious, and identifying them may contribute to bottlenecks that prevent those who are contagious from being found in time."

 And in the article Your Coronavirus Test Is Positive, Maybe It Shouldn't Be, The Times also pointed out what the CDC knows full well about amplification and the sensitivity of the PCR tests.

"Most tests set the limit at 40, a few at 37… The CDC's own calculations suggest that it is extremely difficult to detect any live virus in a sample above a threshold of 33 cycles."

As reported by NPR back in February, the CDC did an internal review of PCR tests and confirmed they could be wrong as often as 33% of the time but the agency authorized them to be sent out across the country for comprehensive use anyway. Even serial reversalist Anthony Fauci has been caught sagely reporting wildly inconvenient truths about COVID that were previously the provenance of conspiracy theorists, such as the prevalence of false/positive tests:

"If you get a cycle threshold of 35 or more, the chances of it being replication competent are minuscule. You almost never can culture virus from a 37 threshold cycle. So I think if someone does come in with a 37, 38, even 36, ya gotta, ya know, it's just dead nucleotides. Period."

Again – most tests set the limit at 40, which means a massive number of false positives are guaranteed.

And guess what other highly salient COVID information you don't know about because of the disinclination to disrupt the prevailing narrative?  Johns Hopkins University recently published a study that stated: "In contrast to most people's assumptions, the number of deaths by COVID-19 is not alarming. In fact, it has relatively no effect on deaths in the United States."

You read that right: There is no difference in the number of U.S. deaths this year over last. There have been fewer deaths from influenza, heart, and respiratory ailments and pneumonia – and the difference has been made up for by the Wuhan virus.

Naturally, the inconvenient news out of Johns Hopkins in no way comports with the fire-ants-in-my-underpants COVID hysteria pimped by the mainstream media. So it was quickly deleted from the university’s website. Of course.

New York opened its schools. Then it closed them. Now it may open them again – but who really knows, with Tweedledee and Tweedledum, Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill De Blasio, in charge? Under the calm, coiffed authoritarianism of Constitution flouter Gavin Newsom, California has never opened its schools and has just closed all its restaurants for dining, putting an immense number of people out of work at the time of year when the food-service industry typically posts the lion's share of its profits. Many thousands of small businesses (not to worry, Amazon and Home Depot) have been all but crushed nationwide from the draconian restrictions imposed by the New Totalitarians.

As it becomes more and more apparent, the throttling of America and the rest of the world has not been at the hands of a virus with a 99.74% recovery rate – but blue state governors and global leadership, most of whom have abandoned any pretense of believing in science when it doesn't serve their authoritarian agendas.

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Read more from Pennel Bird.