I got a reply to my FOI request to Public Health Wales.
I asked how many amplification cycles are being used in the PCR testing in Wales.
This is what they said:
The real-time PCR assays in use in Wales for COVID-19 diagnostics all run
for 45 cycles however, the cycle number where the sample is defined as
RNA NOT DETECTED varies by platform and target gene detected by the
system. This is defined by the manufacturer. One platform (Hologic) is
isothermal, this means it does not cycle through temperature changes in
the same way as the real-time PCR systems, therefore CT values are not
reported by this system.
Well, that's just super.
We get to pick between documented over-amplification (45 cycles), and undocumented over-amplification ("not reported by this system").
At 45 cycles, each sample is being amplified 32,768 times beyond the 30-cycle threshold that these papers suggest is the upper limit for infectiousness:
This misuse of PCR testing is destroying the livelihoods of ordinary people and taking the lives of people suffering from serious non-COVID-19 conditions. The general public needs to stop getting tested, or they are going to have their communities locked down in perpetuity.
Thanks for that but could you explain what that means in easy terms for me and what that amounts to.
Thanks.
😀
Thanks for that but could you explain what that means in easy terms for me and what that amounts to.
Carl Heneghan explains it here:
https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/infectious-positive-pcr-test-result-covid-19/
See in particular the section titled "Why does the cycle threshold cut-off matter?".
And also this:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.08.04.20167932v4
Basically, if the Ct is too high, you are not detecting infectious virus in someone. If the Ct is sufficiently high, anything would test positive (hence the reports of goats, fruit etc. testing positive).
Heneghan's paper suggests infectious virus can only be found in samples when the Ct is lower than 30. Researchers verify this by attempting to culture virus from the samples taken from people - it seems to be impossible to do this with samples taken at Ct values higher than 30.
So with a value of 45 (as used in Wales), a lot of the so-called "positive" results will be occurring in people who are not infectious.
So with a value of 45 (as used in Wales), a lot of the so-called "positive" results will be occurring in people who are not infectious.
The corollary being that false positives are falsely reporting a falsely-used falsehood.
I've never seen so many falsies.
