What we are being told everyday about the virus and its victims would not hold up in a court of law. Medical authorities though are having a field day coming up with the best arguments for throwing everything at the coronavirus, even if it means closing the world down, keeping everyone in their houses, crashing the economy; pretty much stopping as much human activity as possible. The world is panicking as 60 countries report coronavirus infections and as I write, the stock market is set to crash again.
Yet all of this is based on the testing for coronavirus, which is touch and go all the way. Stories in several countries suggest people are having up to six negative results before finally being diagnosed. Meanwhile, officials in the epicentre of the epidemic, Hubei province, China, “have started counting people with symptoms rather than using the tests for final confirmation,” according to the BBC. Meaning we do not know if the deaths are due to other causes like regular forms of pneumonia and flu.
The New York Times hit piece on the viral epidemic and the Trump administration said, “the coronavirus isn’t like the common cold. In fact, early indications are that the virus may be as lethal as the 1918 Spanish Flu, which killed as many as 50 million people.”
But will the self righteous Times report that 25 million of those could be saved with sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) another 5 million with intravenous magnesium, another 5 million with IVs of vitamin C, 5 million with iodine and another 5 million with an injection of pharmaceutical sourced selenium.
If 50 million die from the coronavirus whose fault will it be? Is it a mean spirited virus, the reported preconditions among the critically ill, or the arrogance of medical officials who have been huffing and puffing for decades yet still do not know how to treat critical lung disease. They want to frighten us with worst case scenarios while refusing to look at the most basic answers that would help doctors save people.
One woman in prison in Iran said she believed she had the virus and wanted to be tested but what is the point if doctors confess they have no treatment that works. There are innovative treatments for patients hospitalized for pneumonia or the common flu but most doctors stick to the lockstep of medical thinking, which is quite limited.
Hard to tell yet if the medical response is actually more of a threat than the virus itself, which is reported to be quite mild for at least 80 percent of the population and especially mild for children. It is impossible to keep up with the fast-changing coronavirus statistics: the number of confirmed cases in new countries seems to roll like ticker tape and yet there is no accountability for the quality of the information.
“It works like this – the manipulating body covertly creates a problem and then directs the media to incessantly focus on it without recourse. The problem could be anything – a war, a financial collapse, a rash of child abductions, or a terrorist attack. The power of the media can create the false perception that a big problem exists, even if it doesn’t.” Paul Joseph Watson, Order Out of Chaos, pg. 13.
World governments are obligated to follow world medical institutions responses to the coronavirus pandemic. They have no choice and neither do we if we are ordered to close down our lives in quarantine. The doctors and their parent medical organizations get to play God, tough luck if you do not like it. In a pandemic medical truth becomes divine truth even if there is little truth in the narrative.
The Quicksand of Coronavirus Tests
A study in the journal Radiology showed five out of 167 patients tested negative for the disease despite lung scans showing they were ill. They then tested positive for the virus at a later date. Doctors like to assume patients like these have the coronavirus forgetting to mention that lung scans show up the same for regular pneumonia patients, as well as from the flu and fungus infections in the lungs, all of which will show up on lung scans.
Patients with pneumonia due to other viruses, bacterial and fungus infections as well as to the effects of heavy pollution are potentially being counted as coronavirus victims. Thousands of patients die everyday from these other causes but when the coronavirus shows up we are ready to suicide our economy and our collective lives because the medical establishment knows whats best.
The BBC said Chinese journalists have uncovered other cases of people testing negative six times before a seventh test confirmed they had the disease. And similar issues have been raised in other affected countries, including Singapore and Thailand. In the US, meanwhile, Dr Nancy Messonnier, of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, says some of its tests are producing “inconclusive” results.
Thus the question is being raised that the RT-PCR test for the new coronavirus is based on flawed science. False-negatives in diagnostic testing lead to the release of infected people, motivate extreme containment measures that have been implemented. False-negatives can explain why official figures are too low. Or that patients with other diseases are not being diagnosed with coronavirus but eventually after enough tests doctors finally get what they are looking for or what are called false-positives.
Hawaii announced its coronavirus tests from the CDC were faulty. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that some of its coronavirus test kits sent to laboratories across the U.S. have reported that they are not “working as expected.”
Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said that when various state laboratories performed quality control tests on the kits, the labs “identified some inconclusive results.” “Specifically, some public health labs at states were getting inconclusive results and what that means is that test results were not coming back as false positive or false negatives, but they were being read as inconclusive,” said Messonnier.
The CDC designed a flawed test for COVID-19, then took weeks to figure out a fix so state and local labs could use it. New York still doesn’t trust the test’s accuracy and neither should we. ‘Confusion breeds distrust,’ which is growing each time China changes how it counts coronavirus cases. China’s lost a lot of credibility and faith in the accuracy of its data with its swift and frequent changes, international researchers say.
The changes in reporting signaled that Chinese health providers were likely struggling to efficiently administer the official COVID-19 test kits, director of global health studies at Seton Hall University Yanzhong Huang said. These tests are a form of nucleic acid test, which are often used to detect viruses like Hepatitis and Ebola. Such tests can have as low a rate of accurate diagnosis as 50%, Huang said, and that figure could be even worse in a city like Wuhan that has such a stressed health-care system amid the outbreak.
“When you’re facing an outbreak like what is happening in Wuhan, it can be so overwhelming that it may basically overwhelm their capability to provide even the testing services,” he said. “If you don’t handle it well, or you are not adequately trained, that kind of test leads to a false negative or positive.”
If healthcare workers across Hubei province don’t have the resources or time to properly administer the tests, Huang said it’s better to rely on symptoms for official counting so that more people can receive treatment. However, this would lead to counting patients with other forms of pneumonia of regular influenza victims.
Zhang said his company’s tests are able to directly detect the COVID-19 pathogen, but require a special machine called a “thermocycler,” which can cost thousands of U.S. dollars. He acknowledged also that the “pathogen is not detectable when its volume is very low.” “This detection requires reagents, machines and skilled personnel,” he said. So are we to believe that these expensive machines and skilled personnel are available everywhere in the world?
What are the consequences of inconclusive test results? A false positive could theoretically expose someone without coronavirus to a hospital setting where they run the risk of being exposed to other types of illnesses, or far worse, a quarantine setting with other patients who have tested positive for coronavirus, where (given how contagious it is) they would most certainly catch it.
A false negative means that someone with COVID-19 is theoretically released back into the world to expose otherwise healthy people to the virus, putting entire swaths of the world on edge. “Testing for coronavirus is not available yet in New York City,” city Department of Health spokeswoman Stephanie Buhle said at the very end of February. “The kits that were sent to us have demonstrated performance issues and cannot be relied upon to provide an accurate result.”
Conclusion
Currently, most pandemic-prone diseases, including coronavirus, are diagnosed by polymerase chain reaction (PCR), a molecular technique that often requires special laboratory machines and highly trained technicians to operate them. PCR tests are difficult to scale or decentralize. Bill Gates points out that portable versions of these molecular diagnostic machines need to be distributed throughout Africa to prevent the spread of coronavirus. We do not read about anyone gearing up to provide such equipment.
Running the test machines also requires a consumable test kit, and the number of coronavirus cases in China has exceeded its laboratory testing capacity due to a shortage of PCR testing kits. Consequently, China has had to resort to using CT scans as a hospital-based rapid test to screen infected patients for coronavirus, followed up by laboratory-based testing for confirmation. Many clinics do not have the expensive machines to do CT scans and good thing because these scans do not test for the virus. They can only report on the state of the lungs but not what is causing any infection.
In our age of evidence-based medicine, nothing is more important than the quality of laboratory tests. It is commonly thought that laboratory tests provide two-thirds to three-fourths of the information used for making medical decisions. If so, test results had better tell the truth about what is happening with our patients.
A study five years ago estimates that in the United States, some 251,000 deaths per year occur because of errors in medical care. This makes medical errors the third leading cause of death, only after heart disease and cancer. Lab test failures contribute to delayed or wrong diagnoses and unnecessary costs and care. For context, a 2014 study estimated that diagnostic errors happen about 12 million times per year in U.S. outpatients.
I am not saying the Chinese did the wrong thing and that a disaster is not unfolding but what I am saying is that the entire story is like a house of cards. There is nothing secure in the official statistics. Alexander Aston writes, “The virus is serious, and will have dramatic consequences, but it is no black death. The virus is a catalyst, something beyond our agency to control which is triggering cascading changes in a system that has been rotting for some time. The virus is a spark, not the cause, and it is breaking down the last reinforcing bonds holding the global system together.”
We all now have front row seats to seeing how corrupt the medical establishment is and it will not be pretty.
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