Positive tests don't mean people have the virus now.
The PCR test looks for the virus by amplifying the RNA it detects. Every amplification is called a cycle. The more cycles the test uses, the higher likelihood of finding pieces of the virus’s RNA. In the United States, most labs go through 40 cycles, according to the Times. Experts interviewed said this number of cycles is unnecessarily high:
Tests with thresholds so high may detect not just live virus but also genetic fragments, leftovers from infection that pose no particular risk — akin to finding a hair in a room long after a person has left, Dr. Mina said.
Any test with a cycle threshold above 35 is too sensitive, agreed Juliet Morrison, a virologist at the University of California, Riverside. “I’m shocked that people would think that 40 could represent a positive,” she said.
A more reasonable cutoff would be 30 to 35, she added. Dr. Mina said he would set the figure at 30, or even less. Those changes would mean the amount of genetic material in a patient’s sample would have to be 100-fold to 1,000-fold that of the current standard for the test to return a positive result — at least, one worth acting on.
So, an oversensitive test is detecting the “cases” Dr. Fauci is having the vapors over. Taiwan, which has been praised for its response to the virus, uses a cycle threshold of under 32 to diagnose patients likely to become ill and infectious. Without a doubt, this allows them to do more effective contact tracing and mitigation. They are targeting the contacts of those highly likely to be contagious. An Oxford study found cycle thresholds higher than 30 were detecting non-infectious cases.
Dr. Anthony Fauci was on CNN Monday morning, lamenting the number of daily positive tests for COVID-
pjmedia.com