Is it all false?
Medicine has a very long tradition of jumping to conclusions and explaining all kinds of fancy mechanism.
Has anynody done the calculations of false positive covid tests ? It sounds great that a test is 99.9% accurate when it comes to specificity, but the results are terrible when very few have the so-called virus. See the quote below from the Norwegian authorities.
With a prevalence of 0.01 per cent (as in Norway today), the positive predictive value would be around 7 per cent with today's PCR test (sensitivity 80 per cent and specificity 99.9 per cent). That is, 14 out of 15 who test positive are not infected with SARS-CoV-2.
If we presume that the rate is as low as 20 positives in Australia, one in a million, then we would have 1000 false positives if we test a million. If we are lucky we would find one of the Infected ones. We would then probably treat 1000 persons as if they had so-called Covid.
All the positives in Melbourne may in principle be false positives. Maybe one or 2 have the virus. Now, if the accuracy is only 99%, we would have 10000 false positives for each hit.
And this is the best possible scenario, not counting false negatives.
Victoria actually did 1 million tests and got 0.3 % positives. If the accuracy of the tests used were 99.7 they could all be false positives.
https://www.fhi.no/en/op/novel-coronavirus-facts-advice/testing-and-follow-up/test-criteria-for-coronavirus
Now 99.9 % specificity may seem a bit high, and BMJ states the following
As current studies show marked variation and are
current estimates from systematic reviews,
numbers of 70% for sensitivity and 95% for specificity for illustrative purposes
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