Only one in 1000 positive tests should be counted as positive.

Covid tests may be 1000 times too sensitive

From an article in NYT:

"The PCR test amplifies genetic matter from the virus in cycles; the fewer cycles required, the greater the amount of virus, or viral load, in the sample. The greater the viral load, the more likely the patient is to be contagious.

This number of amplification cycles needed to find the virus, called the cycle threshold, is never included in the results sent to doctors and coronavirus patients, although it could tell them how infectious the patients are.

In three sets of testing data that include cycle thresholds, compiled by officials in Massachusetts, New York and Nevada, up to 90 percent of people testing positive carried barely any virus, a review by The Times found.

On Thursday, the United States recorded 45,604 new coronavirus cases, according to a database maintained by The Times. If the rates of contagiousness in Massachusetts and New York were to apply nationwide, then perhaps only 4,500 of those people may actually need to isolate and submit to contact tracing.

One solution would be to adjust the cycle threshold used now to decide that a patient is infected. Most tests set the limit at 40, a few at 37. This means that you are positive for the coronavirus if the test process required up to 40 cycles, or 37, to detect the virus.

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."

 This means that the number of those who are now tested positive should be divided by 1000, also the dead, of course. They may die from anything and be counted as Covid if they have traces of Covid proteins. That means that there are 27,931 cases in the world, and a total of 905 deaths to date, in the world.

Since the only thing that makes a death a covid death, is the PCR test, they may have died from any of the 150 viruses sirculating at any time or any of the commodities that most have. Only 6% seem to die from Covid alone, but remember even these are flu deaths where SARS CoV 2 is the only virus tested for. All of the symptoms are extremely vague and common to most flus and pneumonias. 

With the new information there have been only 194 deaths in the US and 6,529 people really contaminated. This seems ridiculous, but if the testing machine had been stopped at the point the researchers say, the numbers would not have been higher than that. The tests would not have been counted as positive, neither for the contaminated nor the dead.

The whole point is that the false positives are both for cases and for deaths, so case fatality percentages stay exactly the same.