From and Article out of India where they are asking the same question.

“Disease is rightly described as Dis-ease, meaning thereby a feeling of being unwell. Since an overwhelming majority of those who are counted as cases of COVID do not develop any dis-ease, it is therefore all about the result of a test called RT- PCR, a positive report implies infection by the virus.

With stakes high, the test ought to be fool proof. But what have caused doubts are the high number of false positives and false negatives thrown up by the tests. The sceptical layman is also asking how the test is deemed to be fool-proof when the coronavirus is so new, barely six months old, and when we know so little about it.

But such is our faith in the reliability of this test that no one barring a few seems to have subjected the test to a scientific scrutiny.

Torsten Engelbrecht and Konstantin Demeter in an article published last month in ‘offGuardian’have raised some valid concerns. OffGuardian as a journal has been mired in controversies, but the issues flagged are pertinent.

A test needs to be tested against a gold standard. In case of an infectious disease, the gold standard remains the demonstration of the microorganism (bacteria, virus or parasite as the case may be).

In case of RT PCR for COVID-19 the virus has so far not been demonstrated. How have we then relied so heavily on a test that has no validation of its reliability?

Over a century ago Robert Koch postulated that in a microbial infection the microbe must be present in every case of the disease. Microbe must be isolated from the patient with the disease and grown in pure culture. The specific disease must be reproduced when a pure culture of the microbe is inoculated into a healthy susceptible host.

With certain modifications these postulates have been the basis of defining a microbial disease and have so far withstood the test of time. In the present pandemic, with half a million deaths over six months, the disease is yet to pass muster Koch’s postulate.

The issue of a lack of a gold standard to validate the specificity (the test being specific to the disease and giving no false positives) and sensitivity (the test picking up all cases with virus and giving no negatives) has been raised by an Australian infectious diseases specialist, Sanjaya Senanayake.

Torsten Engelbrecht in the controversial paper has raised what appears to be a valid issue. “The PCR is extremely sensitive, which means it can detect even the smallest pieces of DNA or RNA — but it cannot determine where these particles came from. That has to be determined beforehand.”

But if the virus has not been isolated so far, how on earth can we be sure about it. So far no one has claimed to have isolated the virus in purified form.”

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So my understanding now by what is meant by “Purified Virus” is now boiled down to this one sentence.

A Microbe must be isolated from the patient with the disease and grown in pure culture. The specific disease must be reproduced when a pure culture of the microbe is inoculated into a healthy susceptible host.

Apparently no one has be able to do this as of yet . Thus there is no proof that this virus is the cause of a disease.

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And Further more there seems to be no proof that the small piece of RNA they are testing for actually comes from this virus. It may be cellular debris . It may be from another virus. Apparently there is nothing actually specific about this rna they are looking for. It has not been purified .

Realistically if 80% of those who are positive for this little strand of RNA do not get a disease does than not raise the question how do we know this strand is actually a piece of a virus which is actively causing disease in the other 20%.

This is complex stuff and I have very little background in this science ( other than a couple of microbiology courses that bored me to death 50 years ago 🙂

I have misinterpreted some of the findings in these studies . No one is saying they don’t have the genome of a virus…but they are saying no scientific proof exists that the virus causes this disease or that there is even a valid test to detect it’s presence , or that thegenome they identified is even a virus

I suppose what they are saying is that so far no scientist has been able to extract a pure virus from an infected patient and reproduce it in a petri dish culture in pure form and then “infect” a host with it.

Not even an animal host .

Don’t get me wrong…there is certainly an awful disease out there …only an idiot would dispute that but it seems that the cause of the disease is still not scientifically established and the test has so many flaws in it as to render it completely useless.

Maybe the RNA strand being tested for is insignificant / incidental and that’s why 80% are asymtomatic while the 20% have something else going on ( TB?)

I am sure many here with say…ah Fully …this is splitting hairs.

But to me it is everything.

The huge % of asymptomatic “cases” has to be a clue to look into this issue.

How can we just say…well most people are not affected by this pathogen but those who are get it really bad .

Looks like this Indian Author agrees.

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Jharkhand is a small state (where I live) with a low disease load and an even lower mortality rate. Ever since the first case was detected in the state, the local newspapers publish the new cases and every single death in great details.

So far, there have been approximately two thousand and five hundred positive cases as I write. Of the positive cases that were detected on surveillance of healthy contacts, not one developed even moderate symptoms during their quarantine period. Similar has been the experience in neighbouring Bihar and Odissa. So much for the denominator in our arithmetic.

Now the numerator- the number of deaths. In Jharkhand, there have been fifteen deaths so far. The sole criterion for the label of Covid death has been a positive RT PCR test. No patient has so far died of Covid pneumonia. Each single death has been due to a condition that would have caused the fatality irrespective of the test report- Brain haemorrhage, Renal failure, Myocardial infarction, advanced tuberculosis and as farfetched conditions as head injury due to fall from roof, abdominal injury due to road accident and complications after a child birth.

All were counted as COVID death based on a report the positivity of which has not caused a single illness out of over two thousand healthy persons. Similar is the story in the neighbouring states.

No one, yes no one knows for sure how many out of the half a million deaths reported in the world have actually been due to the coronavirus, to the exclusion of those with an incidental positive (true or false) report.

Isn’t it a piquant arithmetical function? Neither the numerator nor the denominator is anywhere near correct and yet the entire world is paralysed with mortal fear.

Whole Article

https://www.nationalheraldindia.com/opinion/positive-negative-positive-how-reliable-are-covid-19-tests