Straightforward question: I keep hearing/reading about the new rising cases of COVID every day and week and I wonder, who is getting tested? The ones forced to do so by work is not a great number and I have not seen in months those long lines of people dutifully waiting to get their brain swabbed via nasal cavity. If you are already tested and know the result, I doubt you will go and get tested again every week or even month. If you already got the shot, why bother with testing, specially if you are symptom free? I am not even seeing people in line getting the vaccine, so where are the powers that be gathering the info from?
Inquiring minds.
I think they have a spinning prize wheel and every day they spin it and throw a syringe at it. Where it lands is the new “varient and the new numbers of horrific deaths….
That was better than my idea, that they pull the numbers out of their rear ends…
I wonder what the tests detect. IOW, what are they testing for?
It’s already come out that many of the “tests” will come back positive if either corona or influenza are present. The CDC has recommended that hospitals only use tests that differentiate between the two, so we know tests are out there that don’t. So how many “COVID positive” results are actually “influenza positive”?
Also, are they still using the Innova rapid-result nasal swabs that are notoriously unreliable, so much that the FDA has pulled emergency-use authorization and issued a Class 1 recall? Y’know, the tests that Jeff Bezos used four on himself at once, and two said positive and two said negative (he can only be one or the other, positive or negative, which means this small sampling had a 50% false-result/failure rate).
On top of that, a vaccine is supposed to train your body to make antibodies, and the mRNA-based vaccine makes its own spike proteins to achieve that effect, so if the tests are looking for either spike proteins or antibodies, would we not expect vaccinated individuals to test positive across the board?
My hypothesis: Some of the test results represent unvaccinated people who feel ill and want confirmation or who are required to test because of their “status” (perfectly reasonable), a few are hospital patients who are required to be tested before being admitted (somewhat reasonable), but most are coming from vaccinated people who are job-mandated or COVID-paranoid enough to continue getting tested even though they’ve had the “99% effective” vaccine.
My subsequent hypothesis is that the “99% effective” vaccine:
a. is nowhere near 99% effective (without doing borderline-criminal manipulative or mis-representative magic on the statistics);
b. by accident or by design, does not help limit transmission, and may in fact increase transmission rates by lowering or masking symptoms (infected people think they’re OK so they go out and socialize — and spread the virus);
c. comes with a laundry list of potential side effects, most of which are currently unknown or unreported, and any of which could be an alternative explanation of why the vaccine is being pushed so hard for an otherwise-unremarkable virus with cheap, effective, and readily-available remedies (HCQ and Zinc, for one).
But those are just my thoughts.
(Edit: As an add-on to both hypotheses, I wonder if the vaccine is still being tested on the population at large, and a sizeable number of “vaccinated” people received a placebo and have zero immunity, and that’s contributing to the large number of positive tests among “vaccinated” people. Think: “double-blind study with a sample size of 120 million”. Just a thought.)
I have noticed that many of the new Covid numbers are now given as % increase, instead of actual case numbers. For instance, they will say, Tampa had an increase of 100%, instead of saying they had 10 cases, when they had 5 cases yesterday. To me, a % is pretty much useless, especially when they had been using actual numbers before. The only use is that it is telling by what it doesn’t show.
There is no doubt that Covid 19 and it’s variants are dangerous, especially for those with co-morbidities. But to intentionally lie and obfuscate as they have done since the very beginning, does not help, and it sets off alarms in thinking peoples heads. And those alarms, once rung, cannot be un-rung. And the more lies that are told, the closer we look. As in, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.
Fauci and company have no shame, apparently. And my parents did not raise a fool.
When you see percentages, one reason may be that they don’t want you to see how small the actual numbers are. It’s not “useless”, it’s deliberately misleading.
The media reports on a small town that experiences a 300% increase in homicides. 300%! ZOMG!
They don’t tell you until the 10th paragraph that last year the town had one homicide, but this year a man distraught over losing his job and being unable to support his wife and two kids, killed them and then himself. Tragic, yes, but not exactly indicative of an epidemic of violent crime.
Like pkoning said, percentages are a way to make statistically-insignificant variations in small numbers sound like a much bigger deal than they are. It’s a deliberate deception.
I have been vaccinated (J&J 3/21), I am scheduled to go on a cruise with Carnival in late Aug. They require testing for vaccinated passengers with 72 hours of boarding. If you are unvaccinated, they will allow a limited number of you to travel if you have the above testing – followed by another test on embarkation, and on debarkation. Along with the option of imposing quarantine in cabin if the tests return a positive result. I don’t think they know what vaccinated means
Healthcare theater. Sadly Carnival, which in my family’s experience runs a great operation, appears to be doing the Kabuki in order to operate.
Mebbe kinda like Krupp in 1938.