Nearly 90 percent of all coronavirus diagnoses in the U.S. were more than likely not contagious, according to a recent report by the New York Times.
Researchers found the vast majority of individuals who had tested positive for COVID-19 potentially carried such “insignificant” amounts of the virus that they weren’t even contagious.
That means that most of the 6 million Americans who have tested positive for the virus had its antibodies, but were likely not spreading it to others.
Dr. Michael Mina, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said the tests used by most hospitals and labs were much too sensitive, and therefore overstated the public risk of super spreaders.
These tests, called PCR tests, identify the virus’s genetic material, but do not report the amount of genetic material present, which is what determines how sick a person is, or whether that person can spread the sickness to others.
“We’ve been using one type of data for everything, and that is just plus or minus — that’s all,” Dr. Mina said. “We’re using that for clinical diagnostics, for public health, for policy decision-making … It’s really irresponsible, I think, to forgo the recognition that this is a quantitative issue.”
This is just the latest question that has been raised in regards to the coronavirus and our response to it.
Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention quietly updated its COVID-19 death numbers to indicate that only 6% of Americans classified as coronavirus deaths died solely from the coronavirus.
All other deaths were connected to underlying conditions or varying circumstances.
This means that the justification for the extended shutdowns are no longer viable, according to some critics.
Dear God. If you accept the overall numbers of coronavirus deaths, with the CDC’s report that only 6% of those were actually FROM the Chinese Virus, just over 11,000 actually died from the virus. We annihilated our economy, cost tens of millions of Americans their jobs for that??
— Ned Ryun (@nedryun) August 31, 2020
The CDC now claims that 94% of all coronavirus deaths were supplementary, meaning, the person had co-morbidities. Less than 10,000 Americans have died from Covid-19 alone. #Coronavirus is and always has been a hoax. Democrats masked & impoverished America to rig an election.
— Candace Owens (@RealCandaceO) September 1, 2020
