I know this a lot to read. Some more relevant snips. If I find more, I'll make another post.
"There was a famous Chinese paper that estimated that if you're testing asymptomatic people, up to 80% of positives could be false positive.
"What they do is they take some kind of a continuum and they arbitrarily say this point is the difference between positive and negative."
"Wow," I said. "That's so important. I think people envision it as one of two things: Positive or negative, like a pregnancy test. You "have it" or you don't."
"PCR is really a manufacturing technique," Crowe explained. "You start with one molecule. You start with a small amount of DNA and on each cycle the amount doubles, which doesn't sound like that much, but if you, if you double 30 times, you get approximately a billion times more material than you started with. So as a manufacturing technique, it's great. What they do is they attach a fluorescent molecule to the RNA as they produce it. You shine a light at one wavelength, and you get a response, you get light sent back at a different wavelength. So, they measure the amount of light that comes back and that's their surrogate for how much DNA there is. I'm using the word DNA. There's a step in RT- PCR test which is where you convert the RNA to DNA.
"I think if a country said, "You know, we need to end this epidemic," They could quietly send around a memo saying: "We shouldn't be having the cutoff at 37. If we put it at 32, the number of positive tests drops dramatically. If it's still not enough, well, you know, 30 or 28 or something like that. So, you can control the sensitivity."
Yes, you read that right. Labs can manipulate how many "cases' of Covid-19 their country has. Is this how the Chinese made their case load vanish all of a sudden?