Imagine changing the rules in the middle of the game, so that hits rather than runs, or first downs rather than touchdowns, determine the game winner. That is exactly what is happening with COVID reporting, just as many of us predicted. This confirms the lingering question of how much of COVID was about the actual virus versus a political club to hurt President Trump and drive him from office, quite successfully.
As an interesting coincidence, the first case of the novel coronavirus arrived in the U.S. on the same day the House walked articles of impeachment to the Senate. The next impeachment was based on Trump’s supposed calls for violence at a pre-planned Capitol riot just before Congress was to certify (or not) the Electoral College vote, the riot blamed on a speech he gave after the rioting already started.
In politics, there are no coincidences, and the recent rule changes for tallying COVID case are no exception. What happened after Orange Man went from bad to gone?
The World Health Organization, on Biden's inauguration day, released a notice that the COVID PCR test was overly sensitive based on its cycle threshold. A positive result, rather than simply being added to the case counts broadcast constantly by Fox News and MSNBC, must consider other factors such as test specifics, symptoms, and patient history, as would be done for most other laboratory tests in medicine.
Lowering the cycle threshold means fewer cases going forward, not due to anything Trump or Biden did or did not do but simply because of a new way of counting cases. Interestingly this notice was created on Jan. 13, but not released until Jan. 20, Biden's inauguration day. What a coincidence!
Did the basic concept of interpreting a medical test based on context just dawn on the medical experts at the WHO? Physicians do that all the time. A single high blood pressure reading in the doctor’s office may be due to “white coat syndrome” rather than true hypertension and is viewed in that context.
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