1) The definition of Covid deaths is too broad. Currently any death with an incidental positive Covid test within prior 28 days is counted as Covid. However, even deaths from the misdiagnosis of respiratory failure will result in Covid being put as the primary cause. There is no post mortem evidence that these are Covid deaths. There is no equivalent rise in death certificates with mentions of pneumonia as was seen in the spring. Accident and Emergency attendances for acute respiratory infections are currently 300 per day lower than average.
2) The tests are not measuring the disease. It is nonsense to rely simply on positive test cases without requiring the presence of symptoms to define the scale of the epidemic. However, if positive tests are to be used, determination of the test accuracy rate is absolutely essential (especially the false positive rate). These should be independently determined. This work must be current to assess the current rates. Those defending the tests claim they have been quality checked by the use of “whole genome sequencing” – but that test has never been used as a diagnostic test in this way either, so it’s like using one unvalidated process to validate another.
3) Excess deaths are not all Covid deaths. Pandemics can cause excess deaths. Lockdowns can also cause excess deaths and we saw excess deaths from many causes in Spring. There appears to have been no attempt to analyse these deaths or factor them into current decision-making processes. Normal interactions with the health service have still not resumed and excess deaths in the 15-44 year-old age group have climbed steadily throughout the year. These are nearly all non-Covid deaths.
4) There is an NHS staffing crisis caused by false positive test results. NHS including ambulance staff and care home staff are all being tested and made to isolate merely on the basis of a single positive test even when asymptomatic, when the evidence on spread from asymptomatic subjects is equivocal at best. This is causing a staffing crisis in the NHS which will undoubtedly result in patients dying.
5) The only confirmatory testing carried out has shown no Covid. Army testing in Liverpool uses a different and more reliable test – the ‘Lateral Flow Test’ (LFT). It has demonstrated that there is minimal Covid in the Liverpool community, the alleged hotspot. The numbers testing positive are barely above the false positive rate reported for the LFT meaning there were no real Covid cases found. In other words, the Army results confirm the fact that at least 90% of the PCR were false positives and the government is panicking on the basis of a massively exaggerated and unreliable statistic.
6) Weak criteria used to declare a positive will result in false positives. Testing in May, by Imperial College showed that only half of the positive results from commercial laboratories were true positives and they questioned the criteria these laboratories were using to define a positive.
7) The results from PCR testing no longer fit reality.
ONS random population sampling, using PCR testing, predicted that 4300 in 100,000 of the population of Salford (4.3%) had COVID on 11th November (16 times higher than their national estimate for 27th April to 10th May). Typically, during a pandemic, the general prevalence in the entire population is substantially less than 1%.
Finally, positivity rates from PCR testing started to become strongly correlated with the volume of testing carried out after the middle of July.