COVID-19 Asymptomatic Transmission

WARNING: IF YOU ARE TRIGGERED BY NON-MAINSTREAM VIEWS AROUND COVID-19, DO NOT READ THIS BLOG!

Before I go off into my somewhat non-mainstream views, let me first say what I DO believe about COVID-19

• A respiratory corona-virus related to SARS, MERS, and common colds, originated in Wuhan China and spread very quickly around the world.
• The virus was most deadly for the elderly and people with certain co-morbidities, exceeding a 10% case fatality rate, which is dreadful. This has resulted in considerable excess deaths around the world.
• People at greatest risk should absolutely take the new vaccination.

Early on in the pandemic, this notion of "asymptomatic spread" first appeared. I recall at the time thinking that didn't make much sense. These respiratory viruses are spread by droplets that come from coughs and sneezes. In fact, the reason we cough and sneeze when we get this type of virus is precisely to spread it. From a virus evolutionary point-of-view, that is the purpose of inducing coughing and sneezing, to better spread itself. So I was initially quite skeptical that this virus somehow spread effectively when a person has the virus but has no symptoms of having the virus (is "asymptomatic"). My common-sense bullshit meter was tingling, but who knows?

In fact, I was even skeptical if a person can properly said to "have" the virus if they have no symptoms. That flew in the face of standard medical practice. In general a "case" has always in the past required symptoms of some sort. In this instance, we said that if a PCR test returned positive, that was called a "case" even with no symptoms. We'll come back to this later.

I was relieved when on June 8, Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove the Technical Lead for the COVID-19 response at the World Health Organization said asymptomatic spread was "very rare", in accordance with all experience of such viruses in the past. Here is a clip from the news conference where she says that.

She is saying that it is very rare for an asymptomatic transmission person to transmit the disease. She is asking for quarantine and contact-tracing for symptomatic individuals as a top priority.

A furor arose as a result of her statements, and she pseudo-walked the statement back, saying it was based on relatively few studies (4 peer-reviewed), included some unpublished information she had received from expert-briefings from member countries, and that it did not include "computer models" that concluded a wide-range of possible numbers for asymptomatic transmission, up to about 40%. It was clear however, that her judgment remains that it is rare. If you want to hear her "walk-back", you can find it here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RcJ2yyNkUk&t.

I revisit this because there has been a new, major peer-reviewed study published out of Wuhan, China, in Nature on Nov 20, 2020 that has recently come to my attention: Post-lockdown SARS-CoV-2 nucleic acid screening in nearly ten million residents of Wuhan, China. Of course, take anything out of China with a grain of salt. And in fact, this paper made the point that Wuhan is "good to go" and "open for business" (using scientific jargon) - and so we are to infer China as a whole as well, so there is a political point. But the interesting result is that out of 10,000,000 people tested they identified no symptomatic cases and 300 asymptomatic cases. The did contact tracing on the 300 asymtomatic cases out to an additional 1174 close contacts, and found no transmission to any of them. The number of cycles of the PCR test run on the 300 was around Ct=35 with a range as low as 30 and as high as 39. I'll get back to the significance of this later as well.

This is strong evidence that, in the real world, people who test positive for COVID-19 in a PCR test DO NOT transmit the disease. And that is sort of, yeah, duh. As Jeff Tucker writing about this study in Asymtomatic Spread Revisited re-quoted himself from June as saying:

What this suggests, of course, is that there is nothing mysteriously magical or insidious about this new virus. It behaves like the viruses that scientists have been studying for one hundred years. What we do with a normal virus is be careful around others when we have symptoms. We don’t cough and sneeze on people and generally stay home if we are sick. That’s how it’s always been. You don’t need lockdown to achieve that; you just proceed with life as normal, treating the sick and otherwise not disrupting life.

I make this point in the context of lockdowns causing huge negative health and social outcomes. Increases in suicides, un-diagnosed and missed medical treatments causing death, increases in mental health issues and drug addictions, increases in incidences of domestic violence, people losing their livelihoods and being driven into poverty.

On to the question of the COVID-19 PCR tests. I previously covered this a bit, but let me restate in the context of this information about lack of spread from asymptomatic cases.

DNA (Deoxryboynucleic Acid) is the blueprint for life.

It is a spiraled double-stranded chain of nucleic acid made up by assembling base-pairs in a certain order. The bases are named A, C, T, and G. The ordering of these create chemical factories that are the body's instructions on how to produce proteins inside the cell. The proteins then go on to regulate all aspects of how we develop and operate as humans. Identical DNA is contained inside all our cells, and comprise a unique sequence of 3 billion of these base pairs for each of us.

DNA replicates by splitting the pair of strands into two single strands. Once split, only the right complementary molecule can bind to the site of the split. All the building blocks are floating around loosely and those that can bind do bind, and that way you get back to having two identical double-helix strands.

RNA (rybonucelic acid) is a close relative of DNA. DNA splits and repairs, constructing an RNA strand in the process which then leaves the nucleus of the cell and goes out into the cell to manufacture the proteins. RNA is made of basically the same stuff as DNA, but has only a single strand. An RNA molecule can reproduce in a way similar to DNA, by attracting complimentary bases and then splitting into two RNA strands. The genetic material of viruses is in fact RNA bundled inside a little delivery capsule made of proteins. It cannot reproduce outside of cells, but must bind to a cell and inject its RNA into a cell. Inside the cell, the RNA finds a fertile ground to reproduce itself, eventually killing the cell and bursting out with multiple copies of itself.

This brings us to the PCR

The initials "PCR" stands for "Polymerase Chain Reaction". DNA Polymerase is an enzyme that can bind to DNA strands and cause them to replicate. the PCR test contains a custom-made enzyme that can cause a matching fragment of DNA to replicate if it is present. This is done over and over again to amplify that little bit of DNA, in the process binding molecules that fluoresce to that DNA segment. Once enough of that DNA is made, the light from the fluorescence can be detected. The number of cycles of replication needed to achieve that is denoted by Ct, the cycle threshold. If that can be done after relatively few cycles, there was lots of that DNA present. If after midling many, then there was just a few. If you run it enough times, you will always find the thing being looked for. PCR was initially used for forensic testing of DNA by law enforcement. You used DNA taken from the suspect to create a PCR test. you then run the PCR test against a sample found on the crime scene.

The PCR test was invented in the 1990s by a wild and crazy pot-smoking, LSD-experimenting, surfer named Kary Mullis who eventually won the Nobel Prize for it. He was on the OJ Simpson trial team. He wrote a book about his exploits

Here is Kary Mullus in 1993 talking about the PCR test in the context of detecting the HIV virus.

With PCR, if you do it well, you can find almost anything in anybody, it starts making you believe in the sort of Buddhist notion that everything is contained in everything else. Because if you can amplify one single molecule up to something that you can really measure, which PCR can do, then there's just very few molecules that you don't have at least one single one of in your body, ok? So that can be thought of as a misuse of PCR just to claim that it's meaningful.

Mullis was no fan of Fauci. Here he is commenting on him regarding his involvement in the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

Kary Mullis died suddenly in August, 2019, just prior to CORONA-19 hitting, unfortunately.

In many jurisdictions, in Ontario for example, you can be said to test positive up to Ct=45. That is universally regarded as too high! Here is a little chart that explains why.

The red line shows how a typical COVID-19 viral load proceeds in a patient exposed to the virus. For a while it is nothing, then it very suddenly spikes. The body is very, very good at fighting off things like this, and once the immune system kicks in it rapidly drops the viral load. You would be considered asymptomatic on either side of that spike (before day 4 and after day 9).

The dotted blue lines show at what Ct a COVID-19 PCR test detects a viral load. It shows that with a Ct=25, you're pretty safe, but juice it to Ct=30 to be extra safe. Ct=35 is overkill (the difference between 30 and 35 cannot even be seen on this scale). This is covered in the following video from Professor Michael Mina, MD, Ph.D.Assistant Professor of Epidemiology, Immunology, and Infectious Diseases at Harvard. A pretty trusted source in my opinion.

Here is another graphic that demonstrates how this stuff is known. You run a PCR test and see how many cycles it takes to hit. You also attempt to culture the sample to grow the virus. This tells you fairly definitively if there is any live virus. If no live virus, you are not infectious.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.08.05.20168963v1

 

After 30, it's very rare. Below 27 it's safe to say you have live virus and should be quarantined.

Earlier studies out of Massachusetts, New York, and Nevada carried out in July showed that up to 90% of people testing PCR-positive for COVID-19 carried barely any traces of the virus. That was covered by the New York Times in late August: Your Coronavirus Test Is Positive. Maybe It Shouldn't Be.

In an unusual move, the WHO on Dec 14 released a memo saying the Ct values should be checked to ensure we are not getting overly many false positives:  https://www.who.int/news/item/14-12-2020-who-information-notice-for-ivd-users. That's as official as it gets.

So what am I saying? I am saying that the PCR tests are overly sensitive, and a very significant number of people are testing positive that are not at all infectious. Therefore end lockdowns and mask mandates. They're scientifically dumb and have extremely bad side effects, both health and economic. Focus on quarantining the ill as we have done forever, and make a special effort to protect the elderly who are at particularly high risk.

Trust the properly interpreted science, not the politicians. Politicians, mainstream media, and social media are outdoing one another with doom porn to get virtue points. Safe to ignore.