Re: this. And eating dirt as a kid

But there are 35-40% false negatives. If you know how the test works, you know. False negatives are common because the test relies on nasal secretions, and covid has evolved over time to be more in the throat and upper airways and has less presence in the nose itself.

You're better off swabbing your cheeks and throat for covid, if you want more accuracy.

The tests look for 3 biomarkers (sometimes two) unique to the virus. The odds of finding those specific biomarkers without actually having covid present (false positive) is extremely rare. In fact, many people who are asymptomatic will test positive because covid is present in their nose, but they are not "infected" yet, or won't be. So they chalk that up to a false positive, when in fact it is positive, but you never got sick. That itself is rare, but that's how most false positives happen, and again technically, most of them are still accurate, but do not indicate a systemic infection.

If your test is positive, then you're 99% assured you are infected. If it is negative, there's around a 35-40% chance the test didn't detect it and you're still infected. And I'm not convinced there isn't a genetic factor as well. You are far more likely to have an infection without the virus being present in your nose, than to have it be present in your nose but not infected.

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We're into our 6th pandemic strain here in the US+worldwide.

Mar 16, 2024, 11:13 AM

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That TLDNR post I made a while back saying covid isn't a pandemic, well, this is why. It's a new virus, which is technically a pandemic of pandemic (worldwide dominant) viruses. There have been 6 pandemic covid strains to date. Wuhan (A.1 and B.1), Alpha, Delta, Omicron (original), XBB.1.5, and now most recently JN.1. When you have a pandemic strain appear, it becomes dominant, worldwide, and other prior variants die out. Then the new pandemic strain keeps evolving "perpetuating variants", all based off the parent pandemic strain, and you end up with a period of no dominant strains, but MANY (sometimes 50+) smaller strains that have limited success. During these periods of perpetuating strains, after a dominant strain, that is when cases and illnesses are low. The lower the cases, the more diverse the variants circulating. Every now and then a novel strain will appear, or evolve, into a dominant strain. This is when cases rise, and a new dominant strain spreads worldwide. This is why covid isn't a pandemic. It's a pandemic of pandemics, as it is an entirely new virus.

The chart below illustrates what I'm talking about. The picture below illustrates every single sequenced covid sample in the US since the start of the pandemic (millions). The grey area, just picture it mentally as a rainbow with hundreds of colors, as that is the "other" category and represents variants less than 2%. The areas where you have solid lines go vertical the most, those are your waves, and pandemic variants. As you can see at the right, we're at yet another pandemic strain, this time JN.1. Lot of people sick and cases are high is what this translates to.

Please note: The chart below just shows the percentage of all sequences for specific strains. The number of cases, and the severity of infections, differ greatly among variants. Also note the graph at the bottom showing cases. That graph is not accurate for the past year or more. Cases are not reported now except in medical/hospital settings.