I am hearing accusations of conspiracies in hospitals over using the COVID diagnosis for more reimbursement. And although it may be happening it is not by design. I worked over 30 years as an attending OBGYN physician and I rarely saw dishonesty among health care workers. As a group these people are by far the most trustworthy I have ever encountered. The problem is in the false positivity with the PCR test. 

If you are generally aware, the PCR test is used to amplify small amount of genetic material so as to recognize patterns of DNA by "cycling." (Also, for RNA virus, the RNA is converted to DNA in order to be detected, it's just the way the test works) This is how we have been able to recognize the genomes in Egyptian mummies and Wooly Mammoths. It works because if you amplify and cycle enough times to "grow" legitimate DNA fragments, you get something with with a fair amount of specificity. 

What is becoming more and more apparent is that the PCR test was not designed as a diagnostic tool for infection, and really cannot function as one without having a huge amount of false positives, period. 

When it comes to COVID, the presence of viral particles picked up by the PCR technique does not and has not been quantitatively linked to an active "symptomatic" infection. It simply cannot be so, because infection threshold as a result of viral load is different for each patient. It turns out, if you "cycle" over around 25 times, the false positivity of COVID infection starts getting very high. I and others have explained in blogs how people can be exposed to virus, and mount a simple innate immune response and never know any differently. 

When you test these people with very low viral loads, who are not sick, you can find the viral RNA code that is used to "diagnose" if you cycle enough times. The last I read, Labcorp cycles at least 40 times to detect viral genome fragments. The PCR test was never intended for diagnosis of infection but as a qualitative test for presence of parts of a virus genome. 

I know there has been some confusion circulating the net about what the test inventor Kary Mullis had said about that. But we walk daily with people who have any number of parts of killer virus or bacterial genomes which one could pick up with a PCR test if one had the specific test for it. Would we claim that that individual was an infected patient? No! 

We now know that the prevalence of COVID is much higher than we had anticipated, at least 53 million in September by recent CDC estimate, and increasing. 

What does this all mean and what is my point?  So, what we are seeing in rising hospitalizations and deaths, is probably flu like respiratory illness from a variety of viruses, which we see every winter at at a high rate in our hospitals. Many of these so-called infections and deaths are falsely testing positive to COVID because of prior non-infectious exposure. And it is now well known that people can test PCR positive for several weeks after exposure. 

Some reports by TV experts claim that the virus has changed and it isn't killing like before. That is wrong. The virus still kills like before, and I imagine any astute clinician would recognize it right away with the DIC like metabolic appearance and ground glass opacities on chest CT.  If you are not seeing those two things in a sick patient, then it probably isn't a COVID pneumonia and patients are therefore dying of a winter time flu like illness, not COVID. 

The hospitalizations now do not reflect the COVID clinical pattern seen back in March and April. In conclusion, what we see now are ordinary respiratory illnesses needing supportive care masquerading as COVID because of a false positive PCR testing which is a clinically unreliable test for symptomatic infection. This is not a theory. There is research to back this up.