Chicken Little and Henny Penny had been spending a lot of time together during the pandemic, mostly sitting out on Henny Penny’s front porch, drinking coffee if it happened to be morning, and wine in the afternoon. Both had been careful about public exposure, and they felt relatively safe around one another. But they were socially distancing there on the porch, nevertheless.
Coffee was the beverage of choice, at the moment.
“Nice day, for November,” Chicken Little observed.
“Yes. And it doesn’t look like the sky is falling,” joked Henny Penny, taking a sip. “Not even slightly.”
Chicken Little ignored the jab. “So, I hear where Joe Biden says he’s not going to order a national shut-down,” he remarked. “Says it would be counter-productive. But he says Congress needs to spend whatever it takes to help workers and families.”
He knew Henny Penny was not a Biden fan, and he expected a possibly sarcastic response. But she simply changed the subject.
“I saw a video yesterday,” she said. “The PCR testing that all the public health people have been relying on, turns out it’s been churning out false positives like crazy. And everyone knows about it, but they keep reporting the cases as positive anyway.”
“I don’t think ‘everyone’ knows about it,” Chicken Little chirped. “I’ve never heard about it.”
“Well, it was in The New York Times, so you should have heard about it. Isn’t that where you’re getting all your news?”
“I just look at the graphs, in the COVID section. Who can keep up with all the articles?”
“Well, maybe you should read the articles once in a while,” Henny Penny clucked. “This one talks about the method the testing laboratories use for the tests, and that most of the results are false positives.”
“Oh, come on,” he scoffed. “I seriously doubt most of the tests are false positives.”
“Scoff all you want. I’m just quoting the New York Times. The lab gets a sample from a swab, and puts it into a machine that creates copies of the virus DNA. The DNA is too small to measure, so the machine generates DNA copies until they start to see evidence.”
“I think it’s RNA,” Chicken Little noted.
“Okay, sure, RNA. Each ‘cycle’ of the machine makes a certain number of copies, so they keep running cycles until the virus shows up. Or it doesn’t show up. If it takes more than 30 cycles to make the virus show up, it means that the person tested was probably not contagious, because they had very little virus in their sample. In other words, the person had a little bit of virus, but nothing worth getting excited about.
“So, yes, they’re technically ‘infected’ but they don’t carry enough virus to spread it to another person. But the labs are all running 35 to 40 cycles, looking for virus in ever more meaningless amounts, and then declaring that the person is ‘positive’.”
“That sounds a little bit crazy,” Chicken Little had to admit.
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you. The video I was watching yesterday talked about a French study from this past September, where they compared PCR test results, with results from the same people when the sample was cultured. When the PCR test found virus at 25 cycles, about 70% of the same people had the virus also show up in the culture. But when the lab had to run 30 cycles to find the virus, only 20% of the cultures showed the virus. And when the lab had to run 35 cycles, less than 3% of the people had contagious levels of virus showing in the Petri dish.
“But all of our labs are running 35 cycles, or more… and then reporting people as positive. So, it’s like, 97% of the people who are testing ‘positive’ are probably not contagious.”
“This was really in The New York Times?” Chicken Little asked, scratching his head.
“Part of the story was. But most of it was in a video by a nutrition expert. She seemed like a pretty smart lady.”
“And she was probably also telling you, that we don’t need to wear masks,” Chicken Little chirped.
Henny Penny gave him a sharp look. “As a matter of fact, she was. But as you know, I always wear a mask whenever I go out. Which is as infrequently as possible.”
Chicken Little stroked his stubby beak thoughtfully. “Well, if the testing is as inaccurate as you say, then why are the hospitals filling up?”
“Are they filling up? Really? Colorado appears to have about 1,597 hospitalized COVID patients. But we have about 10,600 hospital beds in the state.”
Henny Penny’s face flashed the look of a winning debate contestant.
“Yes, but 33% of Colorado hospitals say they are facing staff shortages,” Chicken Little argued. “And the rate of new deaths last week was nearly as high as it was back in April, when the hospitals were still learning how to keep people alive.”
Henny Penny took a sip her coffee. “Well, either the sky is falling, or it isn’t.”
Chicken Little gazed out at the snow-decked mountains. “I’m saying, yes… it is.”