Pseudo-Epidemics: Why COVID-19 Is Guaranteed to Never End
8th August 2020
The problem is simple but vicious circular logic. In the 2006 case sanity was able to reassert itself because there was a much slower test which was considered reliable. It defined what we call the ground truth: the final arbiter of reality. PCR tests could be cross-checked against the ground truth after enough time had passed, allowing the big reveal that the error rate on the PCR was 100%.
But with COVID-19 there is no other test. And it’s a “new” virus, whose exact effects are unknown, so it was decided that the obvious choice of using symptoms as the ground truth would be taking too much risk.
In this situation something new and very nasty has happened. The PCR test has itself become the ground truth. Despite having had an error rate of 100% in the past, it now by definition has an error rate of zero.