Context: There's a widespread and false belief that PCR tests return falsely positive due to an excessively high number of cycles. That's just not true: the technique looks for a specific genetic sequence, and if it isn't there, there's nothing to amplify. x.com/mackayim/statu…
The more sophisticated version of this meme is “well, ok, they aren’t literally false positive in the sense they *never* had the virus, but fully recovered and non-infectious people can be positive because PCR is so sensitive.” Maybe, but that doesn't apply here.
@BadCOVID19Takes It’s insane how much this illogical argument comes up from people with little to no understanding of PCR parroting it.
@BadCOVID19Takes It was a single NYTimes times article with a nuanced story and a biased headline. And we’ve been dealing with that article for months now.
@BadCOVID19Takes Don’t they look at more than one sequence as well to rule out/minimize the chance of read out from fragments?