That's a really big stretch even for you.

The Irish prime minister said "In Ireland we counted all deaths, in all settings, suspected cases even when no lab test was done, and included people with underlying terminal illnesses who died with Covid but not of it."

I am pretty sure other countries did the same.

[Link] - builder fell off a ladder and was a "covid death"

Do you seriously think I believe that rubbish?

Firstly masks stopping viruses have been debunked for a long time. Plus how can social distancing stop airborne particles. How did your experts come up with 6 feet or whatever. Lol.

The PCR test was not even made for making a diagnosis. The PCR test is not a diagnostic test. Kacy Mullis the inventor told us explicitly that . "It's not a virus test." It's for amplifying genetic material. The more cycles used the greater chance you'll find anything - and that's what they did. Amplified the cycles.

The PCR test only needed to find a fragment of the genetic material. A bit like finding a horsetail and thinking you've found the horse.

Government scare tactics of people testing positive with a test not testing for a virus. Asymptomatic people testing positive.

Asymptomatic people never made People sick before this pandemic. Now all of a sudden they did. Just as on the masks. Fauci changed his mind on healthly people getting ill.

" You're not laughing now are you". Nigel Farage 2016.

Yes a correlation doesn't imply causation, and causation always implies correlation.

However most people will look at correlations and without thinking jump to conclusions. I mean, this site is rife with examples like that one

For the benefit of those people – 'It’s possible to find a statistically significant and reliable correlation for two variables that are actually not causally linked at all. In fact, such correlations are common! Often, this is because both variables are associated with a different causal variable, which tends to co-occur with the data that we’re measuring.'

'Let’s think about this with an example. Imagine that you’re looking at health data. You observe a statistically significant positive correlation between exercise and cases of skin cancer—that is, the people who exercise more tend to be the people who get skin cancer. This correlation seems strong and reliable, and shows up across multiple populations of patients. Without exploring further, you might conclude that exercise somehow causes cancer! Based on these findings, you might even develop a plausible hypothesis: perhaps the stress from exercise causes the body to lose some ability to protect against sun damage.

But imagine that in reality, this correlation exists in your dataset because people who live in places that get a lot of sunlight year-round are significantly more active in their daily lives than people who live in places that don’t. This shows up in their data as increased exercise. At the same time, increased daily sunlight exposure means that there are more cases of skin cancer. Both of the variables—rates of exercise and skin cancer—were affected by a third, causal variable—exposure to sunlight—but they were not causally related.'

Essentially, the more thorough and peer reviewed papers are, the less likely you're going to have hypotheses that don't stack up under scrutiny or are based on surface level interrogation of what might appear to be obvious correlations.

That's the point

Did you know? 98.0000001% of people are morons.

If you're implying that a significant proportion of COVID diagnoses were Flu, I'm afraid I can't agree based on the facts around how competing viruses win out.

Can't dispute the fact that some misdiagnosis would have happened, and I'm sure there were financial incentives aplenty + obvious profit to be made. But based on current information I cannot agree with the unsaid insinuation.

As for PCR, it is a diagnostic. The question is more about what the result could indicate rather than what it does, to your point, there are several possibilities for someone testing positive with a PCR that are not all currently infected/contagious.

Antigen testing was/is much more accurate for that.

Did you know? 98.0000001% of people are morons.

From what I understand, the current variant of COVID is less contagious. This might explain why... plus you have to remember that the thing of the earlier lockdowns had a big effect on what would usually be peak flu season/transmission. COVID was still packing a punch all year round and far more contagious, unlike flu, which is mainly seasonal.

It's also worth noting that cases did not exactly dry up completely, there were less but still between 2-4,000 a week at peak.

So yes, always competing, but maybe this year the latest flu mutation will be more contagious, or less, than COVID. We shall have to wait and see

And also, 'Flu-like' is not the same as the Flu. There were plenty of common symptoms that deviated massively from what the average flu case would express, and the main issue with covid was how contagious it was and how long lasting the effects, and a persons contagiousness, could be. Different class of virus but with some shared symptoms. Certainly not the same

The simple fact that even in a bad flu season the case and death count are way way lower than most weekly figures through the early days of COVID.

If you want to imply that well, maybe it was a high contagion flu virus and big pharma and government decided to label it as something else to make loads of money then for plenty of fairly obvious reasons you're spinning out of rational orbit. Profit levels were and are off the chart for this thing anyway, I don't think trying to keep a secret that big amongst basically the entire scientific community would be possible, or worth it for a few extra million.

I deal in most likely scenarios. Your angle is close to or is the least likely.

Did you know? 98.0000001% of people are morons.

Even if you totally reject the benefits of masks, which I don’t because it’s logical that suppressing the viral load entering the local environment or directly in your face must result in a lower exposure, then surely the fact that our social contacts were restricted ought to be enough. Never mind the 6ft rule, that was just another attempt at trying to reduce the levels reaching us in the early days. Part of a belt and braces strategy.

The PCR test was a quick and easy indicator before something more specific was available. It worked to confirm probable infection before symptoms emerged for many, including myself on 2 occasions. Armed with that knowledge I took appropriate precautions and isolated completely. Infection was then confirmed when sending away the test to the laboratory.

Why on earth are you so disparaging about a useful tool in a fight with a new disease that threatened to seriously harm us?

For the avoidance of doubt any comments in response to a previous post are directed to its ideas and not at any, or all, posters personally.