Is rapid antigen test the cause of the recent surge in cases in Europe?

I'm just curious because take Texas for example, by now nearly a quarter of the new cases are probable cases from rapid antigen tests which are becoming more widespread in use. These tests are highly inaccurate and becoming more and more inaccurate as fuzzballs mutate away from the original configuration the tests were calibrated for in early January 2020. So my hunch is a huge bunch of the cases in Europe these days are false positives from rapid antigen tests done during mandatory testing of children, travelers, healthcare workers, office employees, just to name a few, and are not real infections. You can see in the link Austria has a # ton of cases but very few deaths, for example only 48 deaths out of 15,809 cases today. So I'm just wondering how many of these cases are false.

Texas fuzzball dashboard

www.worldometers.info...

a reply to: ResistanceFighter

The PCR is also wildly inaccurate. They can never tell if there is an active infection. EVER

It can be inferred by cycle count, which in the US, they are requiring a CT of 28 for the vaxxed, but anything goes for those who have chosen to remain human 1.0. (that inference still does not = actual infection detection)

I don't know about the reliability of the rapid antigen. Have any info on its stats?

In the UK the kids soon learnt that putting Coca Cola up the nose before a lateral flow test meant a positive result and ten days off school.
Schools caught on and emailed parents encouraging them to witness the kids doing their test.
The lateral flows that Boris Bunter spent 2 billion pounds of tax payers money on were declared unfit for purpose in the US and other countries who got their money back.
But no no,the UK kept them and dished them out seven at a time for free at the chemist to anyone who wants them.
Deliberate raising of the fear factor to suit the government propaganda so it wouldn't surprise me if other countries have used them for the same purpose.

a reply to: ResistanceFighter

As far as I'm concerned, they can give any test they like, but the real test is whether you get sick or not and how bad.

All the rest of it is just "noize". Noise and propaganda, food for the media (and SCREW them!).

a reply to: ResistanceFighter

According to the COVID-19 Dashboard by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University (JHU), in the US, the graphs of deaths from COVID-19 seem to be the same shape as the graphs of the new infections, but they lag by about two weeks.

This probably indicates that there is a reasonably accurate capture of data in the US.

Also, at the moment, both new cases and deaths are going down. May that trend continue.

COVID-19 Dashboard
by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University (JHU)

originally posted by: Extremistcontent
a reply to: ResistanceFighter

The PCR is also wildly inaccurate. They can never tell if there is an active infection. EVER

It can be inferred by cycle count, which in the US, they are requiring a CT of 28 for the vaxxed, but anything goes for those who have chosen to remain human 1.0. (that inference still does not = actual infection detection)

I don't know about the reliability of the rapid antigen. Have any info on its stats?

rtPCR has a nominal measured false positive rate of 16%, and a nominal measured false negative rate of 9.3%. Both of these rates go up if the disease burden (the number of actual viruses in the sample) is very low.

It is logical that if you are trying to measure something that is vanishingly small, you can miss things.

But such a small disease burden is also not likely to be as infectious or as symptomatically obvious as the usual amount of the virus in an infected person.

So PCR is OK for testing purposes, it just has a margin of error, and some conditions where it doesn't work as well (and those conditions where it doesn't work as well, are well below the threshold of ANY other testing methodology, or of symptomatic assay).

If the tests give lots of false negatives, people might be spreading the virus more and that would be worse than false positives. From what I am hearing about the rapid tests from people who work in the medical field is that they are not very accurate either way.