An appeals court in Portugal has delivered some amusing news. Four people forced to quarantine based on a PCR test result challenged that order in court and won. How? According to this report, the Court deemed the PCR test too unreliable.
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“if someone is tested by PCR as positive when a threshold of 35 cycles or higher is used (as is the rule in most laboratories in Europe and the US), the probability that said person is infected is less than 3%, and the probability that said result is a false positive is 97%.”
One of the four tested positive. The local health authority demanded they quarantine. I know. I said there were four people. The same authority claimed three others were in close enough contact to be at risk. Does this all sound familiar?
The Court disagreed.
“Given how much scientific doubt exists — as voiced by experts, i.e., those who matter — about the reliability of the PCR tests, given the lack of information concerning the tests’ analytical parameters, and in the absence of a physician’s diagnosis supporting the existence of infection or risk, there is no way this court would ever be able to determine whether C was indeed a carrier of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, or whether A, B and D had been at a high risk of exposure to it.”
There’s a good deal more to unpack and its relation to matters of Portuguese Law, but in the end, the test can’t be relied on in these circumstances.
A fact that is just as true in the US.
