Taken all together it is my professional opinion that upto 50% of reported COVID cases are false positives, but there are no real data to confirm my estimate or the ONS data.
There's plenty of data out there, for example:
https://fingertips.phe.org.uk/stati.../excess-mortality-in-england-latest.htmlWe know from this dataset that c. 117,588 people have died with Covid-19 mentioned on the death certificate. That might not be the primary cause of death, but we also know that the excess deaths figure (ie those who have died over and above the number we would expect to have died) is 98,232.
So this raises a couple of interesting questions. 117,588 - 98,232 = 19,536, ie the number of people with Covid who would have died anyway. But those 98k people weren't expected to die, and if the false positive rate is 50% then what did 49,000 people die of? Is there some hidden lethal disease out there that is finishing people off that we don't know about?
For me, Occam's Razor is useful here. Either the false positive rate is around what the ONS reckons it is, so a massive proportion of the 117k death really were down to Covid, or the false positive rate is what you estimate it to be, meaning that there's a mysterious unknown factor out there that has killed nearly 50 thousand people who have died from something other than Covid and whom weren't expected to die as part of normal mortality causes.
Alternatively, we could raise the possibility that although the false positive rate may be very high, this is only reflected in tests which do not lead to mortality that has C19 mentioned - ie the people all remained healthy, didn't die, and so didn't figure at all in the mortality data.
The total number of recorded cases so far in the UK is just over 4 million and total deaths just over 120k to date. If we accept the ONS estimate of negligible false positives then we see that the death rate is 0.03 or 3% - which is broadly in line with expectations. If on the other hand we posit a 50% false positive rate then the true number of C19 cases is actually closer to 2 million - indicating that we have a death rate of 6%, meaning C19 is a much more lethal virus than we thought.
I respect your professional opinion, but frankly I'm much more convinced by the ONS data. Your alternative seems much too scary for me, I want to be able to go back down the pub!
