Isn't this just another way of saying it wasn't as contagious as claimed?
Yep.
How many "Symptomless infections" were just false positive test results?
From the FDA website:
Potential for False Positive Results with Antigen Tests for Rapid Detection of SARS-CoV-2 - Letter to Clinical Laboratory Staff and Health Care ProvidersRemember that positive predictive value (PPV) varies with disease prevalence when interpreting results from diagnostic tests. PPV is the percent of positive test results that are true positives. As disease prevalence decreases, the percent of test results that are false positives increase.
For example, a test with 98% specificity would have a PPV of just over 80% in a population with 10% prevalence, meaning 20 out of 100 positive results would be false positives.
The same test would only have a PPV of approximately 30% in a population with 1% prevalence, meaning 70 out of 100 positive results would be false positives. This means that, in a population with 1% prevalence, only 30% of individuals with positive test results actually have the disease.
At 0.1% prevalence, the PPV would only be 4%, meaning that 96 out of 100 positive results would be false positives.
Health care providers should take the local prevalence into consideration when interpreting diagnostic test results.
Those are antigen tests (the 'rapid test'), and I would expect that the same sort of results would be expectedregardless of where we are in the pandemic for any prevalence group.
For the follow up (confirmation, and considered more accurate) PCR testing, they used up to 40 cycle PCR tests instead of the (now CDC recommended) maximum of 28 cycle PCR tests (to avoid false positives in vaccinated people)--unless you haven't been vaccinated, of course.
Each cycle doubles the viral material present, so a 40 cycle test would yield a result amplified by over a trillion times. A 28 cycle test only amplifies Any viral material by a factor of 268 million. (2^40=1,099,511,627,776, 2^28=268,435,456) big difference.
No wonder fruit and goats were testing positive.
https://sentinelksmo.org/cdc-maximum-28-ct-for-post-vaccine-covid-pcr-tests/