Jessica Hockett, PhD
I’m sharing the video and transcript of a short PowerPoint presentation I made for a colleague about flu and SARS-CoV-2 tests and testing data in New York City. I don’t have the exact recording date. I created the associated data file in May 2023 but estimate having made the recording a month or two later.
For now, I’m dating this post 25 September 2026. I may move it to a 2023 date if I can establish exactly when I recorded and privately shared the presentation.
In contrast to some analysts, I date the beginning of the disappearance to spring 2020, rather than autumn 2020, and regard it as extending through the summer of 2021. I hold a Human Interference view of the temporary “disappearance” of positive flu tests reported by many (but not all) countries in 2020 and believe this disappearance was both intentional and critical to the launch of the COVID event.
Even those who disagree regarding strategy or intent can appreciate Martin Neil’s “boxing match” metaphor in a Freedom Research interview:
“An interesting thing is that we were told that flu had disappeared since Covid was so powerful, so deadly. It was a boxing match – and Covid won, yes? Flu disappeared…We had to accept that we had a deadly and novel virus in the presence of Covid. For that to be true, there had to be no competitors. Therefore flu went.”
The main points I made and questions I raised in the presentation follow:
- Flu testing went up sharply in March 2020, but positivity did not. Who was being tested, and what changed after New York City announced its first COVID case?
- There were plenty of SARS-CoV-2 tests. Between March and mid-May, more than twice as many SARS-CoV-2 tests were reported as flu tests over the entire season. Why were so many tests were available so suddenly?
- Who all was being tested? During 15–21 March alone, 39,493 tests were reported. These are the same weeks when people say, “You couldn’t get a test anywhere.” Because hospital testing was prioritized, an ED visits went down, it raises the question of who exactly was being tested.
- Many of the flu tests, and most of the SARS-CoV-2 tests in March could have performed on people already in the hospital. The hospital census shows a potential source of those numbers. Records to establish who was actually tested, and whether old specimen from earlier weeks were being tested, are needed.
- These were also the weeks when COVID-like illness came online as a reporting category. What I call the ‘handoff’, or ‘crossfade’, between influenza-like illness and COVID-like illness (CLI) was happening at the same time. CLI essentially equated to ILI with a positive SARS-CoV-2 test.
When dashboards and press conference figures showed “new” case numbers daily, the public was not given any sense of where those figures came from or what portion of people already in hospitals (or suddenly transferred from nursing homes to hospitals) were being tested.
Testing (and re-testing) existing patients can easily be used to stage sudden spread.
Transcript:
All right, Martin [Neil], I’m going to try to explain what I see in this New York City flu and COVID testing data.
First slide here. Pardon me that some of the dates were cut off at the bottom, but this is the number of flu tests given in New York City weekly, starting [at] the beginning of the flu season in 2019.
At least in the States here, we measure the beginning of flu season in flu-surveillance data from week 40 in a calendar year, then through week 22 or so in the following year. So we have the end of September 2019. You can see it weekly, going all the way through to the end of February 2020.
New York City announced its first COVID case on March 1st, so that’s why I’m bringing the data up to that point.
Pretty strong flu season — about 30–35% [positivity], I think, peaks out there in January. Then the percent positivity, and the number of positive flu tests, and number of flu tests given, start to go down.
It is interesting that there’s, like, a peak in December, then it levels off a bit, then it peaks again in the second week of January. Then we see it go down.
Now let me add in the rest of the flu season.
Starting the week of March 1st, we see flu tests given go up, and then go really up, before they disappear.
What we don’t see is a correspondingly high percentage of flu tests returning positive.
I bring this up because this is a similar pattern that we see in our national data here, the CDC flu-surveillance data. But people who — in the US, anyway — are fans of the viral-interference theory, this is what say, this is what they point to as evidence that SARS-CoV-2 was interfering.
They say, “Look, look: a lot of flu tests were being given, and they were coming back negative. And the reason that a lot of flu tests were being given is because there weren’t enough COVID tests.” That’s that side’s argument.
Now let me bring in the COVID tests. I’m going to say ‘COVID’, even though we know it’s SARS-CoV-2.
So the COVID tests come in. Now, scale-wise, I look at this and I’m like, Oh. My. Gosh. First, how could anybody say that there weren’t enough COVID tests? There weren’t enough COVID tests for what? There were plenty of tests, okay?
The scale is incredible relative to the number of flu tests that were being given. By mid-May, we see that 244,000 flu tests have been given the whole season, and just between March and mid-May, more than double that had been given [in SARS-CoV-2 tests].
So, no, there were plenty of tests. I actually have questions about why there were so many tests available so suddenly. This is echoes of H1N1, right?
A test comes online, and then look at the percent positivity right off the bat. What in the world is going on?
Now, people have said — or, like, I guess Clare [Craig] would say, “Oh, all these sick people are coming to the hospital.” Well, where were they before? Right? They would have shown up in ILI. Now, ILI is a different dataset, but that just doesn’t make sense to me.
So when I go to the raw numbers — look at the raw numbers: flu tests, flu positives, COVID tests, COVID test positives, and then the percent positivity for both.
Flu percent positive did reach 37%. Fairly high, but it didn’t break 40 [percent].
But then go down to March 1st. That’s when the first COVID case was announced. We see a healthy number of tests given there, coming back 20%. And then the testing really takes off.
The key week for me in the COVID testing is that week of March 15th to 21st. “15 Days to Stop the Spread” was announced on March 16th. New York’s formal stay-home order, I think, was issued on the 18th and didn’t take effect until the 20th. I think I’m right about that.
They weren’t testing everyone. These are the weeks when people will tell you, “You couldn’t get a test anywhere! They weren’t testing just anyone!”
Well, who in the world were those 39,493 people? Who were they in that week, let alone the 7,000 in the week before? Right?
This is way more tests than [were] being given anywhere else in the US. I think, basically, the U.S.’s test numbers at that point were New York’s numbers.
But look at flu.
So, the number of flu tests given goes down. At the end of February, it’s at 9,000 — almost 10,000, right? Then that first COVID case is announced, and the flu tests go back up again, but we don’t have as many positives.
So again, what’s happening there? Who is being tested?
I think a lot of those flu tests in March, and most of those SARS-CoV-2 tests in March, were people already in the hospital.
Let me show you the hospital data. Now, unfortunately, this dataset — the state’s dataset for New York City hospitals, or actually for all hospitals, but this is New York City only — doesn’t start until March 26th.
But they report on March 26th (let’s just go with this) that there were just under 17,000 people in the hospital on that date.
Okay. Now let’s go back to that data, focusing just on February and March.
Do you see how 16,000 people in the hospital could have been tested for COVID? That’s where a lot of those numbers could have come from: whoever was already in the hospital.
Flu tests also could have been given to people already in the hospital, and/or maybe some earlier specimen were being tested. Hey, let’s go test those earlier specimens from earlier in the season again. Who knows? Who knows what was going on there.
But these are really, really critical weeks because these are also the weeks —the ones I have highlighted in yellow — when COVID-Like Illness, as a reporting dimension, came online.
It’s basically influenza-like illness, but with a COVID diagnosis. Right? So it’s the handoff — what I call the handoff, or the crossfade — with ILI and CLI that was happening at this time.
So, I know the way I look at data is maybe a little different than you all do, but what was going on here? That’s what I ask when I look at these numbers.
Where were the tests coming from? Who was being tested?
There was not — we don’t even hear now people claiming that, in March 2020 in New York, all of these people were suddenly becoming ill. We just don’t hear that.
We know that — I think the best estimate that I read is that 450,000 people left Manhattan. Now, there are eight million people in New York, right? So that’s maybe a drop in the bucket, but people were not out.
So I have a lot of questions about this period. I have a lot of questions about where those flu tests are from, where the SARS-CoV-2 tests are from — mostly from the hospital.
And if that’s the case, if they went and just tested a whole bunch of people in the hospital right away to get the numbers up, that’s scandalous. That’s scandalous. Because it is not what anyone assumed when they were seeing those case numbers on TV at the time, or on the internet at the time. That’s not what people assumed.
I would love to know what proportion of those tests were people who were already in the hospital by March 1st, because I think they were used to create the appearance of sudden spread.
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
Tests versus all-cause mortality. Not in presentation but created around the same time and shared in other forums.
All articles related to Flu/Flu Shot are here. All articles related to SARS-CoV-2 Testing are here.
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