I've been thinking for awhile that the real pandemic was faulty tests (+ media/corrupt health bureaucrats).

Seems like given your premise, it's entirely possible that China gave the world initially incomplete (or just false) data that would assist in driving up the false-positive rate. I'm not familiar with assay studies, but given this assumption, could a PCR test be confirmed which just so happened to identify Influenza in addition to COVID (especially when run at higher cycles)? That is, they transcribed what China told them to look for, which just so happened to catch many things. Or is that not possible with how this stuff works?