Read Counts, qualitative or Quantitative?

Question

[vborincenturion]

Hello BioStars community.

I have a question about the read counts classification. So, I was thinking, read counts may be considered qualitative data? Because, in my view, it is only a count of a specific sequence to a database. So, it's pretty much the same thing as turning your qualitative data into a contingency table. I ask this because I see articles using CCA - Canonical Correspondence Analysis (used for qualitative data) and also PCA - Principal Component Analysis (used for quantitative data) to show the similarity or correlation between samples.

It is maybe a simple question, but I do not see a discussion about this.

Thanks