It must have taken a special effort to write all those words without once mentioning the false positive rate of the PCR test (~2.3%), which (unlike earlier in the pandemic) is now in the ballpark of reported case numbers: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.26.20080911v...
I think the implication is if true false positive rate closely matches the reported positive result rate there haven't actually been a growing number of cases just a growing number of tests. I'm not sure the linked material validates this claim strongly though but I also haven't put in the time to see if it doesn't either.
Wow, thank you for that, I had no idea PCR is this inaccurate. The process always created a very "pure" image in my head, and now I feel kind of stupid never checking how inaccurate it is in practice. Of course I'm not a professional in the area.
How does it happen on a molecular level that PCR delivers a false positive? Are the primers sometimes broken (matching not exactly what they're supposed to match)?
A properly performed PCR test is essentially 100% specific. False positives come from contamination of samples, mislabelled samples, and other forms of human error.
If the false positive of the PCR test really is 2.3%, how are so many places able to have positivity rates consistently less than that, more like .1%[1]? And how can test pooling in huge numbers (like was done in Wuhan) work?
A false positive rate that high doesn't pass the sniff test.
I'm not sure if this is it, but assuming the correctness of the test is independent of the sample quality, a sample could be split and tested multiple times to obtain a result with a much better FPR.
To my knowledge, the most common failure mode is that the concentration of viral RNA in the sample is below the limit of detection. This could be because the swab wasn't done correctly, the patient wasn't shedding very much virus, the sample was mishandled (heat can break down the sample), or the sample wasn't adequately mixed.
The tests themselves are fine, false positives are due to human error:
"The high specificities (usually 100%) reported in PCR-based tests for SARS-CoV-2 infection do not represent the real-world use of these tests, where contamination and human error produce significant rates of false positives."
New York reports positivity rate below 1% for a while now, so false positive rate cannot be 2.3%.
If the false positive mechanism is contaminating one sample with another, the false positive rate will depend on the true positive rate in the samples that the lab/testing site is processing. The other possibility would be if positive control amplicon contaminated the lab, which does happen.
The underlying assumption behind false positive rate is that tests are independent and identically distributed. If in practice this is not the case, then false positive rate becomes misleading.
Hm, the numbers I've dug up (though rather hastily; I haven't read much of the documents) don't really match 2.3%... they seem to be 0% in their tests. Here [1] is where I think you can find the info for all the FDA-authorized tests. I see mentions of NPA (negative percent agreement) being 100% in their trials in [2] and [3] for example, though the sample sizes don't seem too large (something like 30-50). Any idea what I'm missing, or if it's just because of small sample sizes? (I'm not exactly trained in this, but my impression was PCR was more accurate than that.)
The PCR test can produce high numbers of false positives. It depends on a variable called the "cycle threshold" (Ct), which is the number of times amplification is run.
Different tests have different Ct numbers, so some specific tests are overly sensitive. However there is no data on what test is used where, or when tests were changed.
I've seen lots of clinics testing numbers, but I've never, literally never seen a PCR test with a FP rate that high. It kind of beggars belief.
This article doesn't even deal with SARS-CoV-2, so until it gets peer reviewed and, more importantly, replicated, it should be treated as an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence.
Because the image lack a graph of the number of test ? Because tests were scarse at first and only done only to people coming to hospitals and relatives and now anyone can pass one ?
I've been fascinated by the mechanisms behind human facial recognition ever since I read Peter Watts 'Blindsight'. Near the end he introduces an idea similar to the Chernoff face[1], plots of multivariate data in the shape of a human face. The idea is that humans are so keyed into recognizing subtle nuances in facial expressions, we're better at interpreting mulitvariate data graphed as a facial expression.
Some interesting parts from this interview:
- She surprisingly claims that she's not good at recognizing emotions.
- She can recognize adults based on how they looked as children. This suggests there's a sort of 'fuzzing' process that allows her to interpolate aging.
> (No more than 250,000 deaths from COVID-19 worldwide within a quarter of a year, compared to 1.5 million deaths during the flu wave in 2017/18).
Interesting weasel-words and cherry-picking. First, comparing a quarter of a year of Covid deaths against a whole year (or two?) of normal flu, and then subtly shifting between deaths from Covid and deaths during a flu wave (so not caused by the flu?).
For a more accurate comparison: "between 291,000 and 646,000 people worldwide die from seasonal influenza-related respiratory illnesses each year"[0] and 907,917 have died from Covid so far this year[1], despite all the extra measures taken to limit its spread and mortality rate.
> and then subtly shifting between deaths from Covid and deaths during a flu wave (so not caused by the flu?).
Newsflash, genius. They are counting every person that died with COVID (or even "presumed" positive) as a death from COVID-19. The actual number of people that were killed directly by COVID is not known, just like we don't measure, test, or track every single person that dies of flu each year. It's an estimate that's arrived at long after the fact by reviewing data.
In California, deaths are only counted if the death certificate has “COVID-19” as the cause of death. If someone is hit by a car and is also positive for COVID-19, that shouldn’t be counted.
> Cumulative number of COVID-related deaths as reported by local health department, beginning March 19, 2020. This determination is made by local health departments based on the cause of death reported on death certificates. It is expected that, to be counted, COVID is the cause of death or at least a contributing factor to the death. COVID-related deaths are also counted in “Positive Cases”.
That language says nothing about whether a positive test is required to attribute a death to COVID-19.
Here is the CDC's policy:
> In cases where a definite diagnosis of COVID–19 cannot be made, but it is suspected or likely (e.g., the circumstances are compelling within a reasonable degree of certainty), it is acceptable to report COVID–19 on a death certificate as “probable” or “presumed.”
Thanks for the newsflash, fellow genius. So are you saying that the number of people killed by Covid isn't known, and the number of people killed by flu each year isn't known, so we basically have no valid data and can't compare the two diseases in any meaningful way?
If not, what would you say is a reasonable way to compare them?
> The people dying from corona are mainly those who are statistically dying this year because they have reached the end of their lives
The excess deaths statistics [1] give lie to the tired claim that these were all people who "would have died anyway." 200,000+ more people have died this year in the US alone than normal, and it's very statistically-significant, particularly as the annual death rate is under 3 million.
You won't be able to prove your assertion until there is a known vaccination that helps elderly people avoid Covid. At that point, if these deaths occured in elderly who were probably within a year of dying even without covid, we'd expect to see next year a much smaller amount of deaths compared to average, because so many people died one year early.
I’m an ER doc, it’s unclear to me how many of these excess deaths are due to covid, or due to the covid lockdown. I am sure that many are due to covid, but patients avoiding hospital due to the worry about covid, cancelling surgeries, and delaying chemotherapy adversely affects health too. The US government paying for covid care is also a positive step for society, but it does have the effect that patients who have no covid symptoms but have a positive screening test who die of non-covid pathology will end up being labelled a covid death in order to maximize the hospital and physician reimbursement.
If the original claim was being made in good faith I would agree that "2017/18" means a single year, but given the other prevarications I couldn't rule out an attempt at double-counting.
Same in France: the government destroyed the economy and made the worst massive privation of liberty since the establishment of the Republic (even the German invader didn’t go that far during WWII). So of course they’re trying to covert their misdeeds by lying about the virus dangerosity to avoid people’s backlash.
TL;DR: Some (many?) PCR tests are using too high a cycle threshold, which makes them too sensitive. Key quote:
Juliet Morrison, a virologist at the University of California-Riverside, said she believes any test with a cycle threshold over 35 is too sensitive. "I'm shocked that people would think that 40 could represent a positive," she said.
The following is my commentary, and not specifically in the article above:
There were many early tests that were giving false negatives. It looks to me like test manufactures over-compensated to make sure they never give false negatives. There is no data source that I can find that shows what test is used in what area, or what CT is used for what test.
This article is basically bullshit derived from a NY Times article, and I'm really sad that it got published. You know how every once in a while the media publishes an article about something you know and it's riddled with errors that drive a particular narrative? That article is my experience.
Research scientists and clinical scientists are worlds apart, and have very different goals in life.
I wouldn't trust a cT coming out of any research lab either, but clinical labs are far far more controlled and have far better processes, and have intense validation that shows that their threshold is repeatable, accurate, and a true representation of their limit of detection.
No research lab does any of this, and they almost never have extremely basic contamination protections like separate rooms for pre- and post-amplification rooms.
I've watched research scientists try to stand up clinical labs during this pandemic, and it has been an education for them to bring their standards up to what is the baseline for clinical testing. Its not unlike giving a butcher a scalpel and expecting brain surgery: there are a lot of the same skills involved but also very different and extremely narrow it's of knowledge.
Can you explain to the layperson why it's "basically bullshit"? The NYT article I linked describes a real-world scenario where a fake outbreak (100% of cases were false positives) actually occurred (note: I am not claiming Covid-19 is fake).
Also, specific false positive rates aside, is it not likely we're now approaching a rate of "cases" which is hard to distinguish from false positive tests, which would help explain the drop in hospitalization / ICU / mortality?
> Many of the new molecular tests are quick but technically demanding, and each laboratory may do them in its own way. These tests, called “home brews,” are not commercially available, and there are no good estimates of their error rates.
The technology, as mentioned, was new at the time and not even commercially available. There have been 13 years of improvement since then.
Yes, Victoria has managed to combine the economic catastrophe of a New Zealand lock down with the death rate of a Swedish no lock down.
And this will continue for at least another month. All in all it's rather amazing how by trying to do everything right the Victorian government has managed to do everything wrong.
At least the current government gets to wag its finger at people for wanting such unreasonable things as jobs, leaving your house after work, or sleeping with your partner for the first time in 3 months.
This is madness. The lockdown is the only thing that stopped several hundred deaths from becoming several thousand (or much more). No job is worth dying for, and few jobs are worth becoming crippled for. Make no mistake that this virus cripples many survivors.
His point is that you need to defend yourself. There is overwhelming evidence that lockdowns have saved negative lives: that is, they killed people outright who would be alive today if not for lockdowns.
Consider that lockdowns cannot stop the virus forever. They were only ever pitched, even by advocates, as a delaying strategy to reduce pressure on hospitals. Total numbers of infected were never meant to change, as logic dictates. However lockdowns and other restrictions, when as long as they have been, do create new deaths by e.g. delaying cancer checkups and treatments, by causing job losses and subsequent poverty related deaths, by stopping the elderly from seeing their family - deaths by loneliness are a real thing in elderly care!
If you're going to assert that lockdowns can actually reduce the death rate rather than increase it you will need to give arguments for why that's the case, especially over the long term.
Lockdowns in South Korea and Australia have unambigously halted outbreaks. Your argument makes sense as far as the initial plan was, but it is clear in hindsight that lockdowns can effectively stop the outbreak and thus will actually lead to reduced cases. Just because America has failed utterly to stop it's outbreak doesn't mean it isn't possible.
That is a failure of hotel quarantine. The lockdown that followed was harsh and it worked. I am in another Australian state, the lockdowns have been lifted and I can go to work with little fear of contracting COVID.
Halted for how long? It only takes one person or fomite to come in and create a new outbreak that spreads before it's detected. America isn't special in any regard. Only a tiny number of countries are pursuing lockdown-until-vaccine as a strategy, as it's obviously a bad one.
It's worth noting that nobody until very recently was claiming lockdowns could eliminate outbreaks. That whole notion was deemed absurd as recently as June. The problem is obvious - for as long as there is a pool of people, somewhere, spreading the disease, and a large pool of people who haven't developed immunity, and international travel, then the virus will get in. Meanwhile lockdowns have catastrophic consequences far in excess of their benefits (halting COVID is not very important given how mild it is).
In the least inflammatory tone possible, what do you think they should be doing instead?
There's a lot of pile-on about how they've done everything wrong without a lot of suggestion about what they should've done instead / should currently be doing instead.
For example, if Andrews and co cave to the federal and local pressure and re-open the state today, and everything explodes in two weeks, who takes the blame then? Still Andrews and co.
While it's been a huge outbreak by Australian expectations, it's still tiny when compared to the rest of the world.
If we had the 10, 15,000 cases per million that are more commonplace around the world, there'd still be a stuffed economy, lower employment, increased mental health issues, right? We'd just have another layer of mess with hospital overload and death that we don't have in a large amount at the moment.
Name one country that has had hospital overload. Any country. This was an expectation that was reasonable in February, and become a talking point for people who want lockdowns for ideological reasons and aren't willing to look at new evidence. [0]
In short: open everything and let the devil take the hindmost. The alternative is a yo-yo lock down until Bangladesh manages to deploy a vaccine to everyone infected before the virus mutates, something that will happen in 202-never.
[0] Even the horror stories from New York were because they didn't have the capacity to bury people fast enough, not that they ran out of hospital beds.
Not really. Hospital overload here is defined as people being unable to get healthcare because no hospital can take them. This news story covered Spanish hospital 'overload' at the time, which basically meant they converted some beds to ICU/COVID beds.
It discusses one of the hardest hit hospitals. However the absolute numbers were small and they never turned people away.
This sort of bed conversion is known to happen even in normal years, so it doesn't mean much by itself. Dramatic language can be misleading. Unfortunately it is standard for health officials to describe hospitals as "overloaded" or "at breaking point" simply due to seasonal flu outbreaks, as in these articles from 2017:
In Madrid many people were turned away from hospitals. I know personally people that could not get into the hospital with a double pneumonia and were told to call an ambulance if their oxygen levels dropped. Ambulances took 4-6 hours to respond, instead of minutes. In regular times a double pneumonia 100% lands you at the hospital.
Not a direct acquaintance, but a friend of my sister was two days siting in the hall of the Gregorio Marañon until they could transfer him to IFEMA. Almost no supply of food during these two days, and he was lucky to have a seat, many people lying on the floor.
They found many bodies of people dead by COVID-19 at home. They found some bodies on the streets.
I don't get how can you pretend that many hospitals / regions were "overload".
Spain had similar problems to Italy early on in the outbreak where they shut down large chunks of hospital capacity by insisting doctors and nurses self-isolated, although it's now known that this was actively harmful: the virus is virulent and would have infected them sooner or later anyway, and the ones who weren't already elderly or sick wouldn't have been badly affected.
It's a debatable question whether this shutdown of hospitals was due to the virus, or due to the over-reaction to it. Other places where the virus started later didn't do this to the same extent (although the UK did and is still doing so!), and they saw less serious problems.
As for "many bodies of people dead at home/on the streets", can you show me reports of people dropping dead of COVID on the streets? I never heard that, it seems it hasn't happened elsewhere and sounds suspect.
Remember that basically all reports about people dying "of" COVID are garbage. The average age of death when testing positive is over the average life expectancy in most places (maybe all, I haven't checked). Almost all such reports are of deaths that were naturally happening anyway due to age or other serious health conditions, and COVID was just co-present at time of death - maybe it pushed them over by a little bit, but probably only by months. Correlation/causation mixups are a huge problem with COVID datasets.
A part from the general mismanagement (quarantine, contact tracing, aged care) there has been a complete lack of consistent strategy. You can't just change the strategy every 6 weeks.
NZ went for elimination from the outset so when the virus came back in Auckland several weeks ago it was a no-brainer to immediately lock down again (although now they seem to have shifted to a suppression strategy, let's see how that goes for them...).
Sweden went for a flatten the curve(ish) strategy which meant that they did not automatically enact a lockdown when things started heating up in terms of case numbers/deaths because they were confident enough at the time that their health care system would cope.
Those are two very different strategies with different outcomes but they were consistent and thereby achieved their respective goals.
Victoria (and Australia as a whole) has gone from flatten the curve to suppression and now to elimination.
If Victoria had chosen elimination after the first flare up back at the end of May, then that would have most probably been achieved by now.
The government mandated curfews, for instance, do not seem to have been a recommendation from the health authorities (in fact, no other country has them).
It really does not make much sense to unnecessarily restrict the times when people can, e.g., go out and buy groceries. The wider the allowed hours, the less density of people there will be in those indoor places, which will help decrease the spreading of the virus.
Probably not much. But that's because you used the word "doing". If you had asked "what should Victoria have done instead?", then there is a long list.
To pick on one thing, I was amazed press were showing people in the locked down towers apparently depending on charities for essential supplies. To this day don't know if it was a beat up or real, but if real it boggles the mind. It implies the lock down was little more than a thought bubble with almost no effort put into planning.
Obviously, they did eventually react to the collapse of contract tracing, the explosion of cases, the outbreak in nursing homes and so on, and as a consequence everything seems to be as under control as it can be now. But it does seem to all be reactive, not proactive.
I do wonder how the situation arose. At one level it's obviously a reflection of competence of the bureaucracy, as this is where the pollies (who usually have very little expertise in their portfolio) get their advice. But those same pollies have been there for 10 years and so they should by now have made their stamp on the culture of the bureaucracy. Frankly when you compare it's performance with bureaucracies in all other states, it was very poor. For me (a Queenslander) the outstanding state was NSW the Ruby Princess cluster fuck notwithstanding.
Yes. I think this is the answer to the question posed by this article.
Coronavirus quickly found its way into aged care facilities, causing a higher death rate. But as the virus progresses through the wider community the death rate declines.
Locking people in their homes, which lowers Vit D especially as they are S hemisphere, will increase mortality rate. These are bureaucrats and thugs enforcing this, not nutritionists or medical doctors. I expect their rate to mirror NYC with their tactics for combatting a virus as if it is a bacteria.
Still doesn't make sense though. Pretty much everyone is inside all day either due to work or the weather being shite, and even if you do go outside you probably won't have much exposed skin due to the weather being shite, and even if you did the sun is low in the sky due to it being winter and...
Yeah, I think it was in a thread on r/askscience with some nurses replying basically stating that the methods of treatment for infected patients has evolved as understanding has grown. Steroids was one item they mentioned, another was avoiding the respirator at almost all costs; which is part of why the demand for them has gone down now.
Note that this is specific to the UK. In other European countries like Spain, death rates have been rising (with a few weeks lag from case rates). They just are nowhere near the first wave, when death rates were more than 10x what they are now but case rates were lower than today and because of severe under-testing.
holy shit that page shows that the US is an anomaly compared to all countries it is normal to compare to. It doesn't help that it is gigantic country where it is hard to limit internal travel, but still we are doing something wrong here.
not sure what you mean by anomaly, US looks a lot like Sweden, a country that looks like will be faring the best
counter-intuitive as it may sound today, US might just end up the country that did really well. Most large countries are simply not measuring/admitting the real number of cases.
This is false, if you look at expected deaths the US is sky high while all of Europe is under control.
If we don't get vaccine then sure all countries might eventually end up the same, but Europe is largely back to normal living with kids back at school with almost no cases. In the US we still have lockdowns and no control at all.
At the beginning of the pandemic, there was less information on the nature and pathology of the disease, as well as how well governments and people would be able to adapt new behaviors to contain it.
With updated information, we can narrow the expectations between the most optimistic and pessimistic models, but recorded deaths will always be a lagging indicator. As of right now, the fivethirtyeight summary (https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/covid-forecasts) has a spread in the US between 231,000 Americans dead by Oct. 17 (IHME) and 205,000 dead by Oct 17 (Los Alamos). What has changed since the disease started is the death curve has gone from exponential to linear (thank goodness), which is likely due to public health controls having an effect (we can guess this because the curve linearized around mid-April, which is about a month after California began treating the disease as an emergency and 2 weeks after New York followed suit). As it stands, it'd take over a decade to reach a million US deaths, assuming nothing changes (i.e. assuming people continue to avoid unnecessary contact and travel and protect their respiration); had the curve stayed exponential, it would have taken under a year.
There's also the risk of hospital saturation; even if we don't get a vaccine, countries that manage to slow the spread and diminish the effective R0 enough that their hospital capacity remains unsaturated will have more survivors than countries that don't.
The disease is 99+% survivable with optimal medical care during the worst phase of it and significantly less survivable without it.
I was referring to the symptomatic cases, which are the relevant ones if we're trying to estimate survivability from death statistics or risk of hospital saturation.
Most countries have twice as many cases now than at their peak in Spring and the trend is accelerating. As for most of Latin America, they are just not reporting the numbers because they are too poor to test.
Sky high death rate? Not even close. The worst hit countries, deaths per population are the European ones. Again, that is not a reflection on the societies, just perhaps their age distribution and other factors.
That the US is doing really badly is just propaganda fueled by the imminent election. Again, it is normal, election propaganda is anything but fair.
Sweden has always been near the top 10 (currently 13th; to give some context, Italy is 12th) and somehow the myth of "Sweden is magically successful at fighting COVID-19" refuses to die.
If having 1 in 1730 people die is such a huge success, I suppose having 1 in 1690 die is okay, too.
(To avoid misunderstanding, no, I don't think any of these numbers is okay. Many developed countries have an order of magnitude better results.)
It's useful to split the US into two pieces - NYC/NJ/CT/MA and the rest of the country. Death rates are roughly similar within those two groups yet very different between those two groups. (The "hotspots" outside the NYC group seem to be largely driven by travel from NYC.)
It's also probably because we know more about how to treat people with the virus. At first ventilators was the go-to plan for people with difficulty breathing, until it was shown that ventilators were either not very useful or even detrimental. At first we didn't realize quite how bad it was for the elderly. The reason that Sweden had so many deaths at first and now virtually none is because there were breakouts in nursing homes at the beginning. Similarly in the US some states (eg. New York, New Jersey) required nursing homes to admit people who have been tested positive for the virus. Now the leaders of those states realize how bad that is and are better protecting the elderly.
I recommend reading the latest COVID-19 care protocol from Eastern Virginia Medical School. It has been updated several times and contains details on clinical best practice.
There is still no treatment. THe people I know who were positive literally received absolutely no medication and were told to just stay home for 14 days despite having a fever and cough. They don't even consider it worthy of any medication or treatment in the U.S. unless you already are obese, diabetic, or have asthma. I think the actual reason we see cases and not deaths is just more testing is happening. At the start they wouldn't even test you if you had a fever and cough unless you knew someone who also had tested positive. Which meant basically it was impossible to get a test because other sick people had the same problem. I have also heard that there is a significant amount of false positives because they rushed most of these testing processes in order to meet demand. I believe it was news that like people had swabbed pieces of fruit like a papaya or something and sent it in and received a positive test still. It is right that most sick or susceptible people are better protecting themselves as well, as they should.
There's a difference between "didn't need treatment/medication" and "no treatment available". A fever/cough don't require prescriptions or a hospital visit, the same as a flu. If things get significantly worse it does, same as a flu (just more likely to happen than with the flu).
It's also important to note treatment isn't the same thing as a cure. Treatment is any medical care for the illness (i.e. things that help keep you alive through it) not just things that make the illness go away (bit of a rectangle/square thing).
One of the sane voices I hear during this pandemic is from Dr Normal Swan, a physician and health journalist here in Oz. He speaks everyday on Coronacast[0]. According to him, one of the reasons is also Dexamethadone which has been proven to reduce mortality by ~20%.
tl;dr of what I've heard on various episodes
- "Standard care" practices have changed
- Dexamethadone
- Lot more of the younger population being infected who have typically been known not to die of the virus (relative to older folks)
- More testing which increases the denominator of CFR
> The PCR test amplifies genetic matter from the virus in cycles; the fewer cycles required, the greater the amount of virus, or viral load, in the sample. The greater the viral load, the more likely the patient is to be contagious. This number of amplification cycles needed to find the virus, called the cycle threshold, is never included in the results sent to doctors and coronavirus patients, although it could tell them how infectious the patients are. In three sets of testing data that include cycle thresholds, compiled by officials in Massachusetts, New York and Nevada, up to 90 percent of people testing positive carried barely any virus, a review by The Times found.
> ... One solution would be to adjust the cycle threshold used now to decide that a patient is infected. Most tests set the limit at 40, a few at 37. This means that you are positive for the coronavirus if the test process required up to 40 cycles, or 37, to detect the virus. Tests with thresholds so high may detect not just live virus but also genetic fragments, leftovers from infection that pose no particular risk — akin to finding a hair in a room long after a person has left, Dr. Mina said. Any test with a cycle threshold above 35 is too sensitive, agreed Juliet Morrison, a virologist at the University of California, Riverside. “I’m shocked that people would think that 40 could represent a positive,” she said. A more reasonable cutoff would be 30 to 35, she added. Dr. Mina said he would set the figure at 30, or even less. Those changes would mean the amount of genetic material in a patient’s sample would have to be 100-fold to 1,000-fold that of the current standard for the test to return a positive result — at least, one worth acting on.
Every published "case" should include the PCR cycle threshold to enable statistical analysis.
They've talked about this issue a lot on TWIV [1], and apparently many of the most commonly used PCR machines do the maximum number of cycles on every sample and then test to see if the sample is positive or negative. So they couldn't report a cycle count even if they wanted to, the machine doesn't allow it. I don't know what percentage of PCR machines in the wild this applies to, but based on how they talk about it on the podcast, it seems like a lot of them.
Maybe the global cycle count for the machine could be adjusted, similar to what you are talking about, but that is different than reporting the cycle count of every positive test.
The PCR test make/model could be published with each positive case, then the well-known maximum could be cross-referenced from FDA docs on each test, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24427765
Without the Ct value, "cases" are not comparable on the basis of test positivity.
With transparency on the Ct value, we can determine which tests and configurations best support health.
P.S. "the machine does not allow it" could be an HN firmware challenge. If the fate of civilization depends on PCR test machines, do any of them have auditable open-source firmware?
tldr: because the corona thing is just not as dangerous as your government and media would like you to believe.
But you shouldnt commit wrong think! Its because we "now better protect the elderly". This is a true fact and questioning it is illegal. This is the new normal now. You will not get your rights back.
In my experience, no one who's seen what this virus can do to their own age cohort talks like that. I have a (early thirties, no co-morbidity, no pre-existing conditions) brother who was hit particularly hard by covid, from which he's still recovering.
Also, I don't know where you are, but what rights have you lost, exactly? My country locked down pretty hard and pretty early, and the only "rights" I've lost are going to crowded spaces and walking around without a mask in populated areas.
the rights I have lost is that the economy got ruined and my generation has to pay for this bullshit and for the rest of europe because our politicians just love to give away money to strangers. Also the corona rules are used to selectively disallow unwanted protests. There is no scientific proof that the lockdown or the mask did anything. look at sweden:practically no new deaths and almost no new cases. But I guess most people are fine with it. So I better get in line ... or else :-) My parents both had corona and they are fine by the way. Just a mild flu. Actually more like a cold.
Or else what? You don't seem to actually be concerned about anything happening to you for saying this, it sounds like you're just unhappy people don't agree with you. Now, that's only human- but come on, my good dude, chill out.
saying this just leads to my posts being censored. I am not scared about this because this is just internet lala land. But the fact is: If I tried to do anything about this in real life I would get into trouble.
Look, I don't disagree that it affects mainly the elderly. As to there not being any proof that the lockdown or mask did anything: we'll get a better picture once people have had the time to compare and study the statistics and filter out confounding factors.
When comparing Sweden and Belgium, for instance, there are some key differences despite similar population numbers: population density, number of pensioners, population concentration (Sweden mainly has Malmö, Göteborg and Stockholm as population centers), how healthcare is funded, how wide streets are, social norms, lifestyle (indoor vs outdoor), etc. When it comes to how they reported cases and deaths, there are also great differences in methodology.
I do share your sentiment about the political caste having overreacted, though. This is the third crisis I'll be paying for, to support a generation that makes myopic decisions when in power.
thank you very much for giving me this great chance to reflect on my attitude. You are right! I have sined. I promise that I will not post any wrong opinions in the future. thanks again comrade and have a nice day!
People often resort to this "wrong opinions" canard as an explanation for why they were moderated, but actually you've just been posting bad (for HN) comments. If you expressed your opinions thoughtfully and substantively, there wouldn't be a problem.
We don't care about opinions. We care about how you treat other users and if you're dumping junk or toxic comments into the community.
just delete my account if you think so. I think you and your "unbiased" opinions are junk too. this is just another communist shithole. might just go to weibo and post my junk there.
I also think that it makes zero sense to think you have the moral high ground here. If you said be more nice in a nice way it would make sense. but you throw around things like "dumping junk" and "posting junky comments". read the guidelines, retard! Or do they only apply to me?
So you know one person that had a bad time? So what? That's called an "anecdote," it's not data. People get sick and die all the time from all kinds of things. That even happened before COVID-19. Non-geriatric populations are not at an increased risk compared to a normal cold or flu season.
Hey there is a lot of health misinformation in this thread. Please seek advice from professionals, not potentially biased people on a software start up forum. There is a reason medical professionals are trained not to give advice about your symptoms outside the practice.
Turns out science opinion changes with new evidence. When this all started the evidence did not suggest masks would help. Turns out they do, so now the science advice has changed. So your argument is because science is working as intend we should thus not trust it? This is a common anti-science/anti-medicine fallacy.
Incorrect. Dr Gupta and others had known all along that masks are useful. They were contradicting themselves when they were telling us "don't use masks, they are useless, we need them for the healthcare personnel". Why did they need them for the healthcare workers if they were useless? They simply decided to lie to us.
Because we're relying on a test which can barely be trusted. It's a research tool and should never be used in a diagnostic capacity. Don't listen to me about it though, that quote is from the PCR test's inventor Kary Mullis. It's bizarre that this isn't mentioned more.
There's a rumor that it has a high false positive rate as well. There was a New York Times article that summarized this a few days ago. Again, perplexing why this isn't mentioned and studied more.
This "fact check" only serves to confirm pieceofcakedude's statement. Not about who said it (who cares?), but about the test not being trustworthy. Reuters states, in the last paragraph, "PCR tests ... show that SARS-CoV-2 viral genetic material is present in the patient" -- not that the PCR test confirms any minimum quantity, enough to cause any adverse effects. This is what the NYTimes reported on, that the amplification necessary to detect the virus was very often so great, implying what existed in the person was so tiny as to be inert. Reuters agrees: "It is important to note that detecting viral material by PCR does not indicate that the virus is fully intact and infectious"
Pregnancy tests should return a binary result. Pretty much every other test requires a quantity for context. Imagine a blood-alcohol test that can say yes, alcohol is present, but is unable to distinguish between ingesting a teaspoon of cough syrup vs. drinking a six-pack.
Fact checks from zero credibility organizations like Reuters don't hold any weight with me and shouldn't with anyone else. That's not even Mullis' original quote. I'm actually not sure what the fact check proves.
Okay fine, let's say Reuters is correct and Mullis never said whatever quote some randoms on Facebook are trying to say he said. Here's a research paper pointing out everything wrong with the PCR test:
You call Reuters zero credibility but then link to some crank with a background in telecom litigation with no virology experience whatsoever who denies that we can sequence viral DNA?
Questioning known corrupt organizations like the FDA, CDC and WHO makes me feel better, not worse about Mullis and Crowe. It's the scientists who blindly follow authority who really make me nervous. But that's just me. Sounds like you might be in the opposite camp.
I've looked through your link and saw Crowe in the comments section. He mentions there are two new hypotheses in 2014, hence why its still being discussed. They really have no answer for his questions besides "move on, the science is settled". But critically look at his points, maybe you can address them. BTW, anyone who ever tries to to tell you "the science is settled" is trying to shut down debate, as Crowe correctly recognizes.
Any comments on the actual paper itself that Crowe wrote? You don't need a background in virology to figure out that there's giant issues with the PCR test. If you read the paper at all you'd see that, but I'm guessing you didn't.
Kary Mullis was an astrologist who thought that environmentalists were responsible for the AIDS hoax and wrote the forward to an AIDS denialist book written by a person who with her 3-year old daughter then died of AIDS a few years later.
There is literally no benefit to engaging with these charlatans or their half baked ideas.
Have you ever run a PCR? It's not magic and none of the arguments by these bizarre COVID truthers hold any water when there are thousands of people using them in research every single day.
This is definitely a fringe opinion. PCR is in widespread use in medicine today, and he's the only one I've ever heard of that made this claim.
Mullis also has said that HIV does not cause AIDS. While I'd look at his argument, I wouldn't give his opinion all that much weight just because he invented PCR.
> Cases peaked at 5,451 on April 5, reached a low of 101 on June 10 and very recently have appeared to be rapidly rising again. The most recent rise in cases, to more than 2,600 a day, is particularly unsettling.
One thing the article briefly mentioned but didn't really dig into (IMO) is that the peak of 5,451 cases on April 5th is basically a meaningless number and that it is important to try to figure out what the real number should have been.
On April 5th, the UK was only doing 16,000 tests a day and had a nearly 40% positive rate for tests. Only very sick people were being tested. That implies that the 5,451 cases detected that day is a vast undercount of the actual number of new cases at that point. It is bad data science to keep reporting that peak case number in comparison with the current case numbers as if it means anything.
So how many new cases were there on April 5th? No one knows for sure, but various estimates based on community surveys guess that it was more like 100,000/cases per day. That would be a very different graph than what gets attached to every news story.
Compare that with now, where the UK is doing ~200k tests a day (over 10x!). We also have much better community survey data now and can estimate that there are about 3,200/cases a day right now. The daily testing is picking up the majority of those expected cases.
So if you actually compare numbers that are comparable (~100k cases/~1000 deaths with ~3k cases/~10 deaths), you get a much better idea of what is actually going on. Demographics are definitely working in our favor now, which keeps death rates lower. But it's not like we have "solved COVID treatment" and can cure everyone now because we know to use steroids. It's mostly that there just aren't nearly as many people getting it right now as there were at the peak. Even if tomorrow we detected 5,451 cases again, there's no reason to expect that the death rate should approach the peak because we are getting much closer at detecting all the sick people than before.
3,200 cases/day is a little more than the daily positive UK RT-PCR tests. But by the government's own admission and recent commentary about cycle counts, it's entirely plausible and in fact likely that 100% of these are false positives. It's the only explanation you need to determine why there are no deaths, although there may well be other correct explanations too.
The problem is that the test's sensitivity has been amped up to such a huge level that labs are reporting positive for people who have virtually no virus in their blood, or actually no viable virus at all, and certainly are not infectious let alone at risk.
Fortunately the British government in the last few weeks finally understood that RT-PCR tests do in fact have false positives, contrary to what was being regularly claimed back in April. They changed their guidance on September 6th. There's an analysis of this by a scientist here:
The number of cycles is not actually specified in the publication. Instead each laboratory must determine their own. A beautiful French study demonstrated the relationship between the number of cycles and the chance that a sample will be from an infectious case. Above 30 cycles and the chances of a test being from an infectious case are only 50/50. Above 34 cycles they are all positive. Another laboratory may find a different cut off. Indeed, a Canadian study found no cases requiring more than 24 cycles were infectious.
To put it in perspective, COVID testing labs have routinely been reporting positive at 40 cycles.
148 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 206 ms ] threadHow does it happen on a molecular level that PCR delivers a false positive? Are the primers sometimes broken (matching not exactly what they're supposed to match)?
I'm not sure it really is. Take it with a grain of salt for now. I feel like there's a missing piece of the puzzle here.
A false positive rate that high doesn't pass the sniff test.
[1]https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-testing [2]https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/26/world/asia/coronavirus-wu...
Different tests are used in different jurisdictions and at different times.
"The high specificities (usually 100%) reported in PCR-based tests for SARS-CoV-2 infection do not represent the real-world use of these tests, where contamination and human error produce significant rates of false positives."
New York reports positivity rate below 1% for a while now, so false positive rate cannot be 2.3%.
[1] https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/coronavirus-disease-2019...
[2] https://www.fda.gov/media/141951/download
[3] https://www.fda.gov/media/141760/download
Combine that with [1] which makes a good argument that some high Ct levels may be too sensitive.
Just randomly looking, this test[2] approved in June uses the Ct of 40 which is criticised above.
[1] https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2020/09/01/covid-tes...
[2] https://www.fda.gov/media/139572/download
The PCR test can produce high numbers of false positives. It depends on a variable called the "cycle threshold" (Ct), which is the number of times amplification is run.
Different tests have different Ct numbers, so some specific tests are overly sensitive. However there is no data on what test is used where, or when tests were changed.
https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2020/09/01/covid-tes...
This article doesn't even deal with SARS-CoV-2, so until it gets peer reviewed and, more importantly, replicated, it should be treated as an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence.
Some interesting parts from this interview:
- She surprisingly claims that she's not good at recognizing emotions.
- She can recognize adults based on how they looked as children. This suggests there's a sort of 'fuzzing' process that allows her to interpolate aging.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernoff_face
Interesting weasel-words and cherry-picking. First, comparing a quarter of a year of Covid deaths against a whole year (or two?) of normal flu, and then subtly shifting between deaths from Covid and deaths during a flu wave (so not caused by the flu?).
For a more accurate comparison: "between 291,000 and 646,000 people worldwide die from seasonal influenza-related respiratory illnesses each year"[0] and 907,917 have died from Covid so far this year[1], despite all the extra measures taken to limit its spread and mortality rate.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2017/p1213-flu-death-esti...
[1] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
Newsflash, genius. They are counting every person that died with COVID (or even "presumed" positive) as a death from COVID-19. The actual number of people that were killed directly by COVID is not known, just like we don't measure, test, or track every single person that dies of flu each year. It's an estimate that's arrived at long after the fact by reviewing data.
> Cumulative number of COVID-related deaths as reported by local health department, beginning March 19, 2020. This determination is made by local health departments based on the cause of death reported on death certificates. It is expected that, to be counted, COVID is the cause of death or at least a contributing factor to the death. COVID-related deaths are also counted in “Positive Cases”.
https://covid19.ca.gov/data-and-tools/
Here is the CDC's policy:
> In cases where a definite diagnosis of COVID–19 cannot be made, but it is suspected or likely (e.g., the circumstances are compelling within a reasonable degree of certainty), it is acceptable to report COVID–19 on a death certificate as “probable” or “presumed.”
There is also a lack of consistency between how states count deaths: https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/which-deaths-c...
If not, what would you say is a reasonable way to compare them?
The excess deaths statistics [1] give lie to the tired claim that these were all people who "would have died anyway." 200,000+ more people have died this year in the US alone than normal, and it's very statistically-significant, particularly as the annual death rate is under 3 million.
1. https://www.sciencealert.com/2020-has-killed-up-to-200-000-e...
* https://twitter.com/lymanstoneky/status/1301975654771064834?...
* https://twitter.com/lymanstoneky/status/1301976643146317825?...
This suggests undiagnosed COVID is in fact the cause of most of the excess deaths.
> a whole year (or two?) of normal flu
Flu season is fall to spring, that range is (northern hemisphere) half a year. Both years are given because it started in 2017 and ended in 2018.
TL;DR: Some (many?) PCR tests are using too high a cycle threshold, which makes them too sensitive. Key quote:
Juliet Morrison, a virologist at the University of California-Riverside, said she believes any test with a cycle threshold over 35 is too sensitive. "I'm shocked that people would think that 40 could represent a positive," she said.
The following is my commentary, and not specifically in the article above:
There were many early tests that were giving false negatives. It looks to me like test manufactures over-compensated to make sure they never give false negatives. There is no data source that I can find that shows what test is used in what area, or what CT is used for what test.
Research scientists and clinical scientists are worlds apart, and have very different goals in life.
I wouldn't trust a cT coming out of any research lab either, but clinical labs are far far more controlled and have far better processes, and have intense validation that shows that their threshold is repeatable, accurate, and a true representation of their limit of detection.
No research lab does any of this, and they almost never have extremely basic contamination protections like separate rooms for pre- and post-amplification rooms.
I've watched research scientists try to stand up clinical labs during this pandemic, and it has been an education for them to bring their standards up to what is the baseline for clinical testing. Its not unlike giving a butcher a scalpel and expecting brain surgery: there are a lot of the same skills involved but also very different and extremely narrow it's of knowledge.
Can you explain to the layperson why it's "basically bullshit"? The NYT article I linked describes a real-world scenario where a fake outbreak (100% of cases were false positives) actually occurred (note: I am not claiming Covid-19 is fake).
Also, specific false positive rates aside, is it not likely we're now approaching a rate of "cases" which is hard to distinguish from false positive tests, which would help explain the drop in hospitalization / ICU / mortality?
> Many of the new molecular tests are quick but technically demanding, and each laboratory may do them in its own way. These tests, called “home brews,” are not commercially available, and there are no good estimates of their error rates.
The technology, as mentioned, was new at the time and not even commercially available. There have been 13 years of improvement since then.
And this will continue for at least another month. All in all it's rather amazing how by trying to do everything right the Victorian government has managed to do everything wrong.
At least the current government gets to wag its finger at people for wanting such unreasonable things as jobs, leaving your house after work, or sleeping with your partner for the first time in 3 months.
Consider that lockdowns cannot stop the virus forever. They were only ever pitched, even by advocates, as a delaying strategy to reduce pressure on hospitals. Total numbers of infected were never meant to change, as logic dictates. However lockdowns and other restrictions, when as long as they have been, do create new deaths by e.g. delaying cancer checkups and treatments, by causing job losses and subsequent poverty related deaths, by stopping the elderly from seeing their family - deaths by loneliness are a real thing in elderly care!
If you're going to assert that lockdowns can actually reduce the death rate rather than increase it you will need to give arguments for why that's the case, especially over the long term.
Try living under curfew for a few months and see if you still think that keeping 10000 people in their 80s alive for another two years is worth it.
It's worth noting that nobody until very recently was claiming lockdowns could eliminate outbreaks. That whole notion was deemed absurd as recently as June. The problem is obvious - for as long as there is a pool of people, somewhere, spreading the disease, and a large pool of people who haven't developed immunity, and international travel, then the virus will get in. Meanwhile lockdowns have catastrophic consequences far in excess of their benefits (halting COVID is not very important given how mild it is).
There's a lot of pile-on about how they've done everything wrong without a lot of suggestion about what they should've done instead / should currently be doing instead.
For example, if Andrews and co cave to the federal and local pressure and re-open the state today, and everything explodes in two weeks, who takes the blame then? Still Andrews and co.
While it's been a huge outbreak by Australian expectations, it's still tiny when compared to the rest of the world.
If we had the 10, 15,000 cases per million that are more commonplace around the world, there'd still be a stuffed economy, lower employment, increased mental health issues, right? We'd just have another layer of mess with hospital overload and death that we don't have in a large amount at the moment.
In short: open everything and let the devil take the hindmost. The alternative is a yo-yo lock down until Bangladesh manages to deploy a vaccine to everyone infected before the virus mutates, something that will happen in 202-never.
[0] Even the horror stories from New York were because they didn't have the capacity to bury people fast enough, not that they ran out of hospital beds.
New Jersey - At capacity, Elective surgeries cancelled
Alabama - Elective Surgeries Cancelled, state of emergency declared
California - set up tents outside, patients in hallways
Pennsylvania - Surge tents
https://english.elpais.com/society/2020-04-07/spains-intensi...
It discusses one of the hardest hit hospitals. However the absolute numbers were small and they never turned people away.
This sort of bed conversion is known to happen even in normal years, so it doesn't mean much by itself. Dramatic language can be misleading. Unfortunately it is standard for health officials to describe hospitals as "overloaded" or "at breaking point" simply due to seasonal flu outbreaks, as in these articles from 2017:
https://www.thelocal.fr/20170111/french-hospitals-stretched-...
https://www.euronews.com/2017/01/12/struggling-to-care-hospi...
Not a direct acquaintance, but a friend of my sister was two days siting in the hall of the Gregorio Marañon until they could transfer him to IFEMA. Almost no supply of food during these two days, and he was lucky to have a seat, many people lying on the floor.
They found many bodies of people dead by COVID-19 at home. They found some bodies on the streets.
I don't get how can you pretend that many hospitals / regions were "overload".
It's a debatable question whether this shutdown of hospitals was due to the virus, or due to the over-reaction to it. Other places where the virus started later didn't do this to the same extent (although the UK did and is still doing so!), and they saw less serious problems.
As for "many bodies of people dead at home/on the streets", can you show me reports of people dropping dead of COVID on the streets? I never heard that, it seems it hasn't happened elsewhere and sounds suspect.
Remember that basically all reports about people dying "of" COVID are garbage. The average age of death when testing positive is over the average life expectancy in most places (maybe all, I haven't checked). Almost all such reports are of deaths that were naturally happening anyway due to age or other serious health conditions, and COVID was just co-present at time of death - maybe it pushed them over by a little bit, but probably only by months. Correlation/causation mixups are a huge problem with COVID datasets.
NZ went for elimination from the outset so when the virus came back in Auckland several weeks ago it was a no-brainer to immediately lock down again (although now they seem to have shifted to a suppression strategy, let's see how that goes for them...).
Sweden went for a flatten the curve(ish) strategy which meant that they did not automatically enact a lockdown when things started heating up in terms of case numbers/deaths because they were confident enough at the time that their health care system would cope.
Those are two very different strategies with different outcomes but they were consistent and thereby achieved their respective goals.
Victoria (and Australia as a whole) has gone from flatten the curve to suppression and now to elimination. If Victoria had chosen elimination after the first flare up back at the end of May, then that would have most probably been achieved by now.
It really does not make much sense to unnecessarily restrict the times when people can, e.g., go out and buy groceries. The wider the allowed hours, the less density of people there will be in those indoor places, which will help decrease the spreading of the virus.
Probably not much. But that's because you used the word "doing". If you had asked "what should Victoria have done instead?", then there is a long list.
To pick on one thing, I was amazed press were showing people in the locked down towers apparently depending on charities for essential supplies. To this day don't know if it was a beat up or real, but if real it boggles the mind. It implies the lock down was little more than a thought bubble with almost no effort put into planning.
Obviously, they did eventually react to the collapse of contract tracing, the explosion of cases, the outbreak in nursing homes and so on, and as a consequence everything seems to be as under control as it can be now. But it does seem to all be reactive, not proactive.
I do wonder how the situation arose. At one level it's obviously a reflection of competence of the bureaucracy, as this is where the pollies (who usually have very little expertise in their portfolio) get their advice. But those same pollies have been there for 10 years and so they should by now have made their stamp on the culture of the bureaucracy. Frankly when you compare it's performance with bureaucracies in all other states, it was very poor. For me (a Queenslander) the outstanding state was NSW the Ruby Princess cluster fuck notwithstanding.
Even the second wave isn't anywhere close to being as large as what Europe/NYC had but is largely confined to aged care homes.
Coronavirus quickly found its way into aged care facilities, causing a higher death rate. But as the virus progresses through the wider community the death rate declines.
Still doesn't make sense though. Pretty much everyone is inside all day either due to work or the weather being shite, and even if you do go outside you probably won't have much exposed skin due to the weather being shite, and even if you did the sun is low in the sky due to it being winter and...
Is that any clearer? :D
The first thing they do now in the hospital is steroids, they learned after NY.
In the UK they had the Oxford study
https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2020-06-16-dexamethasone-reduces-d...
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/spain/
counter-intuitive as it may sound today, US might just end up the country that did really well. Most large countries are simply not measuring/admitting the real number of cases.
If we don't get vaccine then sure all countries might eventually end up the same, but Europe is largely back to normal living with kids back at school with almost no cases. In the US we still have lockdowns and no control at all.
So, would it be true if you looked at recorded deaths? After all, at the beginning of the pandemic they were expecting millions of deaths in the US.
With updated information, we can narrow the expectations between the most optimistic and pessimistic models, but recorded deaths will always be a lagging indicator. As of right now, the fivethirtyeight summary (https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/covid-forecasts) has a spread in the US between 231,000 Americans dead by Oct. 17 (IHME) and 205,000 dead by Oct 17 (Los Alamos). What has changed since the disease started is the death curve has gone from exponential to linear (thank goodness), which is likely due to public health controls having an effect (we can guess this because the curve linearized around mid-April, which is about a month after California began treating the disease as an emergency and 2 weeks after New York followed suit). As it stands, it'd take over a decade to reach a million US deaths, assuming nothing changes (i.e. assuming people continue to avoid unnecessary contact and travel and protect their respiration); had the curve stayed exponential, it would have taken under a year.
The disease is 99+% survivable with optimal medical care during the worst phase of it and significantly less survivable without it.
All the excess hospital beds built at the height of the hysteria went unused.
Italy got saturated, and the outcome was tragic.
https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2020/03/19/italian-h...
Most countries have twice as many cases now than at their peak in Spring and the trend is accelerating. As for most of Latin America, they are just not reporting the numbers because they are too poor to test.
Sky high death rate? Not even close. The worst hit countries, deaths per population are the European ones. Again, that is not a reflection on the societies, just perhaps their age distribution and other factors.
That the US is doing really badly is just propaganda fueled by the imminent election. Again, it is normal, election propaganda is anything but fair.
US is actually doing well overall.
To put it in context, "twice as many cases than in spring" can still be per capita 10 times smaller number than in USA.
> US is actually doing well overall.
Yeah, if the number of deaths doubles, USA can be number one! Wait, that is actually not a good thing...
If having 1 in 1730 people die is such a huge success, I suppose having 1 in 1690 die is okay, too.
(To avoid misunderstanding, no, I don't think any of these numbers is okay. Many developed countries have an order of magnitude better results.)
Don't they have access to this data? How's that a speculation and not a plot?
https://www.evms.edu/covid-19/covid_care_for_clinicians/#d.e...
■ Vitamin C 500 mg BID and Quercetin 250-500 mg BID
■ Zinc 75-100 mg/day
■ Melatonin (slow release): Begin with 0.3mg and increase as tolerated to 2 mg at night
■ Vitamin D3 1000-4000 u/day
■ Optional: Famotidine 20-40mg/day
It's also important to note treatment isn't the same thing as a cure. Treatment is any medical care for the illness (i.e. things that help keep you alive through it) not just things that make the illness go away (bit of a rectangle/square thing).
tl;dr of what I've heard on various episodes
- "Standard care" practices have changed
- Dexamethadone
- Lot more of the younger population being infected who have typically been known not to die of the virus (relative to older folks)
- More testing which increases the denominator of CFR
[0] https://www.abc.net.au/radio/programs/coronacast/
> The PCR test amplifies genetic matter from the virus in cycles; the fewer cycles required, the greater the amount of virus, or viral load, in the sample. The greater the viral load, the more likely the patient is to be contagious. This number of amplification cycles needed to find the virus, called the cycle threshold, is never included in the results sent to doctors and coronavirus patients, although it could tell them how infectious the patients are. In three sets of testing data that include cycle thresholds, compiled by officials in Massachusetts, New York and Nevada, up to 90 percent of people testing positive carried barely any virus, a review by The Times found.
> ... One solution would be to adjust the cycle threshold used now to decide that a patient is infected. Most tests set the limit at 40, a few at 37. This means that you are positive for the coronavirus if the test process required up to 40 cycles, or 37, to detect the virus. Tests with thresholds so high may detect not just live virus but also genetic fragments, leftovers from infection that pose no particular risk — akin to finding a hair in a room long after a person has left, Dr. Mina said. Any test with a cycle threshold above 35 is too sensitive, agreed Juliet Morrison, a virologist at the University of California, Riverside. “I’m shocked that people would think that 40 could represent a positive,” she said. A more reasonable cutoff would be 30 to 35, she added. Dr. Mina said he would set the figure at 30, or even less. Those changes would mean the amount of genetic material in a patient’s sample would have to be 100-fold to 1,000-fold that of the current standard for the test to return a positive result — at least, one worth acting on.
Every published "case" should include the PCR cycle threshold to enable statistical analysis.
Maybe the global cycle count for the machine could be adjusted, similar to what you are talking about, but that is different than reporting the cycle count of every positive test.
1: https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/
Without the Ct value, "cases" are not comparable on the basis of test positivity.
With transparency on the Ct value, we can determine which tests and configurations best support health.
P.S. "the machine does not allow it" could be an HN firmware challenge. If the fate of civilization depends on PCR test machines, do any of them have auditable open-source firmware?
Doesn't seem like you're using a throwaway for this. Why aren't you concerned for your safety?
Also, I don't know where you are, but what rights have you lost, exactly? My country locked down pretty hard and pretty early, and the only "rights" I've lost are going to crowded spaces and walking around without a mask in populated areas.
Or else what? You don't seem to actually be concerned about anything happening to you for saying this, it sounds like you're just unhappy people don't agree with you. Now, that's only human- but come on, my good dude, chill out.
When comparing Sweden and Belgium, for instance, there are some key differences despite similar population numbers: population density, number of pensioners, population concentration (Sweden mainly has Malmö, Göteborg and Stockholm as population centers), how healthcare is funded, how wide streets are, social norms, lifestyle (indoor vs outdoor), etc. When it comes to how they reported cases and deaths, there are also great differences in methodology.
I do share your sentiment about the political caste having overreacted, though. This is the third crisis I'll be paying for, to support a generation that makes myopic decisions when in power.
The idea here is: if you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; if you don't, please don't comment until you do.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We don't care about opinions. We care about how you treat other users and if you're dumping junk or toxic comments into the community.
https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/corona-virus?episodeguid=...
There's a rumor that it has a high false positive rate as well. There was a New York Times article that summarized this a few days ago. Again, perplexing why this isn't mentioned and studied more.
Pregnancy tests should return a binary result. Pretty much every other test requires a quantity for context. Imagine a blood-alcohol test that can say yes, alcohol is present, but is unable to distinguish between ingesting a teaspoon of cough syrup vs. drinking a six-pack.
Okay fine, let's say Reuters is correct and Mullis never said whatever quote some randoms on Facebook are trying to say he said. Here's a research paper pointing out everything wrong with the PCR test:
http://theinfectiousmyth.com/book/CoronavirusPanic.pdf
Let me know what you think.
https://davidcrowe.ca/cnp-wireless.com/dcroweresumelib.php
Holy shit, of course that nutjob is also an AIDS truther:
https://www.davidcrowe.ca/SciHealthEnv/alive-aids-stats.html
And still was in 2014! (Ctrl + F “David Crowe” in the comments):
https://retractionwatch.com/2014/09/26/publisher-issues-stat...
Find better role models.
Mullis talking about his experience: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vaMZ4NyNCwI
Questioning known corrupt organizations like the FDA, CDC and WHO makes me feel better, not worse about Mullis and Crowe. It's the scientists who blindly follow authority who really make me nervous. But that's just me. Sounds like you might be in the opposite camp.
I've looked through your link and saw Crowe in the comments section. He mentions there are two new hypotheses in 2014, hence why its still being discussed. They really have no answer for his questions besides "move on, the science is settled". But critically look at his points, maybe you can address them. BTW, anyone who ever tries to to tell you "the science is settled" is trying to shut down debate, as Crowe correctly recognizes.
Any comments on the actual paper itself that Crowe wrote? You don't need a background in virology to figure out that there's giant issues with the PCR test. If you read the paper at all you'd see that, but I'm guessing you didn't.
There is literally no benefit to engaging with these charlatans or their half baked ideas.
Have you ever run a PCR? It's not magic and none of the arguments by these bizarre COVID truthers hold any water when there are thousands of people using them in research every single day.
Mullis also has said that HIV does not cause AIDS. While I'd look at his argument, I wouldn't give his opinion all that much weight just because he invented PCR.
One thing the article briefly mentioned but didn't really dig into (IMO) is that the peak of 5,451 cases on April 5th is basically a meaningless number and that it is important to try to figure out what the real number should have been.
On April 5th, the UK was only doing 16,000 tests a day and had a nearly 40% positive rate for tests. Only very sick people were being tested. That implies that the 5,451 cases detected that day is a vast undercount of the actual number of new cases at that point. It is bad data science to keep reporting that peak case number in comparison with the current case numbers as if it means anything.
So how many new cases were there on April 5th? No one knows for sure, but various estimates based on community surveys guess that it was more like 100,000/cases per day. That would be a very different graph than what gets attached to every news story.
Compare that with now, where the UK is doing ~200k tests a day (over 10x!). We also have much better community survey data now and can estimate that there are about 3,200/cases a day right now. The daily testing is picking up the majority of those expected cases.
So if you actually compare numbers that are comparable (~100k cases/~1000 deaths with ~3k cases/~10 deaths), you get a much better idea of what is actually going on. Demographics are definitely working in our favor now, which keeps death rates lower. But it's not like we have "solved COVID treatment" and can cure everyone now because we know to use steroids. It's mostly that there just aren't nearly as many people getting it right now as there were at the peak. Even if tomorrow we detected 5,451 cases again, there's no reason to expect that the death rate should approach the peak because we are getting much closer at detecting all the sick people than before.
The problem is that the test's sensitivity has been amped up to such a huge level that labs are reporting positive for people who have virtually no virus in their blood, or actually no viable virus at all, and certainly are not infectious let alone at risk.
Fortunately the British government in the last few weeks finally understood that RT-PCR tests do in fact have false positives, contrary to what was being regularly claimed back in April. They changed their guidance on September 6th. There's an analysis of this by a scientist here:
https://lockdownsceptics.org/when-is-covid-19-not-covid-19/
A useful quote is this one:
The number of cycles is not actually specified in the publication. Instead each laboratory must determine their own. A beautiful French study demonstrated the relationship between the number of cycles and the chance that a sample will be from an infectious case. Above 30 cycles and the chances of a test being from an infectious case are only 50/50. Above 34 cycles they are all positive. Another laboratory may find a different cut off. Indeed, a Canadian study found no cases requiring more than 24 cycles were infectious.
To put it in perspective, COVID testing labs have routinely been reporting positive at 40 cycles.