Depends on the type of test: Coronavirus Testing Basics
Coronavirus Thread
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at6
1st Sergeant
I still practice the distancing and wear a mask as per the "guide lines" which seem to be so superfluous that I am coming to the conclusion that the politicians and the experts are all full of dung.
Stands to reason, doesn't it? Look at the words:
POLITICIAN:
POLI - a form of "polly", meaning "many"
TICIAN - built around the root "tice", the source of "entice", but in the form of practitioner of same.
SO: "a practitioner of many enticements", in other words a "pied piper" or "demagogue".
EXPERT:
EX - meaning "formerly" or "in the past"
PERT - root of "pertinent" meaning "relevant" or "having bearing on the issue".
SO: "an out-of-date former authority", a "has been".
Fills you with confidence and respect, doesn't it?
Bottom line: You've got to fact check everybody and decide for yourself who meets your standards of credibility. It's tough to get outside your comfort zone, recognize and try to ignore your emotional biases, and separate hard facts from ideology, but if democracy is to survive, we all need to learn to do it, and do it well. (Wouldn't a benevolent despot be so much easier on our harrassed, overstressed minds? Seems to hold an attraction for many today.) Think about it.
Cheers,
Wes
Snautzer01
Honourably banned
- 42,422
- Mar 26, 2007
Yes but is the benevolent despot you describe gluten free?
Actually, quite glutinous from his photos!
Because there's so much spurious and misleading information floating around out there that people start to question the effectiveness and necessity of these measures and begin to subscribe to conspiracy theories about nefarious manipulation of the innocent and ignorant public.
at6
1st Sergeant
From reports on various news channels, I'm thinking that this plague will never end. People becoming re-infected with a new variant while World wide there are dramatic increases in the infection rate. China has ruined economies and lives with this one. If anything, it brings us closer to God seeking his protection and guidance.
I think you're right. IMHO, globally, we've long since lost any chance we may have had to get ahead of this thing and corral it. We'll have to learn to live with it as a permanent fixture, like the flu and the cold, and the sooner we as a species learn to accept that fact and adopt the attitudinal, lifestyle, and institutional changes to cope with it, the sooner we can relegate it to the less lethal status of its viral relatives. Forget panaceas like vaccines and miracle drugs. It can evolve faster than our science can.
It didn't have to be this way. We (or at least some of us) have known for some time how to deal with outbreaks of this kind. We just haven't had the social will and social cohesion to allocate the resources to prepare for this kind of threat before it becomes imminent. For that the butcher bill is being paid, but not by the guilty parties.
As a species, our widespread inability to differentiate factuality from ideology and adapt to rapid change might well be our undoing, or at least the undoing of our society as we know it.
This may sound callous, but depending on your perspective, you could say this pandemic has some benefits. Like reducing the huge burden the boomer generation has placed on the Social Security system.
We who have grown up in a world of eternal verities and stable institutions are philosophically and emotionally ill adapted to life in this explosively changing social environment we find ourselves in. Alvin Toffler nailed it in his book "Future Shock" back in the 1960s. Not enough people have read it. And unfortunately the people who need it most won't read it.
Is this cause for feelings of depression? On a personal level, no, life will go on with or without any particular one of us individually. And our descendants, having grown up in a much more fluid and fast paced world than we did, are better adapted. With any luck at all, they will operate the world on their watch more wisely than we did on ours.
Cheers,
Wes
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at6
1st Sergeant
I happen to be one the Boomer Generation and I plan to out live many of the Millennials.
at6
1st Sergeant
michaelmaltby
Colonel
Be careful what you wish for .....
China's internet watchdog launches new app to squash online rumours
China's internet watchdog launches new app to squash online rumours
Italy report 30th August, weekly changes
cases 268,218, +8,873, deaths 35,477, +40, recovered 208,536, +3,066, active cases 24,205, +5,767, tests 8,591,341, +583,704, people tested 5,117,788, +377,820
fatality rate 13.2% (-0.5)
mortality rate 588 per million (=)
test rate 142.4 per thousand (+9.6)
positive rate 5.2% (-0.3)
test rate this week 9,677 per million (+2,213)
positive rate this week 2.3% (+0.4)
new case rate this week 147 per million (+57)
cases 268,218, +8,873, deaths 35,477, +40, recovered 208,536, +3,066, active cases 24,205, +5,767, tests 8,591,341, +583,704, people tested 5,117,788, +377,820
fatality rate 13.2% (-0.5)
mortality rate 588 per million (=)
test rate 142.4 per thousand (+9.6)
positive rate 5.2% (-0.3)
test rate this week 9,677 per million (+2,213)
positive rate this week 2.3% (+0.4)
new case rate this week 147 per million (+57)
MIflyer
1st Lieutenant
Well, now even the New York Times has been forced to admit that our testing methods produce a huge number of false positives, perhaps even the majority of test results.
According to The New York Times, potentially 90 percent of those who have tested positive for COVID-19 have such insignificant amounts of the virus
present in their bodies that such individuals do not need to isolate nor are they candidates for contact tracing. Leading public health experts are now
concerned that overtesting is responsible for misdiagnosing a huge number of people with harmless amounts of the virus in their systems.
Looks like what that immunology expert doctor was warning about, with the tests detecting pieces of the virus.
According to The New York Times, potentially 90 percent of those who have tested positive for COVID-19 have such insignificant amounts of the virus
present in their bodies that such individuals do not need to isolate nor are they candidates for contact tracing. Leading public health experts are now
concerned that overtesting is responsible for misdiagnosing a huge number of people with harmless amounts of the virus in their systems.
Looks like what that immunology expert doctor was warning about, with the tests detecting pieces of the virus.
That is not what the article says. It says that the people tested may not have viral loads high enough to be contagious. The current testing methods only say yes or no. The experts are saying that we need to different tests that reports the viral load.
From your same New York Times article. Can't cherry pick data to prove a point, especially one with political motovations.
" Most of these people are not likely to be contagious, and identifying them may contribute to bottlenecks that prevent those who are contagious from being found in time. But researchers say the solution is not to test less, or to skip testing people without symptoms, as recently suggested by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Instead, new data underscore the need for more widespread use of rapid tests, even if they are less sensitive.
"The decision not to test asymptomatic people is just really backward," said Dr. Michael Mina, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, referring to the C.D.C. recommendation.
In fact, we should be ramping up testing of all different people," he said, "but we have to do it through whole different mechanisms."
It's just kind of mind-blowing to me that people are not recording the C.T. values from all these tests — that they're just returning a positive or a negative," said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Columbia University in New York. It would be useful information to know if somebody's positive, whether they have a high viral load or a low viral load," she added."
Yes, PCR tests are very sensitive. The whole question of what influences how contegious someone is is still in research. It's a very complex question.
SaparotRob
Unter Gemeine Geschwader Murmeltier XIII
Sadly, I agree.
Politics in a nutshell.
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