Sep 17, 2020 -- 12:14PM, Mexico wrote:

ITThe full lockdown was all about social distancing. Everyone is claiming it successfully bought the R rate down, same as Italy & China & Germany.Recently there has been more social interactions & number of infections have increased.Yep laugh, the "virus load" might be a factor. Are some unproven theories that masks may help even if don't completely prevent infection as people get a small initial exposure to the virus.All a bit difficult to prove as considered unethical to expose 10,000 people to a fine mist of virus, some with masks & some without. Then observe how many get ill.

I don’t understand IT’s position on this. He says he’s in favour of social distancing but opposed to lockdown and won’t tell me whether he thinks lockdown contributed significantly to social distancing.

Yes, there isn’t an awful lot of high quality real world data on masks. There is very good quality mechanistic stuff, however, especially for masks preventing virus leaving mask wearers in droplets.

On Crips’ line on testing, err, it’s fake news. All tests have both a false negative and false positive rate. The false negative rate for PCR swabs is probably about 30%, so a negative test reduces your P of having the virus to about 0.3 of your pre test probability. This does depend a bit on how the swab is done and is therefore likely to be worse for home testing. So a negative home test might not be very helpful, although if it takes 5-7 days to turn up, go to the lab and a result come back, the person is by then much less likely to be highly infectious anyway. The false positive rate is close to zero. You can quibble a bit about non viable DNA being amplified in people who no longer have active virus and this probably is a thing to an extent in small numbers of people but in practice, a positive test indicates active infection an overwhelmingly large proportion of the time.

Sep 18, 2020 -- 5:00PM, Dr Crippen wrote:

Look at Spain and France if you want to know whether large spikes in cases eventually lead to people getting ill.Okay lets look at France - no it hasn't happened there, or Italy or the UK.However Spain's death rate has gone up. That's one out of four.Germany same story as well, increase in positive cases - no marked increase in deaths.

You’re one for trying to pick at a small strand of a larger debate and not engage on most of it, aren’t you? It’s not a bad trick, if a bit transparent. It would help you if you didn’t try to imply that I’ve said things I didn’t though. Italy, Germany, Italy and the U.K. haven’t seen a comparable spike in cases to France and Spain, although may be following on. Hence I didn’t mention them. Also, you probably ought not to get basic and verifiable facts wrong: death rates in France have very clearly gone up, from generally single figures to the teens in August to now mostly 20-50 in September.

Sep 18, 2020 -- 6:00PM, Dr Crippen wrote:

No, you said - Look at Spain and France if you want to know whether large spikes in cases eventually lead to people getting ill. So I did and you were wrong again. There's been no significant increases in deaths in France. A small rise yes, but we can expect small spikes now and then.Spain has seen a significant rise, but they're a tourist hotspot, they've got people coming and going all the time.And if we look at the chart for positive cases in Spain, there's far more new cases now than there were even at the peak. It's been like that for a month.Yet deaths are still only a fraction of what they were then.

I’d accept some quibbling about whether France really shows that increases in cases means people eventually getting ill from someone who wasn’t obviously in bad faith trying to claim that deaths hadn’t really gone up there when they’ve more than doubled. That’s well before we see the full effect of the spike in cases too, bearing in mind that deaths lag weeks behind cases. You can also see, accepting that judging from a few days is hard, that the trend continues upwards. In addition, France has seen a lot more ITU admissions. Is that ill enough for you?

Talking of bad faith, somehow Spain doesn’t really count because they wear sombreros or something equally absurd? There’s travel? From where, places with much lower rates of virus?

Oh and while we’re on the subject of bad faith, telling me I’m wrong again when I’m not and you are is bad enough but doing it after you’ve ineptly tried to pick apart a small strand of my argument, having run away from almost all of a detailed post explaining how and why you’re wrong is a real chef’s kiss, isn’t it?

Sep 18, 2020 -- 6:41PM, edy wrote:

Stop behaving like a common troll, Crippen.

It’s the one thing he’s good at, edy. He’s certainly not got any ability at debating beyond a basic level of gaslighting.