Sep 17, 2020 -- 8:24AM, Mexico wrote:
SontAre you still trying to defend your garbage based on one person you know who works for an unnamed company. You haven't even said if she lied to get a test she wasn't entitled to. Yet you have decided that problem with lack of testing isn't caused by number of infections rising ten fold in a few weeks. No can't be that.Maybe this rise in infections is why Leciester have decided to close parks an hour early, I doubt the reason for this decision wasn't to annoy voters out walking their dogs on their own. You have made a big point of parks closing a bit earlier than normal but haven't bothered to research the reasons behind this decision. Were groups of 16-18 year olds meeting up after school?WTF are you on about "snitching " . Ever since we has had police, people have been asked/ expected to report crimes. Well before Covid the UK had two telephone numbers for emergency & non emergency cases. It isn't new.
Boris clearly disagrees with you Mexico.
But Boris Johnson has now urged people to speak with rulebreakers before notifying the authorities - contradicting Home Secretary Priti Patel, who said it was 'personal responsibility' to make sure people obeyed rules.
The PM said: “I have never much been in favour of sneak culture, myself. “What people should do in the first instance is obviously if they are concerned is raise it with their friends and neighbours.
“But I think what is reasonable for anyone to do is if they think there is a serious threat to public health as a result of their neighbours’ activities – if there is some huge kind of Animal House party taking place, as I am sure, hot tubs and so forth, and there is a serious threat to public health then its reasonable for the authorities to know.”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8742205/Do-not-snitch-unless-neighbours-having-Animal-House-parties-Johnson-says.html
Sep 17, 2020 -- 8:40AM, PorcupineorPineapple wrote:
My daughter has just started year 7 and has been walking down to school with a friend. He got ill last weekend and has been off since. By all accounts, he's not too bad but has been told he can't return until he gets a test. Unfortunately, that's not as easy as you'd hope a civilised country to be and he's now looking at going into a second week off from school for what may be no more than a bad cold.Utterly farcical.
Expect to see more of this. The majority of people get 1-3 colds a year.
Sep 17, 2020 -- 10:46AM, Mexico wrote:
Laugh The 3 on the R rate isn't the maximum a person can infect but how many on average they do. That is why lockdown brought down R rate from over 3 to below 1If we all go out to nightclubs, packed pubs, crowded theatres , rammed into tube carriages then average number of infections will be higher. If everybody was locked away in solitary confinement then R will be lower .It is a balancing act ever since economy started to reopen & to some extent even UK softish lockdown was a balancing act.
Social distancing and less people being susceptible as more people had had it brought the 'r rate' down.
Same as Sweden.
Sep 17, 2020 -- 12:21PM, Whisperingdeath wrote:
Do anybody really believe that wearing a mask in a confined public space like public transport will not help curb the spread of the virus?
Do we really believe it will?
Best to keep 2 metres apart.



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 17, 2020 -- 5:34PM, nineteen points wrote:
muzzles mandate.cases rocketing.fact.is this a fact we like or do we discount this one?
Assuming this is true (a source would be useful) then of course we don't like it. Nor would we if the rate was increasing in any race, ethnic origin or anything else you want to call it. Not sure what you meant by "do we discount this one". I'm sure you will clarify what you meant.
Sep 17, 2020 -- 2:02PM, Mexico wrote:
SontYou claim that people have been traveling in their droves in past 3 months but not bothered to explain what you man by droves.Do you mean simlar number of flights to summer 2019?Maybe a 10% drop is still drovesIs a 50% drop still droves of people? A 75% drop?What is your point...The infection rate has increased and some of that is blamed on people going on summer holidays and basically ignoring social distancing.
I thought it was those wancors not wearing face nappies?
No I say droves because that's how many have still been travelling

Sep 18, 2020 -- 11:25AM, ----you-have-to-laugh--- wrote:
we have a health service , expert at detecting diseases and handling testing.somehow our government overlooked this fact and paid some old pals to set up an outsourced system.somewhat beggaring belief.
They also misled people as to who was doing the work, by calling it NHS Test and Trace, when the NHS hasn’t been doing it.
The only thing I can really say in their defence, is that the long term underfunding of the NHS and PHE especially would have made running this programme very difficult without some external support. This was also an issue in contracting out of services after the 2012 reforms, where the NHS would have done a better job in lots of cases but often didn’t have the strategic capacity to put slick proposals together. Nonetheless, as the stats for PHE tracing v private tracing somewhat show (yes, there are some quibbles as to how to interpret the rather different types of tracing required), this would probably have been done better in house. If government can’t rapidly provide support to an effective internal agency to do what it’s best at, that’s a massive failure of government.
Oh and it was a pleasure, edy. Funny how nobody other than you came back on it though.
Sep 18, 2020 -- 4:03PM, Dr Crippen wrote:
No Fatslogger, it's you who is wrong as usual.why did numbers of positive swabs fall so dramatically and are now going back up?Because it's blindingly obvious that they're doing umpteen more tests now than they were. You don't seen to do common sense.How do you explain the high rates of positive tests when people aren't falling ill?
Dear God you’re bad at this. You know that the arrogant dismissals just look like you don’t know about Dunning and Kruger when you’re so obviously wrong?
Were we doing more tests in June and July than April and May, with vastly fewer positive results, both absolutely and, as a partial control for greater testing, proportionately? The answer is that we were. There is no possible way your theory is consistent with the facts.
People are falling ill. The numbers remain very low by comparison with the early pandemic because of a number of factors:
1. There are many more tests done, crucially in relatively well people, so average severity of disease is much lower. In the early pandemic we still tested all suspected Covid cases coming to hospital but not many outside hospital. So overall there are many fewer cases than there were.
2. Younger and less vulnerable people are catching it, on average, with very low mortality. The lower overall prevalence of the disease in the community has made it easier to protect vulnerable people than earlier, as have a number of other measures.
3. Treatment is better, although it’s easy to overstate this. Frankly elderly people will still have a high chance of getting very sick if they catch it.
Look at Spain and France if you want to know whether large spikes in cases eventually lead to people getting ill. Or you could wait for a few more weeks and look at figures here. It won’t be the many hundreds of deaths per day it was at the peak, I don’t think but it won’t remain very few either, unless the case numbers come back under control very soon and probably not even then. Death is a lagging indicator.
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.
Sep 18, 2020 -- 6:58PM, Dr Crippen wrote:
Oh go away and put edy back on, he's much more fun than you.
I’m sorry that you don’t enjoy having your half arsed theories and ludicrous attempts at debate chopped into match wood, Crips. Perhaps try to be less scientifically illiterate and rhetorically inept in the future.
Sep 18, 2020 -- 7:15PM, Dr Crippen wrote:
You certainly get upset easily.
Not really. As I say, I enjoy showing you up, although you do make it too easy for it to be really good sport.
Did you forget to engage with the issues you brought up for your fifth post in a row Crips? It’s hard to work out why, isn’t it?
Sep 18, 2020 -- 8:44PM, Dr Crippen wrote:
Porcupine has come for a tilt now.He'll be blowing his top soon to join Fatslogger.
Do you think pretending that people are cross with you rather than deeply amused at your ongoing humiliation will allow you to report them and get them banned? Even by the risibly low standards of reasoning you’ve displayed so far today, that’s a stretch, isn’t it?
Sep 18, 2020 -- 8:59PM, lfc1971 wrote:
It is possible for the number of false positives to be much greater than the real number
Yes, it’s possible. Depends on the incidence in the population (being tested, not necessarily the general population) and the false positive rate of the test, as in how often it says something is present when it isn’t.
Sep 18, 2020 -- 9:08PM, lfc1971 wrote:
Yes but even if it is very close to zero , and as I say it may be less accurate than that You can have many more false positives , than true positives
This is possible, although unlikely for various reasons given on another thread but wouldn’t explain the recent increase in cases anyway, would it?
As we’ve both said it depends on how low the prevalence is. If you have a highly accurate needle in a haystack test that will pick up every real needle 100% of the time and correctly identify little bits of straw as not needles 99.95% of the time, which sounds really rather good, once you’ve got a haystack of 10000 bits of straw and 1 needle, it will (on average) find you 6 needles.
Sep 18, 2020 -- 9:41PM, lfc1971 wrote:
Now how accurate do you think it is likely to be , in the real world ?
It depends on what you mean by accurate. It’s detecting the Coronavirus very accurately. The test is amplifying viral DNA. If it picks it up, it can’t tell whether that’s dead DNA in a non infectious person, although I think the notion that this explains many positive results is false, or from live virus in someone who’s infectious. In hospital it really doesn’t affect what we do to distinguish, we’d manage the person the same, with careful isolation and the usual management of Covid, which isn’t mostly anything very clever unless they need respiratory support. For population screening the distinction doesn’t matter very much for the individual, who just has to isolate anyway because it would be a bonkers risk to assume dead virus. It probably also doesn’t matter that much for policy decisions, because it’s still people who’ve recently had the virus, even if you assume that a high proportion aren’t actively infectious.