Last testing session on Thursday, 10 students tested positive for covid. But with more students distance learning and a bunch testing positive this weekend and staying home, a colleague and I are wondering if we’ll be over 10 students this time. Fewer students in the testing pool means fewer tests but a wider spread could still means a higher percentage of positive tests.
My class tested negative as did my colleague’s. I guess we’ll find out in about an hour.
7
Anti-vaxxers are going to jump all over this as another way that scientists are lying to them and Republicans are going to backdoor into becoming the party of legalizing weed.
That headline is misleading, there’s still plenty of ways smoking weed could help you avoid covid, even if that particular study was bad. I think we will have to do more research and I will volunteer my services.
But people are going to latch on to the idea that smoking weed means they don’t need to be vaccinated.
So. They have too many false positives AND false negatives to be used for decision making? That doesnt seem particularly contradictory.
It’s like with masks, they’re just lying to us so they can be sure there will be enough weed for healthcare workers.
Apparently, some classes are going back to a proper schedule pending testing tomorrow morning. I guess 78 positive students and 3 teachers (excluding 1 at home caring for her covid+ kid) in the last two weeks isn’t enough.
At the same time, not every teacher is recording the results as they’re supposed to. I hate to suspect ulterior motives but they almost certainly have an incentive to keep schools open and may very well be not reporting on students who test positive outside of class in order to keep in-person classes going.
News continues to be good on the falling 7dma front. UK cases are still falling off a cliff, 7dma now down 45 percent from peak:
NY’s 7dma down 29 percent in just 7 days:
Florida’s down 10 percent in 4 days:
US as a whole 7dma has now decreased for the past two days.
And finally, no sign that the rapid decrease in South Africa is bottoming out:
You need to boil it.
I think for safety’s sake I’m just going to let my mail pile up on the counter without even glancing at it until my wife moves the pile somewhere and I don’t even see it.
While the latest daily UK covid case numbers are certainly encouraging, they are not completely unexpected. Since the 11 Jan people who test positive with a lateral flow test (LFT) no longer need a confirmatory PCR test. Although LFT results are supposed to be registered, it is possible not everyone is officially logging them. This could be contributing to daily case rates hitting their lowest point since mid-December.
Prof Sir David Spiegelhalter, the chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at the University of Cambridge, warned earlier this month before the change came into force: “It will become much more important that people report positive lateral flow tests otherwise nobody will know what’s going on. There’s already a problem with daily cases, with people not getting tested or not reporting results.”
However, it should be noted that some experts believe cases could be plateauing. Dr Susan Hopkins, the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) chief medical adviser, said cases appeared to be “plateauing” in parts of the country. Meanwhile, Prof Linda Bauld, a professor of public health at the University of Edinburgh and chief social policy adviser to the Scottish government, said Omicron cases in the UK appeared to be “stabilising”.
Which is why hospitalisations are a better measure than cases…
They are to some extent, but they lag. Given the sharp decline in cases, the resemblance to SA data, the wastewater data around here etc seems highly likely we are on the downside of new cases. Hospitals and deaths still lag, and SA seems to have had more deaths further out than from prior waves (could just be a reporting issue), so we will have to wait until the other side to get a full extent of the damage. Certainly seems likely U.K. and much of the US are at least on the downside of this wave.
Lol, yeah ok.gif that cases have dropped 45 percent because of how they’re reporting tests and not because cases are dropping in the exact same fashion as they did in South Africa, and in the exact same fashion that they have started to in states like NY.
Edit: Also, yeah, hospitalizations lag cases, so, no, that is not a better measure of what’s happening right now.
It’s an interesting anomaly that hospitalizations actually are peaking at the same time as cases
EDIT: A pessimistic interpretation is that some of the recent dynamics in hospitalizations are incidental identifications (no lag), and there’s still a bunch of people infected in the last few weeks who will show up for COVID soon.
possible? - absolutely guaranteed.
Where are you seeing that hospitalizations are peaking at the same time as cases? Cases peaked in the UK almost two weeks ago.
Testing anomalies in the UK do not explain similar declines in South Africa or New York.
I was purely highlighting that that the use of the possible was optimistic at best - I wasn’t trying to explain NY or SA.
I also think UK numbers are not falling off a cliff as such but falling down a very steep hill.
