Meh I just looked it up again and I was right about false positives but the rest of my explanation was garbage. But at least I finally understand the “50% error rate” statements which seemed bonkers before.
What I’m seeing now is that a specificity of, for example, 96% would mean this test would give 4% false positives. (I think for any reason at all, not necessarily due to other coronavirus antibodies.)
The explanation for the “50% error rate” stat that we’ve heard is directly related to a low prevalence of true positives in the field. The example they give is if only 5% of the tested population has the disease, and the specificity of the test is something between 96-98%, then more than half of the tested positives are actually false positives. So whether or not a test with a specificity of 96-98% is “good enough” really comes down to the prevalence of what you’re testing for. I think that finally makes sense to me.
The good news is that once we all have CV-19 the accuracy of the current antibody tests will be perfectly acceptable!
Scientists have been keeping track of clusters of Covid-19 since the pandemic began.
As well as hospitals, care homes and cruise ships, these concentrated outbreaks have also been repeatedly appearing in meat-processing plants, choirs, bars and gyms.
So why is it so important to understand where superspreading is happening and how it can be stopped?
I agree - you described what I meant by “running out the clock” more eloquently than I could. Each day that passes we’re better at treating, detecting, tracing, etc. That all sounds great, and I think it would be best if everyone swallowed some short-term pain for longer-term gain.
Begs the question, if it isn’t tenable to gestapo lockdown until cure, but longer than now is good, how do we know what the inflection point is where we do start trading “convenience for death”, to put it poorly. I think if our leadership was better at explaining that decision tree/thought process, people like me would be more comfortable knowing how to proceed.
Yeah, there’s a whole thing about a plandemic with Dr. Fauci the evil villain. I know a dude who’s usually pretty smart who buys into the whole thing. I guess they want everyone quarantined so we reduce our immune system and die off later or something and he claims they’re inflating the # of covid deaths on purpose (which is easily shot down because we can go back and look at death rates from previous years). He linked me to some video several times, but I could never watch it because the link was always taken down. He claims it’s because they don’t want the truth getting out. I think it’s because it’s a bunch of bullshit. He’s also a 9/11 truther
I wouldn’t put anything past our own government, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence in my mind. He hasn’t shown me anything reasonable or factual to make me think this is some conspiracy. And not to get off topic, but I do find it very suspicious how the buildings came down better than most demolition companies could do. Even Jesse Ventura doesn’t buy it. But I don’t know where to get real data on how steel reacts to super hot airplane fuel and there would have to be so many people in on it, it would get found out imo. But then, there’s always a non-zero chance of just about anything I guess
i was a freshman living in a dorm room when the movie loose change went viral and am proudly ashamed to admit that i was a 9/11 truther for about a week until i found a website that debunked the whole thing and snapped me out of it.
I mean you make the call as to why. Contact/droplet is standard isolation for covid patients who do not have aerosolizing procedures taking place. Contact/droplet requires a surgical mask not an N95. Any face covering is going to stop some respiratory droplets from going into your mouth and nose, so obviously any face covering will at least partially protect you from a major infection route. Positive pressure hoods are best, then n95s, then surgical masks, then whatever you got available. It’s also true those masks will keep respiratory droplets from escaping, so they do protect others.
But isn’t the current research pretty clear (at least according to WaPo and NYT) that cloth and surgical masks offer much more protection to others than to the wearer?
I’ve played with several doctors who seem competent in their field but are bad at poker. LOL at expecting doctors to be smart when it comes to non-doctor things.
This is why anyone who thinks that the French salon is a model for public discourse is fucking delusional. We don’t need everybody trying to have an opinion on everything.
We should not settle for 20k cases per day. That’s sentencing a few thousand to die every week.
We have shown that we knock down case by about 80-90% in the heaviest hit states. Right now about a quarter are from the heaviest hit states. If we get the other 15,000 down to 3,000 and reduce the heavy states also down to 3,000 that is 6,000. I’d like to be under 10k/day and preferably under 5k/day.
I’d really like to see how a state like Michigan that had a hard shutdown and not that much wide open idiocy recently handles a Well managed reopening with masks etc.
The goal of getting down a full order of magnitude:
Lives saved now are lives that can be saved again later. Lives lost are gone. Dead.
Once we are down 90% then if we open up and have a problem we should be to reign in the spread before it reaches the old peak. If we open from near the peak we go up to 5k or even 10k deaths per DAY.
Well if that’s your litmus test than yeah - pretty much every conspiracy theory is on the table.
But really - just think through the logistics of it. Watch a documentary on a controlled demolition sometime. It’s just impossible to pull off w/o detection, perfect secret keeping from 100s of co-conspirators, and for what gain? Just planes crashing wouldn’t be quite enough oomph?
Some conspiracies are theoretically possible. 9/11 controlled demolition makes no sense at any level.
You are correct. It makes sense doing the ~99% for smear regardless. Probably not 99.99 without some further reason like high risk comorbidiry. At some point the effort does not justify the return.
The nice thing with smear is that you have the individual choice to control your own exposure. Wash your hands. Wipe down high contact items. Don’t touch your face. That probably gets you into the high 90% reduction range.
Now If you quarantine items, wipe down or UV everything, that’s up to you. The delta to society spread is really small (net R). But the risk to you is real and controllable as to how much effort you put in.
If you try to do your own risk assessment, viral load likelihood on a surface is something to estimate. The other big factor is your risk factor (including the risk factors of your contacts).
Personal I’m washing my hands or purel whenever offered in public. I’m not touching my face. I’m especially cleaning after using a stylus or touch screen. I’m generally quarantining purchased items 2-3 days. If I don’t then I wash my hands again. I’m not wiping down groceries unless I must use immediately.
So come home, wash hands
Prep food, wash hands
Handle hardware store purchase right away, wash hands.
I went to visit family this last weekend. I refused to do anything inside and basically walked around their side yard and hung out on their patio all weekend. I was pretty much treated like a giant weirdo even though there were six people there 65+. Their mask wearing/other behavior left a lot to be desired. My BIL’s brother was there and my mom insisted people wear masks around her inside. He had some kind of a fainting spell after like 10 minutes and mentioned he had never worn a mask before…
The one thing that was kind of good/surprising is I brought up how we needed to dramatically reduce the current numbers to do important things like have kids in school. Everyone agreed. Then I asked how we were going to get there. The general consensus was basically that it would just happen on it’s own. I asked them if they thought they were magic or if Kansas or Oklahoma was magic or if we just haven’t been as heavily exposed yet. The response was basically to get upset at me.
My point is even the morons know we can’t cruise along at 20k/1k a day. Even they know it is insane. They just aren’t willing to be bothered doing anything about it. Like Trump though bad behavior and throwing caution to the wind has been normalized.
