There’s also a difference between “11% of this sample of people with preexisting respiratory conditions tested positive” and “11% of the population of Italy was positive”.
Edit: to be clear I don’t have an opinion about the validity of either the deer or the Italy study. It seems likely in my uninformed opinion that it’s a testing issue in both cases. But it doesn’t make sense to me to discredit the Italian study because we’d know if it was spreading undetected but write off the deer study because of course there’s going to be undetected spread long before we recorded cases.
OK fair point but it’s still a pretty sizable number. And of people who’d be most vulnerable. We’d expect to see some sign of pneumonia cases increasing.
Again - the virus was somehow circulating globally, then went back home to within a few miles of its likely place of origin to mutate into something more deadly.
Think about that. Just apply basic logic to everything we know.
Maybe the Wuhan lab was studying the milder version and accidentally created a more deadly version, which escaped. That is at least possible I guess. But they’d had to have known about the milder version.
I got that weird nasty dry cough in December 2019 - which went around all over the country. I almost never get sick, and I’ve never had a cough that lasted almost a month like that. Maybe whatever that was triggers covid antibody detectors for some reason. I got tested for antibodies in May just out of curiosity. I was negative. But also antibody tests were a joke then, and the antibodies could have worn off by then.
This is the type of shit that Churchill has been banned for, and let’s go over why. We’ve talked about this study. This article is a preprint with no peer review and contains super unlikely results.
But the reason why @churchill gets banned isn’t that. The reason why he catches bans for this type of shit is that he knows the authors of this paper redid their study and the early data was mysteriously left out. You can find it here.
Wastewater studies seem to be always finding crazy amounts of antibodies everywhere - and pushing timelines for first appearance back months or over a year.
Yeah maybe, if they knew to look for it. A group comprised of a bunch of 60+ year old smokers would probably have a lot of pneumonia cases either way. It’s also possible that it was a less dangerous strain that circulated first.
I feel like the Italy study was dismissed early on in the pandemic and then never really revisited. And like, some kind of stuff over sensitive test that picked up different coronavirus antibodies makes sense, but doesn’t that seem like it would be really easy to account for? Like, just test a bunch of different samples of coronavirus antibodies and see what dings positive. Or take the samples from this test that were positive and run them through different tests.
Antibody studies are really difficult to get right. Antibodies have largely the same structure one from another, so if your antibody test is testing for some of the conserved parts and not the variable parts of the antibodies, you’re going to get a ton of false positives. It’s why the fact that the Italian study has no negative controls, where known-covid-negative samples are tested to see the false positive rate of the test, is a huge red flag.
I mean I can see how it gets tiring always having to fact check someone blindly posting articles. I in no way have the knowledge to pick apart these studies and put together it’s flaws.
Publishing these preprints is the worst idea ever. This is like the 2,000th time we’ve seen a paper spread around the internet before going through peer review.
“Healthy” is the reporter’s term, not the original authors of the study. These were people who were asymptomatic for covid-19, but not especially healthy. As has already been quoted for you, the cohort was highly enriched for old smokers, aka, very vulnerable.
