Coronavirus in the United States - news and thoughts

Unexplained excess deaths at home almost nine times higher than those from Covid

More nonsense I guess. I'm sure they are Covid Deaths...

 

Lies, Damned Lies and Health Statistics – the Deadly Danger of False Positives – Lockdown Sceptics

Long read on the number of false positives.

"Think of any diagnostic test a doctor might use on you. The ideal diagnostic test correctly confirms all who have the disease and never wrongly indicates that healthy people have the disease. There is no such test. All tests have some degree of weakness in generating false positives. The important thing is to know how often this happens, and this is called the false positive rate. If 1 in 100 disease-free samples are wrongly coming up positive, the disease is not present, we call that a 1% false positive rate. The actual or operational false positive rate differs, sometimes substantially, under different settings, technical operators, detection methods and equipment. I’m focusing solely on the false positive rate in Pillar 2, because most people do not have the virus (recently around 1 in 1000 people and earlier in summer it was around 1 in 2000 people). It is when the amount of disease, its so-called prevalence, is low that any amount of a false positive rate can be a major problem. This problem can be so severe that unless changes are made, the test is hopelessly unsuitable to the job asked of it. In this case, the test in Pillar 2 was and remains charged with the job of identifying people with the virus, yet as I will show, it is unable to do so.

Because of the high false positive rate and the low prevalence, almost every positive test, a so-called case, identified by Pillar 2 since May of this year has been a FALSE POSITIVE. Not just a few percent. Not a quarter or even a half of the positives are FALSE, but around 90% of them. Put simply, the number of people Mr Hancock sombrely tells us about is an overestimate by a factor of about ten-fold. Earlier in the summer, it was an overestimate by about 20-fold.

Imagine 10,000 people getting tested using those swabs you see on TV. We have a good estimate of the general prevalence of the virus from the ONS, who are wholly independent (from Pillar 2 testing) and are testing only a few people a day, around one per cent of the numbers recently tested in Pillar 2. It is reasonable to assume that most of the time, those being tested do not have symptoms. People were asked to only seek a test if they have symptoms. However, we know from TV news and stories on social media from sampling staff, from stern guidance from the Health Minister and the surprising fact that in numerous locations around the country, the local council is leafleting people’s houses, street by street to come and get tested.

The bottom line is that it is reasonable to expect the prevalence of the virus to be close to the number found by ONS, because they sample randomly, and would pick up symptomatic and asymptomatic people in proportion to their presence in the community. As of the most recent ONS survey, to a first approximation, the virus was found in 1 in every 1000 people. This can also be written as 0.1%. So when all these 10,000 people are tested in Pillar 2, you’d expect 10 true positives to be found (false negatives can be an issue when the virus is very common, but in this community setting, it is statistically unimportant and so I have chosen to ignore it, better to focus only on false positives)."

 

Belgium's Security Council introduces long-term coronavirus strategy

I think this is the way most areas should treat Covid with the issues with false positives. Make policy decisions with regard to hospitalizations and not cases. Especially seeing all the college kids getting Covid but having about zero hospitalizations from it. Florida's hospitalizations are down significantly from their peak.

 

You also have to wonder at this point how many of those "hospitalizations" are simply done out of an abundance of caution. That is a pretty rapid decrease, frankly. Seems to indicate a lot of short hospital stays.

 

True. I think the article on false positives is intriguing for sure. I mean it makes sense in that cases are down a bit but hospitalizations are down significantly. Just happy my kids are back in school and having a good start to the year. Week 6 already. Time flies.

 

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.09.21.20198796v1.full.pdf

Study in Japan of 615 adults in Covid anitbody test. When it started 6% had antibodies, by mid-summer 47% had them. Not one person hospitalized or died. Researchers also found:

"This suggests that serological testing may significantly underestimate past COVID-19 infections, particularly when applied to an asymptomatic population."

"These findings should also take into context the epidemiological dynamics seen during this COVID-19 wave. Japan took the atypical step of not instituting a mandatory lockdown..."

"During this time, businesses, restaurants, and transportation were kept open, and public life continued relatively unabated. Nevertheless, the second wave peaked and subsided on its own... the possibility of herd immunity should be considered."

 

That is good news. Hopefully also the case here.

 

What drives me crazy is IF someone dies in Michigan and they had Covid at anytime in the past according to the Michigan records, then they are recorded to have had a Covid related death. That is crazy. Especially with the studies showing the high amount of false positives. This is how numbers get inflated. I don't know if all states are doing this but my guess is yes.


Coronavirus - MDHHS issues statement about COVID-19 death data

 

once again i ask, where is this great post holiday uptick in cases? highest day since the labor day weekend was 51,480 . within a 3 week post july 4th holiday there were almost a dozen 60,000 or more days, so again, where is the upturn, or are we going to be like paul revere, saying " the cases are coming, the cases are coming " when they are not.

 

Paul monologues misleading and false statements for the first four minutes, but Fauci's response is worth watching.

 

when is the statue of fauci going to be built, and will future rioter and looters let it stand?

 

A 'distressed' Birx questions how long she can remain on White House task force, sources say - CNNPolitics

 

Is this a conspiracy site? With a name of “lockdown skeptics”. Like those poor souls in icu realizing it’s not a hoax after all. Just be carful - a lot of this is nutty click-bait conspiracy BS.

 

Former head of Pfizer R & D. Think he might know what he’s talking about. Read the article for yourself.

 

as of 9pm today, from worldometer just over 41,400 new cases. it has been 2 and a half weeks since the labor day holiday weekend and still waiting for the sky is falling increase in cases, how much longer do i have to wait, or, could it be they will not happen, oh the egg on peoples faces who predicted big increases, or do they say just you wait and see?

 

yes sir , 2 come on mans from people who just do not want to believe the false hype about holiday crowds leading to a big outbreak in new cases, figures show they just are not happening, yet people just do not want to face reality, cases are not increasing.

 

Who said anything about “not believing the false hype” or whatever that means. Did I think we could see an uptick in cases following Labor Day, yes, yes I thought that was a possibility. Did I post anything about it? Did I tell you it’ll happen? Nope, I sure didn’t. So, I don’t know where you’re getting the “not wanting to believe the false hype” from. It appears that people learned from the 4th, that’s great. It’s possible that since school started, less people took a 3 day weekend then taking the whole week around the 4th, great. Lots of explanations on why we’re not seeing another surge, great. 400 pages or so back you were all about finding the positives, silver linings, Now you’ve got multiple posts gloating about nailing a wild ass guess. Good for you man, don’t pull a muscle patting yourself on the back.

 

there were plenty of people, including the all powerful fauci predicting doom and gloom, saying look at Europe, there getting the 2nd wave, saying sending kids to school was going to allow them to contaminate their parents,etc. this has not happened but people still will not say they were wrong, let's keep businesses at half opening, keep others closed because, maybe,just maybe we might be right. time to admit that we are doing well and back off the doomsday scenarios.

 

Yep. And I posted some data yesterday that shows how areas can hit herd immunity like the Japan study showed. And the false positive rate is a huge issue that some are ignoring.

 

Today, 9/24.....