Slitherine

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ORIGINAL: obvert

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ORIGINAL: Chickenboy

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ORIGINAL: obvert

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ORIGINAL: Chickenboy

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ORIGINAL: obvert

Random testing advocated to help define opening measures after lockdowns.

We are flying blind in the fight against Covid-19. The number of cases is surely much greater than what we see and what is being relied on to provide direction for devising and implementing policy.

But is the true number two to three times higher, as some experts say? More like 10 times, as other analysts calculate? Or perhaps as much as 50 to 100 times higher, as indicated by early random testing in Iceland; a population study of Vò, Italy; and some recent results in California?

The recent Nobel in economic science went to Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer, researchers using random control trials, the mainstay of scientific medicine. Their work dramatizes how misleading it can be, for example, to measure disease prevalence by reference to those who seek treatment at rural health clinics, omitting the multitudes who have no access.

Local random tests should be undertaken immediately. University researchers, working with local governments or operating independently, could conduct simple randomization, testing perhaps 5,000 or 10,000 individuals. We would quickly learn whether total cases were five times or 50 times current estimates in those areas.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/24/opinion/coronavirus-testing.html?rref=opinion&module=Ribbon&version=context®ion=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Opinion&pgtype=Multimedia

Apples and oranges, my man. Apples and oranges.

And, no, I won't spend any more time than the hour I did this morning to elaborate on the issues with Mario Cuomo's 'quick and dirty' serology testing. If you and others blaze on by and don't appreciate my POV here, that's fine with me. But you're off the mark by a long shot.

I'm not on or off the mark. I'm not an expert. I'm just looking for hope among experts who are working on this right now.

Your POV is fine, and very useful, but it's not the only one and I'm surprised you think this is a counter to your posts. It's just posting what out there.

We will have to know how many people have had it at some point.

Agreed. You're not an expert. Disagreed. You are off the mark still. No the reference isn't a counter to my posts. By omission, not acknowledging the effort of meaningful replies is. There are plenty of 'what's out there' to go around. Weigh random indecipherable internet garbage through whatever lens you see fit. But I won't waste my time trying to point you in the right direction any further.

Very odd you'd have this response coming from a scientific background. So cutting. Ouch!

"Not acknowledging the effort of meaningful replies?" Your post wasn't in response to me.

I'm weighing things alright, and I'm beginning to see how relative weight is depending on the viewpoint.

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ORIGINAL: DD696

Having lived in Georgia for 12 years, I know nothing and have nothing seemingly meaningful to say.

Tomorrow I'm getting my nails - toenails included - done, getting a haircut and a tattoo on my ass.

Monday I can eat in restaurants.

Ain't life great?

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ORIGINAL: DD696

Having lived in Georgia for 12 years, I know nothing and have nothing seemingly meaningful to say.

Tomorrow I'm getting my nails - toenails included - done, getting a haircut and a tattoo on my ass.

Monday I can eat in restaurants.

Ain't life great?

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ORIGINAL: Chickenboy

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ORIGINAL: obvert

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ORIGINAL: Chickenboy

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ORIGINAL: obvert

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ORIGINAL: Chickenboy

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ORIGINAL: obvert

Random testing advocated to help define opening measures after lockdowns.

We are flying blind in the fight against Covid-19. The number of cases is surely much greater than what we see and what is being relied on to provide direction for devising and implementing policy.

But is the true number two to three times higher, as some experts say? More like 10 times, as other analysts calculate? Or perhaps as much as 50 to 100 times higher, as indicated by early random testing in Iceland; a population study of Vò, Italy; and some recent results in California?

The recent Nobel in economic science went to Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer, researchers using random control trials, the mainstay of scientific medicine. Their work dramatizes how misleading it can be, for example, to measure disease prevalence by reference to those who seek treatment at rural health clinics, omitting the multitudes who have no access.

Local random tests should be undertaken immediately. University researchers, working with local governments or operating independently, could conduct simple randomization, testing perhaps 5,000 or 10,000 individuals. We would quickly learn whether total cases were five times or 50 times current estimates in those areas.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/24/opinion/coronavirus-testing.html?rref=opinion&module=Ribbon&version=context®ion=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Opinion&pgtype=Multimedia

Apples and oranges, my man. Apples and oranges.

And, no, I won't spend any more time than the hour I did this morning to elaborate on the issues with Mario Cuomo's 'quick and dirty' serology testing. If you and others blaze on by and don't appreciate my POV here, that's fine with me. But you're off the mark by a long shot.

I'm not on or off the mark. I'm not an expert. I'm just looking for hope among experts who are working on this right now.

Your POV is fine, and very useful, but it's not the only one and I'm surprised you think this is a counter to your posts. It's just posting what out there.

We will have to know how many people have had it at some point.

Agreed. You're not an expert. Disagreed. You are off the mark still. No the reference isn't a counter to my posts. By omission, not acknowledging the effort of meaningful replies is. There are plenty of 'what's out there' to go around. Weigh random indecipherable internet garbage through whatever lens you see fit. But I won't waste my time trying to point you in the right direction any further.

Very odd you'd have this response coming from a scientific background. So cutting. Ouch!

"Not acknowledging the effort of meaningful replies?" Your post wasn't in response to me.

I'm weighing things alright, and I'm beginning to see how relative weight is depending on the viewpoint.

My post-from this morning-was in response to (mostly) your dedication on this thread to trumpeting the need for MORE TESTING. Without a clear understanding from a scientific perspective what your requests meant or how they would be interpreted. So I'm frustrated that you're not listening to my explanations while I'm trying to explain things to you. Or at least not acknowledging my efforts to speak to those issues that you seem to care about.

Anyways, I'm all better now. Have a good afternoon.

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ORIGINAL: Chickenboy
None of the relevant health histories were taken from the shoppers. How many of these people had a FUO (Fever of Unknown Origin) or other clinical signs going back to-say-December 1, 2019? Dunno. So now you lost your 'asymptomatic' versus 'symptomatic' distinction. Were any of the shoppers known positive by RT-PCR (and recovered)? Dunno. Now you lost your correlation between RT-PCR (virus positive) and convalescent serum response too.

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ORIGINAL: Canoerebel

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ORIGINAL: Sammy5IsAlive

A question for those of you with science/medical backgrounds (which I don't have)

One of the things that concerns me looking at what is going on in Europe is the amount of healthcare professionals (also in the UK apparently public transport workers) who are getting sick.

Is this the following a possibility?
1) An immune system, once it is up and running in response to the virus has a 'carrying capacity' of the amount of virus it can remove over X amount of time.
2) Thinking optimistically - for most healthy people this carrying capacity is above the increase in levels of virus over the same amount of time - both in terms of the virus multiplying inside of the body and, potentially also in terms of continued 'intake' of the virus from outside the body.
3) But there will still be a time lag of the immune system response to get up and running - so potentially when you test these people they will still have a level of infection Y despite showing no symptoms. This level of infection will test positive.
4) Some people will not have this balance - either because their immune system is not able to remove the virus quicker than it is spreading inside their body or because their circumstances (whether it be because they are a healthcare professional or because by some other quirk of their circumstances) they are getting repeated exposures higher than the norm. So these people will see their level of infection increase until it reaches a point where they become symptomatic - for the sake of argument 4Y.

That is one proposition.

But there might follow a more worrying possibility. That would be that absent social distancing measures individuals are gradually shedding/transmitting more virus than the 'community' carrying capacity is able to deal with. If that were the case you could potentially have a situation where large parts of the community are gradually getting more and more infected until as a community they start reaching that 4Y point where they become sick and you suddenly see precipitous rises in cases and deaths.

Is that way off beam? For me the other more basic explanation for high proportion of medical professionals dying is that they are all exhausted both in general terms and in terms of their immune systems.

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ORIGINAL: Canoerebel

Are you a Big Bug or a Little Bug?

Finished re-reading Wednesday. :)

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ORIGINAL: Chickenboy

From Worldometers today:

[sarcasm mode engaged]
Luxembourg has tested >60,000/M people for the virus! They're doing a great job! South Korea only 11,000/M! By comparison they don't know WTF they're doing! They really need to up their testing game just looking at the raw numbers. I'd say that they should quintuple their testing program at the very least before we have enough information to say whether their efforts have been successful. MORE TESTING!
[/sarcasm mode disengaged]

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ORIGINAL: Chickenboy

From Worldometers today:

[sarcasm mode engaged]
Luxembourg has tested >60,000/M people for the virus! They're doing a great job! South Korea only 11,000/M! By comparison they don't know WTF they're doing! They really need to up their testing game just looking at the raw numbers. I'd say that they should quintuple their testing program at the very least before we have enough information to say whether their efforts have been successful. MORE TESTING!
[/sarcasm mode disengaged]

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ORIGINAL: Chickenboy

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ORIGINAL: Sammy5IsAlive

A question for those of you with science/medical backgrounds (which I don't have)

One of the things that concerns me looking at what is going on in Europe is the amount of healthcare professionals (also in the UK apparently public transport workers) who are getting sick.

Is this the following a possibility?
1) An immune system, once it is up and running in response to the virus has a 'carrying capacity' of the amount of virus it can remove over X amount of time.
2) Thinking optimistically - for most healthy people this carrying capacity is above the increase in levels of virus over the same amount of time - both in terms of the virus multiplying inside of the body and, potentially also in terms of continued 'intake' of the virus from outside the body.
3) But there will still be a time lag of the immune system response to get up and running - so potentially when you test these people they will still have a level of infection Y despite showing no symptoms. This level of infection will test positive.
4) Some people will not have this balance - either because their immune system is not able to remove the virus quicker than it is spreading inside their body or because their circumstances (whether it be because they are a healthcare professional or because by some other quirk of their circumstances) they are getting repeated exposures higher than the norm. So these people will see their level of infection increase until it reaches a point where they become symptomatic - for the sake of argument 4Y.

That is one proposition.

But there might follow a more worrying possibility. That would be that absent social distancing measures individuals are gradually shedding/transmitting more virus than the 'community' carrying capacity is able to deal with. If that were the case you could potentially have a situation where large parts of the community are gradually getting more and more infected until as a community they start reaching that 4Y point where they become sick and you suddenly see precipitous rises in cases and deaths.

Is that way off beam? For me the other more basic explanation for high proportion of medical professionals dying is that they are all exhausted both in general terms and in terms of their immune systems.

Sammy,

Sorry I didn't see this post the other day. It got buried.

Since you asked for my opinion, I'll give you a quick one:

I think it's more of an exposure risk than anything else. Lots of sick people exhaling / spitting up / coughing / defecating lots and lots of viruses. Good and widespread disposable PPE lowers this risk, but there are still lots of unknowns. Healthcare workers are only human and it only takes one mistake when you're dealing with novel respiratory pathogens. When combined with the fact that few hospitals have a really-o truly-o purpose built "isolation" facility and that facility is crammed in some cases beyond reasonable capacity, it's a wonder that *all* healthcare workers aren't exposed.

What you're proposing is plausible (re: immune system variations between people). But my money is still on the 'the dose makes the poison' volume of virus that they're exposed to every day.

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ORIGINAL: Sammy5IsAlive


I think that much of their success may be due to them testing in large numbers early on, isolating pockets of the virus, and slowing the spread amongst the wider national population.

Would you say that that approach will only work very early in the spread of the virus and that the ship has passed for the US and for European countries like Italy/Spain/France/UK?

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ORIGINAL: Sammy5IsAlive

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ORIGINAL: Chickenboy

From Worldometers today:

[sarcasm mode engaged]
Luxembourg has tested >60,000/M people for the virus! They're doing a great job! South Korea only 11,000/M! By comparison they don't know WTF they're doing! They really need to up their testing game just looking at the raw numbers. I'd say that they should quintuple their testing program at the very least before we have enough information to say whether their efforts have been successful. MORE TESTING!
[/sarcasm mode disengaged]

At least in terms of Europe I think there may be a big distinction between proactive testing and reactive testing. In terms of deaths/M some EU countries are doing far better than others. Luxembourg is one of them. Germany is probably the one that has had the most attention. Portugal is another country doing really well - worthy of mention given that Luxembourg and Germany are two of the richest countries in the EU whereas Portugal is the poorest in Western Europe (i.e. west of the old communist bloc).

I think that much of their success may be due to them testing in large numbers early on, isolating pockets of the virus, and slowing the spread amongst the wider national population.

Would you say that that approach will only work very early in the spread of the virus and that the ship has passed for the US and for European countries like Italy/Spain/France/UK?

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ORIGINAL: Lowpe

Not sure of the scale, or really what is being show on the image, but the classical way to beat a virus is herd immunity.

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ORIGINAL: Chickenboy

And this is a problem that you can't 'test your way out of' once you're in it up to your eyeballs.

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ORIGINAL: Lowpe

Not sure of the scale, or really what is being show on the image, but the classical way to beat a virus is herd immunity.

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ORIGINAL: Chickenboy

Only if the virus doesn't beat you first. In the case of COVID-19, large portions of nursing home populations won't have the opportunity to develop herd immunity if they die en masse from a point source introduction. One of the most frustrating things about this disparity in clinical disease/mortality is how young carriers of the agent are entirely unaffected while the most susceptible die with alarming alacrity. Nasty wicked problem.