Covid 19

[Ed W]

I am going to steer clear of the rights and wrongs of lockdown and infection rates etc, I am an engineer with does not understand such things. I am also going to buck the trend of doom and gloom - whether this is that we are all going to catch it and die or cause sufficient economic damage that the survivors will be forced to return to the stone age.

Yes COVID has been a catastrophe on both human and economic fronts, but I think there are many positives that will come out of this in the longer term.  Change creates opportunity, and just as many have lost jobs I can see that there will be many new avenues for employment and business.  It is already clear that the COVID crisis has forced both business and individuals to embrace new technologies years, if not decades, faster than they would have done without it.

I can see that for many work life balance will be revolutionised as companies realise that many people can work effectively from home and that many meetings can be held virtually and still be effective for instance.  A dramatic reduction in commuting is likely to be a result that is good for road / rail congestion and the environment.

So though things look pretty dark at the moment, I think that the post-COVID world from about the middle of 2021 could be a very exciting place to be..

 

[maxf]

Who want's long-lasting multi-organ damage in the relatively young? Not me.
https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4470

Estimates of one in twenty people getting symptoms for over 8 weeks.
https://covid.joinzoe.com/post/long-covid

Long Covid is going to stop you going for significant exercise or caving for a while. That's not going to help anyone's mental health.
https://www.bhf.org.uk/informationsupport/heart-matters-magazine/news/coronavirus-and-your-health/long-covid

To quote the BMJ link you supplied:

'The research has not yet been peer reviewed and could not establish a causal link between organ impairment and infection'

 

[zzzzzzed]

Mortality rates really aren't that unusual this year. Sure,  higher than last year, the worst in 10 years even (by 3%), but lower than 2008 and I don't remember that making headline news or forcing a national lockdown.
https://www.actuaries.org.uk/learn-and-develop/continuous-mortality-investigation/other-cmi-outputs/mortality-monitor

If you look at the last 27 years data, winter and spring 2020 had the eight highest death rate.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/how-strong-was-the-scientific-advice-behind-lockdown

A bad influenza years kills more people than Covid has.  If we didn?t have the technology to identify the new virus nobody would have noticed anything unusual about this year.

People keep saying that the death rate would have been higher without the lockdown but, if you look around the world, there has been a large difference in the severity of the lockdowns but not a similarly large effect on the outcomes.

Peru, for example, imposed one of the earliest and strictest lockdowns in the world yet it has had a higher death rate per capita than Brazil which has been widely critised for it?s relaxed policy.

 

[maxf]

Which brings me to one of my original statements in my firstpost in this thread questioning what the real pandemic is..

It has to be over testing....

Imagine if every winter we tested everyone with a PCR test set to identify the common cold... We would have rocketing cases and deaths attributed as such as they are to covid now.

It cannot identify the difference between who is ill and who was ill who is infectious and not to mention the elephant in the room, false positives from over run labs

 

[mikem]

One of the problems is that hardly any of the statistics are comparable, as things have been done so differently this year (even within the past few months).

 

[aardgoose]

It cannot identify the difference between who is ill and who was ill who is infectious and not to mention the elephant in the room, false positives from over run labs

The majority of PCR tests are for people who are displaying symptoms of covid, thus it is more likely they have an active infection than a random sample of the public.  The false positive 'elephant' is a covid deniers conspiracy theorist myth that has been debunked multiple times but is still parroted by ignorant celebrities despite having the facts explained to them.

The ONS paper details the issues in this paper which is about their random population sampling (the pillar 4 tests in the second link below, which are a tiny fraction of the total tests). The bulk of samples in the national figures are of symptomatic people so the number of false positives is even lower than this paper suggests (pillars 1 and 2).

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddiseases/methodologies/covid19infectionsurveypilotmethodsandfurtherinformation/pdf

https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/testing

The real pandemic is covid, there isn't any doubt about that. We wouldn't have rocketing deaths from the common cold, if we were testing for it, because it doesn't kill people.

You are implying that thousands of doctors are breaking the law every day when completing death certificates in a coordinated conspiracy.

 

[maxf]

It cannot identify the difference between who is ill and who was ill who is infectious and not to mention the elephant in the room, false positives from over run labs

The majority of PCR tests are for people who are displaying symptoms of covid, thus it is more likely they have an active infection than a random sample of the public.  The false positive 'elephant' is a covid deniers conspiracy theorist myth that has been debunked multiple times but is still parroted by ignorant celebrities despite having the facts explained to them.

The ONS paper details the issues in this paper which is about their random population sampling (the pillar 4 tests in the second link below, which are a tiny fraction of the total tests). The bulk of samples in the national figures are of symptomatic people so the number of false positives is even lower than this paper suggests (pillars 1 and 2).

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddiseases/methodologies/covid19infectionsurveypilotmethodsandfurtherinformation/pdf

https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/testing

The real pandemic is covid, there isn't any doubt about that. We wouldn't have rocketing deaths from the common cold, if we were testing for it, because it doesn't kill people.

You are implying that thousands of doctors are breaking the law every day when completing death certificates in a coordinated conspiracy.

Why the large difference between PCR and LFT results ?
And if claiming LFT is not fit for purpose then why is it being issued to NHS contractors ?

Why have a number of scientists said that anything over a cycle  threshold of 29 is unlikely to be an infectious case yet Wales one of the 'crisis centres' in the UK is using 45 cycles  and acheiving very large numbers of 'cases'.

How many genes are the UK testing for postive result to be reported ?

Lots of questions... No official answers just ever growing statistics...

How can labs scale up test capacity and maintain accuracy...?

I'm not denying that something isnt happening but im in the camp of its similar to what is to be expected in a bad flu year but with the added bonus of reduced staffing which links to the over testing.

 

[maxf]

The main symptoms being a cough and a high temperature ?

Its no wonder so many people go for test, along with all the people in their offices once they report to work that they are going for a test...

 

[maxf]

Please explain this with regard to pre and post death cause determination...


how to check monitor width and height

 

[droid]

Which brings me to one of my original statements in my firstpost in this thread questioning what the real pandemic is..

It has to be over testing....

That great virologist/epidemiologist Donald J Trump said that too.

Must be right then...

 

[PeteHall]

That great virologist/epidemiologist Donald J Trump said that too.

Reductio ad Trumpum? 

 

[aardgoose]

How many genes are the UK testing for postive result to be reported ?

What do you mean?  The main PCR tests for three different targets of the covid genome. Is that what you mean?

As to Lateral Flow Tests [LFT], they are being used because they are quick and cheap. But they aren't very accurate and will only detect cases with high viral loads. PCR are very accurate and sensitive but are costly and slow requiring specialised labs. LFT tests generate a lot of false negatives, ie people are told they are OK when they are not. This is all documented and well known.

Lots of questions... No official answers just ever growing statistics...

There are lots of answers from official sources. You refuse to either read them or understand them, and them claim they haven't been answered and go on to quote well known deniers.

How can labs scale up test capacity and maintain accuracy...?

By building new labs and staffing very quickly, the so called 'lighthouse labs'.  They aren't relying on the existing pathology labs, although capacity in universities and research institutions is used for full sequencing - ie testing the full genome of the samples.

See here for the full sequencing effort:
https://www.cogconsortium.uk/

I'm not denying that something isnt happening but im in the camp of its similar to what is to be expected in a bad flu year but with the added bonus of reduced staffing which links to the over testing.

No, you are denying there is something, you just did. You are grasping for excuses to ignore people dying, because you don't want to be inconvenienced. You are just repeating all the same myths that have been repeatedly discredited. You are behaving like every other conspiracy theorist. There isn't over testing, they are testing people reporting symptoms.

Covid has a much higher fatality rate than flu, and that is ignoring the long term organ damage in people that survive.

There is a massive community of scientists working in this virus, for example here. This doesn't happen with the common cold or 'flu.

https://virological.org/c/novel-2019-coronavirus/33

1800 people recorded dying of covid in the last two days, London's hospitals are at maximum capacity. Cases are increasing rapidly. We haven't had the spike from Christmas gatherings yet. 

I'm sorry trying to save lives upsets you so much.

 

[RobinGriffiths]

This is what pisses me off. And I won't do the clickbait tw*ts the favour of providing a link. The Daily Mail has had headlines along these lines for months: 'Experts warn those areas that spent Christmas in Tier 4 are most at risk of even TIGHTER 'Tier 5' Covid restrictions in January - despite data showing cases may already be falling in some of them'

The italic bit being the trope they have been trotting out for months. Exactly the same headline when Lockdown 2 came, Blah, Blah, Lockdown 2 coming despite, blah, cases in blah going down.

When the dust settles, I hope the role of the media in all this is taken into accout when the enquiry begins.

 

[Laurie]

If this disease was killing everyone who caught it would the attitude to lockdowns be the same as now?
Where do you draw the line?

 

[oldfart]

The NHS should now be getting the extra ?350 million a week from Boris's brexit bonus. He tends to keep his promises like the one where he said "F*&k business".

 

[Fjell]

Well, strangely, it has come to pass.

The next budget is ?1.8tn for 7 years. Most of it now based on GNI.

The UK?s share of EU+UK GNI is about 15%.

So 0.15 x 1800000 * 1.15 / 1.1 / 52 / 7 = ?775mln per week. And I can assure you we would not get half back (Ireland will get about a third of theirs).

No-one expects the Spanish Inquisition.

Best not to bring it up.

 

[martinb]

This is what pisses me off. And I won't do the clickbait tw*ts the favour of providing a link. The Daily Mail has had headlines along these lines for months: 'Experts warn those areas that spent Christmas in Tier 4 are most at risk of even TIGHTER 'Tier 5' Covid restrictions in January - despite data showing cases may already be falling in some of them'

The italic bit being the trope they have been trotting out for months. Exactly the same headline when Lockdown 2 came, Blah, Blah, Lockdown 2 coming despite, blah, cases in blah going down.

When the dust settles, I hope the role of the media in all this is taken into accout when the enquiry begins.

Unfortunately, OFCOM is fairly toothless when bringing the role of newspapers and the likes of the BBC to account.

And, the Levison 2 enquiry was quashed by the government on the behest of some of its more implicated MP's and Newspaper Oligarchs.

So the chance of the government or the media being held to account is vanishingly small.

 

[NewStuff]

No, you are denying there is something, you just did. You are grasping for excuses to ignore people dying, because you don't want to be inconvenienced.

Emphasis mine. Every single conversation with one of the anti-vax/denier lot boils down to this.
Much as I have an exceedingly healthy disregard for authority, there are times you need to buckle down and deal with it. This lot don't want to, they don't like it, it's not compatible with their lifestyle and mindset. All of the fluff, posture and misdirection is simply to hide the fact they haven't got the spine to admit they're cunts and simply don't want to deal with the inconvenience. I've seen people that can barely add up to 10 using their fingers tell PhD biologists they're wrong about this, and it's all a hoax. Worse still are the reasonably intelligent one that know they're wrong, but still put personal liberty ahead of a clear need for a short term societal responsibility. No-one has yet explained to me why the entire world puts everything on hold to deal with this, or why for the first time ever, governments have got their act together and are maintaining a global veil of secrecy and coordination with each other, when normally they struggle to organise a piss-up in a brewery. It's deffo a hoax or the numbers are wrong,or some other bullshit because that explains away their own responsibility nicely. It's not their fault, they're not the bad ones. There is absolutely no concept of personal responsibility.

Admin - I  know exactly what your stance on language is, and I usually respect that. However, I fully feel that any lesser words don't even begin to convey my contempt for the twats that keep this dragging out and subjecting all of us to endure this for far longer than we needed to.

 

[Stu]

No, you are denying there is something, you just did. You are grasping for excuses to ignore people dying, because you don't want to be inconvenienced.

Emphasis mine. Every single conversation with one of the anti-vax/denier lot boils down to this.
Much as I have an exceedingly healthy disregard for authority, there are times you need to buckle down and deal with it. This lot don't want to, they don't like it, it's not compatible with their lifestyle and mindset. All of the fluff, posture and misdirection is simply to hide the fact they haven't got the spine to admit they're cunts and simply don't want to deal with the inconvenience. I've seen people that can barely add up to 10 using their fingers tell PhD biologists they're wrong about this, and it's all a hoax. Worse still are the reasonably intelligent one that know they're wrong, but still put personal liberty ahead of a clear need for a short term societal responsibility. No-one has yet explained to me why the entire world puts everything on hold to deal with this, or why for the first time ever, governments have got their act together and are maintaining a global veil of secrecy and coordination with each other, when normally they struggle to organise a piss-up in a brewery. It's deffo a hoax or the numbers are wrong,or some other bullshit because that explains away their own responsibility nicely. It's not their fault, they're not the bad ones. There is absolutely no concept of personal responsibility.

Admin - I  know exactly what your stance on language is, and I usually respect that. However, I fully feel that any lesser words don't even begin to convey my contempt for the twats that keep this dragging out and subjecting all of us to endure this for far longer than we needed to.

"people that can barely add up to 10 using their fingers" is now my go to insult. Brilliant, just brilliant. 

Your choice of language? Think sometimes such brutal vernacular is needed. Cuts through the BS.

 

[Pitlamp]

Actually it puts a lot of people off.

Folk are more likely to warm to someone's point of view if it's articulated with reasoned argument.