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Daily coronavirus-related chat, questions, and minor updates - April 21
This thread is posted daily, and is intended as a place for more-casual discussion of the coronavirus and questions/updates that may not warrant their own dedicated topics. Tell us about what the situation is like where you live!
My state's governor (TN) is opening the state back up starting next week. Case level has been roughly flat for almost a couple of weeks, so invariably we'll see an increase with the push to get things closer to normal. I'm not surprised, as the very pro-business republican that was slow to enact measures to begin with was bound to do this, I'm just disappointed.
Also concerned with Georgia's imminent reopening despite their rising number of cases and proximity to the state. I don't see any scenario where that won't spread north to TN.
Same for my state.
I'm curious if there is anywhere to read more about these tests?
replying here because I just finished an elaborate-ish reply:
I would be very sceptical of those kind of numbers(30% immunity in stockholm). Today again, I've heard one of german's leading experts (Christian Drosten) give a lot of caveats regarding for example the Santa Clara study. german transcript of the podcast
deepl translation of one of the relevant sections:
Korinna Hennig:
So the test detects a different pathogen. That's the specificity.
Christian Drosten:
Right, false positive results, that's specificity. If a test does not give a false positive result with 100 people tested, then the specificity is 100 percent. But if one in 100 is false positive, then the specificity is only 99 percent in such a test. At the moment we can say 2 percent false positive rate - these are only reference values, which I can say from experience and from our own validation work, these are our experience values. We simply have to subtract a number like this, but it is very difficult to detect it in a test. If we say we are expecting 2 per cent, I cannot see how this was done in this study when you test it on 30 negatives. So if I want to recognize 2 out of 100, but in reality only test 30, then the risk that I will, by pure chance, recognize the one I want to recognize or cannot recognize, whether I recognize it or not, is a purely statistical distribution. And in this study, they tested 30 negatives and none of them became false positive.But what does that mean?
Korinna Hennig:
It could have been a coincidence.
Christian Drosten:
Exactly, it could be coincidence. That means we can't really assume that it's really specific. From these figures that were found here, we probably have to deduct something. In reality, this is probably not up to 4.2 percent, but is somewhere in the range of 2 percent or 3 percent.
He also mentions the volunteer-based approach being a problem and the detection of IgM-antibodies from a past, different infection - he describes these as "rather sticky"; apparently they tend to confound antibody tests. The verification tests to rule out a false positive, a test of virus + supposed antibodies + cells, usually does not happen.
Combine all of these caveats, and people with other recent infections will flock to the tests and their IgM antibodies will flag them as having survived corona.
Nevermind that the italian situation demonstrates that it can get a lot worse in stockholm. If Stockholm has 30%, what's that number in lombardy? 300%?
Here's a working paper claiming that The Subways Seeded the Massive Coronavirus Epidemic in New York City, based on negative correlation between subway usage and reported COVID-19 cases. (Via Marginal Revolution.)
My now-ex girlfriend just forwarded me some conspiracy theory about how bill gates is trying to do population control on the world and track everyone.
I don't even feel like arguing. Her mom has always been a little too much into crystal healing for comfort.
What was that again about the pandemic accentuating everyone's traits?
I've repeatedly now read of people that report having had a "weird" infection sometime before corona was really wherever they live. I'm calling chinese trolls or -more likely- psychology being wack, all the corona news making them overthink their experience until it conforms to the reported symptoms and such.
There where click bait headlines on a lot of major news sites a week or two ago along the lines of
The answer of course, is no.