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NON_POLITICAL China Coronavirus THREAD

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brianmanahan said:
giant eagle has a bunch of places doing curbside pickup. all the walmarts are doing it, and even the little non-chain grocery stores are doing it as well.
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Curbside pickup doesn't do anyone any good if they aren't taking advantage of it & just going into the store themselves to shop.
If i had a condition where i couldn't wear a mask safely i sure as hell wouldn't be going shopping. There are others ways. Sometimes i wonder if people do this just to cause problems.
In that story i posted, the only thing that i might side on was the person trying to get their prescription. Sometimes you have no choise on where it's filled(i guess) & possibly not all stores have a drive thru.
 
Ichinisan said:
I dunno. I say a private store should have a right to deny whoever they want, and consumers have a right to boycott them or support them.

I have no doubt there are people with ideological contradictions on this. Is there anyone specific you can point to?

If I have a choice between a store that requires masks and one that doesn't, I'll visit the one requiring masks.
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Wait, you mean we ... As consumers..... Can... Choose things. ????

Crazy. But no seriously, with the whole cake thing, I don't think someone should be able to decline their services based on the person ordering, but I do think they should be able to decline based on how dumb the product being ordered is.

To put it simply, if someone requests an order of "I suck dicks" with your name and a graphic of your face, Is that helping the customer or the customer degrading you?

Personally I don't think it's baffable to say that the market can solve this equasion....
 
K1052 said:
Though this was a pretty informative run though of how various health professionals gauge and manage personal risk at a time like this:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1279148043573571585
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Super interesting. Lots and lots of info here. I'm actually being more careful than all these folks but my life is less complicated. I want to quote Fauci here:

"Fauci: I’m 79 years old. I am not getting on a plane. I have been on flights where I’ve been seated near people who were sneezing and coughing, and then three days later, I’ve got it. So, no chance. No Metro, no public transportation. I’m in a high risk group, and I don’t want to play around."
 
Muse said:
"Fauci: I’m 79 years old. I am not getting on a plane. I have been on flights where I’ve been seated near people who were sneezing and coughing, and then three days later, I’ve got it. So, no chance. No Metro, no public transportation. I’m in a high risk group, and I don’t want to play around."
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But what about your rights?

/S
 
K1052 said:
Antibody tests are so readily available now that there is no real reason not to get one IMO. If it comes up negative combined with the negative PCR I'd probably wager you didn't get it. Surface contact transmission potential of COVID is now thought to be very unlikely so I doubt it was the food and a vacant home should present no real danger of infection. There are still a lot of other pathogens running around out there which could make somebody this sick.
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Well, false positives are a reason not to get one.
 
Brainonska511 said:
Beckman Coulter just had an antibody test approved with a reported >99% specificity, so at least that test could cut down on the false positives.
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Certainly, still depends on prevalence of course, and what we intend to do with testing.

If it's to satisfy the curious itch of, "Did I have covid?!" maybe it doesn't matter so much, if the plan is to use testing as the basis for policy and large scale population safety when we need really accurate data.
 
Red Squirrel said:
I have not really been following this as much now but it's good to know we're doing well here compared to the states. I have to say our government overall has been handling this well.

www.cnn.com

See how Canada crushed the curve while the US struggles - CNN Video

CNN's Paula Newton explains what measures Canadians are taking to flatten the curve as countries continue to battle the coronavirus pandemic.
www.cnn.com www.cnn.com
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It also helps that the population is pretty sparse in most of northern Canada. Pretty easy to social distance when you're the only family within 10 acres of you 🙂
 
TheVrolok said:
Certainly, still depends on prevalence of course, and what we intend to do with testing.

If it's to satisfy the curious itch of, "Did I have covid?!" maybe it doesn't matter so much, if the plan is to use testing as the basis for policy and large scale population safety when we need really accurate data.
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For sure prevalence matters a lot with these tests, but higher specificity will help a lot with lower prevalence populations too due to a false positive rate that can be an order of magnitude lower.

For illustrative purposes, hypothetically, if you had no incidences of covid, a 95% specificity test will report 50 false positives in 1000 people compared to only 5 with a test with 99.5% specificity.

Edit:
I'd further add though, policy shouldn't be set solely on antibody test results. I think it can provide policy makers some useful information, but it needs to be combined with information from existing viral tests, maybe ratio of positive viral tests to hospitalizations (to provide some rough baseline of overall infections), and also err on the side of 'positive for antibodies' != immune to reinfection.
 
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Still seeing the interesting trend of exploding cases for the last few months with a disease that generally kills within weeks... but the numbers of deaths don't seem to be tracking. And... perhaps the death counts are not artificially inflated as known in the past, but if they are then this makes the science of the numbers even more interesting. Are we seeing the effects of mutations? I wear a mask in public, but it's not because of what the numbers are telling me.

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maddogmcgee said:
If
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Brainonska511 said:
For sure prevalence matters a lot with these tests, but higher specificity will help a lot with lower prevalence populations too due to a false positive rate that can be an order of magnitude lower.

For illustrative purposes, hypothetically, if you had no incidences of covid, a 95% specificity test will report 50 false positives in 1000 people compared to only 5 with a test with 99.5% specificity.

Edit:
I'd further add though, policy shouldn't be set solely on antibody test results. I think it can provide policy makers some useful information, but it needs to be combined with information from existing viral tests, maybe ratio of positive viral tests to hospitalizations (to provide some rough baseline of overall infections), and also err on the side of 'positive for antibodies' != immune to reinfection.
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I know the math well, I lecture on biostatistics (from a clinical perspective). You're absolutely right that the better specificy the less false positives, but it's not necessarily the absolute number of false positives that is the issue, it's the ratio of false positives to true positives. Even if the absolute number of false positives is low, if the number of true positives is even lower, it's more likely you're positive test is really negative and thus the problem - and we can't know that without accurate data about prevalence. No of course if we're talking absolute numbers as small as a 99.5% specificity would give us, the false positives probably don't matter a huge deal, probably.

Of course all this depends on a few unknowns as well - how many folks develop antibodies, how long do we retain antibodies (ie is prevalence of positive antibody status increasing indefinitely?)? Probably the vast majority of people and probably indefinitely - but that may not be the case for sure.

You're also certainly right that it shouldn't be the sole determiner of policy.

My initial statement is simply in regards to the increasingly common sentiment of, "Well, everyone may as well just antibody testing because why not?" which is a lot more complex than it seems on it's face and not necessarily a good thing. I'm being pretty pedantic about it, but what can I say, I lecture on biostats, I can be pedantic. 😛
 
K1052 said:
Antibody tests are so readily available now that there is no real reason not to get one IMO. If it comes up negative combined with the negative PCR I'd probably wager you didn't get it. Surface contact transmission potential of COVID is now thought to be very unlikely so I doubt it was the food and a vacant home should present no real danger of infection. There are still a lot of other pathogens running around out there which could make somebody this sick.
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Good point on the double negative, but it's just that from a statistical point of view, having a 30% false negative rate on a coin flip problem is... not very good. And I've read that the antigen tests are even worse. I've read they are only correct ~50% of the time, making them all but useless.

A positive PCR result is much more statistically sound since it has a very low false positive rate.
 
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Caveman said:
Still seeing the interesting trend of exploding cases for the last few months with a disease that generally kills within weeks... but the numbers of deaths don't seem to be tracking. And... perhaps the death counts are not artificially inflated as known in the past, but if they are then this makes the science of the numbers even more interesting. Are we seeing the effects of mutations? I wear a mask in public, but it's not because of what the numbers are telling me.

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Deaths are a lagging indicator, it'll go up in a couple weeks. Who said they were "artificially inflated?" If anything, there's an undercount.
Keep in mind the people getting infections now are, on average, significantly younger than the initial outbreaks. Many of the deaths were in nursing homes, but now the infections are with normal people ignoring social distancing or mask-wearing. We don't yet know which hospital systems will be overwhelmed and lead to excessive deaths (Houston and Phoenix metro are likely candidates), but you still shouldn't see > 2500 daily deaths like there were back in April. Here's hoping we don't, at least.
 
manly said:
Deaths are a lagging indicator, it'll go up in a couple weeks. Who said they were "artificially inflated?" If anything, there's an undercount.
Keep in mind the people getting infections now are, on average, significantly younger than the initial outbreaks. Many of the deaths were in nursing homes, but now the infections are with normal people ignoring social distancing or mask-wearing. We don't yet know which hospital systems will be overwhelmed and lead to excessive deaths (Houston and Phoenix metro are likely candidates), but you still shouldn't see > 2500 daily deaths like there were back in April. Here's hoping we don't, at least.
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Perhaps death counts will rise in a few more weeks but this disease was killing in 2-3 week of contraction. Things have been opened up now long enough to see that effect and it's just not there. Lots of videos about why the numbers are inflated (any patient dying from another source who tests positive is said to die from C19, etc...). I agree that bedspace is a critical factor...
 
I left North Carolina today after being there for the past week.

The beach I was at was very uncrowded which was nice. We were in our own little bubble pretty much all week. We had a 12x12 tent up daily on the beach with no one within 20+ feet of our tent each day. The only time I really came close to people was in passing on the little walkout from the condo complex to the beach. But even then, people were giving space and what not.

The grocery store I went to was pretty empty 2 times I went but one time it was crowded. The last time I went I would say like 25% of people didnt have masks on and it was crowded. Thankfully I went for one item and left quickly.

Then today when we left I went to a gas station like 15 minutes from the beach. I went inside and no one was wearing a mask other than myself and one other guy. No employees were and like 5 other customers weren't. Then on the way home as we got closer to Maryland you could just see places taking more and more precautions.

It is just mind boggling to me at this point that some places still aren't taking this serious. I even heard one of the unmasked people in the grocery store mentioning "hoax" to his wife and clearly knew what he was talking about.
 
Caveman said:
Perhaps death counts will rise in a few more weeks but this disease was killing in 2-3 week of contraction. Things have been opened up now long enough to see that effect and it's just not there. Lots of videos about why the numbers are inflated (any patient dying from another source who tests positive is said to die from C19, etc...). I agree that bedspace is a critical factor...
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Things have opened up for a bit, but it's an exponential growth pattern -- it can take quite a while before the trend becomes significant enough to notice.
 
Anyone sees the new "Shamwow" face mask commercial? Yes, the same company with the same pitch guy. He looks a lot older now.

$15 each but the masks are made in US or Germany with zinc. I think I will stick with my $2 per mask (cloth reusable).
 
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