@LаngLаngС Does treated for covid mean diagnosed with covid? I think preventative treatment within a pandemic makes sense, especially if the treatment has few side effects.

Among those 75%, how many were tested actually, vs how many never tested at all?

@fredsbend Yup. They were hospiatlised, got the official ICD10 code, based on 'typical symptoms', then all tested and tested again and despite an ample supply of false positives in the employed PCR tests, no CoronaRNA anywhere. What is unclear from that is whether they were also checked in the up the chain as "cases". Locally they were, but were reported as such in the national register? Idk.

In contrast to the claims in that speech we analyse on main, in Germany every positive PCR test result gets reported and counted as *Covid case'. Leading to such phenomena as media reporting on the tragic death of a twenty-sth "from Corona'. And as such a case he went into the national register. Well, he's dead, true, and was young, true, he had a positive test, true, with sever course of Covid, true, but what seems to get ignored here was that he also had severe leukemia. Weeks to live.

Wanna play with some graphs? levitt2.herokuapp.com

Caveat. The scales tend to change, so take a closer look at what numbers they really display.

My mother, an RN at a local hospital, told me today they're only testing faculty, symptomatics, and pre-ops. I was surprised to hear that because I thought they were treating basically everyone who goes in the hospital.

If the tests are good, and I assume they are, testing everyone once or twice a month would be ideal, no?

@LаngLаngС Well there is such a thing as multiple causes of death. In your example the person may have died eventually but the covid most likely helped speed it up which shouldn't be forgotten.

Covid mortality is down, from 6%ish to 2%ish, I just read. My math when looking up the numbers was under 1%, so idk anymore.

down where? I am seeing a 2.5% for the world overall and 2.5% for the US

That was maybe June July, with slight but educated adjustments for various confounders. In other words, maybe I was wrong at the time. But getting a proper margin of error would help.

But maybe my source isn't "adjusting" like I did.

@JoeW Indeed. But it is this complicated and always fraught with uncertainty that how these numbers are counted and then communicated. Public only gets to see the 'casedemic. Here it's defined that every person tested positive is a 'case', symptoms or not, false positive or not. 'Plus the pictures and horrible individual anecdotes. The latter in my example case quite distorted. The whole thing represents a serious disease, but the picture isn't nearly as bleak as testing numbers suggest.

@fredsbend Not necessarily. No available test is 100% accurate, but all cause costs financially and in terms of capacity for treatment etc. The first PCR test already had in its publication paper the description of 'false reaction that had to be repeated to deliver the accurate result'.

When just testing the accuracy of labs in April, they are quite keen to follow protocal then, the overall rate was 0.7% false positive for 'no virus', 0.8% for pos for nCov when probe really had HCoV OC43, and 6.8% when the probe was really HCoV 229E. In reality labs are now under pressure, cranking out results without re-testing positive s when already cutting down the steps from 2–3 to one. Recently the number of across the board 30% false positives in practice floated around.

Then there is this cycle threshold. Completely unstandardised an apparently done often so many times that hte amount of dead or alive virus material detected was too small to be of real concern, ie: apparently not infective.

Add then to that the false negatives. PCR sometimes fails or fluctuates, antigen test also not perfect and covers a different time window. Meaning: some people get a clean bill but so reassured then go on and out and may really infect people. Mass testing is much less reasonable than it looks at first glance. Add to that that rigorous representative studies are so minute in number and frequency that this – our testing behaviour – really fosters a distorted picture.

One representative testing regime intended for monitoring infliuenze but this year upgraded to include nCov resulted in nCov being entirely absent from the test results for the entire summer from all tests, while rhinoviruses saw a huge increase during the masked frenzy, btw. So, when real prevalence is that low, mass testing is not really advisable.

Coincidentally, the single pass single target testing strategy was only recommended by the WHO in case prevalence would be high and therefore test labs overwhelmed. Now they are overwhelmed mainly because people run around like headless screaming chicken and simply demand more tests. I consider that a veritable waste of resources.

Your 'testing everyone admitted to hospital' example is a slightly different angle though. People concentrated in such a place, increased vulnerability of many there, possible greatly enhanced exposure and a real meed for early detection increases the odds for 'makes sense' quite a bit.

Is this real: twitter.com/disclosetv/status/1323025162518880256 ?

@LаngLаngС Ha, when you typed "laos" did you mean "always"? Otherwise, yes, we are talking a different language. I am not confusing chiropractic with osteopathy. I am cautious about claims about osteopaths, because the meaning of osteopathy seems to be regional. I am dubious about osteopathy because it is based on pseudoscience, but I don't know how far they have progressed in shedding themselves of those ideas and adopting medical science (especially in the USA).

> A new study published in Royal Society Open Science found that citizens who lack confidence in their government’s response to the coronavirus outbreak show heightened fear and paranoia. This heightened fear is then linked to increased distress.

And thus, the politicization of a pandemic.

@fredsbend I would think that study is stating the obvious, that if someone didn't trust the governments response to a pandemic that fear/paranoia would follow. Either the government is trying to control things by faking the pandemic or they are trying to get rid of people by not controling the pandemic

Nice, just had an answer deleted after a question was edited to change what it was asking and I haven't had time to do the work to update it based on what was being asked.

Ah it was the question itself that got deleted

@Oddthinking Yo. 'Always'. I think we do speak the same language when it comes to evaluating the theoretical base of all those 'methods' I mentioned. But I continue to be fascinated for such cases when we have four different frameworks of 'understanding the world' that when presented one problem either all caolesce towards one and the same 'intervention procedure' or all provide an acceptable solution. Our historical scientific understanding labels that as 'mere chance'.

And one that by our expectations and trust in science gets ever more diminished the farther you get a way from 'good science' as the theoretical base. But if one of these 'alternatives' 'gets results' whether on par or 'not as good as top science but an improvement' then we might see why some people still do not rule out old methods, outdated methods, theoretically unfounded and therefore bad methods.

Homeopathy as well as those pseudoscience or 'traditional' methods we talked about here recently have a conceptual framework that is either completely or at least largely inacceptable for me. If one of those theories leads to a practice that is indeed directly more damaging than good, then this must be laid bare and shown around.