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Off Topic Coronavirus

Discussion in 'Queens Park Rangers' started by Sooperhoop, Feb 8, 2020.

  1. Star of David Bardsley

    Star of David Bardsley 2023 Funniest Poster

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    The true number of infections is logically far more than the number of positive cases. Good spot, Buttsy.
     
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  2. Butthuber

    Butthuber Well-Known Member

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    Assuming infections are much higher than positive testing results then why is the mortality so low ?
     
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  3. Star of David Bardsley

    Star of David Bardsley 2023 Funniest Poster

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    Excess deaths this year are pretty high around the world considering we’ve all been social distancing and thus minimising diseases that thrive on close contact.
     
    #11143
  4. Butthuber

    Butthuber Well-Known Member

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    Nope, in the US they have admítted that the Covid-19 related deaths did not exceed 9000 people. Same applies for most countries where they had corrected the numbers dramatically. Social distancing is what they call "nudging" - they push you into a certain direction in order to see how you "behave".

    The financial meltdown is the reason why they keep up the narrative.
     
    #11144
  5. Star of David Bardsley

    Star of David Bardsley 2023 Funniest Poster

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    You can’t correct excess deaths. People either died or they didn’t.
     
    #11145
  6. colognehornet

    colognehornet Well-Known Member

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    The second wave of infections does not appear to be accompanied by any increase in the numbers dying - also the percentage of those classified as serious or critical has dropped to about 1% (it was about 6% during the peak of the first wave). Various reasons could be put forward for this - a) the proportion of young victims is much higher now b) There is a time lag involved and the deaths will occur later or c) The disease is mutating into a milder form (just as infectious but not as deadly). Optimists will hope the last one is true, and it makes evolutionary sense for the virus to go in this way. What this suggests is that we are following a normal pattern for such pandemics (the Spanish, Hong Kong and Asiatic influenza all mutated into weaker forms which could spread easier until they eventually converged into simply being seasonal flu). What the low death figures do not suggest is that there is a conspiracy at work !
     
    #11146

  7. Stroller

    Stroller Well-Known Member

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    A large percentage of excess deaths will have been caused by the reaction to the virus (closing the NHS) rather than the virus itself.
     
    #11147
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  8. Butthuber

    Butthuber Well-Known Member

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    Right, but that is just what they did. Again, everyone they told us who supposedly died "from" Corona eventually only died "with" Corona.
     
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  9. Star of David Bardsley

    Star of David Bardsley 2023 Funniest Poster

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    Probably and that’ll cause plenty of deaths next year too.
     
    #11149
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  10. Stroller

    Stroller Well-Known Member

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    Or perhaps there is no second wave, but just more testing resulting in more known cases!
     
    #11150
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  11. Butthuber

    Butthuber Well-Known Member

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    There has NEVER ever been a second wave with the same virus in history which is just another nonsense narrative. You are so inclined telling the people here that there is a deadly virus but you do ignore all the facts that I have provided from official sites.
     
    #11151
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  12. Star of David Bardsley

    Star of David Bardsley 2023 Funniest Poster

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    The Spanish flu had multiple waves but yeah ok.
     
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  13. colognehornet

    colognehornet Well-Known Member

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    The Spanish flu had several waves and the Hong Kong flu also returned a year later (68 and 69 - with the Woodstock festival in between them). The Black Death kept reoccuring from 1342 right up until the 18th Century. I should stick to your conspiracy theories because you appear to know little about either history or medicine. The only disease which has ever been totally eradicated is Smallpox.
     
    #11153
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  14. Butthuber

    Butthuber Well-Known Member

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    Did you know that the huge number of people that died through the Spanish flu was caused through premature vaccination. Secondly most people died from the very bad conditions at that time - 20 - 30 people living in a rather small room in miserable circumstances.

    Eventually, if people are really scared about this virus then I do not mind if they are getting the vaccine they are looking for. There is no reason anyone else does need the same treatment.
     
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  15. Butthuber

    Butthuber Well-Known Member

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    The Spanish Flu did not have several waves. First reason were the very bad conditions in those times and then came the premature vaccination. Does this sound familiar to what they want to do nowadays ?
     
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  16. colognehornet

    colognehornet Well-Known Member

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    Sorry but you are out of your depth - again ! There were four waves from early 1918 to 1920.
     
    #11156
  17. Butthuber

    Butthuber Well-Known Member

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    So where is your "depth" then - any official documents attached ?

    As usual, you are just talking whereas I have links & facts for most of what I am writing here. If you are not smart enough reading nor understandig them - hard luck.
     
    #11157
  18. kiwiqpr

    kiwiqpr Barnsie Mod

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    Coronavirus: Tests 'could be picking up dead virus'
    By Rachel Schraer Health reporter
    • 5 September 2020

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    The main test used to diagnose coronavirus is so sensitive it could be picking up fragments of dead virus from old infections, scientists say.

    Most people are infectious only for about a week, but could test positive weeks afterwards.

    Researchers say this could be leading to an over-estimate of the current scale of the pandemic.

    But some experts say it is uncertain how a reliable test can be produced that doesn't risk missing cases.

    Prof Carl Heneghan, one of the study's authors, said instead of giving a "yes/no" result based on whether any virus is detected, tests should have a cut-off point so that very small amounts of virus do not trigger a positive result.


    He believes the detection of traces of old virus could partly explain why the number of cases is rising while hospital admissions remain stable.

    The University of Oxford's Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine reviewed the evidence from 25 studies where virus specimens from positive tests were put in a petri dish to see whether they would grow.

    This method of "viral culturing" can indicate whether the positive test has picked up active virus which can reproduce and spread, or just dead virus fragments which won't grow in the lab, or in a person.

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    This is a problem we have known about since the start - and once again illustrates why data on Covid is far from perfect.

    But what difference does it make? When the virus first emerged probably very little, but the longer the pandemic goes on the bigger the effect.

    The flurry of information about testing and the R number creates confusion.

    But however we cut it, the fact remains there are very low levels of infection in the UK overall, lower than a number of other European countries.

    Where there are local outbreaks the system - by and large - seems to be having success in curbing them.

    And this comes after the opening up of society over the summer.

    Of course, the big question is what happens next, with schools back and winter around the corner.

    There is a growing sense within the public health community that the UK is in a strong position - and certainly a return to the high levels of infection seen in the spring should be avoided.

    But there is also extreme caution and an understandable desire for complacency not to creep in.

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    How is Covid diagnosed?
    The PCR swab test - the standard diagnostic method - uses chemicals to amplify the virus's genetic material so that it can be studied.

    Your test sample has to go through a number of "cycles" in the lab before enough virus is recovered.

    Just how many can indicate how much of the virus is there - whether it's tiny fragments or lots of whole virus.

    This in turn appears to be linked to how likely the virus is to be infectious - tests that have to go through more cycles are less likely to reproduce when cultured in the lab.

    False positive risk
    But when you take a coronavirus test, you get a "yes" or "no" answer. There is no indication of how much virus was in the sample, or how likely it is to be an active infection.

    A person shedding a large amount of active virus, and a person with leftover fragments from an infection that's already been cleared, would receive the same - positive - test result.

    But Prof Heneghan, the academic who spotted a quirk in how deaths were being recorded, which led Public Health England to reform its system, says evidence suggests coronavirus "infectivity appears to decline after about a week".

    He added that while it would not be possible to check every test to see whether there was active virus, the likelihood of false positive results could be reduced if scientists could work out where the cut-off point should be.

    This could prevent people being given a positive result based on an old infection.

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    And Prof Heneghan said that would stop people quarantining or being contact-traced unnecessarily, and give a better understanding of the current scale of the pandemic.

    Public Health England agreed viral cultures were a useful way of assessing the results of coronavirus tests and said it had recently undertaken analysis along these lines.

    It said it was working with labs to reduce the risk of false positives, including looking at where the "cycle threshold", or cut-off point, should be set.

    But it said there were many different test kits in use, with different thresholds and ways of being read, which made providing a range of cut-off points difficult.

    But Prof Ben Neuman, at the University of Reading, said culturing virus from a patient sample was "not trivial".

    "This review runs the risk of falsely correlating the difficulty of culturing Sars-CoV-2 from a patient sample, with likelihood that it will spread," he said.

    Prof Francesco Venturelli, an epidemiologist in the Italian region of Emilia-Romagna, which was hit hard by the virus in March, said there was "not enough certainty" about how long virus remains infectious during the recovering period.

    Some studies based on viral cultures reported about 10% of patients still had viable virus after eight days, he said.

    In Italy, which had its peak earlier than the UK, "for several weeks we were over-estimating cases" because of people who acquired the infection several weeks before they were identified as positive.

    But, as you move away from the peak, this phenomenon diminishes.

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    Prof Peter Openshaw at Imperial College London said PCR was a highly sensitive "method of detecting residual viral genetic material".

    "This is not evidence of infectivity," he said. But the clinical consensus was that patients were "very unlikely to be infectious beyond day 10 of disease".
     
    #11158
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  19. colognehornet

    colognehornet Well-Known Member

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    #11159
  20. Staines R's

    Staines R's Well-Known Member

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    Absolutely......When you had people refusing to go to hospital with obvious cardiac issues that needed urgent treatment.....or family members putting their elderly relative back to bed after a classic symptom stroke and not calling back until hours later.....all because they didn’t want to get COVID in hospital....

    I ask myself how many of these ‘excess’ deaths are due to the actual virus.
     
    #11160
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