Coronavirus Thread

[st albans fox]

on the subject of tory donors, the PPE company highlighted yesterday on the thread ref a £120m contract is apparently traceable back to the partner of michelle mone (the tory baroness) …...

[Izzy]

11 minutes ago, Zear0 said:

Suggest he drops his suit off to the dry cleaner (if they can remain open) on the way out.  State of the bloke.

Said the same on the politics thread half hour ago. A bit of pride in ones appearance and some personal grooming wouldn’t go amiss. Some may argue it’s difficult to take his message seriously if he can’t take himself seriously. 

[st albans fox]

2 minutes ago, Cardiff_Fox said:

Said before you can’t blame the current govt for the tough decisions they face but bloody hell, the lack of competence is terrifying. 

as, by definition, is the level of incompetence …...…….

 

seriously, how can they be trusted to make the right decisions when they cant even organise a meeting  ???

[StanSP]

6 minutes ago, Cardiff_Fox said:

Said before you can’t blame the current govt for the tough decisions they face but bloody hell, the lack of competence is terrifying. 

I think at this stage you probably can because they're just as culpable for getting us in to this terrible stage as anyone else. 

[Carl the Llama]

26 minutes ago, dsr-burnley said:

And of course a fair chunk of the increase in identified cases is because of that.  When the students were at home, they weren't tested.  Now they're at university, they are tested.  Of course they will find more cases.  If you have a sample of 20,000 people and 1% of them have coronavirus, almost all of them asymptomatic, then you have 200 new cases this week that you wouldn't have found last week.  Repeat that across all universities, and you will find the number of identified cases will increase.

 

Randomly test 2 million students and you will find enough cases to panic our very panicky politicians.

Absolutely spot on, we beat the virus by not testing for it.  Good one Mr Trump.

[CosbehFox]

Just now, StanSP said:

I think at this stage you probably can because they're just as culpable for getting us in to this terrible stage as anyone else. 

 

Disagree to an extent despite hating the lot in charge as much as anyone 
 

Europe is equally facing the same upward curves despite their own track and trace systems plus governments who probably went even stronger with their restrictions. The human race in a Western culture clearly struggles to observe such restrictions.  
 

However you can do it in such a way that doesn’t have so many **** up’s along the way and inconsistencies

[FoxesDeb]

Apologies if it's a bit too mainstream for some, but this makes an interesting read for those who seem to think the UK is the only country struggling with how to deal with the situation:

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-54482905

[dsr-burnley]

14 minutes ago, Carl the Llama said:

Absolutely spot on, we beat the virus by not testing for it.  Good one Mr Trump.

I'm afraid you've completely misunderstood.

 

I'll make it simpler.  Before universities went back, virtually none of the students were tested and we found virtually no positive cases.  Now that universities have gone back, loads of students have been tested and we found loads of cases.  How much of that increase in positive tests is because we have tested more, and how much is the expected increase brought about by moving groups of people around the country?

[foxile5]

29 minutes ago, Izzy said:

Said the same on the politics thread half hour ago. A bit of pride in ones appearance and some personal grooming wouldn’t go amiss. Some may argue it’s difficult to take his message seriously if he can’t take himself seriously. 

He's a scruffy tramp. 

[Carl the Llama]

Just now, dsr-burnley said:

I'm afraid you've completely misunderstood.

 

I'll make it simpler.  Before universities went back, virtually none of the students were tested and we found virtually no positive cases.  Now that universities have gone back, loads of students have been tested and we found loads of cases.  How much of that increase in positive tests is because we have tested more, and how much is the expected increase brought about by moving groups of people around the country?

I still don't understand why you think testing is a problem.  Before universities went back the students were at a much lower individual risk of contracting the virus and becoming a potential carrier.

[AjcW]

4 minutes ago, Carl the Llama said:

I still don't understand why you think testing is a problem.  Before universities went back the students were at a much lower individual risk of contracting the virus and becoming a potential carrier.

Yeah I think you're on the right side of this argument. The only way of avoiding what has happened was to make term one of Uni home based. Simple as that.

 

As Carl has said, 2 million tests might have just shown up a few positives back when the R was low and people were in their homes. And testing once they'd got to Uni would have just highlighted the impending crisis. 

 

There was only one solution and they wouldn't have agreed to that due to the fact it would have crippled the private rental sector for Universities.

[dsr-burnley]

19 minutes ago, Carl the Llama said:

I still don't understand why you think testing is a problem.  Before universities went back the students were at a much lower individual risk of contracting the virus and becoming a potential carrier.

I don't think testing is a problem.  You're way off beam there - nothing I said was meant to imply that testing is a problem.

 

I was just suggesting that if you take a random sample of people who were not tested last week and you do test them this week, the increase in positives can't be said to be all new cases.

[Carl the Llama]

3 minutes ago, dsr-burnley said:

I don't think testing is a problem.  You're way off beam there - nothing I said was meant to imply that testing is a problem.

 

I was just suggesting that if you take a random sample of people who were not tested last week and you do test them this week, the increase in positives can't be said to be all new cases.

they have to be fairly new, don't people usually stop testing positive after a couple of weeks?

[Stivo]

This conversation started after I described the screening style testing at cambridge.  
 

DSR Burnley is correct, if you screen a large population e,g all students or all nhs employees then you should expect to Identify a batch of new cases which may not otherwise have been found.  That does not necessarily translate into an increase in prevalence within that population.

 

On the other hand if you are offering tests only to those with symptoms then an increase in cases probably does mean an increase in prevalence in that population.

 

I would hope that decisions are made taking account of such nuances.

 

When it comes to cases what matters most is the change week on week, and care needs to be taken  to factor out changes that occur because of random testing/change in testing availability.

Edited 12 October 2020 by Stivo

[Legend_in_blue]

I think the reliance on the result of the test has to be questioned.  I've thought this for a while.

 

Also the govt just taking carte blanche a positive result as a case is also short sighted.

[dsr-burnley]

10 minutes ago, Carl the Llama said:

they have to be fairly new, don't people usually stop testing positive after a couple of weeks?

Yes, that's the idea.  But then if the virus is at a stable level you would find that the positive tests dropping off the radar would be replaced with people who were negative last time.

 

The idea is that if no students were tested last week and all two million were tested this week, you would expect the number of cases to rise by 11,000 purely on increased testing and random presence of the disease.  If it rises by significantly more, as you would expect, then it's because of the students coming together.  Northumbria for example had 770 positive tests out of 26,000 students (though I don't know how many of the 26k were tested); you would expect to randomly find 1 in 170 infected, which is 150 or so, and therefore the suggestion is the disease is a bit rampant in Northumbria university.  No surprise there.  Newcastle had 90 tests - which proves absolutely nothing without further information.

[UniFox21]

2 minutes ago, Legend_in_blue said:

I think the reliance on the result of the test has to be questioned.  I've thought this for a while.

 

Also the govt just taking carte blanche a positive result as a case is also short sighted.

Yes, it identifies more false positives than false negatives, but we need a system to pick up those with the virus.

 

We struggle to test those in need once, we can't start testing 2 or 3 times to rule out false positives. 

[rachhere]

1 hour ago, Cardiff_Fox said:

Said before you can’t blame the current govt for the tough decisions they face but bloody hell, the lack of competence is terrifying. 

Communication is everything right now and this is just shocking to be honest. I can understand the Minister is under lots of pressure and no doubt in back to back meetings all day long, but this is why they have teams of people supporting them. Why aren't the civil servants taking initiative here in scheduling these meetings in good time, and why hasn't the Minister got a handle on his department to ensure things like this aren't happening time and time again.  

[FoxesDeb]

On 07/10/2020 at 20:03, FoxesDeb said:

Can you provide a comparison between us and a similar country? Because the population density and demographic of Sweden is vastly different, so different I'm not even sure why you would compare the two? Besides, it's well documented that they have also had restrictions, just their population hasn't been whining and bleating about them, they have just accepted it and got on with it

 

22 hours ago, FoxesDeb said:

Please can you show me where I said 'people only have mental health issues due to Facebook and Twitter'? Clearly you have never read any of my posts on the Depression thread...

@joachim1965 I'm still waiting 

[Countryfox]

1 hour ago, Izzy said:

Said the same on the politics thread half hour ago. A bit of pride in ones appearance and some personal grooming wouldn’t go amiss. Some may argue it’s difficult to take his message seriously if he can’t take himself seriously. 

Could be worse Muzzett ...   he could have red hair ...     Yuk !!! ...    

 

 

[Dan LCFC]

On 10/10/2020 at 10:21, Harrydc said:

What's really annoying me is how many people are blaming the students in Nottingham. 

 

It's funny, because if they don't get tested then it's really not an issue, because no one is dying FROM (not with ) Coronavirus in Nottingham. So, I'll say it again, more tests mean more positive cases. It's not difficult to comprehend. People are so fearful of each other, policing each other and I don't like the road were going down. Covid doesnt scare me, but the world we are living in does. 

This in a nutshell. The cure is worse than the disease. It's despicable.

[Legend_in_blue]

More headshaking at what is being said at this press conference over here.

 

Adamant the drop in the virus was due to the lockdown (the downwards curve started before the lockdown did) and adamant that cases in the 10-19 age group are pretty much solely down to those not of school age (show us the breakdown of the data then rather than a decade's worth of ages in one block).

 

 

[Izzy]

Billions and billions of extra support for businesses in restricted areas until at least next spring. The financial cost of this pandemic is eye watering and I dread to think how many decades it will take to pay it all back. Nightmare. 

[foxile5]

5 minutes ago, Izzy said:

Billions and billions of extra support for businesses in restricted areas until at least next spring. The financial cost of this pandemic is eye watering and I dread to think how many decades it will take to pay it all back. Nightmare. 

Who will we owe it to? I'm confused with those figures and how they are even possible. 

[Izzy]

9 minutes ago, foxile5 said:

Who will we owe it to? I'm confused with those figures and how they are even possible. 

This explains it in layman's terms.

Coronavirus: Where do governments borrow money?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-50504151