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Dave
Thanks for obliging. The reason why I asked you to provide a link is that I can then refute what that link alleges.
In answer to your link here is a specific link that addresses this question. I know it is from the Huffpost but the argument there is pretty solid, using the same statistics provided in your link.But there are other arguments also to prove the errors of this supposed high false positive rates (FPR) of the PCR in the diagnosis of SARS Cov2. To start with let us agree that the FPR is not known and there is no published data, but we could look at other sources to try and find out what it could be. First of all I would like you to look at this article from a scientist with first hand knowledge of the PCR which explains why the PCR combines both a high sensitivity and a high specificity and done properly with the appropriate internal controls should never give a false positive. Even contamination can be detected by these internal controls. The article does need some sort of general scientific background to understand: The “false-positive PCR” problem is not a problem.
So this is some scientific background, let us try to look at what data may be available to find out the true FPR of the PCR in actual settings. There are several indirect ways, but just to look at this simplistically, then if the test has an FPR of 1% then if you test 1 million individuals you should get 10,000 false positive cases, or if it is 0.1% it would be 1000 false positives. Given this let us look at what the Chinese did (despite being communists). They tested the whole population of Wuhan after the lockdown to see if there were any residual cases. In under two weeks they tested over 9 million people and had only 300 positives, all asymptomatic. So even if these three hundred were all false positives then the FPR would be something like 0.003%.
Other indirect evidence for a low FPR is from countries like New Zealand, Australia and Hong Kong who cintinued mass testing after they suppressed the virus and if the FPR was a constant then you would expect there to be a sort of background positivity due to this.
Another evidence can also be seen from many countries where transmission has been low but with high testing. Here is a chart of all the statistics. and if you filter on the heading ‘Test per million population then you will see that there is no correlation between this and the total number of cases.As to the Great Barrington Declaration, funded by the Koch foundation, here are some prominent experts explaining what this is not only naïve but impractical to implement. Extracts:
“interventions to reduce transmission, to develop better treatments and to protect vulnerable people. This declaration “An effective response to the Covid pandemic requires multiple targeted interventions to reduce transmission, to develop better treatments and to protect vulnerable people” is just one aspect of a sensible strategy – protecting the vulnerable – and suggests we can safely build up ‘herd immunity’ in the rest of the population. This is wishful thinking.”
“Those behind the Barrington Declaration are advocates of herd immunity within a population. They state that “Those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal”, with the idea being that somehow the vulnerable of society will be protected from ensuing transmission of a dangerous virus. It is a very bad idea. We saw that even with intensive lockdowns in place, there was a huge excess death toll, with the elderly bearing the brunt of that, and 20-30% of the UK population would be classed as vulnerable to a severe COVID-19 infection.”
and so on, I will let you read the rest.
Also there is another fallacy, that building up immunity with vitamins and sunshine is the answer to Covid-19. This is based on a very basic misunderstanding of what is the cause of the severe disease. To explain this: there are two factors at play: one factor is who gets severe disease and who gets mild or asymptomatic infection, and the second one is who dies from the disease. The first factor appears not to be related to the properties of the virus itself, but in the host’s response to the virus which affects about 20% of those infected. This is a delayed reaction which is caused by the the immune response to the virus. The normal response is to produce antibodies, which kill the virus and get rid of it with minimal damage to the person. The second type of response is an exaggerated inappropriate response characterized by what is known as a ‘cytokine storm’ causing a specific type of lung injury and possibly also injuries to other organs. This response is not age related and can affect anyone of any age, above 20 years. Not enough is known as to why some people get this response, but there is a suggestion that it is genetically determined as there are genetic factors that determine response to infections and this has been shown in other infections. The main factors that determine whether someone will die from the infection are age and co-morbidities. So if 100 young people get the serious form of the infection, they will still go to hospital, may even be ventilated, but say 99% of them will survive. However if 100 individuals who are old or have comorbidities get the serious form, more of them will die say 10-20. And this is why the various causes a serious problem, because the serious illness is not limited to the elderly.
Applying elementary commonsense, aren’t you incredulous 9m tests only result in 300 Positives? In my link an expert highlighted the existence of a False Positive Rate and the Health Secretary agreed a FPR of about 1%. This figure could be higher or lower, but seriously do you really believe as low as 0.003%? Or is this figure similar and as reliable as a Marxist-Leninist Albanian election result?
Another elementary observation is those testing Positive are mostly otherwise healthy, so they’re testing Positive for something that isn’t making them ill, hence easy to conclude the Positive is a False Positive.
And if in doubt do a second test, but this is something the government refuse to do, no doubt to keep the figures as high as possible.
Why do you distrust the Chinese figures?
With respect Matt Hancock is not an authority on the PCR and nor for that matter is Hartley Brewer. He was answering an off-the-cuff political question and less than 1 percent sounded a good figure to quote.
As to Yeadon. He proposed theories plucked out of thin air about previous immunity to coronavirus in the population.
Dave. Why are our hospitals now full to capacity with patients? What is your view, or is it a hoax?Also I have given you different lines of argument but all you do is to hark on your fear of reds under the bed.
“Why are our hospitals now full to capacity with patients? What is your view, or is it a hoax?”
https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/press/press-releases/winter-daily-situational-report-16-january
It happens every year, they knew it was coming this year but they had a problem, they had built all the Nightingale hospitals so to obviate that problem they dismantled them blaming it on staff shortages but that was a lie, most nurses are twiddling their thumbs at the moment.
The government deliberately created a crisis, actively underresoursed the NHS this year on things they needed, wasted billions on things that were not needed and purposely put additional pressure on an already broken system.
Why would they do that? Is it a hoax?
ps before you lecture on statistics you need to brush up on what sample, population and rate mean. You may think you know what they mean but you clearly don’t.
But thanks for this, I laughed out loud;
” To start with let us agree that the FPR is not known and there is no published data, but we could look at other sources to try and find out what it could be ….
So this is some scientific background …”
Priceless
I doubt the government figures, or more exactly the figures given at a press conference by the Prime Minister, Health Secretary, Chief Scientific and Medical officer’s, who are ruling by decree, particularly when they are debunked the next day by all and sundry experts and journalists, bar the BBC. And I doubt them because they’re used to justify policies, a national lockdown, that makes no medical sense, because you can’t stop a respiratory virus from passing through the population.
Hence my immediate scepticism of a 0.003% FPR from a government that imposed an inhumane lockdown without a free press allowed to question the policy, but which you readily believe because you think it proves criminal lockdowns work!
I think prolonged lockdowns of the healthy is elementary nonsense, but my question to you regarding the 1000s of experts signing the Great Barrington Declaration was not whether they were right or wrong, but whether you think they are spreading “disinformation” – a soviet communist term to silence/imprison in mental hospitals critics of government policy.
Charlie
Too many coincidences Charlie. First, winter pressures occur in winter. How come we had one in April May and then now one in December January. And why if the current crisis is just not the ‘normal’ winter crisis are these cases not diagnosed with ‘flu, and why is everyone not rushing to do something about it if it was flu? Ah, I get it, despite the fact that there are antivirals, such as Tamiflu that work for flu, everyone is ignoring this, the medics are letting their patients die rather than giving effective treatment, Pharma is forgoing the big profits they would get for pushing more of their established vaccines and treatments, in order to risk the future on uncertain vaccines, and maybe also to control us. Then of course this is not only happening in Britain, but all over the world. What a coincidence and this big conspiracy is just in order to pretend there is a new epidemic, and the reward of course is to have wrecked economies. It really takes a very warped mind to construct this scenario when there is a much simpler explanation. I am afraid you do not seem to understand science at all.“I doubt the government figures, or more exactly the figures given at a press conference by the Prime Minister, Health Secretary, Chief Scientific and Medical officer’s, who are ruling by decree, particularly when they are debunked the next day by all and sundry experts and journalists, bar the BBC. And I doubt them because they’re used to justify policies, a national lockdown, that makes no medical sense, because you can’t stop a respiratory virus from passing through the population.”
And you doubt everything? So what. Does it alter the facts? No. You can continue to deny and make many completely unfounded assumptions. I think you are not here to debate facts, just to propagandise a very conspiratorial stance.
Dave
The great barrington declaration was not signed by thousands of experts. I am sorry I gave the wrong link earlier to critique by experts of the GBD, here it is.It is indeed interesting to see who has signed this. There are ten from England, none of them a jobbing clinician who is actually treating patients with Covid-19 or at the coalface. So it really matters very little whether there are a thousand signatories, it matters what they do to have so much more insight.
OK SA, you are in charge, you know the winter sickness season in getting closer and hospitals start to fill. You have brand new Nightingale hospitals, 47,000 volunteer ex NHS staff at your disposal.
What do you do?
It’s simple isn’t it, you dismantle the overflow hospitals and make recruitment of the volunteers so difficult that only a small proportion of them can be recruited and then only into admin jobs.
The recruitment process required the applicants to submit 21 forms, one to provide evidence of Prevent Radicalisation training.
Yes too many co-incidences.
But it isn’t that Parliament hasn’t sought the right advice and received the correct expert opinion, they just chose to ignore it.
“and therefore it is very clear that the UK is killing many more people via lockdowns and suspended health services than it could possibly save from Covid.”
SA “The great barrington declaration was not signed by thousands of experts”
This open letter is signed by 699 medical doctors and 2312 medically trained health professionals from Belgium. It criticises every aspect of the pandemic measures, including its justification, effectiveness, harmful side effects, contra-effective masks, inaccurate statistics, vaccine safety and legality, unsound medical and scientific guidance, censorship of alternative views, PCR test reliability, incompatibility with the Hippocratic Oath, and much much more.
See elsewhere on the same website for source notes, an update on the ‘second wave,’ and list of signatories.
Great Barrington Declaration
https://gbdeclaration.org/view-signatures/
“The great barrington declaration was not signed by thousands of experts.”
Yes it was.
“There are ten from England”
There are many more than 10. One Main Signatory, Eleven Co-signatories, Many Thousands of Supporting Signatories.
“none of them a jobbing clinician who is actually treating patients with Covid-19”
Many thousands are practising medics working with Covid patients.
“So it really matters very little whether there are a thousand signatories, it matters what they do to have so much more insight.”
Condescending, resentful twaddle; and what’s with the England hang-up?
3 Primary Signatories
44 Co-SignatoriesSupporting Signatories
Concerned Citizens: 712,344
Medical & Public Health Scientists: 13,083
Medical practitioners: 39,544Re The Barrington Declaration, yes there are more than ten as they also have a separate listing from the UK of about forty. But the list contains many non-clinical scientists that have nothing to do with direct patient care. I pasted this earlier to show their affiliations, some of them even have none, but the list was removed.
None of those on the UK list dealt directly with Covid patients, there were some oncologists, but their main concern is treating patients with cancer. Actually some of them do not exist on the Medical Directory website and some have retired.
Listen, I do not dispute that other patients suffer and there is a mushrooming of mental health issues. I do not doubt that there is economic hardships but all of this is due to a serious pandemic. These are two separate issues, there is a serious pandemic, actions taken to suppress it will also be harmful but there is little alternative. The other factor of course is the long-term neglect of the health service, privatizations and underfunding that left the NHS ill equipped to deal with the pandemic. But what I hear from you is that the virus is inconsequential. That is what I am arguing here, the virus is real and serious and the PCR is accurate and the numbers are escalating rapidly. And that is what is being denied by the three of you, on the basis of selective information and some signatories who go against the majority of expert opinion in the heart of dealing with the pandemics, and these experts you totally discount in preference of those who just reiterate what you want to believe.
Dave, 14:18:
– “lockdown, […] makes no medical sense, because you can’t stop a respiratory virus from passing through the population”
China has. So has New Zealand. And Singapore, Taiwan, Iceland etc… Also many islands.
Re: Dave, 06:44 – the article by Toby Young (eugenicist) is hopelessly out of date (September). Yes, a small false positive rate will yield many false positives if used to screen a population in which prevalence is low, but prevalence is now high.
The “issue” was raised by, ahem, Mike “there will be no second wave” Yeadon; I hope we’re all treating his pronouncements with appropriate scepticism these days.
So the Belgian letter was allegedly signed by 699 doctors. There are 35,000 doctors in Belgium. But so what? How many epidemiologists was it signed by?
Only a small fraction of the letter’s citations are to scientific sources, and many are seriously odd, causing me to doubt the general scientific literacy of the signatories – it looks like a political / PR effort to me, and not even a good one.
But we’re back to “experts” battling like Jedi Knights – Node, how many times? Evidence beats opinion, even “expert” opinion, especially when those “experts” aren’t even in the right field.
And the Belgian letter also is seriously out of date; dated September 5, Belgium’s current wave didn’t start until later that month.
Node, did you post on this thread as “Duck”?
Charlie, 13:28 – “they had built all the Nightingale hospitals so to obviate that problem they dismantled them blaming it on staff shortages but that was a lie, most nurses are twiddling their thumbs at the moment.”
And yet at 16:23, Charlie cites a Daily Mail article; here are some quotes from it:
– ‘We had warned of a staffing crisis in ICU before the pandemic. The Government’s didn’t listen.’
– The Nightingales were billed as the solution to stopping hospitals becoming overwhelmed – by providing extra capacity for patients.
– But they are being shuttered as Covid-19 hospitalisations surge past the peak of the first wave, and amid mounting warnings from NHS trusts that they are struggling to cope.
– Professor Steve Hams, chief nurse at Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, told BBC Breakfast today his trust already has 200 Covid-19 patients on its wards – more than triple the 60 they had in April.
– ‘We have seen that exponential rise. We truly are in the eye of the storm at the moment,’ he said. ‘It has probably been one of the most challenging times of my 25-year nursing career but one that I am most proud of.’
– ‘In many ways in the first wave in April we didn’t entirely know what to expect and now we kind of do but this virus seems to be one step ahead of us every time.
– ‘When we get little gains and little wins it’s a real boost for our colleagues. We felt during April that there would be an end to this but actually we’re now seeing a third peak so trying to keep our colleagues and our teams going through this time is just incredibly difficult.
– ‘I think it is fair to say that I – like many of our colleagues across the country – am becoming increasingly exhausted.’
– – – – – – – – –
Of course, you can cherry-pick from anywhere, even the Daily Mail. Dave showed us how above; December 29, at 22:48:
– “The Daily Mail dutifully publishes the official narrative, but due to a very large middle-class readership, it also has to tell the truth or suffer the same fate as the Ministry of Truth…”
So anything that supports their story these denialists call “the truth”, and anything that contradicts it they dismiss as “the official narrative” – and that’s how conspiracy theory works!
Charlie at 18:13, answering SA:
SA – “The great barrington declaration was not signed by thousands of experts.”
Charlie – “Yes it was.”
Really? Thousands of epidemiologists? Because that’s the field they need to be expert in. Not medicine, not general practice, not dentistry; epidemiology, because social restrictions are about preventing the spread of infection, not treating those infected.
John P.A. Ioannidis, Professor of Medicine, Epidemiology and Population Health : “The global response to the COVID-19 pandemic is a once-in-a-century evidence fiasco”
Yes, Ioannidis. That’s one epidemiologist. You quote him over and over and over again, so I assume he’s the only one saying what you want to hear; I’m sure if there were two you’d quote them both.
He’s come in for a lot of criticism from his field. I’m not surprised; a load of his work on this has been obviously sloppy, eg. the Stanford study that used a self-selected sample recruited from Facebook adverts and came up with a result around a fifth found by far more rigorous studies, or his paper at WHO that took diverse countries’ mortality statistics at face value* and didn’t bother checking them against the mortality-from-all-causes statistics.
* You lot are always dismissing the UK statistics as corrupted, but even though Ioannidis takes a host of different countries’ statistics at face value, you laud him to the heavens. But then you probably didn’t know because you didn’t bother to read his paper – probably too busy scouring conspiracy theory sites for the next morsel to promote your macabre fiction.
Two of the three authors of the Great Barrington Declaration are epidemiologists.
Martin Kulldorff, PhD, is a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and Brigham & Women’s Hospital who develops epidemiological and statistical models to detect infectious disease outbreaks. The epidemiologist has repeatedly said that restrictions for young and healthy people are unwarranted, as the risk of COVID-19 mortality is a thousand times higher for the elderly than it is for youth.
Sunetra Gupta, PhD. Gupta, is a professor of theoretical epidemiology in the department of zoology at Oxford University.
“We can’t just think about those who are vulnerable to the disease,” Gupta told The Guardian in June. “We have to think about those who are vulnerable to lockdown too. The costs of lockdown are too high at this point.”I had a look at the frontpage co-signers of the the Great Barrington Declaration and found I actually know several of them, either personally or via colleagues who work with them. I wouldn’t fault their professionalism too readily. (In particular Lisa White, Professor of Modelling and Epidemiology at Oxford University, is very sharp, sincere and thorough.) The problem isn’t with their expertise in epidemiology or related branches of medicine; it’s with their lack of expertise in public health policy, sociology and behavioural science. The declaration makes a definitive judgement about the optimum strategy for protecting public health, which depends on many more pragmatic factors than medical science.
In the early days of this pandemic, before the first UK lockdown was proposed, I advocated similar action: i.e. shielding and supporting the vulnerable and letting the virus spread naturally through the healthy population. But I didn’t think it through well enough. Some of my elderly relatives were appalled at the proposal to impose severe restrictions on them while the rest of society continued with their normal lives relatively unimpeded. Extended families would have to be separated according to age and underlying health conditions (many of which would be difficult to identify reliably). Mandatory imposition would constitute a selective disregard of individual freedoms and human rights. It would be a very hard sell. Moreover, it may not even be viable at all, as we know so little about acquired herd immunity to each strain of the virus.
Interestingly, some of its most sanguine supporters on the internet hold views contradictory to the underlying science: e.g. that there is no virus, that testing is unreliable, that the wrong therapies are being applied, that the concept of herd immunity is flawed, and so on. I think they only mention it as a way to cast doubt on scientific consensus and public health policy, or to undermine the rationale for social distancing and lockdown measures. It’s important to keep the scientific consensus and the public health policies separate, because they depend on different domains of reasoning – matters of fact vs matters of concern (aka the ‘is/ought’ dichotomy). Imho, the signatories to the Great Barrington Declaration should confine themselves to telling us facts about the virus and how it spreads, without insisting on a plan of action to tackle it.
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