> unfortunately the false positives with our PCR testing is abysmal
I keep hearing this argument, but it's unconvincing. Here in Alberta we've seen positive cases and hospitalizations and deaths move in relation to each-other. If the false positive was so high we wouldn't be able to make out that pattern from the noise, but it's incredibly obvious. Also, in the early days we saw case rates much lower than the false positive rates I saw talked about, and so that doesn't hold water either.
covid deaths are labeled based on positive test results (and clinical diagnosis) so they will always move together regardless of specificity or sensitivity
here's a study showing above CT 32 not a single live virus was able to be cultured [1]
I didn't say just deaths, hospitalizations as well. In Alberta people were until just this week experiencing severe and acute respiratory distress in droves, so much so that our ICU was at the highest capacity ever and specifically 3/4 full of COVID+ patients, and this is sheer coincidence that it matches up with surge in positive test cases from several weeks ago? Our premier actually noted that a large group of cases currently in hospital were in the sub 50 age group as evidence that the vaccination against COVID 19 is working for the above 50's[1], who have had the opportunity to be vaccinated. Given all these facts it suggest to me there is an acute respiratory disease that is running rampant through my province that responds well to the COVID vaccine.
How do you explain this? How do you explain record ICU numbers and uncharacteristically large groups of the young being stricken by a respiratory condition in May, long after cold and flu season and matching record COVID case numbers?
Well I don't really feel I have to explain anything? The diligent work put into CT by researchers shows high CT positives are very likely false positives.
But I can offer up some explanations regardless, just for the sake of conversation. Any respiratory infection that gets hospitalized with high CT covid tests is capable of being a misdiagnosed CV19 infection. I'm unsure about CA, but in the US there are huge financial incentives to misdiagnose a patient as cv19+
As for record number of patients (I'll take your word for it as in the US the actual ICU numbers are lower for 2020 than 2019 and hospitalizations countrywide 2020 at no point were higher than 2019) - I think that a much more logical conclusion is that people were scared to go to the hosptial - preventative visits/treatments were delayed and now you're dealing with the predictable rise in illness due to disruption to healthcare from government regulations and overall hysteria keeping people from the hospital that would've otherwise been there.
Disruptions as small as daylight savings changes is associated with large spikes in heart attacks - it's really not surprising that global disruption will have negative health repercussions.
As far as I'm aware there is zero financial incentive here in Canada, and that argument sounds a lot like they are knowingly faking the cases, which is a much different argument than the diagnostic doesn't work and implies malice.
Just to remove doubt, the ICU has been record setting[1]. As an aside, that article even discusses your claim about bad PCR tests.
And are you saying that people have delayed their care to the point where they are now in the ICU, just under half of who are sub 50, and all those happen to be because of a respiratory infection? In addition, those peaks of ICU numbers have started to come down. It must be a coincidence that case counts have been dropping for a while here - how does that make sense if it's just people delaying care? It really doesn't meet any sort of sense that the peaks are always linked.
Alberta has put together a great data portal[2], complete with tracking case counts and severe cases. It's easy to see, based upon the actual data, how the cases, hospitalizations, and ICU are related.
I'm really not sure where the disconnect is, because all of that seems highly reasonable to me.
Yes, I'm saying people avoided preventative care because they were scared to go near hospitals - this is not a controversial topic, it's clear that is true.
I'm not sure about your point with respiratory infections but covid goes on the death certificate with a recent positive test even if you died in a car accident.
No, I've never suggested "coincidence" with case counts and hospitalizations. It seems quite intuitive to me that false positives are happening at a similar rate as usual and more hospitalizations just means more false positives in the hospital. You get false positives with high CT - there have been multiple studies confirming this fact at this point, it's not a controversial statement as far as I'm aware.
> I'm not sure about your point with respiratory infections but covid goes on the death certificate with a recent positive test even if you died in a car accident.
> No, I've never suggested "coincidence" with case counts and hospitalizations. It seems quite intuitive to me that false positives are happening at a similar rate as usual and more hospitalizations just means more false positives in the hospital. You get false positives with high CT - there have been multiple studies confirming this fact at this point, it's not a controversial statement as far as I'm aware.
But these positives come BEFORE the hospitalizations and deaths. I don't feel like you're understanding the order of events - high cases AND then hospitalizations after weeks. You keep describing events where people are retroactively proven to have COVID - this isn't the case. These are people who test positive and then later enter hospital.
I think you may misunderstand my point. I'm not claiming covid doesn't go up and increase hospitalization - I'm simply saying there are a lot of false positives. Of course there are real cases that precede hospitalizations, but that correlation does nothing to show there aren't massive false positives. The more covid is spreading, the more real cases but also the more false positives. You need covid virus in the patient to test positive. A false positive means the patient isn't sick with covid, not that there exists no covid on that patient.
covid spread increases -> hospitalizations go up - we both agree on this point
covid spread increases -> false positives increase due to more viral spread that will attack asymptomatic/immune individuals (we do know that other coronaviruses have cross immunity with cv19 so it's not uncommon to be asymptomatic due to preexisting immunity)
> A false positive means the patient isn't sick with covid, not that there exists no covid on that patient.
> false positives increase due to more viral spread that will attack asymptomatic/immune individuals
Ok, so it sounds like you're making the argument that a patient, who has COVID in their system, but is asymptomatic and tests positive would be considered a false positive, even though they can still spread the virus?
Please cite your source that positives at >40ct can still be infectious since I've already provided evidence strongly disagreeing with your assertion here.
You supplied a single study for evidence and then an imgur link.
I wasn't even aware that there was doubt that asymptomatic spread was a thing. I realize now the issue - I believe that someone who has a COVID 19 infection, symptomatic or not, is someone infected with COVID 19, and you've decided that they aren't until they show symptoms. How do you feel about HIV?
At no point did I say or suggest people not showing symptoms are incapable of infecting someone with cv19. I'm not sure where you've come to the conclusion this conversation was ever about asymptomatic spread. PCR tests have nothing to do with symptoms.
However, I am very familiar with the study you've linked. If you can even call it a study - it's more like a fantasy model based on the data of other studies the researchers appear to not even have read! They cite numbers from multiple papers that can't be found in those papers anywhere. There might not be a more embarrassing study I've read than this one.
There first citation to Lee et. al. claims the paper found 100% infectiousness of asymptomatic individuals, yes 100%.
here's a quote from the actual paper
> Although the high viral load we observed in asymptomatic patients raises a distinct possibility of a risk for transmission, our study was not designed to determine this
(you'll note at nowhere in the paper is there anything resembling 100% spread in asymptomatic compared to symptomatic...this number is purely fabricated from thin air)
another citation from that paper is a citation to char et. al. that says the paper claims 40-140% infectiousness for asymptomatic individuals...again let's read the actual paper they cite
here's a quote from the paper
> In the household setting, symptomatic case-patients had 2.7 times the risk of transmitting SARS-CoV-2 to their close contacts, compared with asymptomatic and presymptomatic case-patients
so the above paper deals with household settings and finds roughly 1/3 in a household setting...this paper very generously makes up numbers again to cite to this paper...embarrassing.
the cite mc evoy et. al. as having a finding of 40-70% which they got right! horray!
so 2/3 papers they use to determine their asymptomatic infectious number for their modeling are just garbage citations that don't resemble the findings of the source paper at all
this paper is worse than useless.
again, their model sets the infectiousness rate of asymptomatic individuals based on 3 citations - 2 of which are fabricated...garbage...utter garbage.
Incorrect, they are absolutely counted as covid deaths early on and will likely be re-categorized later, your article even says as much - later corrections are easy for car crashes, but they are not easy for misdiagnosis
either way the context of the conversation is about early trends so my point still stands and is validated by the article you've linked, even.
Misdiagnosis can go either way, not always in favour of covid.
Early trends showed severe undercounting when later compared to excess mortality, probably due to low testing capacity at the start. See here for some more information on the undercounting: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-...
You’ll have to point out in the previous article where it agrees with your point on car crashes counted as covid deaths, it does not show this in the version of the article that is presented to me.
your linked article simply shows gross deaths above baseline are not entirely accounted for by covid - that's not surprising in the least when you disrupt the entire world you'll have deaths from the disruption alongside covid. It makes no attempt at showing covid is undercounted.
If anything I would use that as an argument to show lockdowns may very well be doing substantial harm and causing massive death.
This hypothesis is further supported by the fact that not a single country in the top 30 excess mortality during the pandemic is a country that avoided stringent lockdowns.
Correlation != causation of course, but it's a logical thought to investigate and there's plenty more evidence towards lockdown's doing more harm than good (considering the evidence they prevented spread at all is lacking)
as for your request - I never said the article agrees with my point about car crashes counted as covid deaths, I said it agrees with me that the correction happens later.
You can easily disprove the “lockdowns doing more harm than good” from an excess mortality point of view by looking at countries such as Norway, which had had lockdowns but no significant excess mortality.
I also don’t understand the “evidence they prevented spread at all is lacking” line. We now have multiple waves in multiple countries. My country (Scotland) specifically has peaks in infections that are then followed by falls as a result of lockdowns. In fact we are now seeing infections rise as we ease restrictions again. These falls go against normal seasonal behaviours for respiratory illnesses, so it’s clear that something else is causing the fall - the lockdown!
The fact that a virus needs contact with people to spread is literally virus 101, and therefore limiting contact suppresses transmission - how do you come to the conclusion that this is not the case?
I responded to one of your other comments saying the same thing - norway did not have "lockdowns" like much of the developed world...sweden had more stringent lockdowns than norway. Either way a single datapoint doesn't prove anything, but you're wrong on even your single datapoint.
Lockdowns don't limit transmission because, in the US, only 40% of the economy shut down and traveling metrics didn't go down for very long. It's not that social distancing can't work - it's that it didn't work for likely very complex reasons.
You can see that some countries that did lock down, e.g. Norway didn’t have significant excess mortality so this can dispel any myths about lockdowns themselves causing excess mortality. I’m sure some people will argue that the excess deaths in their country were caused by the lockdown, but in my experience it’s not worth your time arguing back at this stage.
norway locked down with less stringency than sweden - you can see that using the only objective measurements of lockdown stringency (that I know of) in the oxford stringency index
I'm not sure why you would state something completely incorrect so confidently - if you had in fact been arguing with people over that point I would expect you to have come across the most basic data behind your point.
Your assertions don't fit with the data you shared. The Y axis shows strictness and Norway has peaks that are higher and therefore stricter. I suspect you know this given you tried to double-down on it immediately.
If we are playing "No true Scotsman" with the lockdowns and dragging Sweden in, how would you explain Greece vs Sweden?
Excess Deaths per 100k [0]
Sweden: 102
Greece: 38
There is simply no compelling evidence that “lockdowns doing more harm than good” from an excess mortality point of view.
a single comparison really does nothing, here's japan vs sweden that shows the exact opposite - neither of these comparisons are useful for anything other than a datapoint that should be used to study the larger issue alongside all the other data we have
It does do something. It proves you can lockdown without the lockdown itself causing significant excess mortality and gives more credence (as if it’s needed) to the excess mortality that is being seen in other countries being caused purely by COVID.
COVID skeptics are full of assertions such as: It’s just the flu, PCR tests are worthless, the lockdown is killing more people than it’s saving, suicides are way up, we won’t have a second wave etc. When these are proven false they come up with a new assertion, ignoring that they have been wrong about every assertion so far. The scary thing is they seem to sing from the same hymn sheet, so they are being fed this information from somewhere.
It doesn’t matter so much now that people are getting vaccinated, but the vocal minority was a real risk to the integrity of the measures such as lockdowns. If you get a critical mass of people believing this BS then you’ve got a real problem. We’ve seen how the Q-Anon misinformation movement has had real consequences but people seem oblivious when they are being fed FUD about COVID.
you should reread what you've just written and think a bit about who you think the problem is
we were having a conversation pretty tightly scoped to PCR tests that got loosened up (by you) to include lockdowns.
Now you're talking about Q-Anon among other unrelated things. If you want to have meaningful conversation that changes minds by informing people - this isn't the way to do it. It very much seems like you just lump everything into one big ball of political hot topic and leave very little room for nuance from people who disagree with you.
That's very unproductive and I'd suggest this mentality of assuming someone elses position based on political hot topics de jour is exactly why so many people are tribalistic when it comes to choosing what they believe with science.
You’re right about some of the things you are saying, I’ve maybe lumped you unfairly due to first hand experience.
Unfortunately, with my sample size of 2, I have seen the Q-Anon stuff happening real time. Note that I’m not even in America! Both people are engineers. One is an Albanian living in London and I can’t even compute how he’s so wired in to it all. They don’t even know each other but are lockstep with all the COVID stuff they say, now even on to the anti-vaxx angle.
I am american, but to be honest I don't quite know exactly what Q-Anon even is - I just never cared to read up on it I guess
As far as covid stuff I was basically unemployed for the first three months of the pandemic (only having a small workload) so I got super interested in reading white papers etc. you wouldn't believe the amount of absolutely terrible science that got pushed through the peer review process during covid. In another thread I detail a study someone used as evidence to support their opinion on asymptomatic thread.
The study was a model where they chose 75% asymptomatic spread relative to symptomatic spread for their model - the model unsurprisingly found asymp. spread to be roughly the same as symp. spread IIRC - now where did that 75% come from? I came from three studies they cite....2 of those 3 studies they cite do not have anything resembling the number they came up with. In one of the citations it was so bewilderingly wrong I can only conclude they cited the wrong study or they just made the number up entirely.
Back to the topic of PCR - I've seen zero literature to date that suggests a PCR with a CT>40 is beneficial. Further we have many studies that show false positives are absurdly high for many viruses well before CT40
So for someone to claim it's reasonable to use CT40, I believe the burden is on them to prove it since all literature I've seen suggests otherwise.
I keep hearing this argument, but it's unconvincing. Here in Alberta we've seen positive cases and hospitalizations and deaths move in relation to each-other. If the false positive was so high we wouldn't be able to make out that pattern from the noise, but it's incredibly obvious. Also, in the early days we saw case rates much lower than the false positive rates I saw talked about, and so that doesn't hold water either.