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.
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.