Everyone has an opinion. The only opinions I am taking seriously right now are from professional epidemiologists - not doctors, nurses, oncologists, bioethicists, or economists. This article is just noise to me.
We’re Testing the Wrong People
111–120 of 155 posts
Re: We’re Testing the Wrong People
#112I think this article is getting things out of order. The question right now shouldn't be who to test, but rather how do we increase the volume of testing. The article states that we should be running 500k tests a day, as if we're not simply because we choose not too. Right now we don't have the capacity and so we can't scale up at all. Why don't we have the capacity? Well the complete lack of coordination and leaders…
There's, frankly, probably not enough reagents and consumables on the planet for the US to achieve 500k tests a day. As far as I know no country anywhere has managed this level of testing. Germany - who've been doing the best at testing lately - have been stuck at about 50,000 tests a day for a few weeks now, maybe even decreasing slightly. If you take into account the difference in population, that's only the equiva…
There are even plans to increase testing to 4,5 million(!) tests per week in Germany, or ~650k per day. Currently there is unused testing capacity, so it looks like the old restrictive conditions for testing (basically: symptoms and (contact to infected person or stay in high risk area)) are still in place and should be updated ASAP.
Re: We’re Testing the Wrong People
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is if you assume your Constitutional rights are that that any citizen intuits from a casual reading of the Bill of Rights. It suffices in this context to point out that, if you're an American, you don't live in a country that operates on that principle; we've had centuries of jurisprudence that put the Bill of Rights into actual practice, and many of the principles routinely assumed to be violating the plain meani…
Jury trials have been postponed all over the country. And we can't go 2 years without jury trials while waiting for a vaccine. We'll have to find less restrictive ways to coexist with this virus.
Trials are postponed when they can be. Hearings are being conducted remotely. Courts are open where they have to be. Habeas has not been suspended.
Churches are an especially unpersuasive example of overreach, since several churches have been implicated in super-spreader events.
Re: We’re Testing the Wrong People
#114I think this article is getting things out of order. The question right now shouldn't be who to test, but rather how do we increase the volume of testing. The article states that we should be running 500k tests a day, as if we're not simply because we choose not too. Right now we don't have the capacity and so we can't scale up at all. Why don't we have the capacity? Well the complete lack of coordination and leaders…
There's, frankly, probably not enough reagents and consumables on the planet for the US to achieve 500k tests a day. As far as I know no country anywhere has managed this level of testing. Germany - who've been doing the best at testing lately - have been stuck at about 50,000 tests a day for a few weeks now, maybe even decreasing slightly. If you take into account the difference in population, that's only the equiva…
100% there is a shortage of reagents and kits. There are certain countries that are not letting reagents and kits ship out, and we are in no position to call them out on that.
>That doesn't stop the American press making it sound like not achieving those 500,000 tests a day is the result of some uniquely American political failing though.
I don't think we're unique in where we are in comparison with other countries as far as testing, but we are in a unique position in regards to being able to put some strong leverage on getting other countries to work together to respond to this pandemic. We're not doing that and as a result, other countries are having to "roll their own" response to this pandemic just like we are. The lack of coordination within our country is putting us at a unique disadvantage, even if we had better coordination world wide.
This pandemic is a exceptional global crisis in a way we've never seen before, and thus should've led to a addressing it at a global scale in a way we had never seen before. Instead the global response has been crippled in numerous ways at various different points in time.
The American political failing is in not being the true world leaders, and the world is, IMHO, worse off for it.
Re: We’re Testing the Wrong People
#115> Another promising pathway is to pool many tests and run them together. If a pooled sample tests negative, everyone in the pool is negative. If it is positive, the members of the pool can be tested individually. Well, it took a global pandemic, but we finally found a use for bloom filters!
This idea is called group testing [0] and has been used by the army for quite a while. It is also a well-studied problem in information theory as a (useful) basic model and we know optimal solutions to it. What is surprising is that group testing tells us that we can actually do better : the specific construction you pinpoint the people who come up positive, without needing to have a test for each person [1] and this…
Gah, I've passed the editing window. If it's confusing to read, it is supposed to say:
> the specific construction lets you pinpoint the people who come up positive
Re: We’re Testing the Wrong People
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
Jury trials have been postponed all over the country. And we can't go 2 years without jury trials while waiting for a vaccine. We'll have to find less restrictive ways to coexist with this virus.
Trials are postponed when they can be. Hearings are being conducted remotely. Courts are open where they have to be. Habeas has not been suspended. Churches are an especially unpersuasive example of overreach, since several churches have been implicated in super-spreader events.
"When they can be" is a strange way to refer to a universal shutdown of all jury trials in many jurisdictions, such as:
https://www.ktvu.com/news/justice-delayed-california-courts-...
What was perhaps acceptable as a temporary emergency measure is not acceptable as the new normal. The current measures are overly restrictive and cannot continue for two years.
And while I don't care about religion myself, I understand that religious people feel the same way about closing all churches for years. We'll also have to find less restrictive ways to control the virus while allowing the churches to reopen.
Re: We’re Testing the Wrong People
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The only data that is somewhat reliable in this pandemic is COVID deaths. I agree,, especially as you included the word “somewhat”. We have pretty good numbers on people who died in hospitals, but people who died at home appear to be seriously under counted. Additionally, consequential deaths are currently invisible. These are people who died, say, ecause the coronavirus crowded out their access to hospitals. There…
You can get part of that with excess death rates. From the weeks overall deaths subtract the average death rate for this week in past years. That should give both people who died at home and consequential deaths.
There are a lot of people not going to hospitals either because elective procedures were canceled or they fear getting corona virus. These will contribute to excess deaths but not be caused by coronavirus.
Re: We’re Testing the Wrong People
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
> At the beginning there were some authorities (China, WHO) claiming there was no human-to-human transmission. I don't understand how this misconception persists. That is not what the WHO statement said. The statement was that the outbreak was not being sustained by community transmission, and that they believed (this was very early on) that the cases from the Wuhan market were all due to exposure to a single case or…
https://twitter.com/who/status/1217043229427761152?lang=en
Is that supposed to be disputing what the parent said?
> Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China🇨🇳.
Re: We’re Testing the Wrong People
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
Trials are postponed when they can be. Hearings are being conducted remotely. Courts are open where they have to be. Habeas has not been suspended. Churches are an especially unpersuasive example of overreach, since several churches have been implicated in super-spreader events.
"When they can be" is a strange way to refer to a universal shutdown of all jury trials in many jurisdictions, such as: https://www.ktvu.com/news/justice-delayed-california-courts-... What was perhaps acceptable as a temporary emergency measure is not acceptable as the new normal. The current measures are overly restrictive and cannot continue for two years. And while I don't care about religion myself, I understand…
I'm not sure why you'd expect me to respond to (let alone defend) an argument that nobody is making. Clearly things will not continue exactly as they have been for two years. If the same protective needs exist 2 years from now, the courts will have adapted. The churches, for whatever it's worth to you, already have.
Regarding the courts: Ken White is a good source for what's actually happening.
Re: We’re Testing the Wrong People
#120The only data that is somewhat reliable in this pandemic is COVID deaths. Testing the population that is very sick / dying is crucial to understanding the baseline for the worst part of the problem. Once you have that under control, and we are not nearly there yet, you have to get every first responder tested regularly so you can prevent them from spreading the disease and give them some assurance that coming to work…
> The only data that is somewhat reliable in this pandemic is COVID deaths. I agree,, especially as you included the word “somewhat”. We have pretty good numbers on people who died in hospitals, but people who died at home appear to be seriously under counted. Additionally, consequential deaths are currently invisible. These are people who died, say, ecause the coronavirus crowded out their access to hospitals. There…
The number of deaths may be off but that is likely to be dwarfed by the much higher number of total cases that haven't been confirmed. Between this study, the LA study, and the Santa Clara study there could be 10-80x as many cases. That is more significant that the death count being off by a couple percent when it comes to determining the fatality rate.