Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission • Hacker News Board

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#221

Post by jonahbenton » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 7:05 PM UTC

blywi wrote: post #164

forcry wrote: post #20

The most baffling thing is not standardising CT values for RT-PCR tests. I have looked and I cannot even find how increasing CT values affect the false positive rate for the PCR testing. If my understanding is correct a single increment of CT essentially doubles the sensitivity of the test, so difference between CT value of 35 and 40 is 32 fold. CDC is suggesting CT value of 28 for detecting breakthrough infections a…

Do you have source for that claim? I tried to find that recommendation, but all I came up with, was this fact check [1]. According to the fact check the CDC did NOT change cycle threshold, and the thresholds used to decide if test result is positive, are not different for vaccinated and unvaccinated. The quoted 28 cycle threshold is apparently only used for deciding if a sample can be submitted for sequencing. [1] ht…

Also, PCR is not one test, one method, one process. There are hundreds of distinct PCR-type molecular nucleic amplification tests. CDC guidance would only apply to the one process they provide/support. For a survey of the ecosystem and the difficulties in standardizing Ct values, see e.g.

https://www.aacc.org/science-and-research/covid-19-resources...

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#222

Post by pasabagi » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 7:16 PM UTC

native_samples wrote: post #203

pasabagi wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems weird to me. My brother in law literally works with HIV every day in a biology lab. There are thousands of academics who do the same. Why would they bother if it was just some random virus? I can't really speak to the arguments you've presented. Frankly, they seem totally explicable for any number of reasons, but it's not my field. My feeling is simply that tons of people who work in the field believe that HIV…

If you look at what happens to the scientists who dissented, it's no real surprise that nobody investigates this any more. Look at this thread. Mullis invented the PCR test and won a Nobel prize for it, but his beliefs about AIDS were immediately written off without investigation (except by me) and in fact used as a reason to attack and undermine him. Now what happens if you raise questions about this without being a…

I'm not a scientist - I'm actually an ex-philosophy student.

I guess part of my feeling is, sure, science has problems (every scientist will tell you that) but are there better institutions to give us actionable information in the middle of a pandemic? My feeling is no. So, even if I accept your diagnosis of science as "groupthink, politics and power games", I'd say that's just humans. All institutions, all fields are like that. Nonetheless, science has a pretty good record for delivering more or less solid consensus assessments, so even if it does need some reform, I think it's a pretty reasonable bet that the consensus is more or less on the money.

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#223

Post by selimthegrim » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 7:22 PM UTC

native_samples wrote: post #193

taejo wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm no expert, but it seems that the dramatic successes since 1996 in treating and preventing AIDS using antiretroviral drugs to suppress HIV viral load would be a pretty solid debunking.

It's probably just worth reading the book as I have only summarized a tiny fraction of it, and I suspect any debate about the topic could end up as just re-writing the book in forum comments. Obviously Duesberg discusses the history of AIDS treatments. Indeed it doesn't discuss treatment history after the book was written, but it makes a convincing case that the AIDS treatments that did exist up to that point were fr…

AZT was demanded by the gay community, in street marches and protests.

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#224

Post by nickthemagicman » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 7:29 PM UTC

pwinnski wrote: post #218

nickthemagicman wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah that's interesting. Thanks for sharing. Here's a good visualization as well. That looks pretty indisputable. https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid "The raw death count helps give us a sense of scale: for example, the US suffered roughly 360,000 more deaths than the five-year average between 26 January and 3 October 2020, compared to 209,000 confirmed COVID-19 deaths during that period." The Covid death…

So you quote an eight-month figure, ignoring the nearly-nine months since then, and still cling to your narrative even when presented with facts that directly contradict your earlier assertions. Okay. Try some math: 360,000 deaths higher than average over 251 days is 1434 excess deaths per day. From Oct 4 through yesterday is another 296 days, and 1434x296=424,464, so we're talking about a scale of around 780,000, wh…

????

Read my comment again.

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#225

Post by robocat » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 8:20 PM UTC

johnnyApplePRNG wrote: post #132

robocat wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hospitals are full in the UK at the moment. New Zealand hospitals have been in “crisis” pretty much all year, and we have no Covid. Currently it is due to a respiratory virus called RSV, but there were severe problems in other months too, not due to RSV. https://www.google.co.nz/search?q=nz+hospitals+overrun+OR+cr...

Could it be as simple as baby boomers ageing?

Well, the RSV problem affects babies the worst. I have a friend who’s baby is in hospital due to RSV: very worrying. https://www.health.govt.nz/your-health/conditions-and-treatm...

Note that one theory is that the RSV wave is due to relaxing rules on contact, hand cleaning, and mask usage.

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#226

Post by robocat » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 8:23 PM UTC

mizzack wrote: post #39

timr wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have looked and I cannot even find how increasing CT values affect the false positive rate for the PCR testing. If my understanding is correct a single increment of CT essentially doubles the sensitivity of the test, so difference between CT value of 35 and 40 is 32 fold. I have never used this particular set of primers, but have done a lot of PCR. In general, at 30+ cycles, PCR is prone to spurious amplification…

> I strongly suspect that the goal was to cast a wide net (i.e. bias toward false positives) at the expense of accuracy, but then "cases" became some kind of top-line media metric... Then in January the WHO updated the diagnostic protocol [1] because of that false positive/low confidence problem. Unsurprisingly, case counts plummeted in the following weeks. [1] https://www.who.int/news/item/20-01-2021-who-information…

WHO did give a good reason: “ WHO reminds IVD users that disease prevalence alters the predictive value of test results; as disease prevalence decreases, the risk of false positive increases (2). This means that the probability that a person who has a positive result (SARS-CoV-2 detected) is truly infected with SARS-CoV-2 decreases as prevalence decreases, irrespective of the claimed specificity.”

Given that reason, cause and effect would be hard to pick.

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#227

Post by a9h74j » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 9:57 PM UTC

killjoywashere wrote: post #207

a9h74j wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was working in a hospital when they discovered the blood lab was not prepared for the Joint Comission, and I saw the panic based on the scale of consequences you describe. My question refers to blinded testing meaning the lab in question does not know which, and handles, [in this case unexposed swabs from the factory] and it might range around 1-2% of samples on a continuing basis. To me that is the more industrial…

Um, the samples submitted by the external auditor may be positive or negative. And clinical labs re-validate tests routinely, including drawing samples from our own lab personnel. But we don't have dummy patients in the electronic medical record tied to perfectly healthy actors coming in to donate 7 mL of blood in a red top.

Yes, surely for established labs with a culture of competence, care, and conscience, which I am sure is the norm in your parts of the world.

I suspect we are framing in terms of two different, almost non-intersecting kinds of institution.

My impression is of reports of "startup" regional labs which have scaled immediately in a pandemic, reportedly hired off the street (not people whose specific vocation and training and life-choice is toward lab technician or manager or scientist), and have resulted in anecdotal reports -- all heresay technically -- of swabs being left lying about in quantity, picked up off the floor, etc etc etc. To me these reports -- perhaps false -- do not intersect with the concern with detail in a lab that knows how to prevent cross-contamination when running at very high PCR amplifications.

I am not bringing any new evidence to this, so I will leave it with clarifying the focus of my concern. I appreciate your standing up for the integrity and integrity-of-process in established labs.

--

s/the lab in question/the startup lab in question/ a level or two up

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#228

Post by native_samples » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 8:44 AM UTC

selimthegrim wrote: post #223

native_samples wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's probably just worth reading the book as I have only summarized a tiny fraction of it, and I suspect any debate about the topic could end up as just re-writing the book in forum comments. Obviously Duesberg discusses the history of AIDS treatments. Indeed it doesn't discuss treatment history after the book was written, but it makes a convincing case that the AIDS treatments that did exist up to that point were fr…

AZT was demanded by the gay community, in street marches and protests.

Well yes, because they had been told HIV was a death sentence and only AZT could save them. What relevance does that have?

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#229

Post by native_samples » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 8:47 AM UTC

pasabagi wrote: post #222

native_samples wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you look at what happens to the scientists who dissented, it's no real surprise that nobody investigates this any more. Look at this thread. Mullis invented the PCR test and won a Nobel prize for it, but his beliefs about AIDS were immediately written off without investigation (except by me) and in fact used as a reason to attack and undermine him. Now what happens if you raise questions about this without being a…

I'm not a scientist - I'm actually an ex-philosophy student. I guess part of my feeling is, sure, science has problems (every scientist will tell you that) but are there better institutions to give us actionable information in the middle of a pandemic? My feeling is no. So, even if I accept your diagnosis of science as "groupthink, politics and power games", I'd say that's just humans. All institutions, all fields ar…

Do we need institutions to give us actionable information? That starting point contains quite a few assumptions that aren't obvious to me. It's obviously convenient if you have such an institution that's accurate, and there's some logical and cost effective action that comes with it, but if no such institutions exist then the right thing to do is not trust one anyway.

On the topic of consensus specifically, I don't believe that's actually true. Science is full of people claiming there's a consensus but often when investigated it turns out not to be true, and instead there is an ongoing attempt to cover up or suppress disagreement. A claim of scientific consensus always needs to be checked, unfortunately, although that check can often be quite an easy one of the form "does someone make some well functioning technology requiring this belief to be correct".

There is no requirement that information come from institutions, let alone that it be actionable. If you look at where the most accurate information has been coming from throughout it's been bloggers, skeptics, bands of anonymous researchers like DRASTIC and so on. It's not good and it's not better than having trusted institutions, but all such institutions have been hopelessly destroyed from within, largely thanks to ideology. I see no reason to continue genuflecting at their feet of their smoking hulks. Perhaps better institutions will arise, or perhaps people will learn how to filter information and make decisions without being told what to do. Or perhaps both.

Re: Over half of Covid hospitalisations tested positive after admission

#230

Post by forcry » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 11:27 AM UTC

ericlavigne wrote: post #183

forcry wrote: post #20

The most baffling thing is not standardising CT values for RT-PCR tests. I have looked and I cannot even find how increasing CT values affect the false positive rate for the PCR testing. If my understanding is correct a single increment of CT essentially doubles the sensitivity of the test, so difference between CT value of 35 and 40 is 32 fold. CDC is suggesting CT value of 28 for detecting breakthrough infections a…

Very disappointing that the top comment on this article is COVID misinformation. The forcry account was created 3 weeks ago and specializes in COVID misinformation. No, CDC isn’t messing with the tests like this. And all this fancy talk about CT values is just cover for a false statement about CDC policy.

It is not misinformation.

This is the actual document that provides guidelines to labs to assess breakthrough infections

https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/downloads/Information-...

but it is no longer available at that location, for some reason, and here is a link to the old version..

https://web.archive.org/web/20210429184157/https://www.cdc.g...

Also, nice try to look up and discredit what I am saying on the basis of the age of my account. I am afraid such tactics won't fly well here.