67 minutes actually. Worth the time because of the illuminative content. Lauc is some sort of expert - didn’t see any precise information about how - who has been advising the Croatian government, where they appear to have had a fortunate outcome to their management of the situation. Discussion ranges widely over other countries’ responses and outcomes:
Loads of good stuff in there RG - thanks for posting. My first watch impressions of the main points from Lauc’s presentation are:
It was also interesting to see that Lauc seems to believe that social distancing actively slows the spread of the disease - I thought the discussion on that between Cummins and Lauc on that subject pretty interesting.
Overall loads of good points from both of them I thought.
Cheers
PP
Something I just noticed today that agrees with the idea that “virus in the nose cases” (as opposed to covid, the disease) have been very common this summer. Of course this is something that had been mentioned on this board many times already, but the numbers are interesting for another reason.
This is a recent study by UCL showing that the vast majority of cases discovered over the summer had no symptoms:
The study included data from a representative population sample of 36,061 people living in England, Wales and Northern Ireland who were tested between 26 April and the 27 June 2020 and provided information of whether they had any symptoms.
The data showed 115 (0.32%) people out of the total 36,061 people in the pilot study had a positive test result.
<snip>
Of the 115 with a positive result, there were 16 (13.9%) reporting symptoms and in contrast, 99 (86.1%) did not report any specific symptoms on the day of the test.
Ignoring the conclusions that they draw in the article, let’s focus on a different angle - false positives.
Let’s imagine that 2/3rds of the people with zero symptoms were false positives, that would make:
*66 false positives,
*33 asymptomatic true positives, and
*16 symptomatic positives
So the majority of positive results in this case were false positives (in our example of course. The numbers below barely change even if we assume that all the people without symptoms were false positives, though).
What is the false positive rate in this example?
False positive = 66 / 36,061 = 0.18%
The UK is currently running just shy of 300,000 tests per day.
That translates to approximately 540 false positives.
Not a huge amount really. Nothing like the amount that would be required to explain the 10-15,000 positive results per day we’re seeing.
This data makes it extremely unlikely that the increase of positive “virus in the nose” (I liked that phrase!) cases is in any way due to false positives in the PCR.
Of course, as described in the linked video above, that didn’t mean that the 10-15,000 people with positive results have covid, just that they have had contact with the virus. But if the UCL study is right then perhaps 1-2,000 will actually show symptoms, of which maybe 100-200 might end up in hospital etc etc.
Something that is also interesting is the false negatives in the study.
158 people had classic covid symptoms in the study, but only 115 tested positive. 43 people had symptoms but a negative test result.
Wait, that’s not right. Only 16 people who tested positive had symptoms. So that means that 142 people who had symptoms tested negative (and 16 positive).
How many of those were actually positive and infectious (they had symptoms after all)? If we assume 2/3 again, then that makes nearly 30 95 infectious people who think they have a clean bill of health…
Out of 300,000 tests that means 790 infectious people walking around thinking they have a clean bill of health.
That’s why I said the other day that false negatives might be more worrying than false positives.
Anyway. This got sort of long and rambling. I thought all that was interesting, at least.
Cheers
PP