The test used by the White House could have a false negative rate as high as 48%.:eek:
Sure, let’s fast-track that vaccine! :rolleyes:
And results from similar testing in Slovenia.
Link for more complete situation goes to Slovenian US Embassy
And results from similar testing in Slovenia.
Link for more complete situation goes to Slovenian US Embassy
Here in Ireland, things are slightly easing from 18th May.
Main difference for me is I’ll be allowed meet some friends/family outdoors, socially distant up to a max of 4.
Businesses appear to have been slowly reopening, more or less in line with government guidelines.
I’ve been cocooning my elderly (multiple health problems including cancer) mother these last almost 8 weeks and I’m fraying, so while keeping her health (and my own) to the fore, I’m looking forward to things being slightly less locked down.
FWIW I’ve worn masks in stores for most of these past 8 weeks and have observed as best I can the social distancing best practice. I live in a fairly densely populated suburb of the city so it can be hard to give others a 2 metre berth without walking out into traffic.
Does that mean 1.16% of the whole population died or 1.16% of the 5% died?
The latter.
If it were the former, then there would be 545,000 dead in Spain, or nearly twice the entire total deaths worldwide.
Notice how those signs the women in the middle have don’t say “lets go back to work.” Just “go back to work”. How many of these defenders of freedom are up for letting low-paid workers have the freedom to **choose **whether to go back to work in the middle of a pandemic or not - by providing financial support for people who can’t otherwise avoid it to self-isolate?
4,429,884 total cases
298,174 dead
1,659,797 recovered
In the US:
1,430,348 total cases
85,197 dead
310,259 recovered
Yesterday’s numbers for comparison:
The problem that I have with that study is the method in which it was performed. They invited 3,000 people (who they claim were a representative sample of age and geography), but fewer than half of those invited decide to actually go be tested. I’d be willing to bet that the people that showed up were not the same distribution of age and geography (especially age), but the testers seem to ignore that possibility. At the very least, I can’t find any source that shows the breakdown of those invited vs. those who accepted. I also can’t find where the tests took place, but if it was a medical facility, that would make it even more likely to be biased. I don’t know of a single at-risk person who wants to go within a mile of a medical facility right now.
Biased possibilities
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Some of the people who show up had coughs, fevers or similar symptoms over the past 2 months and accepted because they wanted to know for sure.
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Many at risk people have been very careful about possible exposure and therefore are very unlikely to have had the virus. They are also very unlikely to accept the invitation which could increase that risk of exposure.
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People who are currently not feeling well choose to not participate, as they don’t want to infect others or be stigmatized for showing possible symptoms.
I’m sure there are others, but it’s nearly impossible to do an in-person random sample at this particular time.
So there is now a new case where children are also suffering because of this virus. I think they have rashes. I think its is related to Kawasaki.
Also, not sure if false positives are accounted. It is about 3 times more than me (and majority of expert here) would predict, with about 20-30 times more infected than regularly tested positive (cca 1400 infected /per 2,1 million vs 47 infected in 1463 sample). But seems to be somewhat consistent with some other (still rare) similar studies (Austria, Iceland, some regional studies in Germany and US). Samples were collected in last week of april, some at home and some at closest medical facilities. It will be repeated in 6 months and status phone checked bi-weekly in meantime.
Some other interesting data which reveals one slight local abnormality. 80 of 103 dead are accounted at retirement homes, and 80% of that for only 3 or 4 specific ones (of total 102 in the country). Less than 20 actually died on ICUs in hospitals. When doctors were asked why so many were not bothered to be ICUzied (although ICUs were utilized only 35% at the peak), they were like, they would not survive procedure. Granted, average age of the passed is way above average, close to 90, which would also give some answer why positives to dead ration here is relatively high.
With reference to the Guardian article, this is slightly misleading. It wasn’t the governor’s action that was negated by the court, but Secretary Palm’s directive:
Adjusting for a known false positive rate is so straightforward that I would certainly hope and expect a reputable research team would have done so … of course, this does add in some additional possibility of error, but you can account for that too.
DMC’s point about sample bias is well-taken though, and it seems like the most likely biases are in favour of finding more people who had the virus and didn’t notice it (sample probably contains fewer elderly people, fewer people being very strict about isolation, fewer people who live in more remote areas etc). This ties in well with the fact that the study found a very low death rate, compared to the Spanish study (only about 0.16 percent, if I’m doing my maths right)
Hopefully not, otherwise I won’t be able to vaccinated against covid because I’m allergic to the flu vaccine.
The other possibility no one but the scientists seem to want to consider is that we may not get a vaccine - there are many diseases we don’t have one for.
I’ll believe we have a viable vaccine when we actually have a viable vaccine, not until then.
…New Zealand opened up today.
We dropped to Alert Level 2 which essentially allows almost everything to open up again (with the exception of the borders) to some degree or another. Schools go back next week. I went out to a shop today and bought something without having to “text and collect” and if felt really weird.
So this is the real test for how well our lockdown has worked. For the third day in the row we’ve had zero new cases, zero new deaths, only 2 people in hospital and nobody in ICU. And they conducted 6,568 tests yesterday: a big ramp up of the testing to try and see if there are any undiagnosed cases or clusters out there in the community. We are being told that “if you feel sick then stay home. And go get tested.” If you need a test you get a test.
As much as I’m pleased to see how well we’ve done, I still look in abject horror at what is going on overseas, especially in America and the UK. Over the last 6 or 7 weeks (I’ve lost count, everything has rolled into one) we’ve had the science of transmission drilled into us down here. So I watch this from people who are actually setting health policy in the UK and my jawjust dropped. These guys don’t have a clue about “what is safer and what is not.” A real estate agent visiting multiple houses will be significantly more likely to be exposed to the virus than a mum and a dad who have been self-isolating for the last seven weeks. Yet it is the former which is allowed because “they will only come into the house once” which is completely nonsensical. Its the sort of advice which is going to cost lives.
In New Zealand we usedthe concept of the “bubble.” Its a very simply concept to understand: the people you were locked down with “on the first day of lockdown” are in your bubble. At Level 4 you had to remain in your bubble, so if someone was incubating Covid-19 then it would only potentially spread to people within your bubble. When we dropped to Level 3 we were allowed to “expand our bubbles” to include another bubble. That meant we could catch up with whanau but still limited exposure to within those two bubbles.
But what they are doing in the UK is the opposite of this. They are allowing multiple bubbles to interact and consider this to be safer and less risky than two bubbles merging. I dread what we will see in a couple of weeks.
Beijing Back to Campus Bulletin!
It’s been a few days now since the students have returned to campus. My school’s 12th graders and 9th graders (aka “Year 12” and “Year 9” for some odd Australian and/or Chinese reason) returned to the campus, a boarding school, on Sunday, 10 May 2020 and Monday, 11 May 2020, respectively. Classes began for Year 12 students on Monday, 11 May 2020 and Year 9 students on 12 May 2020.
This schedule required us teachers to be on the campus Sunday and Monday at 8:00 a.m. instead of 8:30 a.m. That part doesn’t bug me so much; what does is that we still stay until 5:30 p.m. each day. What I did appreciate this time, though, is the “Semester Opening Ceremony” (yeah, TIC*) was held with just select senior staff and teachers and all of the students during the student’s evening study hall time (7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.). The staff shuttle buses therefore ran their morning routes thirty minutes early.
Once departing the bus in the school parking lot, I noticed the line barriers (what are those thing called?) set up again. A couple of students were entering the campus and they had to do the same routine we staff did last week.
All classes are divided into two groups: Group A and Group B. Half the classes on each floor are in Group A, the other half in Group B. Group A classes begin at the normal times (8:30 a.m. for morning classes, 1:50 p.m. for afternoon classes) and last for forty-five minutes with a ten-minute break between classes. Group B’s classes begin at the same times, but the first class in the morning and the first class in the afternoon are fifty minutes long. This is to minimize the number of students in the hallways and restrooms during the break between classes. Every restroom on campus now had an occupancy limit clearly posted at the door. In addition to that, every other stall door is bolted shut and every other urinal is covered up. Some genius decided that the western style commode on the first floor male restroom is one of the stalls to be closed–I hope he falls into the squatter.
Each grade is now assigned a time to go the cafeteria (aka “canteen” for yet another Australian or Chinese reason). Before the pandemic, the students had the entire lunch break (12:00 noon to 1:50 p.m. for the students) to hang out and eat at any of the canteens on campus. Now they must be escorted by their grade’s senior teacher.
Students are no longer permitted in any of the teachers’ offices. If they need to use the restroom, only one student per class may go. (Reminds me of that character in Summer School who got the restroom key on the first day and returned it on the day of the final exam. Or was that Fast Times at Ridgemont High?) The form teachers are required to ensure no students are in the halls during classes.
In class, we teachers have been tasked with ensuring the students do not congregate closer than one meter to each other, and that they wear their masks properly instead of the usual Chinese practice of wearing it as a sort of fashion statement (not covering the nose or even the mouth). For Group B classes, those teachers are permitted to let the students have a rest in place for the extra five minutes of the first period in the morning and the first period in the afternoon. Personally, I think that Group A should have the normal times for the morning and the fifty-minute class in the afternoon, just to make it fair.
The school staff discovered that with all the social distancing and other pandemic prevention rules (“Pandemic prevention”? Apparently someone forgot that it’s already a pandemic now; we need to control it, not prevent it.) the students in one of the two departments in which I’m currently working simply do not have enough time to get to PE class, have PE class, clean up after PE class, and then get back to their classroom for their other subjects. This is because that department is further away from the gym than the other departments. The decision came down on Tuesday that the students in that department will all have PE in the final period in the afternoon. I suppose I should mention that there are four periods in the morning and four in the afternoon.
The students are again [del]herded[/del] escorted to dinner by their department’s head teacher and are turned over to the form teachers for study hall, and finally to the dorm teachers at 9:00 p.m. I have no idea what the new dormitory restrictions are so I cannot report on those.
The Beijing Municipal Education Commission and the Beijing CCP Education Committee have observers meandering around campus throughout the day to ensure the staff and students are following the new rules.
All of the above is for private boarding schools in the city. The training centers (“cram schools”/“afterschool academies”) are still closed.
For the public schools, the 12th graders returned a few days ealier, 27 April 2020. Their campuses have similar markings and signages throughout the campus but their control procedures are more strict. The students are stuck in the classroom for the duration of the day. During their ten-minute break, they get to rest in place. There is no leaving the classroom until lunchtime and then when it’s time to go home. I do not know if they get escorted to the cafeteria for lunch or if the food is brought to their classrooms.
The really big news was announced yesterday by the Beijig Municipal Education Commission! The other grades, except for first, second, and third grades, are returning to campus per the following schedule:
The very important announcement over the commission’s official WeChat account is that the summer holiday will not be postponed. I was very excited to read that, but I still have my doubts about it for the private schools. Anyway, so long as the borders are closed to foreigners retrurning, that might not be such a big issue for us foreigners in country.
A number of foreign teachers at my school and, of course, at others are not in China now for the aforementioned ban. Some of those teachers are stranded in locales where they can neither return to China nor get to their home countries. On the foreign teachers’ WeChat group, someone stated that some teachers were told those whose contracts end this semester will not be renewed. Note that I have heard nothing from administration or senior management on that nor anything official; it’s just something one of those out-of-country teachers stated in the group.
If true, I guess I can see the school’s side, but at the same time, it’s really looks like abandonding somene especially if that person is stranded elsewhere and has been doing the job online as directed. If not true, that’s good news for those folks.
Speaking of contracts ending in July, mine does. I’ve already asked my department head what’s going on with that. I guess I just have to be patient. That’s getting very difficult the longer my wife is stuck oustide of the country! Oh, and her visa, just like mine, expires 31 July 2020. Actually, there’s a possibility that her visa may be void because it was issued last year. I guess we’ll discover what’s going on with that when and if China cancels the ban on foreigners returning.
I think I did not make any spelling or grammar errors in this post. I do not mind if you find any and let me know I made such errors.
*TIC = This Is China.
I forgot to mention one thing I found interesting. The night before last when I got home from work, one of my neighbors was taking a video of her daughter, who’s in primary school, doing a number of exercises. The neighbor then had to send the video to her daughter’s PE teacher as that was the daughter’s final exam to show she understood the proper way to peform those exercises.