2020-11-19
@blumenkraft
4 years ago
my pronouns are: none.
please, do not refer to me.
even better: do not perceive me.
for practical purposes, I don't exist.
please, do not refer to me.
even better: do not perceive me.
for practical purposes, I don't exist.
yes, there seem to be no/not enough standards and this is indeed a thing that must be addressed. this is a function of this virus being a new thing and that we are still learning about it, and also a lack of federal coordination.
with able people in the Whitehouse, we might see that.
Written with Beta.
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Discussion
dear internet:
if you march with the nazis, you express your freedom of speech.
but then my freedom of speech allows me to call you a nazi. deal with it!
if you march with the nazis, you express your freedom of speech.
but then my freedom of speech allows me to call you a nazi. deal with it!
@blumenkraft the flu and COVID-19 come from a similar type of virus, so it’s not a wholly inaccurate statement.
@phoneboy how do you mean a similar kind of virus? SARS-CoV-2 is a coronavirus. Influenza is an influenza virus. those are very different as a virus. they are also very different in symptoms and deadliness.
@phoneboy and Covid spreads differently and easier.
@blumenkraft At least one virologist agrees with what I said [weforum.org].
Not saying this to minimize COVID-19 by any stretch—I know several people who had it—though the way they’re reporting “cases” and not hospitalizations and deaths is…suspicious.
Not saying this to minimize COVID-19 by any stretch—I know several people who had it—though the way they’re reporting “cases” and not hospitalizations and deaths is…suspicious.
@phoneboy there are people saying the earth os flat. doesn't made the earth flat for now. :P
@phoneboy who do you mean with 'they' when it comes to reporting.
@blumenkraft I mean the media. Most of what I hear is cases, cases, cases. When you start digging into hospitalizations and deaths…it’s far far less than say, heart disease, which kills orders of magnitude more people a year.
@blumenkraft neither of us are virologists, last I checked, so we could both be wrong. :P
@phoneboy well, the media reports cases because of the exponential growth of the virus - which is the problem with it in the first place. if you don't contain cases, you also allow any subsequent harm (i.e. hospitalization/death/disease).
@phoneboy BTW, if the sort of media you consume is only talking about cases, and not that it causes disease and a shitton of suffering for people, I recommend you to switch the channel.
@phoneboy i used the last months to learn a lot about virology BTW. i know how it works now.
no, I'm not a virologist, but please don't tell me I don't know what I'm talking about.
if I don't know about something I keep quiet.
no, I'm not a virologist, but please don't tell me I don't know what I'm talking about.
if I don't know about something I keep quiet.
@blumenkraft curious if you ran across this podcast [traffic.libsyn.com] in your research. Depending on how many cycles they run the PCR COVID test at (which they don’t tell you) they can crank up the number of “positive” tests…and anything above 35 is useless.
@phoneboy yes, this podcast is good and I'm listening to every episode. i also watched every virology lecture by Vincent.
what do you mean by "anything above 35 is useless"? if you don't see virus after the 35th doubling cycle, the test is negative.
what do you mean by "anything above 35 is useless"? if you don't see virus after the 35th doubling cycle, the test is negative.
@blumenkraft many labs in the US are running it at more than 35 cycles.
@phoneboy what does that mean?
can you cite a source for that?
can you cite a source for that?
@blumenkraft how about this New York Times [nytimes.com] article from August?
@phoneboy paywall! :(
@blumenkraft I dunno, I run an adblocker and get in fine.
In any case, there is zero transparency in the testing. Even Fauci said they didn’t tell him unless he explicitly asked and the lab tech may not even know.
In any case, there is zero transparency in the testing. Even Fauci said they didn’t tell him unless he explicitly asked and the lab tech may not even know.
@blumenkraft here’s another [sentinelksmo.org]. Basically the cycle count is all over the place, not standard, and more importantly not collected with the yes/no result.
@phoneboy depending on the question you ask, the CT value has answers. like, are you infectious (in which case you would need to have a low CT value). of you might ask, is this person in an early stage (in which case you would need a very high value).
@phoneboy or do you want to know if a person was infected in the past (in which case you might want to use an antibody test). maybe there is a question you can answer if you do more than 35 circles (like picking up RNA parts for a study).
@blumenkraft yeah but if you take a positive result at a CT of above 35 and report that the same way you report a positive result with a CT of, say, 10, that’s…misleading.
@phoneboy ok, i accept your premise (for the sake of the argument). what does that mean for the praxis? what would you do differently? or better to say, what question would you ask from a test?
@blumenkraft the only relevant question is: do I have the virus and am I potentially spreading it. At anything above 35 cycles, the answer is no. Even 35 may be too high, since the US CDC guidance on this is…33 cycles.
@blumenkraft of course, if I were king, I’d make major changes to the food system. Not eating the abject garbage we eat in the west and getting some vitamins D would do wonders for our health…and make us far more resilient to coronaviruses.
@blumenkraft theres a reason I doubled down on my health choices after COVID-19. I figure: if this thing is even half as virulent as they said, I want to give my immune system the best chance possible to kill it should I encounter it.
@phoneboy wait, how is there only one relevant question? why do you dismiss all other questions? (like understanding how it spreads, what it does, and how, etc). those are all unanswered questions and you need testing (among other things) to answer them.
@phoneboy i would do things along those lines too if I was king.
@phoneboy i'm still confused about who is behind this conspiracy to falsify tests. or are you saying there are US guidelines that order labs to misinterpret the PCR results? i really don't understand the incentive or function of that.
@phoneboy RE: the NYT article you shared. i've read it now. :)
@phoneboy "The standard tests are diagnosing huge numbers of people who may be carrying relatively insignificant amounts of the virus. Most of these people are not likely to be contagious"
@phoneboy this is exactly the reason why i blow the horn on rapid tests for months now. they allow people do go on with their normal lives. they should be made cheap and available.
@phoneboy there are ways to make it so. it's a political will question, that's all. if you throw money on that, you save a multiple of that in other governmental wallets. so it's a net positive.
@phoneboy the PCR test is not there to tell people if they are infectious. it's there for clinical reasons. those are 2 completely different issues. infected and infectious are different things.
@phoneboy the author completely agrees with me and never mentions that the PCR test somehow delivers wrong results or that someone deliberately falsifies them.
@phoneboy the article raises the question of when to use which test and how to set the CT threshold depending on the question you are asking like if you need it for tracing, diagnostics, studies, and that it's is not tracked (which is a bummer indeed).
@blumenkraft let me ask you: what does a COVID-19 case even mean? If the case is infectious, that’s…interesting. If the case is…not infectious, is it relevant? If they’re lumped into the same stat, that’s basically deception.
More transparency is needed.
More transparency is needed.
@blumenkraft can’t say if it’s a conspiracy or not but the labs are all over the place in terms of standards they follow and yet all positive results are counted (and reported) the same, even when they don’t mean the same thing.
@phoneboy deep dive into what we talked about the other day. i totally agree with Michael Mina here.
At Home Coronavirus Testing and COVID 19 Vaccine Update with Harvard Professor Dr. Michael Mina [youtube.com]
At Home Coronavirus Testing and COVID 19 Vaccine Update with Harvard Professor Dr. Michael Mina [youtube.com]