Medical authorities ‘studying whether there is a reason for judicial penalties’.
Hmmm. Isn’t that roughly what some wackos are criticising China for?
Wackos alleging that the Chinese authorities sanctioned and silenced some idiot doctor who was spinning a lunatic theory about a new virus which rather obligingly happened to cross from bats to humans in the very city which happens to have an institute of virology which happens to be a world leader in the study of bat coronaviruses? 
Jacko wrote:
spinning a lunatic theory about a new virus which rather obligingly happened to cross from bats to humans in the very city which happens to have an institute of virology which happens to be a world leader in the study of bat coronaviruses?
Its all a conspiracy theory. Let’s just move on.
AFAIK the test misses some positive results.
There are two ways in which tests might be wrong. One is to miss true positive results (false negatives) and the other is to miss true negative results (false positives). It’s trivially easy to make a test which gives all its errors in either of these categories, so there are other more sophisticated measures of how good tests are overall. In antibody testing we’re most worried about false positives. In antigen testing we’re probably more worried about false negatives.
But what a test actually means in practice depends very much on the population you are testing. If 0.1% of your population* has had a disease and you get 5% false positives** then only about 1 in 50 people who tests positive has had the disease. If you are in a population where 50% have had it, the very same test becomes much more reliable.
There’s a nice book on this called ‘Reckoning with risk’ by Gerd Gigerenzer.
* There are still places in this situation
** Some of the fingerprick tests are this bad
Maoraigh wrote:
“Two individuals were diagnosed with COVID-19 upon arriving in Iceland yesterday, RÚV reports. A total of 927 tests were taken among approximately 1,100 travellers (children are exempt from screening).”
What tests were taken? Were the two individuals exhibiting symptoms? Was it an active infection or were the two post infection, having recovered earlier?
A study which is currently being done at my hospital found less than 1% of the staff tested so far has IgG antibodies against SARS-CoV2. This shows that herd immunity is still extremely far away. Many of the tested staff members come into close (<2m) contact with dozens of different persons every day. Most wear only standard masks (no FFP2/N95) and no other PPE, unless the patient is a likely or proven Covid-19 patient.
The study is ongoing and will repeatedly test as many members of staff as possible (on a voluntary basis). I volunteered as well and tested negative in the first round. The test is done by venous blood examination.
MedEwok wrote:
Many of the tested staff members come into close (<2m) contact with dozens of different persons every day. Most wear only standard masks (no FFP2/N95) and no other PPE, unless the patient is a likely or proven Covid-19 patient.
That is very interesting, do you think it’s more so that masks are really effective or perhaps hygiene standards of the staff members is far far above the general public?
1% is probably in the right ballpark for the general population. It is 3-4% in the UK excluding London but that includes dense cities like Birmingham so is bound to be grossly misleading.
And I don’t think you need a PhD to work out that in the countryside it will be way below 1% – simply due to the far lower population density. Even allowing for reportedly 80% of infections being asymptomatic (I bet that’s true mostly among young people) there is basically close to nobody who has got ill, yet…
If hospital workers come in at 1% that is probably what one would therefore expect. They may live in dense population centres but hospital staff know that if they touch (and even better kiss) everybody and then stick their fingers up their noses, they will catch everything going, whereas most “normal” people do exactly that, and that is where we get close to 20% in London and probably all the other big cities like that which have the sardine-packed mass transport. Also I expect hospital staff taking care to be sensible and not mix when not working.
From Irish RTE:
“Overflowing hospitals from Kabul to Dhaka are turning away suspected virus patients, mortuaries are being overwhelmed as cemeteries and crematoria struggle to cope, and desperate families are searching for help for critically ill loved ones.
“The situation is catastrophic,” Abdur Rob, a senior doctor at Bangladesh’s Chittagong General Hospital, told AFP.
“Patients are dying in the ambulances on the roads as they shunt between hospitals looking for (intensive care) beds or hospital admission.”"
A study which is currently being done at my hospital found less than 1% of the staff tested so far has IgG antibodies against SARS-CoV2.
I think what this shows is that the tests either don’t work, or more likely are barking up the wrong tree. It’s just not possible to have the kind of continuous, extensive exposure that medical staff do, and not be “infected” in the broadest sense of having your immune system exposed to the virus and needing to deal with it. So it must show that something else is going on, for example that a significant number of people, especially younger ones, resist infection without ever generating detectable quantities of antibodies. Those people are as good as immune, since they are most unlikely to get infected.
Off_Field wrote:
That is very interesting, do you think it’s more so that masks are really effective or perhaps hygiene standards of the staff members is far far above the general public?
A bit of both probably. Hospital staff are more likely to use basic masks properly and routinely disinfect hands after each patient contact.
More importantly, the virus is simply not very widespread here yet. Total (proven) infections for Germany are about 200,000, which equals 0.25% of the population. If we assume that many asymptomatic infections have been missed – let’s say in reality four times as many people had it, which is a pretty high estimate imho – we’d still only be at 1%.
In the general public, the virus is simply not widespread. This 1600 bed hospital currently has a grand total of 5 (!) Covid-19 patients. Thus few of the staff have actually come in contact with one of these, and if they did (knowingly) they wore proper PPE (FFP2 masks + face shields + sterile gown + gloves), which are in abundant supply here. Those staff who came in contact with patients who only later turned out to be positive were quarantined immediately upon the patient’s lab result, so they had little to no chance to infect coworkers in case they got it.
In one case in my own department, a colleague got the virus during her time-off, developed symptoms and immediately got tested. A total of seven colleagues who had been in the same room and less than 1.5m apart during breaks were immediately quarantined. Afaik, only one of them got it as well.
