Advertisement
If you have a new account but are having problems posting or verifying your account, please email us on hello@boards.ie for help. Thanks :)
Hello all! Please ensure that you are posting a new thread or question in the appropriate forum. The Feedback forum is overwhelmed with questions that are having to be moved elsewhere. If you need help to verify your account contact hello@boards.ie

Covid 19 Part XXXV-956,720 ROI (5,952 deaths) 452,946 NI (3,002 deaths) (08/01) Read OP

Options
1129812991301130313041585

Comments

  • Moderators, Business & Finance Moderators, Science, Health & Environment Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 51,688 Mod ✭✭✭✭Stheno


    They are basing that positivity rate off a level of testing about 8 times ours, so possibly ours would be similar if we did that many tests too?



  • Posts: 0 [Deleted User]


    I had a read back through some of her tweets. I can understand her hysteria. It seems to me that she is speaking from her own situation. Olive mentioned having children who are high risk and one became quite unwell after contracting Covid. I have sympathy for her as she is no doubt terrified.

    However given her platform if I were her I'd take a step back. It's all emotion, fear, panic. There doesn't seem to be much in the way of common sense or understanding of scientific evidence. It's very much 'I'm frightened for my family so all of you should be too'.

    Also she is full of blame and anger towards the Government. I'm familiar myself with that kind of thinking but it's usually because we feel powerless and are lashing out.



  • Posts: 533 ✭✭✭ [Deleted User]


    Denmark's likely a very good predictor of what's going to happen here. They've similarly very high vaccine uptake, with mostly the mostly the same vaccines and spacing of doses, a fairly small population and similar kinds of densities, similar weather, similar working patterns etc.

    While they're not absolutely identical, they've more in common than many other comparable countries.

    They also have unusually huge testing capacity, which gives a sense of detail.

    They're a week or 10 days or so ahead of us, so hopefully we might see the positivity rates drop in same way.



  • Posts: 533 ✭✭✭ [Deleted User]


    I'd just add, one thing I have never ever understood about the way we are surveying how well countries are performing is that there has been no attempt to come up with a standardised, random, representative sampling mythology.

    I would expect something like this:

    • Ring fence maybe 5% of the testing capacity.
    • Volunteer households / individuals
    • Representative of different types of household, geographical locations, housing types, work types, commute / travel types, age profiles etc.
    • Test weekly or maybe twice weekly
    • An additional totally random sample just based on geography e.g. setup booths in shopping centres / outside supermarkets and ask people to just give an anonymous swab.

    If every country in the EU or ECDC area did that we could compare like-for-like and get a true picture of scale of spread. Because as it stands we are getting all sorts of selection and self-selection biases, e.g. people who are going because they've a positive antigen tests or symptoms. It would be quite surprising if that didn't turn out a high positivity rate as they're quite obviously highly likely to be positive.

    You're also seeing totally different testing mythologies and capacities being used in different countries and comparisons that just don't make sense. Country X has 20,000 per day and country Y has 5000 a day, yet we don't examine anything about how the testing works or what the scale of testing is or anything really. You're also still getting raw number comparisons without any references to population, both in terms of international comparisons and even county-by-county here.



  • Registered Users Posts: 9,399 ✭✭✭Cluedo Monopoly


    What's all the fuss about the Joe Rogan interview with a doctor? I haven't heard it but I heard it was taken down off Twitter and Facebook. Why was it so inflammatory? I don't have an account for Facebook or Twitter but I would have thought it was full of contentious 'stuff'. What ever happened to freedom of speech in the USA?

    What are they doing in the Hyacinth House?



  • Advertisement
  • Registered Users Posts: 8,586 ✭✭✭lawrencesummers


    Undermining trust in politicians???


    That must have been fabricated in a lab somewhere because surely that never existed.



  • Registered Users Posts: 8,586 ✭✭✭lawrencesummers




  • Registered Users Posts: 8,586 ✭✭✭lawrencesummers


    Why did we stop talking about the ‘R’ number.


    that was something being constantly trotted out and now not a word of it.



  • Registered Users Posts: 9,399 ✭✭✭Cluedo Monopoly


    What are they doing in the Hyacinth House?



  • Registered Users Posts: 5,631 ✭✭✭CalamariFritti


    It is lacking since the start. One of my biggest bug bears. A few half hearted attempts were made. Speaking for Germany attempts at it were actively squashed even.

    Call me a CT guy but the only reason I can think of why anyone would deliberately act so un-scientifically is because they fear the results of such methodical testing would not be alarming enough.

    Just another symptom in along list of manipulation with definitions, numbers, selective truths. whatnot, the whole shebang. Every lever that could be bent was bent in order to 'up' this thing, right from the start and it never stopped.

    Once you realise this its hard to take this pandemic seriously. I mean it cant be that bad if we can afford to leave the best tools in the drawer to protect 'the message', can it?

    Post edited by CalamariFritti on


  • Advertisement
  • Registered Users Posts: 77 ✭✭ganoga


    not sure if the interview was taken down. The doctor being interviewed, dr Robert Malone, has had his twitter account suspended. I haven't searched for or listened to the interview myself because I'm not a fan of Joe Rogan

    edit: looks like it was taken down. Guess I'll go watch it out of spite 🤣



  • Registered Users Posts: 578 ✭✭✭VillageIdiot71


    Can’t help noticing. That Doctor just calmly states his case, and freely acknowledges others may have a different view.

    Reaction on the interweb to him is all ad hominem abuse. ‘What would he say to relatives of people who died’ and that sort of thing.

    I haven’t seen anyone actually respond to what he says - for example, no one id out there saying he is substantially wrong in what he says about the frequency of jabs needed, if this mandatory approach is to make sense, as distinct from making good optics.



  • Posts: 533 ✭✭✭ [Deleted User]


    I’m not really buying into a conspiracy theory on it, but the data quality is pretty poor. I see media reports all the time that would get you a fail in a 1st year stats exam for any decent social science, economics or marketing course.

    The methodologies are often so bad you could drive a bus through the holes in them and the interpretation and presentation is often even worse.

    There’s been a lot of slamming anything at all together, often though crowdsourced data sites online.

    Also seems like the medical data is maybe useful for diagnostic or treatment purposes, but it’s failing to produce a useful picture of what’s going on.

    If anything, it’s left me in no doubt that public health, certainly as it’s presented in the media at present, seems to inhabit a bubble that’s not using modern data analysis methodologies and just looks archaic and chaotic to anyone who’s ever dealt with big scale data analysis. There’s an exceptionalism in medicine that seems to keep trying to reinvent the wheel or ignoring the techniques, experience and expertise of other professions and other sectors when it should be leaning heavily on them.

    I’m seeing a lot of commentary on areas that are actually engineering or social and behavioural science coming from GPs and random medical professionals in a way they wouldn’t tolerate a marketing professor discussing ear surgery.

    You’ve also got people like anaesthesiologists and random surgeons and stuff commenting, with absolute confidence about obscure areas of virology and vaccine production that they’re unlikely to know all that much about.

    I’m not saying that everyone should absolutely stay in their lane, or refrain from commenting at all, but they do need to accept that some specialities, professions and areas of research and sectors have huge specialist knowledge. It’s not all common sense any more than I would take advice from a dentist on my heart or a cardiologist on a root canal.

    I mean from a data analysis point of view the likes of the CSO and Eurostat should be across this stuff at this stage, designing survey and sampling methodologies that might produce some useful data.



  • Registered Users Posts: 127 ✭✭vegandinner


    NPHET have an inconvenient relationship with the data. Poor auld Philip Nolan has had to model a lot of large numbers to fit Tony Holohans agenda.



  • Registered Users Posts: 474 ✭✭glitterIsland




  • Registered Users Posts: 2,985 ✭✭✭gipi


    UK preparing their living with Covid plans, including phasing out of lateral flow tests for all.




  • Registered Users Posts: 1,615 ✭✭✭MerlinSouthDub


    Yes, Denmark should be a very good guide. They did start their Omicron wave a bit earlier than us but I'm guessing we've caught up with them now - we've more cases, a lower population and we are testing much less. I'd be surprised if we don't see our positivity rate falling over the next few days.

    You have to imagine that what we are seeing in Denmark now (and also England) is community immunity at high enough levels to start pushing down case numbers.



  • Registered Users Posts: 784 ✭✭✭daydorunrun


    I’m impressed the dog left the mask on!

    my stupid mutt keeps eating the one I put on him.

    “You tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is, never try.” Homer.



  • Registered Users Posts: 1,123 ✭✭✭spakman


    I kept mine on walking home from shop the other day because it was fcking freezing and my warm breath against the mask helped keep my face warm 🙃



  • Registered Users Posts: 498 ✭✭JP100


    Notice that the article says that free tests will be "provided only in high-risk settings such as care homes, hospitals and schools". It's only here in Ireland that we get the continuation of this charade of trying to claim that schools are low or very low risk settings.



  • Advertisement
  • Registered Users Posts: 2,242 ✭✭✭Markus Antonius


    Why is the obsession with the unvaccinated intensifying further? Slimey Macron now tightening the vice even more on the unvaccinated.

    Time to accept that the unvaccinated are not the cause of the continuing pandemic...



  • Registered Users Posts: 7,455 ✭✭✭prunudo


    Schools aren't high risk. You can't compare children who barely notice they have the virus to a nursing home with elderly people who are most likely to die from covid. Yes it spreads in schools, but they're not high risk.



  • Registered Users Posts: 7,487 ✭✭✭corkie


    @VillageIdiot71

    I thought another poster got moderated here for sharing that spotify podcast?

    For anyone who tuned in? In the USA.

    Fact check: Hospitals get paid more if patients listed as COVID-19, on ventilators

    Our ruling: True

    We rate the claim that hospitals get paid more if patients are listed as COVID-19 and on ventilators as TRUE.

    Hospitals and doctors do get paid more for Medicare patients diagnosed with COVID-19 or if it's considered presumed they have COVID-19 absent a laboratory-confirmed test, and three times more if the patients are placed on a ventilator to cover the cost of care and loss of business resulting from a shift in focus to treat COVID-19 cases.

    This higher allocation of funds has been made possible under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act through a Medicare 20% add-on to its regular payment for COVID-19 patients, as verified by USA TODAY through the American Hospital Association Special Bulletin on the topic.

    VERDICT

    Missing context. There is no evidence to suggest a “mass formation psychosis” has occurred during the pandemic, experts told Reuters. The term itself is not recognised among academics, and modern research into crowd psychology has shown that crowds do not behave in mindless or non-individualistic ways.

    Post edited by corkie on


  • Registered Users Posts: 1,218 ✭✭✭snowcat



    Except that herd immunity is not really showing up in any country. Gibraltar with 100% vaxxed is almost as bad as us. The countries with the highest vax rates are really showing up as worst in the world for virus control.



  • Registered Users Posts: 11,672 ✭✭✭✭ACitizenErased


    natural immunity is generally better than vaccine immunity as far as i'm aware. nowhere has even come close to natural immunity, backed by vaccine immunity.



  • Registered Users Posts: 858 ✭✭✭jolivmmx


    Agreed! I found my immunity to small-pox and polio was far better when I caught the infection, rather than bothering with the vaccine (🙄🙄🙄)

    you are making very specific claims. Now, can you back it up please with some proper peer-reviewed research please? Or are you a University of Facebook grad student?



  • Registered Users Posts: 9,399 ✭✭✭Cluedo Monopoly


    A quick google suggests otherwise.

    Joe Rogan interview with Dr Robert Malone taken down by YouTube | The Independent

    YouTube has removed a video of a recent episode of the Joe Rogan Experience in which the podcast host was talking to Dr Robert Malone – a physician with a history of controversial statements related to Covid-19.

    Prominent virologist kicked off Twitter for spreading anti-vaxx video | Metro News

    A US virologist who claims to be the inventor of mRNA vaccine technology has been banned from Twitter for spreading anti-vaccine content. Dr Robert Malone has amassed over 500,000 followers but the scientist was removed from the platform after sharing a video about supposed harmful effects of the Pfizer vaccine.


    Anyway, I will listen to it tomorrow and see what all the fuss was about.

    What are they doing in the Hyacinth House?



  • Registered Users Posts: 2 Daniel15


    Hello everyone,

    I'm new to this forum, just to remind Coronavirus had increased: Recorded 26,122 Covid-19 cases reported. So be safe and take care of your family.



  • Registered Users Posts: 16,704 ✭✭✭✭astrofool


    He had a paper back in the 80's about mRNA, but the inventors of mRNA vaccines were Drew Weissman and Katalin Karikó and they should get the credit due for them (or not depending on your viewpoint).



  • Advertisement
  • Registered Users Posts: 9,399 ✭✭✭Cluedo Monopoly


    Yes I did read a Time magazine article on those 2 scientists. It was fascinating. They struggled to get funding.

    What are they doing in the Hyacinth House?



Advertisement