except all the antibody tests used are crap. FDA approved or not. So it means nothing until they can make one that is good enough so as not to mix Covid19 with the common cold.
I've seen you say this in another thread but an article said https://www.aspendailynews.com/news...cle_f5291afe-834e-11ea-bcc4-e788eb492b82.html they are pretty accurate. My company offered a free antibody test voluntarily and many people were positive. Whats your reasoning there? you seemed to imply massive false positives, whats the story sir?
The problem is that it usually takes years to find and isolate the specific antibody created by an antigen. The major problem is that they haven't even found a golden standard because even the most expensive and the most time consuming ELISA tests are not specific enough. And another problem is that with these massive studies they do fingerpricks tests which have as low specificity as 30%. 30%. This doesn't come from me it comes from the university of Oxford which has been testing hundreds of antibody tests and still haven't found ONE good enough to approve of. The reason your FDA quickly approved some chinese ones, was to get things running even though they know that the specificity is crap and most of these results is about the other human coronavirus. The common cold. Other governments and CDCs who are more meticulous and scientific and care about reality and not to hurry things along still haven't approved nothing.
This is another example of why it’s important to read the study. It was retrospective and non randomized. They only gave drugs to severe cases. It was specifically a study of men over 65, the majority were black, and I believe all groups were obese on average. The headline for this study could also be “at risk groups with severe covid cases have higher chances of death” https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.16.20065920v1.full.pdf “However, hydroxychloroquine, with or without azithromycin, was more likely to be prescribed to patients with more severe disease, as assessed by baseline ventilatory status and metabolic and hematologic parameters. Thus, as expected, increased mortality was observed in patients treated with hydroxychloroquine, both with and without azithromycin.” You can also look at the patients who got drugs and they had higher blood pressure and lower oxygen levels. The best thing to take from the study is that lower blood pressure and better lung function have better outcomes. Lastly, they did see better outcomes when HCQ and Zithromax were given together, but that could simply be due to the underlying health of the patients it was given to. The patients only given HCQ had the worst blood pressure numbers and worst oxygen levels out of the groups. Long story made short this study does not seem to be worth much at first glance.
Also the theory behind the mechanism of chloroqinue/hydroxycholoroqinue against Covid19 is that it should be given in the FIRST stages to stop the zinc in the virus and stop it replicating. It theoritically is a drug for the initial stages of the disease not for those in the ICU. Let's just wait for SOLIDARITY. It's double blind and will have concrete results once and for all.
this will (sadly) come to light as mass bankruptcies start hitting the tape in coming weeks. going to be a long road ahead back to recovery. trump has been cheerleading "even stronger than before", but that's simply very very unlikely
Covid Spreading Farts https://nypost.com/2020/04/20/can-t...AWvw4enyL1qBPq8yXu9gMu684aYTy4JvuIgQSs7-RGy_E
This says they tested 10 people who had it and they were positive. That's not exactly a big sample size for 100% accuracy. The problem seems to be that there are different companies - some from China, some from here, some FDA emergency measures, some FDA authorized, some immediate results, some sent to labs. Some apparently test for ANY coronavirus. Others have 2-3% false positives. So when you test LA and find that 3% of people had it, it might actually be less than 1%. The FDA approved, send-to-lab ones seem to the most reliable. Here's an article from the UK (though from 2 weeks ago): https://www.ft.com/content/f28e26a0-bf64-4fac-acfb-b3a618ca659d The UK government has admitted that none of the 17.5m antibody tests it ordered in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic work well enough to be used. Ministers had high hopes that the arrival of the tests would give a much clearer picture about how many people had been infected by Covid-19, paving the way for an eventual easing of lockdown restrictions. The failure of the tests is a significant setback and suggests Britain may be further away from being able to launch an effective programme of mass testing. The government is working with nine companies that have developed coronavirus antibody tests, which screen for whether someone has recovered from the disease and is likely to be immune. The tests are being assessed by researchers at Oxford university — but each one has so far proven unreliable. “Sadly, the tests we have looked at to date have not performed well,” wrote Professor John Bell, Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford university on Monday. “We see many false negatives (tests where no antibody is detected despite the fact we know it is there) and we also see false positives. None of the tests we have validated would meet the criteria for a good test as agreed with the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency. This is not a good result for test suppliers or for us,” he said.
What's the answer then? We're still months away from quick and available testing. Vaccines and treatments will take longer. Our cutural discipline for social distancing and cleanliness has got to get better too. This could easily last until June...
Oh my! If I catch this I'm going to be a super spreader. But seriously, I do worry about porta-potties.
That's not bad. That's the best. Because noone is knowing what they are doing including public health experts. Each country are actually experimenting opening what they see fit. If you are the last to open you would already know what is safe and what is not safe based on what happened to others. You think that this way the cost to the economy will be worse but it will actually be smaller. The countries/states who take the wrong steps will be forced to lockdown again and they will go back to the start. Of course Texas volunteered itself to become one of the first to open so the rest of the world, can learn from what happens to yall.
I agree with those 3 points. However, doesn't it also mean that the virus is much more transmittable than previously believed to be such widely spread? It also makes you wonder how much spreading is caused by very mild or asymptomatic carriers. If those people are infectious, then when the shelter in place is lifted, then it's almost impossible to contact trace and telling people that don't feel well to stay home will not be able to contain the spread. It does drastically lower the max ceiling of death though since most cases are mild. Maybe the max now is in the hundreds of thousands rather than millions if the country is opened up completely right now.
Women clear the virus couple of days sooner than men because the virus goes to the testicles. From autopsy in 6 dead men, they found that Covid19 causes orchitis.
no answer to a horrible situation. but the economy is an extremely fragile system unable to sustain such prolonged shocks. 70% of US GDP derives from small businesses. a lot of those are not going to survive. the bulk of US employment lies there. it portends to be a painful cascading effect of more bankruptcies, ensuing unemployment, defaults on loans/mortgages, banks and insurance companies needing to be bailed out, etc, etc. meanwhile in the big business world -- oil/energy, auto, retail, and airlines just to name a few are at zero right now. i am at a loss for words about any solution
Or it was widely here in Feb and the onset of symptoms is slower. You are saying too many infectious people so contact tracing is pointless? I think we at least need to open up everyone who isn't lung/heart or has kidney disease or something.
I agree that the economic hit is going to be ugly, but there's a lot of shock headlines out there right now. 69% of people paid their apartment rent for April - but it was 81% for same period in 2019. And many of the people that didn't pay for April *can* pay - there was just no penalty for waiting in many states and cities, and in many cases, unemployment checks take several weeks to get to you, so people who got laid off in late March would need a couple of extra weeks. As @pippendagimp said, the real hit is going to be that a ton of small businesses are going to close. I think people underestimate the damage here. It's not the shutdown - at least right now, people can go to the government or their landlords and say "help us" and many cities have banned evictions/etc so businesses are sort of frozen in place to some degree. But when things re-open but sales are down 50% because people aren't comfortable going to movies or gyms, there's going to be less assistance available. And that's when things are going to go to hell. I think Georgia is going to be the canary in a coalmine this week when movie theaters and restaurants open.
