New test for Coronavirus

[whit3rd]

On Saturday, March 28, 2020 at 5:02:16 PM UTC-7, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

On Sat, 28 Mar 2020 16:53:01 -0700 (PDT), whit3rd <whit3rd@gmail.com
wrote:

On Saturday, March 28, 2020 at 9:47:55 AM UTC-7, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

If one can believe the numbers on the Johns Hopkins site...

Different testing rates of course make all the numbers nonsense.

No, the numbers are NOT nonsense. They set at least a lower limit, but
that overblown claim is just JL's recurring panic attack.

For a measurement to be 'nonsense' ought to mean that the signal
to noise ratio is somewhere near or under 0 dB.

How many dB is off-by-100-to-1?

Well, it can't be short by 100-to-1 if it's verified by testing, so you must
be speculating that it's OVER by 100-to-1? A medical suspicion of
untested victims can be recorded, too, even if it isn't in the number
you want to quote.

But, implicitly, you've suggested there's an upper credible limit, and the testing
establishes a lower limit. That's real information. Your 100-to-1 crack
is fantasy, a number from nowhere.

Any consistent set of numbers that shows a growth trend is entirely
useful in planning for the future, and ALL this data can be employed to
good effect.

It's not consistent because a case is counted only if it's verified by
a test, and the test kits are just now flooding the market.

Nonsense again. You're talking about US test kits, circa a quarter of Korea's
entire population has been tested, and this is a PANDEMIC situation.
Take the blinders off, and you'll see a lot of good data.

 

[whit3rd]

On Saturday, March 28, 2020 at 9:47:55 AM UTC-7, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

If one can believe the numbers on the Johns Hopkins site...

Different testing rates of course make all the numbers nonsense.

No, the numbers are NOT nonsense. They set at least a lower limit, but
that overblown claim is just JL's recurring panic attack.

For a measurement to be 'nonsense' ought to mean that the signal
to noise ratio is somewhere near or under 0 dB.

Any consistent set of numbers that shows a growth trend is entirely
useful in planning for the future, and ALL this data can be employed to
good effect. You just can't put a three-word-label onto every number,
it must be interpreted with a sophistication that requires a bit of expertise
and a long, dry bit of text (like, an academic publication) attached to
every data set.

The infamous '20%' number is the penetration on a (probably) mainly-healthy population
in a cruise ship with traces of former-passenger pathogens, assayed by sitting the
cruise ship in isolation while cases developed... and picking, relatively arbitrarily,
day 14 to measure the number of illnesses. So, it's a time-specific point on the
exponential disease curve.

But, it can be misinterpreted to mean almost anything,
and that's not a fault in the data.

 

On Sat, 28 Mar 2020 16:53:01 -0700 (PDT), whit3rd <whit3rd@gmail.com>
wrote:

On Saturday, March 28, 2020 at 9:47:55 AM UTC-7, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

If one can believe the numbers on the Johns Hopkins site...

Different testing rates of course make all the numbers nonsense.

No, the numbers are NOT nonsense. They set at least a lower limit, but
that overblown claim is just JL's recurring panic attack.

We know neither the numerator nor the denominator within maybe a
factor of 10. Possibly a lot worse.

And as I've explained, I'm incapable of panic.

For a measurement to be 'nonsense' ought to mean that the signal
to noise ratio is somewhere near or under 0 dB.

How many dB is off-by-100-to-1?

Any consistent set of numbers that shows a growth trend is entirely
useful in planning for the future, and ALL this data can be employed to
good effect.

It's not consistent because a case is counted only if it's verified by
a test, and the test kits are just now flooding the market. And nobody
has a clue about the overall infection rate.





--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

The cork popped merrily, and Lord Peter rose to his feet.
"Bunter", he said, "I give you a toast. The triumph of Instinct over Reason"

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Sunday, March 29, 2020 at 3:47:55 AM UTC+11, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

On Sat, 28 Mar 2020 14:13:36 +0100, Gerhard Hoffmann <dk4xp@arcor.de
wrote:

Am 28.03.20 um 13:38 schrieb jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com:
On Fri, 27 Mar 2020 22:06:36 -0700 (PDT), Michael Terrell
terrell.michael.a@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sunday, March 22, 2020 at 1:51:32 AM UTC-4, Michael Terrell wrote:
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued emergency authorization Saturday for a novel coronavirus (COVID-19) test kit made by Cepheid Inc. that can yield results in a matter of hours instead of days.

The new tool is called the “Cepheid Xpert Xpress SARS-CoV-2 test” and will be made available to the public by the end of the month.

https://conservativefighters.org/news/new-coronavirus-test-can-have-results-within-hours-see-how-it-works/

Abbott Labs has been approved for its new test, and will start shipping them next week.

https://conservativefighters.org/news/fda-approves-major-breakthrough-in-fight-against-coronavirus/

That sounds like a live virus test. Imagine what shipping 50,000 tests
a day will do the case statistics.



In .de, we had a lab capacity for 500,000 tests last week +-3dB
depending on source, and they are calling for more.

Look at the death rate here to see the difference that it makes if you
track the contacts of suspects.

That works only when you start early before the numbers grow too large.
Sorry, your government has slept/downplayed it too long.

If one can believe the numbers on the Johns Hopkins site the total
death count/population for the USA is now 5.2 PPM. For Germany, it's
4.9.

Which doesn't show the USA in a good light. Today the USA the case rate is 373ppm, while Germany is at 689. Both are up from last night, but the USA has gone up more.

> Different testing rates of course make all the numbers nonsense.

They don't. Cases bad enough to kill people get noticed without testing.

This is the first piece I've seen that addresses the problems with
testing rates.

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/03/27/821958435/why-death-rates-from-coronavirus-can-be-deceiving

I think someone here has made some of those same points.

It has been thrashed out in some detail. If you had been paying attention you would have come across links to

<https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-rate/>

which is rather more comprehensive, and has been around for quite a while.

California has discovered that it is far behind New York in test
availability, and is scrambling mightily to catch up.

One has to wonder why it took so long for them to realise they they were going to need to test.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Sunday, March 29, 2020 at 8:59:36 AM UTC+11, Flyguy wrote:

On Friday, March 27, 2020 at 11:50:46 AM UTC-7, Tom Gardner wrote:
On 27/03/20 18:26, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Fri, 27 Mar 2020 18:00:31 +0000, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:

On 27/03/20 17:34, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Fri, 27 Mar 2020 17:06:47 +0000, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:

On 27/03/20 16:33, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Fri, 27 Mar 2020 15:38:56 +0000, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:

On 27/03/20 14:53, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
The usual gang of downers obviously don't want an antibody
test to be available or used on the general population.

That's a silly accusation that does you no credit.

They note that such tests aren't available yet, but that
they will be very valuable when they are available.

See post below.

Below what?

If you mean a post from Whit3rd, again it isn't he
doesn't want a test, it is that he wants a statistically
useful testing regime.

That seems sensible to me. A meaningless test is worse
than no test, since it encourages spurious actions.

Don't you think that a thousand or so antibody tests

AFAIK there is no such reliable test at the moment,
so the question is moot.


on random US
citizens would be statistically suggestive of the overall
had-the-infection rate? To tell us if it's 2% or 50%? 10,000 tests?
100K? Rather not know?

Random sampling works well *provided* there is a uniform
distribution; the variance and confidence interval can
be calculated.

Initially infection outbreaks will be very patchy,
not uniform. Hence it will be difficult if not impossible
to assess the confidence interval. In that case
the numbers will be no more use than random number - and
will probably /be/ random numbers of the form 8 +-15


Test 1000 a week and the data keeps getting better.

More is better, but there is a threshold before
more becomes useful.


The current PCR test only flags live viruses, and it is heavily
targeted at very sick people with symptoms suggestive of C19. Testing
is ramping up. We have no idea of the denominator of the death rate
from this virus. No good idea of the numerator, actually.

That's true in the US and (to a lesser extent) in the UK.

However, all official statistics and prognostications
explicitly acknowledge that, and factor it into the
/range/ of predictions made.


The 2009 flu pandemic infected about a billion people and killed a few
hundred thousand, but didn't get the press or the noisy analysis of
C19.

This is going to be worse.

Possibly. The Hopkins world case count is 580K so far, which is
(computes furiously) 0.06% of a billion.

Look at the trajectory and timescales, not the absolute.

Surely you remember playing with analogue meters; you
could get a quick feel for the final value by seeing
how fast the meter's needle accelerated to the right.
That was especially true with ballistic galvanometers
when measuring charge.


Already the US, with <25% of
the population, has more cases than China.

As if! Do you believe that China is actually averaging about 50 cases
a day now?

It is as believable as anything Trump says.
A good test will be to see what happens when they
relax restrictions. Already they've undone the
re-opening of their cinemas - which suggests a
degree of cockup in their response.

No, China has been lying since the day they locked up the doctor who first reported the crisis. Actions speak louder than words when they:

1. Kept the CDC out of country.

What would the US Centre for Disease Control be doing in China? The Chinese are cooperating with WHO which is the international equivalent, and have been since about mid-Januay

> 2. Removed a Chinese paper “conducted by the South China University of Technology, [that] concluded that the coronavirus ‘probably’ originated in the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention”

Perhaps because it was politically motivated nonsense?

We can't do the same about your half-witted insights, but the scientific literature does have mechanisms for withdrawing suspect papers.

> 3. Kicked reporters from the NYT, WaPo and the WSJ out of the country.

That's more politics. The US press is consistently unkind about China, to the point of printing very one-sided reports, and China kicks them out from time to time.

They are more tolerant of more even-handed reporting.

> Communists lie: consistently, repeatedly, forcefully and reliably. That is just what they do - get used to it.

So does the US press when reporting on communist regimes. They aren't as bare-faced as right-wing nitwits like you - its more selective omission than outright falsehoods (like the claim that Communist regimes lie all the time, which wouldn't be effective, since everything they claimed would then be automatically discounted) - but they certainly don't go in for objective reporting.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Sunday, March 29, 2020 at 9:46:30 AM UTC+11, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

On Sat, 28 Mar 2020 14:59:31 -0700 (PDT), Flyguy <tomseim2g@gmail.com
wrote:

On Friday, March 27, 2020 at 11:50:46 AM UTC-7, Tom Gardner wrote:
On 27/03/20 18:26, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Fri, 27 Mar 2020 18:00:31 +0000, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:

On 27/03/20 17:34, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Fri, 27 Mar 2020 17:06:47 +0000, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:

On 27/03/20 16:33, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Fri, 27 Mar 2020 15:38:56 +0000, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:

On 27/03/20 14:53, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
The usual gang of downers obviously don't want an antibody
test to be available or used on the general population.

That's a silly accusation that does you no credit.

They note that such tests aren't available yet, but that
they will be very valuable when they are available.

See post below.

Below what?

If you mean a post from Whit3rd, again it isn't he
doesn't want a test, it is that he wants a statistically
useful testing regime.

That seems sensible to me. A meaningless test is worse
than no test, since it encourages spurious actions.

Don't you think that a thousand or so antibody tests

AFAIK there is no such reliable test at the moment,
so the question is moot.


on random US
citizens would be statistically suggestive of the overall
had-the-infection rate? To tell us if it's 2% or 50%? 10,000 tests?
100K? Rather not know?

Random sampling works well *provided* there is a uniform
distribution; the variance and confidence interval can
be calculated.

Initially infection outbreaks will be very patchy,
not uniform. Hence it will be difficult if not impossible
to assess the confidence interval. In that case
the numbers will be no more use than random number - and
will probably /be/ random numbers of the form 8 +-15


Test 1000 a week and the data keeps getting better.

More is better, but there is a threshold before
more becomes useful.


The current PCR test only flags live viruses, and it is heavily
targeted at very sick people with symptoms suggestive of C19. Testing
is ramping up. We have no idea of the denominator of the death rate
from this virus. No good idea of the numerator, actually.

That's true in the US and (to a lesser extent) in the UK.

However, all official statistics and prognostications
explicitly acknowledge that, and factor it into the
/range/ of predictions made.


The 2009 flu pandemic infected about a billion people and killed a few
hundred thousand, but didn't get the press or the noisy analysis of
C19.

This is going to be worse.

Possibly. The Hopkins world case count is 580K so far, which is
(computes furiously) 0.06% of a billion.

Look at the trajectory and timescales, not the absolute.

Surely you remember playing with analogue meters; you
could get a quick feel for the final value by seeing
how fast the meter's needle accelerated to the right.
That was especially true with ballistic galvanometers
when measuring charge.


Already the US, with <25% of
the population, has more cases than China.

As if! Do you believe that China is actually averaging about 50 cases
a day now?

It is as believable as anything Trump says.
A good test will be to see what happens when they
relax restrictions. Already they've undone the
re-opening of their cinemas - which suggests a
degree of cockup in their response.

No, China has been lying since the day they locked up the doctor who first reported the crisis. Actions speak louder than words when they:

1. Kept the CDC out of country.
2. Removed a Chinese paper “conducted by the South China University of Technology, [that] concluded that the coronavirus ‘probably’ originated in the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention”
3. Kicked reporters from the NYT, WaPo and the WSJ out of the country.

Communists lie: consistently, repeatedly, forcefully and reliably. That is just what they do - get used to it.

That's a special case. All governments will lie unless someone is able
to catch them. In a communist dictatorship, nobody is.

There's a thing called objective reality. John Larkin hasn't got a clue about it, but even in Communist dictatorships, claiming that the Dear Leader is still alive when he doesn't show up at national rallies isn't worth the effort.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

On Sat, 28 Mar 2020 17:43:30 -0700 (PDT), whit3rd <whit3rd@gmail.com>
wrote:

On Saturday, March 28, 2020 at 5:02:16 PM UTC-7, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sat, 28 Mar 2020 16:53:01 -0700 (PDT), whit3rd <whit3rd@gmail.com
wrote:

On Saturday, March 28, 2020 at 9:47:55 AM UTC-7, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

If one can believe the numbers on the Johns Hopkins site...

Different testing rates of course make all the numbers nonsense.

No, the numbers are NOT nonsense. They set at least a lower limit, but
that overblown claim is just JL's recurring panic attack.

For a measurement to be 'nonsense' ought to mean that the signal
to noise ratio is somewhere near or under 0 dB.

How many dB is off-by-100-to-1?

Well, it can't be short by 100-to-1 if it's verified by testing, so you must
be speculating that it's OVER by 100-to-1?

It was off by a million to one before the tests were deployed.
Demonstrated deaths have been paced by test density. So plotting the
trend is subject to huge errors. And we have no idea how many people
have had the virus with no or mild symptoms.



A medical suspicion of

untested victims can be recorded, too, even if it isn't in the number
you want to quote.

Deaths from colds and flu are estimated at 20 to 50K so far this flu
season. How precise is "medical suspicion" in identifying a cold
virus?



--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

The cork popped merrily, and Lord Peter rose to his feet.
"Bunter", he said, "I give you a toast. The triumph of Instinct over Reason"

 

[whit3rd]

On Saturday, March 28, 2020 at 5:57:43 PM UTC-7, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

On Sat, 28 Mar 2020 17:43:30 -0700 (PDT), whit3rd <whit3rd@gmail.com
wrote:

Well, it can't be short by 100-to-1 if it's verified by testing, so you must
be speculating that it's OVER by 100-to-1?

It was off by a million to one before the tests were deployed.

Obviously 'it' refers to some modern (probably WHO) registry that
has a test standard attached. No one dealing with a real situation needs to rely on
such a high-certainty standard, they pay attention to symptoms and make
diagnoses like before molecular biology arrived. You're looking
at only ONE number that indicates the disease, doctors have a chart full of
indications that usefully generate statistics.

A medical suspicion of
untested victims can be recorded, too, even if it isn't in the number
you want to quote.

> Deaths from colds and flu are estimated at 20 to 50K

By what agency, according to what criterion?

How precise is "medical suspicion" in identifying a cold
virus?

Out of the dozens? Heck, why would I know. Or, care. There's
no important reason to do detailed tests of a common cold.
Learn to ask more interesting questions.

 

[Tom Gardner]

On 28/03/20 21:59, Flyguy wrote:
> Communists lie: consistently, repeatedly, forcefully and reliably. That is just what they do - get used to it.

So do capitalists.

Mensch ist mensch, the whole world over.

 

[Rick C]

On Sunday, March 29, 2020 at 10:38:19 PM UTC-4, Flyguy wrote:

BTW, to put Xi in power you would also have to revoke the Constitution (I am sure you have no problem with that).

On top of not knowing how to trim your posts, you don't know your constitution. We can put anyone we want in charge of fighting this disease. There's nothing in the Constitution about that.

It seems like Trump is starting to be pushed in the right direction by his subordinates. Lord knows he can't figure out any of this on his own. If he continues to act so erratically we may take Eric Trump up on his idea of invoking the 25th amendment.

--

Rick C.

---+ Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
---+ Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

[whit3rd]

On Sunday, March 29, 2020 at 8:09:11 PM UTC-7, Bill Sloman wrote:

> The US constitution is a venerable antique. It should have been revoked - and replaced with something better - quite a while ago. The one you've got was a second try anyway. It replaced the original articles of association, which were even worse.

But in the same time period, France reorganized using the Terror, followed by imperial
Napoleonic militarism. The paper-pushing was ultimately a more satisfying way to
proceed.