About those COVID Tests

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_Doctor CamNC4Me
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Re: About those COVID Tests

Post by _Doctor CamNC4Me »

_EAllusion
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Re: About those COVID Tests

Post by _EAllusion »

There's an old joke about creationists that goes like this:

Creationist: There are inexplicable gaps in the fossil record. No transitional fossils exist for them and evolutionists can't explain that.

Biologist: Here's an example of a transitional fossil.

Creationist: Now you have *two* gaps!

Of course, if you follow ID/creationism, that's both a joke and accurate description of their discourse. Subs, who is a creationist, relies on a variation of this as his one of his core moves. He demands you provide evidence of something. And if you do, he demands you provide evidence of the evidence. And so and and so on. He keeps going until you tire of jumping through his hoops or you do enough to cause him to abandon the thread with no acknowledgement or care. Meanwhile, he offers basically nothing to establish his own views. In this thread, he's implicitly arguing that either the CDC numbers, which are methodologically conservative, are a hoax or the product of shoddy methods that teams of experts missed in order to inflate those numbers. He's further implicitly arguing that the massive jump in all-cause mortality numbers have some other explanation than COVID related deaths. Will he support that with evidence? Naw. The goal is to string you along until one of you tire, only to do it again.

He probably sincerely believes some COVID denialist nonsense, but he knows his apologetics for it is a put on.
_Icarus
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Re: About those COVID Tests

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Has anyone seen subgenius back up his claim that deaths unrelated to COVID are being counted as COVID deaths?

I'm on pins and needles here.
_canpakes
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Re: About those COVID Tests

Post by _canpakes »

EAllusion wrote:
Sat Apr 18, 2020 7:04 pm
He's further implicitly arguing that the massive jump in all-cause mortality numbers have some other explanation than COVID related deaths. Will he support that with evidence?

Well, he did post a pic of a shark. So there’s that explanation.

But, you know how the game is played. It’s all about trying only to sow doubt, and to run away or distract with a different moronic claim should the first be challenged. It’s a wildly dishonest act, but subs isn’t known for his honesty.
_Doctor CamNC4Me
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Re: About those COVID Tests

Post by _Doctor CamNC4Me »

From FOX News:

https://www.foxnews.com/science/third-b ... oronavirus

tl;dr - 1/3 of participants in a random test conducted in MA are positive for the virus.

“Still, it's kind of sobering that 30 percent of a random group of 200 people that are showing no symptoms are, in fact, infected. It's all the more reason for everyone to be practicing physical distancing."

Guess we’ll see how crap goes in the next month as states are liberated or whatever.

- Doc
_MeDotOrg
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Re: About those COVID Tests

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Stanford did a random sampling of 3,300 people in Santa Clara county (home of Stanford and a lot of Silicon Valley).
Palo Alto Online wrote:The number of coronavirus infections in Santa Clara County could be between 50 and 80 times higher than the officially confirmed count, preliminary results from a community-based study by a team of Stanford University researchers indicates.

The prevalence study, led by Stanford Assistant Professor Eran Bendavid, has not been formally published and is still undergoing peer reviews. It has, however, been published on the preprint server medRxiv. As such, it is effectively a first draft, subject to change based on input before formal publication.

That said, the early findings indicate that between 48,000 and 81,000 residents in Santa Clara County were infected as of April 1, back when the official count was 956. The estimate is based on 3,330 blood samples that were taken from volunteers in Mountain View, Los Gatos and San Jose on April 3 and April 4 and tested for antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 .

When adjusted for Santa Clara County's population and demographics, the number of positive results suggests that between 2.49% and 4.16% of the county's 1.93 million residents have had COVID-19.
_Doctor CamNC4Me
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Re: About those COVID Tests

Post by _Doctor CamNC4Me »

So, we can expect 1,600 people within the county to die of shark bites in the next month?
_EAllusion
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Re: About those COVID Tests

Post by _EAllusion »

I'd be careful about the early antibody studies, guys. They have clear confounds in their sampling methodology, which is fine so long as you take this as prelim work and not solid estimates about the prevalence of coronavirus in the locations sampled.

For example, the Stanford study relied on soliciting people from social media ads that the pre-print doesn't share. It's plausible those ads created a selection bias (e.g. people who think they had the virus were more likely to respond/consent to the study). And it wouldn't take much selection bias to juice the numbers when the absolute % is so low.
_EAllusion
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Re: About those COVID Tests

Post by _EAllusion »

Here's a thread on the latter point:

https://Twitter.com/DiseaseEcology/stat ... 3871134721
_Doctor CamNC4Me
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Re: About those COVID Tests

Post by _Doctor CamNC4Me »

That was a good Twitter thread. Maybe the first time I’ve read a Twitter thread and not wanted to drink to cope with humanity. The only problem I see with it is it’s over reliance on scientism, and not enough faith in Christ. That’s problematic and shows that the atheist dogmatic religion of scientism is useless when tackling this epidemic which politicians are using to take our liberties away. #godisgreat #Trump2020 #Ivanka2024

- Doc
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