Must be an American thing - my cards haven't 'changed hands' for getting on for 5 years.boing wrote:credit cards which swap hands probably billions of times a day.
I think we do?We must keep checking our 6 and accept that the bug will evolve but when we see the change we need to properly evaluate its effects.
With the "Kent" variant we found it because the UK has excellent capability. What chance would other countries have to identify a new strain before it was firmly established?we need to properly evaluate its effects.
Two weeks of managed isolation on arrival in NZ, French or not.
Well that nails the Chinese liesThe order bans anyone in parts of the Yau Tsim Mong district, where cases have surged in recent days
Not having a go at boing (for once)...boing wrote: ↑Sat Jan 23, 2021 4:18 pmIf it was a simple matter of an individual being inconvenienced for a couple of weeks inaccurate testing would not be a big issue. It is a big issue when whole communities and economies are put at risk by restrictions based on bad data. Think about it, would you as a pilot dispatch on a 14 hours trans-Pacific flight based on the TV weather channel?
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So there you have the difficulty, the convenient test is less accurate but the more accurate test is more time consuming and more expensive. The clincher which makes testing a poor basis for critical decisions is in the last sentence.According to Daniel D. Rhoads, MD, section head of microbiology at Cleveland Clinic, there are a couple of ways to detect SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Some tests look for a piece of the coating of the virus—they’re called antigen tests—and other tests detect nucleic acid (such as RNA) belonging to the coronavirus.
RNA tests are highly sensitive. “These tests can remain positive even after somebody is no longer sick and no longer shedding virus that can infect other people,” Dr. Rhoads tells Health.
Antigen tests, by contrast, are generally quick and cheap but often less accurate than RNA tests for detecting the novel coronavirus. The problem is that antigen testing is more prone to false negative results, meaning these tests are more likely to miss cases of active infection. And neither antigen nor RNA testing predicts when someone is no longer contagious, says Dr. Rhoads.
This false positive for non-contagious people inevitably distorts the infection count and can lead politically based decisions astray. Unfortunately, the way the test specimens are handled by the testing laboratory can also effect the test results because the test samples are not measured directly they are measured after dilution and the percentage of dilution effects the test results." And neither antigen nor RNA testing predicts when someone is no longer contagious, says Dr. Rhoads".
I didn't say anybody was stupid, although sometimes I wonder... but please point me to one decently researched, peer reviewed paper, that says what you say. I am open minded, and believe in the scientific principle...boing wrote: ↑Sat Jan 23, 2021 5:54 pmSo GG, do you think this Doctor is stupid? Your blanket judgement shows your lack of precise thought.
There are hundreds of assessments of CV tests, most are generalisations and very few venture into actual numbers.
So there you have the difficulty, the convenient test is less accurate but the more accurate test is more time consuming and more expensive. The clincher which makes testing a poor basis for critical decisions is in the last sentence.According to Daniel D. Rhoads, MD, section head of microbiology at Cleveland Clinic, there are a couple of ways to detect SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Some tests look for a piece of the coating of the virus—they’re called antigen tests—and other tests detect nucleic acid (such as RNA) belonging to the coronavirus.
RNA tests are highly sensitive. “These tests can remain positive even after somebody is no longer sick and no longer shedding virus that can infect other people,” Dr. Rhoads tells Health.
Antigen tests, by contrast, are generally quick and cheap but often less accurate than RNA tests for detecting the novel coronavirus. The problem is that antigen testing is more prone to false negative results, meaning these tests are more likely to miss cases of active infection. And neither antigen nor RNA testing predicts when someone is no longer contagious, says Dr. Rhoads.This false positive for non-contagious people inevitably distorts the infection count and can lead politically based decisions astray. Unfortunately, the way the test specimens are handled by the testing laboratory can also effect the test results because the test samples are not measured directly they are measured after dilution and the percentage of dilution effects the test results." And neither antigen nor RNA testing predicts when someone is no longer contagious, says Dr. Rhoads".
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Now, Doctor Mullis received a Nobel Prize for his work on PCR, is that enough for you or would you prefer beatification in addition?This indicates that the belief in the validity of the PCR tests is so strong that it equals a religion that tolerates virtually no contradiction.
But it is well known that religions are about faith and not about scientific facts. And as Walter Lippmann, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and perhaps the most influential journalist of the 20th century said: “Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.”
So to start, it is very remarkable that Kary Mullis himself, the inventor of the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) technology, did not think alike. His invention got him the Nobel prize in chemistry in 1993.
Unfortunately, Mullis passed away last year at the age of 74, but there is no doubt that the biochemist regarded the PCR as inappropriate to detect a viral infection.
The reason is that the intended use of the PCR was, and still is, to apply it as a manufacturing technique, being able to replicate DNA sequences millions and billions of times, and not as a diagnostic tool to detect viruses.
How declaring virus pandemics based on PCR tests can end in disaster was described by Gina Kolata in her 2007 New York Times article Faith in Quick Test Leads to Epidemic That Wasn’t.
There it is. Instead of using a scalpel for our operation we are using a kitchen spoon. By its very principal of operation PCR interferes with the integrity of the sample being tested which makes it sensitive to operator technique as well as providing false positives based on disease artifacts rather than active disease itself.The reason is that the intended use of the PCR was, and still is, to apply it as a manufacturing technique, being able to replicate DNA sequences millions and billions of times, and not as a diagnostic tool to detect viruses.
So much for freedom of speech compadre..boing wrote: ↑Sat Jan 23, 2021 8:32 pmI don't know about a thesis but I do know that at least seven major pharmaceutical companies have spent billions of dollars on producing a vaccine against CV but nobody has seemed to bother to work out how we are going to identify the virus accurately during a pandemic situation. Rule one of problem solving, define the problem.
If you want paperwork on Dr Mullis I suggest you start with his Nobel Prize and that will certainly lead you back to his various writings. It won't help you much of course because his award was for a method of commercially producing large quantities of RNAs, it had nothing to do with disease identification which is exactly the problem with the way it is presently being used.
By the way,Google prevents my VPN from displaying your videos.
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