Coronavirus

[Grumpy Git]

A very good friend of mine was really ill with typical Covid symptoms in early December. The week previous he had been in close contact with several people who had just returned from the Macau GP.

Both my daughter and subsequently my wife were ill in February with the same symptoms. My wife was very poorly, but she could not get a test.

Who knows?

[jimmyp]

11 minutes ago, G STAR RAM said:

Or that there are facts which support both camps and he does not like facts that go against his train of thought?

That would make him the same as many others in this thread then. 

It’s a shame some don’t argue the facts with him, instead they find his style of questioning disagreeable and respond by throwing school ground type personal insults towards him. 

Best just not to debate with him if you don’t like his style.

 

Not saying this is you G star, just a general observation from the last few days. 

 

[G STAR RAM]

14 minutes ago, jimmyp said:

That would make him the same as many others in this thread then. 

It’s a shame some don’t argue the facts with him, instead they find his style of questioning disagreeable and respond by throwing school ground type personal insults towards him. 

Best just not to debate with him if you don’t like his style.

Not saying this is you G star, just a general observation from the last few days. 

You just can't debate with him though, you either accept what he says or you are wrong, its as simple as that.

It's a shame because he is clearly intelligent and does bring a lot of interesting facts to the debate.

And to be fair he dishes out as many insults as he takes.

[jimmyp]

10 minutes ago, G STAR RAM said:

You just can't debate with him though, you either accept what he says or you are wrong, its as simple as that.

You can’t debate him? Or you feel you can’t win a debate against him?

10 minutes ago, G STAR RAM said:

It's a shame because he is clearly intelligent and does bring a lot of interesting facts to the debate.

Yes I have never understood why people feel the need to have the last word, Be it Albert or someone else. 

10 minutes ago, G STAR RAM said:

And to be fair he dishes out as many insults as he takes.

I’m going to disagree on this point.

I have never seen Albert use the kind of childish insults he was receiving the other night. 

 

[G STAR RAM]

31 minutes ago, jimmyp said:

You can’t debate him? Or you feel you can’t win a debate against him?

Both probably.

It does not matter what you say, he takes notice and already he has his answer ready.

He looks at everything through one lens and refuses to even consider any other viewpoint.

And then when you get bored of trying to explain this, he resorts to 'you're backing away from the argument so I win'.

Nothing against the guy though and, as I said, clearly intelligent with interesting points to make and always very strongly backs up his argument with evidence. 

[ramit]

44 minutes ago, jimmyp said:

You can’t debate him? Or you feel you can’t win a debate against him?

Yes I have never understood why people feel the need to have the last word, Be it Albert or someone else. 

I’m going to disagree on this point.

I have never seen Albert use the kind of childish insults he was receiving the other night. 

 

There are things i could say but i won't, the man is not here to answer.

i was drunk and out of line and shouldn't have posted at all in that condition, will learn from it hopefully.  i did receive my first warning since joining the forum though, so rejoice

 

[jimmyp]

4 minutes ago, ramit said:

There are things i could say but i won't, the man is not here to answer.

i was drunk and out of line and shouldn't have posted at all in that condition, will learn from it hopefully.  i did receive my first warning since joining the forum though, so rejoice

 

You getting a warning brings me no joy ramit. 

[jimmyp]

30 minutes ago, G STAR RAM said:

Both probably.

It does not matter what you say, he takes notice and already he has his answer ready.

He looks at everything through one lens and refuses to even consider any other viewpoint.

I’ve noticed this stance frequently when discussing covid with many people. It’s a shame so much false information is in the public domain helping to form some of these viewpoints. 

30 minutes ago, G STAR RAM said:

And then when you get bored of trying to explain this, he resorts to 'you're backing away from the argument so I win'.

Yeah I’m not a massive fan of this. Sometimes people don’t have the facts to validate their viewpoint though, I can understand why some won’t agree to disagree. 

30 minutes ago, G STAR RAM said:

Nothing against the guy though and, as I said, clearly intelligent with interesting points to make and always very strongly backs up his argument with evidence. 

Yeah I think it’s good to have the input from someone living in a country that has dealt with covid in a very different way to the UK.

[Eddie]

2 hours ago, G STAR RAM said:

Or that there are facts which support both camps and he does not like facts that go against his train of thought?

no.

[Eddie]

26 minutes ago, ramit said:

There are things i could say but i won't, the man is not here to answer.

i was drunk and out of line and shouldn't have posted at all in that condition, will learn from it hopefully.  i did receive my first warning since joining the forum though, so rejoice

 

I keep saying the same thing every time I get a warning.

Doesn't work though.

[Albert]

9 hours ago, i-Ram said:

Has the internet broken in Australia, or has old Albert taken to his bed with a nasty cough?

Just had a lot to do. 

Not really relevant to the UK, but we have indeed had our first major outbreak in SA since April. A cleaner for a medi-hotel, which services people in mandated quarantine after returning to Australia, caught the virus. They lived with a large family, and this spread to their 80 year old mother, partner, etc. This cluster was picked up when the mother went to a hospital due to her condition. Since Sunday, when the cluster was announced, 22 cases have been linked to this initial case, and as of yesterday, over 4000 people were in mandated quarantine. 

The Premier of the State made the decision this afternoon to go into 6 days of lockdown while contact tracing of this cluster was ongoing, given the number of areas identified as potential locations of spread. 

Honestly quite proud of the Premier for acting so swiftly. Will be interesting to see how this goes from here. Seems I'll have plenty more time to post on here though. 

Elsewhere in Australia, the virus is virtually eliminated too, now that Victoria has gone 18 (I think) days without a case of community transmission. 

[i-Ram]

1 hour ago, Albert said:

Just had a lot to do. 

Glad you are ok our fellow Ram, and have other interests than just taking our ‘Covid deniers and anti-vaxxers’ to task. 

[G STAR RAM]

No idea what a health data scientist does.

You would think that his claims are backed up with data though.

[Albert]

5 minutes ago, G STAR RAM said:

No idea what a health data scientist does.

You would think that his claims are backed up with data though.

He's a geneticist, not a epidemiologist, so again, an odd person to interview. 'Health data scientist' appears to be what they've labelled his work in bioinformatics as. It's not about working with 'health data' as such, but about the union between topics in biological and information sciences. I suspect they chose that title to sell his research as relevant. 

The point about the unknowns around the vaccines are valid, and we still need more data on how much this reduces spread. Evenly with a highly effective vaccine in this regard, however, other restrictions will need to be used in concert to achieve control, and eliminate the disease. There are no magic bullets. 

There's a broader point in his argument about infection versus symptomatic cases, but given what we've seen from the preliminary data, we don't actually know the testing protocol here. If they are only testing people who are symptomatic, they have a point, but at the same time, a 90%+ reduction in symptomatic cases is a massive benefit even in the worst case scenario. 

The concerns regarding mass screening are valid. 

I strongly disagree with the notion that this is a 'political pandemic'. Here in Australia, we have a strong political divide, which has only been getting wider in recent decades. Despite this, there has been a clear and consistent direction, despite the two sides controlling different states, and our conservative party being in power federally. As noted above, South Australia, under the control of the conservative side of politics, made the decision to go into a lockdown today, days into a cluster, to maintain the elimination strategy we have been pursuing. They did this because the decision was made on the advice of experts, not the politicians. 

The politicisation of the pandemic elsewhere in the World has indeed been worrisome, but that politicisation is an invention of those systems, and not something that really exists as any great debate in academia. You get some tripe like the 'Great Barrington declaration', supported by academic giants of our era like Dr Johnny Bananas, but of course, their claims have already been shown to be false anyhow, and were always very much a fringe position. Ultimately though, where politics has stayed out the decision making, and it has just been left to experts in the health departments, there has been success. 

500+ deaths a day from the virus by the official definition, which is an underestimate as previous discussed due to the 28 day cutoff. It's interesting how they're trying to palm off the excess mortality figures due to people younger than 80 dying. It's also interesting that they're trying to push a line that these deaths cannot be blamed on the pandemic, even though the pandemic, and its impact on the hospitals, is stopping other treatments. This isn't an issue that occurs where governments listened to the health advice and gained control. 

The claim that it's less risk than the regular flu for people under 65 is false. This is a recent article investigation the infection fatality rate from data out of New York. Most notable is that the IFR was 0.116% for people 25-44, and 0.939% for people 45-64. Estimating infection fatality rates for seasonal flus are difficult, but even the 2009 pandemic flu represented at most, a far smaller risk, with the rate varying from the 0.001% range for children and 0.1% range for the elderly. This also only included symptomatic cases, rather than the full IFR as discussed in the other paper for Covid-19. The notion that this disease is less dangerous than the flu for people under 65 is unjustified, and just spreading disinformation. 

As to the claim that it's the same number of people dying as any other data, this is just categorically false based on publicly available data. A ridiculous claim given we have the data to show that it's simply not true. The notion that the same number of people die of flu and pneumonia each year is also just a flat out lie, as has been previously discussed on here. Covid-19 had already eclipsed them both prior to this second wave. The annual deaths from flu and pneumonia (which is virtually just from pneumonia) was 25,406 in 2019, and this figure has been fairly stable since the introduction of wide spread flu vaccines. You can view the data in detail here.

As to flu and pneumonia deaths being down, yes, you expect that given the impact of all the restrictions. They're not Covid specific, they're a blunt tool which works across all infectious diseases. The issue with Covid is that it's actually more infectious, and people don't have pre-existing immunity, hence a high reproduction number. 

The absurdity of the claims made in the latter half of that video are astounding. 

[Stagtime]

2 hours ago, Albert said:

Just had a lot to do. 

Not really relevant to the UK, but we have indeed had our first major outbreak in SA since April. A cleaner for a medi-hotel, which services people in mandated quarantine after returning to Australia, caught the virus. They lived with a large family, and this spread to their 80 year old mother, partner, etc. This cluster was picked up when the mother went to a hospital due to her condition. Since Sunday, when the cluster was announced, 22 cases have been linked to this initial case, and as of yesterday, over 4000 people were in mandated quarantine. 

The Premier of the State made the decision this afternoon to go into 6 days of lockdown while contact tracing of this cluster was ongoing, given the number of areas identified as potential locations of spread. 

Honestly quite proud of the Premier for acting so swiftly. Will be interesting to see how this goes from here. Seems I'll have plenty more time to post on here though. 

Elsewhere in Australia, the virus is virtually eliminated too, now that Victoria has gone 18 (I think) days without a case of community transmission. 

Enjoy your 6 days off mate, up here in Brisbane we are going to 100% crowd for tonight’s State of Origin match. Sold out with 51,000. Go Queensland!

[Albert]

12 minutes ago, Stagtime said:

Enjoy your 6 days off mate, up here in Brisbane we are going to 100% crowd for tonight’s State of Origin match. Sold out with 51,000. Go Queensland!

Go Queensland indeed. Was out there for the match here in Adelaide, with the checkboard layout of course. Was scrappy, but got there. 

Still not super convinced that full capacity at Lang Park is the best idea, particularly with how events are unfolding here, but hey, it's State of Origin. 

[Albert]

Queensland in front quicker than a medi-hotel balls up has put SA in lockdown!

Seeing those crowds makes me anxious still. 

[Stagtime]

9 minutes ago, Albert said:

Queensland in front quicker than a medi-hotel balls up has put SA in lockdown!

Seeing those crowds makes me anxious still. 

I went to a 39,000 crowd a few weeks ago and it definitely is a uncomfortable feeling. 6-6 after 10 minutes.

[Ghost of Clough]

10 hours ago, jimmyp said:

You can’t debate him? Or you feel you can’t win a debate against him?

Albert refuses to accept that there may be more than one way to get through the pandemic, no matter what opposing views are put forward.

[GboroRam]

5 minutes ago, Ghost of Clough said:

Albert refuses to accept that there may be more than one way to get through the pandemic, no matter what opposing views are put forward.

I think Albert says that our chosen way hasn't worked. Hard to disagree.

He's shown a way that has worked, across multiple different countries - each one a counter to one of the reasons why "it'll never work in this country". He's never suggested it's the only way, but it seems to be the only way that's shown to work to date.