The number of over-50s with Covid-19 represents a fifth of those nationwide
Just three per cent are aged over 80, down from 28 per cent six months ago
Peak age range for infections is now in the 20s but used to be in the 80s
Sparked hope further restrictions could soon be reduced as older people shield
Testing
A lot has been made about testing for COVID-19 but it is far from straightforward. There are many publicly acknowledged problems with testing procedures and accuracy of the results. Statistician Nate Silver writes, numbers are meaningless unless you understand how they’re counted.
Browse the articles related to this topic below.
Join our community on Guilded.
The main test used to diagnose coronavirus is so sensitive it could be picking up fragments of dead virus from old infections, scientists say.
Most people are infectious only for about a week, but could test positive weeks afterwards.
Researchers say this could be leading to an over-estimate of the current scale of the pandemic.
But some experts say it is uncertain how a reliable test can be produced that doesn’t risk missing cases.
Prof Carl Heneghan, one of the study’s authors, said instead of giving a “yes/no” result based on whether any virus is detected, tests should have a cut-off point so that very small amounts of virus do not trigger a positive result.
He believes the detection of traces of old virus could partly explain why the number of cases is rising while hospital admissions remain stable.
There is little purpose in using tests to check asymptomatic children to see if it is safe for them to come to school. When children are infected, most are asymptomatic, and the mortality risk is lower than for the flu. While adult-to-adult and adult-to-child transmission is common, child-to-adult transmission isn’t. Children thus pose minimal risk to their teachers. If a child has a cough, a runny nose or other respiratory symptoms, he should stay home. You don’t need a test for that.
Sweden was the only major Western country that kept schools open for kids 15 and younger throughout the pandemic, with no masks or mass testing. How did it turn out? Zero Covid-19 deaths among 1.8 million children attending day care or school. Teachers didn’t have an excess infection risk compared with the average of other professions.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-case-against-covid-tests-for-the-young-and-healthy-11599151722
While the testing data are so opaque, using them to direct local lockdowns is unhelpful, argues Heneghan. “The testing is there to drive the test and trace strategy,” he says. “But what seems to be happening is that, as soon as we see an outbreak, there tends to be panic and over-reacting. This is a huge problem because politicians are operating in a non-evidence-based way when it comes to non-drug interventions.”
https://web.archive.org/web/20200904104824/https://www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m3374.full
Dr. Christian Drosten, publisher a workflow of a real-time PCR (RT-PCR) diagnostic test used throughout the world:
“We are now losing public trust. Certainly. .. Because the disease is not existing! [sic] It’s not there. .. Even though the incidence goes up, the fatalities don’t go up. There are no dead people.”
This is from around 34 minutes into the video. In other words, “We are losing public trust because the real world doesn’t match up with our theoretical data. The public is stupid in trusting their actual experience.” This is clearly a case of very smart people completely clouded to the truth. They trust their theories more than reality.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is no longer recommending testing for everyone who’s been exposed to Covid-19, saying people who don’t have symptoms “do not necessarily need a test.”
The CDC has quietly revised its guidance on coronavirus testing to say that people without symptoms who were exposed to an infected person might not need to be screened.The agency previously recommended testing for anyone with a “recent known or suspected exposure” to the virus even if they did not have symptoms.
The CDC’s previous guidance cited “the potential for asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic transmission” as a reason why people without symptoms who were exposed to the virus be “quickly identified and tested.”
Up to 90 percent of people tested for COVID-19 in Massachusetts, New York and Nevada in July carried barely any traces of the virus, a new report says
Experts say it could be because today’s tests are ‘too sensitive’
In the US PCR testing is the most widely used diagnostic test for COVID-19
PCR tests analyze genetic matter from the virus in cycles and today’s tests typically take 37 or 40 cycles
Experts say this is too high because it deems a patient positive even if they have small traces of the virus that are old and no longer contagious
They suggest lowering the number of cycles, which would hone in on people with a higher viral load and who are more contagious
Today there are 5.9million cases of COVID-19 in the US and there have been more than 182,000 deaths
Nine out a 10 people in England live in areas that have not seen a Covid-19 case in a month and new lockdowns are not needed, an expert has said.
Professor John Clancy, from Birmingham University, has warned that fears of another shutdown are based on ‘dodgy data.’
Writing in a blog, he said: ”91 per cent of England (that’s 51million people) live in neighbourhoods where there hasn’t been a recorded Covid-19 case in the last 4 weeks.’
He added: ‘So-called ‘spikes’ are occurring here, there, and everywhere up and down the country because new testing regimes are causing them either with false positives, picking up residual infections or (usually more likely) suddenly increased testing in specific areas.’
A front line medic says there is no reason to fear a second wave of because the virus was “getting less angry”.
Dr Ron Daniels, an intensive care consultant at Good Hope Hospital in Sutton Coldfield, says Covid-19 is not now as deadly as at the start of the pandemic.
Dr Daniels said talk of a second wave was “hype” and told BirminghamLive : “I don’t want to sound like Donald Trump – but if you test more people, you will find more cases.”
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/coronavirus-getting-less-angry-shouldnt-22563045
CORONAVIRUS hospital admissions were over-counted at the peak of the pandemic as recovered patients returning to wards without Covid were included in the stats.
An investigation for the Government’s Science Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) found that people were being counted as ‘Covid hospital admissions’ if they had EVER had the virus.
Government figures show that, at the peak of the pandemic in early April, nearly 20,000 people a week were being admitted to hospital with coronavirus – but the true figure is now unknown because of the problem with over-counting.
This over-counting mirrors the problems with data for coronavirus deaths – where people who had died of other causes were being included in Covid-19 statistics if they had once tested positive.
Professor Graham Medley, of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, asked by Sage to look into the situation, told The Telegraph: “By June, it was becoming clear that people were being admitted to hospital for non-Covid reasons who had tested positive many weeks before.
“Consequently, the NHS revised its situation report to accommodate this.”
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/uknews/12459291/coronavirus-hospital-admissions-stats-overcount/
Unlike previous epidemics, in addressing COVID-19 nearly all international health organizations and national health ministries have treated a single positive result from a PCR-based test as confirmation of infection, even in asymptomatic persons without any history of exposure. This is based on a widespread belief that positive results in these tests are highly reliable. However, data on PCR-based tests for similar viruses show that PCR-based testing produces enough false positive results to make positive results highly unreliable over a broad range of real-world scenarios. This has clinical and case management implications, and affects an array of epidemiological statistics, including the asymptomatic ratio, prevalence, and hospitalization and death rates. Steps should be taken to raise awareness of false positives, reduce their frequency, and mitigate their effects. In the interim, positive results in asymptomatic individuals that haven’t been confirmed by a second test should be considered suspect.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.26.20080911v3
If you are starting to feel like the coronavirus epidemic will never end, then you may be correct. A statistical quirk in testing means that Britain may never hit zero cases, even if the virus is wiped out entirely.
The reason lies in the large number of false positives that are almost certain to creep in once case numbers drop very low, yet testing remains very high.
Testing is never 100 per cent accurate, and scientists must factor in the false positive and negative rates when determining infection prevalence. The problem is, nobody knows what those rates are.
The best guess at present is that coronavirus tests pick up around 80-85 per cent of positive cases, and around 99.9 per cent of negative cases.
Almost 60 per cent of staff infected with coronavirus continued to work and commute
An uptick in cases hasn’t been matched by an increase in deaths. It’s about time we had a more intelligent conversation about risk
Hard luck to those who switched their holidays to Greece when Spain was put back on the quarantine list. The Greek government has just officially declared a “second wave”. Once holidaymakers have explored the Aegean they face getting to know a lot more about the insides of their own homes upon their return, as Greece is now a favourite to be added to the ever-growing list of countries whose air bridges with Britain have collapsed.
But how real is this “second wave” apparently sweeping Europe? Look at the chart of new recorded infections in Greece and, sure enough, you can call it a second wave. Recorded cases began to inch upwards from mid-June onwards. The figure for Sunday – 202 – was markedly higher than the peak in new recorded infections in Greece’s first wave, which reached 156 on April 21. But then look at the chart for Greece’s Covid deaths and there is not the slightest trace of a second wave.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/08/11/no-europe-isnt-engulfed-deadly-second-wave/
Products made by diagnostics firm Randox removed from care homes and individuals
- Article based on experience working as a doctor in the emergency room of one of the big hospitals in Stockholm, Sweden, and of living as a citizen in Sweden.
- Unlike other countries, Sweden never went in to complete lockdown. Non-essential businesses have remained open, people have continues to go to cafés and restaurants, children have remained in school, and very few people have bothered with face masks in public.
- COVID hit Stockholm like a storm in mid-March. One day I was seeing people with appendicitis and kidney stones, the usual things you see in the emergency room. The next day all those patients were gone and the only thing coming in to the hospital was COVID. Practically everyone who was tested had COVID, regardless of what the presenting symptom was. People came in with a nose bleed and they had COVID. They came in with stomach pain and they had COVID.
- Then, after a few months, all the COVID patients disappeared.
- At the peak three months back, a hundred people were dying a day of COVID in Sweden, a country with a population of ten million. We are now down to around five people dying per day in the whole country, and that number continues to drop. Since people generally die around three weeks after infection, that means virtually no-one is getting infected any more.
- The risk of dying is at the very most 1 in 200 if you actually do get infected.
- In total COVID has killed under 6,000 people in a country of ten million.
- Sweden has an annual death rate of around 100,000 people. Considering that 70% of those who have died of COVID are over 80 years old, quite a few of those 6,000 would have died this year anyway.
- COVID will never even come close to major pandemic numbers like 1918 flu.
- If herd immunity hasn’t developed, where are all the sick people? Why has the rate of infection dropped so precipitously?
- The reason we test for antibodies is because it is easy and cheap. Antibodies are in fact not the body’s main defence against virus infections. T-cells are. But T-cells are harder to measure than antibodies, so we don’t really do it clinically.
- Sweden ripped the metaphorical band-aid off quickly and got the epidemic over and done with in a short amount of time, while the rest of the world has chosen to try to peel the band-aid off slowly.
- I am willing to bet that the countries that have shut down completely will see rates spike when they open up. If that is the case, then there won’t have been any point in shutting down in the first place, because all those countries are going to end up with the same number of dead at the end of the day anyway. Shutting down completely in order to decrease the total number of deaths only makes sense if you are willing to stay shut down until a vaccine is available. That could take years.
- COVID has at present killed less than 6000 in Sweden. It is very unlikely that the number of dead will go above 7,000. An average influenza year in Sweden, 700 people die of influenza. Does that mean COVID is ten times worse than influenza? No, because influenza has been around for centuries while COVID is completely new.
- So it is quite possible, in fact likely, that the case fatality rate for COVID is the same as for influenza, or only slightly higher, and the entire difference we have seen is due to the complete lack of any immunity in the population at the start of this pandemic.
Original source: https://sebastianrushworth.com/2020/08/04/how-bad-is-covid-really-a-swedish-doctors-perspective/
Antibody tests may be missing large numbers of people who contracted Covid-19 because they don’t work for people who had a mild infection, new research from Oxford University suggests.
A study of more than 9,000 healthcare workers suggested significant numbers of people were getting ‘negative’ test results, despite probably having had the virus.
Imposing a widespread regional lockdown in the north west was a ‘rash’ decision which is not backed up by the data, an Oxford professor has claimed.
People in Greater Manchester, east Lancashire and parts of West Yorkshire were banned from meeting different households indoors, in a move that Matt Hancock, the health secretary said was ‘absolutely necessary.’
But Professor Carl Henegehan, director of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at Oxford said the figures were skewed by delayed test results and when plotted by the date the test was taken showed no overall alarming rise.
“The northern lockdown was a rash decision,” he said. “Where’s the rise? By date of test through July there’s no change if you factor in all the increased testing that’s going on.
Why is anyone interested in the number of recorded cases of Covid 19? It might sound a daft question, given that we are in the middle of a pandemic, but it ought to be clear to anyone who spends a few minutes digging around the figures that it is a meaningless statistic. Count deaths, by all means, hospital admissions, ICU admissions – but as for the official figures of how many people have tested positive for the disease, it is pointless worrying about them.
Why? First, because we are only – and only ever have been – detecting a small fraction of total cases of infection with SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes Covid 19. Take the UK. Officially, as of Monday evening, there have been 300,111 recorded cases of Covid 19. Yet serological tests by Public Health England suggest that 6.5 per cent of the population of England have antibodies suggesting they have at some point been infected with the virus – which works out at 4.2 million. In other words, the official count has only managed to capture one in 14 cases of the disease. Why so few? Because in the vast majority of cases – between 70 and 80 per cent according to some estimates – Covid 19 causes no symptoms whatsoever. Those infected have no reason to assume they are infected, no need to seek medical attention and no reason to seek being tested.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/07/28/panic-rising-covid-19-case-numbers-irrational-dangerous/
Coronavirus tests used by the NHS may be unsafe and have been halted, the Government has announced.
The Department of Health said the NHS Test and Trace service had been notified that some test kits produced by Randox Laboratories may not meet required safety standards.