If I had the over under on how long the season would last due to Covid-19, I would have lost. I did not think we would get this far at the beginning of the season.

 

To be fair it's taken an incredible amount of juggling the schedule and ways to do that are being run out of.

 

I didn't think that was going to be enough.

 

I’m not sure I like the NFL’s covid policy. Nick Saban tested positive and then has had 3 consecutive negative tests, each 24 hours apart. The NFL needs to adjust fire.

My son is in the navy. He’s tested positive twice for covid and subsequently tested negative twice after each positive result.

I understand the league’s precautionary measures but you have to exercise a little common sense. If Van Noy and Wilkins have tested positive, so be it. Adapt the NCAA procedures. If the players have 3 negative test results 24 hours apart, then it’s safe to say that positive result could have indeed been a false result, just as my son’s were.

 

I think the navy and the NCAA are not displaying common sense.

 

Welp. This kills a lot of positive momentum going into this week's game.

 

next man up

 

Absolutely. Missing to COVID-19 is no different than missing for injury IMO. You go to war with the army you have, not the one you might want.*

*Apologies to Donald Rumsfeld

 

Please explain to me like I’m a 6 year old how 3 consecutive negative test results 24 hours apart isn’t a common sense approach?

I suppose it would best best if someone tests positive to throw them in a dungeon and let them rot away?

 

The best bet is what the NFL is doing. You can have up to five days before showing a positive result. Waiting the appropriate of time seems like common sense to me.

I don't know how waiting am extra day or two is like locking someone away

 

And I don't see how having a negative test for 3 consecutive days, each test 24 hours apart isn't common sense. Sorry, I just don't see how telling someone who's tested negative that many times after a positive test he can't play/go to work, etc is common sense.

With fear like that, we all just need to be locked down like it's the zombie apocalypse.

 

LOL at one day being zombie apocalypse. Just love how a little extra caution is, "OMG! THE WORLD IS GOING TO END!"

 

OMG, HE'S TESTED NEGATIVE THREE DAYS I A ROW....STAY AWAY, HE'S INFECTED!!!!!!!!!!!

 

%#!# 2020 it's relentless.

 

He could be. That is why they wait a day. It is common sense.

 

The US media mostly ignored it, but for much of the rest of the world the 2nd biggest news this summer was the potential for the Three Gorges Dam in China collapsing due to the relentless rains and floods. So many people in other countries were saying that would fit so perfectly with the kind of year 2020 has been lol. Didn't happen though (at least not yet).

 

See, this is where HYPE and misinformation instills fear in the population. If an individual tests positive, whether or not he's symptomatic, he could be infectious. If he's negative...then negative again 24 hours later...then negative 24 hours later again, he's not infectious...and not infected at all.

 

It is not fear and hype in the population. It is taking the right amount of caution.

 

Yeah, this thing is starting to blow up here on the east coast.

 

Love this!

I got Covid in July doing Jiu-Jitsu. After 3 months of living in hiding, I decided I’m going to life my life. Not be reckless about spreading so I wear a mask in public but I’m still living my life.

I figured this would impact Miami at some point but hate that it’s right now with 2 players from our D. We have so much momentum and I feel like this is a trap game.

 

3 does not equal five. 5 equals five. If the best science is currently that you need a minimum of 5 days between possible exposure and testing to know with much certainty that an individual wasn't infected and spreading to others... Then, you need five days. You could test negative a hundred times in the first 4 days and still be a spreader with no symptoms. That's why this disease is so insidious.

Also, the same posters are turning this political with bad Facebook facts. Sweden has a covid hospitalization rate that is rising faster than any other European country. Much worse than their Scandinavian neighbors. Their decision to rely on citizens voluntary following guidelines and their universal government funded Healthcare resulted in a higher death rate with the first wave, and it's looking now like a worse second wave. With vaccines coming, but still a ways off, their strategy seems disastrous. I hope not, but it's looking like a long winter.

 

This might explain the discrepancies in the tests:

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-54000629

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.

 

It works extremely well if everyone does it, and there are many countries that have had tremendous success, just not the US, Europe, India or the Americas.

For example:
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

Remember the East Asian countries of South Korea, Japan and Taiwan having to deal with the virus early on? They all have societies where the people basically do as the government tells them to, and the virus has either been eliminated or has had relatively little effect on people's daily lives as a result.

Taiwan (population 23.8 million): 7 deaths!! Extrapolated to US population of 331.7 million = 96 deaths
South Korea (population 51.3 million): 488 deaths. Extrapolated to US = 3,155 deaths
Japan (population 126.3 million): 1,867 deaths. Extrapolated to US = 4,903 deaths

Compare that to the 248,000 deaths in the US so far, and rising. And it's not just East Asian countries, but also Australia and New Zealand that have had tremendous success. So yes lockdowns do work, and if everyone does it you can have a mostly normal life afterwards as is the case in most of those countries, but everyone has to play their part. That's naturally too difficult for Europeans and Americans, and that's fine, but let's not act like masks and shut downs don't work. You stop virus transmission and you can kill the spread of a virus. That's obvious.

 

In a country like this, there has to be a stigma associated with not wearing a mask, not with wearing one. That's what's never developed here, and it's a fault of the uppermost leadership.

 

If the test is indeed that sensitive and non-specific, it should be used as a screening to be followed up on by a more specific test. If you're negative on the screening, you're negative. If you're positive on the screening, your status is unknown until the result of the more specific test is obtained.

 

In a country like the US you have to treat it like WW2 and put in severe penalties for non-compliance. I don't see how you can change stigma sufficiently to get near total compliance with the diversity of people in the US. And note that we're almost at the same level of combat deaths of 291,557 in WW2 with COVID-19.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualties_of_war

The last sentence needs modification. If you haven't yet been infected then testing positive means you have the virus because the test is extremely sensitive to the genetic material of the virus. However, if you already tested positive in the past and it's been at least a week, then you could set a non-zero cut-off to balance sensitivity and specificity better.

Thing is, determining the best cut-off requires lots of good data on the distribution of false positives which I bet they don't have because there is no "gold standard" for determining false positives in this case (how to tell if the virus is dead?).

 

Doesn't work when people don't follow the guidelines with parties, etc. So while many European governments acted more responsibly than the US, the culture there still makes it really difficult to enforce compliance like in East Asia.

Can't trust official Chinese statistics, but there's no question China also succeeded. Just in this last week you had over 600 million people travel during their "Golden Week" without many restrictions. So yeah it does work even with 1.4 billion people if you have a government that can truly enforce a lockdown so that people can't violate the rules easily.

Yup.. there's a huge toll on shutting down for longer periods. That's why you need everyone to comply for a short period and mostly be done with it. The problem for much of the world is that you can't enforce that compliance without the equivalent of wartime authorization, which is IMO what we should have done.

Not saying East Asian societies are better in general, but they are FAR better for dealing with pandemics. Hundreds of thousands of extra people dying is no joke.

 

I remember the outrage in the US about the extreme restrictions Australia, how they were putting people who refused to wear masks and get tested into camps (4 star hotels). That this was a coup by the government to put in extreme totaltiarian restrictions that will never go away.

Now Austrralia has the virus under control and most of those restrictions are gone.

 

So there are no false positives for a first-time test?

 

There's never such a thing as NO false positives, but it's pretty rare for a test that looks for genetic material you're extremely unlikely to have unless you have the virus. More likely is a false negative if tested early. That is, you just might not have traces of the genetic material in the sample taken shortly after contracting the disease.

I should add that false positives are far more likely in serology, so looking at antibodies that the body produces in response to an infection. But those tests aren't as accurate as looking for a genetic signature (they're usually much cheaper though).

 

Ah, so the false positive would be that you're contagious. You could have the genetic material and not be contagious.

 

I don't know the details well enough to answer your question, but there are so many things that might not work correctly, either with the machines used or (I would guess) more likely protocols not being followed (i.e., problems on the user side). Probably depends on the specific test. Not an expert on this.

What I know comes from a mathematical innovation I developed for how they estimate the seronegative and seropositive distributions in those serology tests. They use Gaussian mixture models right now (sum of two Gaussians, one for seronegatives and one for seropositives) and the assumption of 2 Gaussians doesn't quite work well for some diseases so I improved on that a bit. That was for trachoma (an eye disease) however.

 

The PCR tests are being run at a cycle threshold, last I read, of 37. That's far far too sensitive. At that threshold, people are testing positive when they don't have enough of a viral load to even be sick, much less spread it. The stuff I've read says that, concerning PCR tests, 90% are basically invalid.

Also, it should be noted that at least when developing the PCR tests, they did not have an isolated sample of the virus, so they used a created coronavirus to build the tests.

As to current infection levels, we are testing millions of people a day. The important figure is not how many infections are found, but how many tests were done. But here we are, freaking out about how many new cases there are, but no one is reporting what percent of the tests are positive, compared to say, any other month.

 

There was quite a bit of outrage in Australia. It's not simply Americans who are complaining about this stuff. Every country has people protesting these measures. I'm not sure why everyone wants to act like it's only Americans who have an issue.

 

There are a lot of people reporting that.

At least the reports I read do a good job of comparing the percentage of positive tests and comparing that to previous months while talking about how much testing has increased or decreased.

 

I didn't say only Americans.