Pseudo-Epidemics: Why COVID-19 is guaranteed to never end
blog.plan99.net
blog.plan99.net
The linchpin of this article is that the Germany death numbers are not substantially different: that is, Germany has not had excess deaths due to the virus when compared to death numbers from last year. Unfortunately, this is the worst possible conclusion you could draw from that graph. Germany went into lockdown, and had people stay home and social distance. Consider, for example, that Germany's traffic deaths are the lowest they have been in 100 years[1]. Influenze has spread less extensively, people have died less from violent crimes, and other, similar phenomena have all occurred as a result of their lockdown. In spite of all of that, Germany has still hit their average death number.
What could possibly explain this? Maybe, I dunno, the pandemic?!
1. https://www.dw.com/en/germany-traffic-deaths-fall-to-lowest-...
The article is about false positive rates on the PCR test.
Germany went into a form of lockdown, but so did the UK, and the UK saw relatively high excess deaths. There has been a lot of analysis of the data on this, and lockdown duration/start/severity doesn't correlate with outcomes in any obvious way.
1. There is not a significant uptick in deaths in Germany.
2. The test is not 100% accurate, and indicates some false positives.
3. From #1 and #2, we can conclude that the "pandemic" we saw there was the result of false positives, and not people actually getting sick.
If #1 isn't reliable, then neither is the conclusion. As hospitalizations and death climb in the US, writing a think-piece article pointing at how Spain is mis-accounting for false positives is irresponsible and dangerous. It pushes a "reopening is fine" narrative, when the people most-likely to read the article are living in places where that is patently false.
As for (1), the graph clearly shows there is no uptick in deaths in Germany. So I'm not sure what you mean by, if (1) is not reliable. The graph is right there.
As for your final point, you seem to be assuming the article was written by an American for a US audience. What's your evidence for that? COVID is bigger than the USA, you know.
...if something causes test numbers to rise then so will case numbers, which in turn will cause a further increase in testing, causing the rise to continue, triggering local lockdowns and pointless evidence free rituals, until people get depressed and stop trying to do things causing numbers being tested to fall again...
Health is run by people who suffer no consequences from policy over-reactions. Lockdown induced job losses won’t affect them, as they work for the government. A larger-scale case of “one rule for them and another for us” can’t be imagined. It’s thus no surprise when we read things like Public Health England defining a COVID death as anyone who has ever tested positive and then died, for any reason, at any time i.e. the UK being supposedly “one of the worst hit countries in the world” is a statistical fantasy. PHE officials defined it this way because they didn’t want to be accused of being a nasty libertarians who were underplaying the problem just to help capitalist workers. The idea that they’d create other, bigger problems simply didn’t occur to them — or worse, it did but they didn’t care.
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My top comment in this thread explains why (1) is not reliable. The graph is a trick of the eyes, due to a lack of consideration for externalities. Over the entire time period, ~10,000 people died in Germany of Covid. Amortized over a 10-week outbreak period, that's 1k / week, on a graph with a scale an order of magnitude higher. Combined with the citation I provided for fewer traffic deaths, plus additional drops in violent crimes, seasonal flu, etc., it is not unimaginable that "everyone staying home" saved a thousand lives a week, or more, during that same time period.
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My final point is that the assumed audience is members of the UK, and given the author's concluding thoughts are mostly concerned with their degradation in respect for the UK health establishment, I think that's sort of a fair assumption to make.
Most people miss that aspect and just look at overall case count.
Personally, I'm more and more encouraged every day that the case count grows dramatically and the resulting deaths don't. That means it's far far less deadly than we thought in March.
Unless you're alleging that testing people or quarantining them kills them, which would be laughable. Or some grand scale conspiracy theory to make it look like a pandemic worldwide.
In the USA the case graph and death graph looks quite different. Just use the Google charts to quickly see:
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=usa%20covid%20deaths
In Spain the death graph lagged the cases graph by only a few days in the first wave. In the second wave of cases (positive tests) they're now experiencing, deaths haven't gone up at all, as apparently the patients are now younger and recover quicker.
Can you show some graphs and working for this claim that death graphs are basically just lagged versions of the case graph? Also why would deaths follow cases by a month when infection-to-death is supposedly about 18 days.
It could also just mean that our tests are inaccurate, and it's as dangerous as it ever has been.
If they are, this suggests that at some point you ought to simply re-test everyone who tests positive the first time.
"At some point" likely only comes once the disease is well under control, maybe down to 3% of current active cases, just as a wild guess? When that happens, the prior of actually having COVID-19 gets really low. Such that even with a positive COVID-19 test the posterior probability is still somewhat low.
This all falls apart if multiple tests on the same patient aren't statistically independent in false positives. For example, I'm no biologist, but I'd guess it's possible there are a few people out there whose human genetics by chance have a short sequence in common with the viral genetics of COVID-19. If that's the case, that part of the patient's own genetic code might invariably get picked up and amplified by the PCR test. So these unlucky folks will always test positive for COVID regardless of whether they have it or not.
Cross-testing some similar coronavirus as positive is much more plausible mechanism of failure. However, different tests check different subsequences.
Excess deaths aren't reliable either, because it can happen independent of any new disease.
The fact that strikes me most is that people have the same flu symptoms, but no "new" symptoms different from the diseases we already know.
an example with math... if false negative is 75%, but false positive is 0%, then you just run the test multiple times to increase confidence in the results.
...if something causes test numbers to rise then so will case numbers, which in turn will cause a further increase in testing, causing the rise to continue, triggering local lockdowns and pointless evidence free rituals, until people get depressed and stop trying to do things causing numbers being tested to fall again...
Health is run by people who suffer no consequences from policy over-reactions. Lockdown induced job losses won’t affect them, as they work for the government. A larger-scale case of “one rule for them and another for us” can’t be imagined. It’s thus no surprise when we read things like Public Health England defining a COVID death as anyone who has ever tested positive and then died, for any reason, at any time i.e. the UK being supposedly “one of the worst hit countries in the world” is a statistical fantasy. PHE officials defined it this way because they didn’t want to be accused of being a nasty libertarians who were underplaying the problem just to help capitalist workers. The idea that they’d create other, bigger problems simply didn’t occur to them — or worse, it did but they didn’t care.
Thus I'm really puzzled why this community would flag it, it is disappointing frankly.
Unfortunately, the article doesn't do that. Instead, it:
- Calls into question the legitimacy of coronavirus death impact, consulting a flat death without considering the externalities of reduced risks that lockdowns bring about.
- Links to the article suggests healthy people shouldn't be wearing masks, even though many people are contagious well before showing symptoms.
- Calls into question Spain's second wave as false, the result of over-testing, even though [it isn't, the case count is rising far above any expected false-positive rate, and people are dying there](https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/spain/).
- Puts forth the sentiment: "The idea that [lockdowns] create other, bigger problems simply didn’t occur to [Public Health England] — or worse, it did but they didn’t care."
If the article addressed this head-on and used that metric to determine which lockdowns might be necessary, that'd be one thing. These conclusions, however, are a bit inexcusable.
That is why I think it shouldn't be flagged, it is the reason why we're discussing this and it is an important debate given the impact.