outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

congrats people of bournemouth - you are now just as patriotic and free as the good people of the lake of the ozarks

‘MAJOR INCIDENT’ declared in BOURNEMOUTH - pls stay away.

With 1/2 million visitors in Dorset, roads are gridlocked, hindering emergency vehicles & beaches are full - with Dispersal Orders on both piers.
I’ve asked Police Minister to dispatch additional police if Dorset requests pic.twitter.com/YnSpfdXOLc

— Tobias Ellwood MP (@Tobias_Ellwood) June 25, 2020

Virus or no virus that looks like my idea of hell

koogs otm, you'd have to pay me a significant amount of cash to go somewhere like that in non-pandemic times

Jesus christ.

Isn't it easier to just chug some Drain-O or something if you're that committed to an early demise?

Bournemouth is pretty much the septic tank of the south coast at the best of times, wonder if they've opened the public toilets?

Yeah, that was precisely the first thought sparked by that photo. 'Wait, where is that horde of people peeing and pooing...oh. Oh, dear god no.'

about that...

Darren Slade, a journalist with Bournemouth Echo, told Sky News there had been “fights breaking out, illegal camping at the beach overnight, and with no public toilets or anything open, all the waste has been left behind on the beach.”

ahhhh, (the state of) nature!!

I guess you need to cover your bases and ensure that even if by some miracle you somehow dodge the 'vid you become infected by something.

shocked I can't see anyone fuckin' in that picture

Okay, I can grasp the idea of people flocking to a nice soft sandy beach resort that is next to a warm and pleasant body of water.

If people are flocking to the British seaside, that speaks of something rather different.

Palm Beach County commissioner’s meeting on masks — mashed up with “Parks and Rec” Town Hall.

The internet remains undefeated... pic.twitter.com/8r4lea9Dly

— Rex Chapman🏇🏼 (@RexChapman) June 25, 2020

Okay, I can grasp the idea of people flocking to a nice soft sandy beach resort that is next to a warm and pleasant body of water.

If people are flocking to the British seaside, that speaks of something rather different.

Don't you be knocking sunny sandy Bournemouth.

The water made warmer - if not pleasanter - by the addition of vast oceans of piss.

Beaches made of rocks, agreeably placed right next to a near-freezing sewer, in a land where it rains 370 days a year. Sign me up!

Bournemouth doing as well as their football team in fighting COVID

looks like 40,000+ new cases today in the US

wow, we must be testing a lot! we're #1

perhaps doing too well. should cut back the testing a bit.

and yet https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/25/world/coronavirus-updates.html

Only 1 in 10 U.S. coronavirus cases are likely to have been identified, C.D.C. chief says.

The number of Americans who have been infected with the coronavirus is most likely about 10 times higher than the 2.3 million cases that have been reported, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Thursday.

“We probably recognized about 10 percent of the outbreak,” Dr. Robert Redfield said on a call with reporters.

He added that between 5 percent and 8 percent of Americans have been infected to date.

The C.D.C. is basing those estimates on antibody test results from across the country. The tests detect whether an individual has ever had Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, as opposed to diagnostic tests, which detect current infections. Both types of tests have been plagued by accuracy problems, although the antibody tests, which are based on blood samples rather than nasal swabs, have had a higher rate of failures.

11 of the 24 weeks in 2020 that we have data for this year are projected to have deaths above forecast (46% of the weeks). The previous 3 years, that happened only 5.5% of the time.

The data is incomplete since a lot of data gets retroactively revised, but 6 of the weeks are projected to be greater than 20% higher than forecast (in the previous 3 years, the highest percent excess was 13.4%). 3 of them are projected to be 30% higher than forecast. and 1 of them is projected to be 40% higher than forecast.

and people still think the numbers are fucking being fudged.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm

I heard they are being killed by masks interfering with God's breath

We are going to see about 300k dead of this by years end aren’t we?

seems very likely. hard to say what would intervene to prevent that.

I often struggle with statistics and probability. Could someone please explain PPV/positive predictive value to me? As in this:

Additionally, with antibody testing, the chance of getting a false-positive test result is high. In an area where very few people have had Covid-19, for example, a higher percentage of positive antibody results may be false-positives, according to the CDC.

“In a population where the prevalence is 5%, a test with 90% sensitivity and 95% specificity will yield a positive predictive value of 49%,” according to the CDC. (Sensitivity refers to a test’s ability to correctly generate a positive test, while specificity refers to a test’s ability to correctly generate a negative result.) “In other words, less than half of those testing positive will truly have antibodies.”

“A positive test result is more likely a false-positive result than a true positive result,” according to the Infectious Disease Society of America.

I don't get it. Is it saying that a certain (big?) number of positive results can be discounted just because ... they're statistically unlikely?

5% of the population has the antibody. The test has a false positive rate of 5% (that's what 95% specificity means). For simplicity, assume a false negative rate of 0% (i.e. assume sensitivity is 100%). It doesn't change the numbers very much and makes the argument easier to follow.

Suppose you test 100 people. On average there are 5 people among the 100 who has the antibodies. But you'll get 10 positive results. That's the 5 real cases (we assume our test catches everyone who has it) plus the 5 false positives.

In other words, given these numbers, a person who tests positive has a 50% chance of actually having the antibodies (5 people among the 10 who test positive actually have it). That's the "positive predictive value".

If you add in the fact that the test has false negatives too, you actually get a positive predictive value a bit below 50%, i.e. if you get a positive test, it's still more likely that you don't have the antibodies than you do.

The simplest way to think about this is: tests are most useful if the true prevalance of the antibodies (5% in this case) is greater than the false positive rate of the test (happens to be 5% too in this case). Otherwise a given positive test is more likely to be a false positive.

Of course if you take the test lots of times and keep getting positive, you can rule out false positives. And a person who has tested positive is *much* more likely to have the disease than a randomly chosen person who hasn't taken a test.

But the basic point is sound: antibody testing is of dubious utility as long as the antibodies are rare and the false positive rate is high.

Awesome break down imo

(FPR >> prevalance is one of the reasons we don't screen healthy young people for diseases of old age btw.)

Thank you! That helps a lot. A follow up: those numbers seem to hinge mathematically/scientifically on a survey of the broader, general population where the vast majority of people have likely not had or even been exposed to Covid. But if you just tested people who had or suspected they had Covid, a sort of self-selecting (if not statistically sound, scientifically speaking) pool, wouldn't the PPV be higher? Maybe it isn't useful in terms of applicable data that can then be extrapolated across populations, but it seems that it could be useful for that specific demographic. That is, you don't screen young people for diseases associated with old age, but if you limited screenings *exclusively* to old people, then would the PPV for Old Age Illness X be higher? Does it/can it work that way?

Or put another way, maybe, does this mean that generally speaking the more prevalent the illness, the higher the PPV, even if the specificity/sensitivity is relatively high?

For example, I was looking at strep throat numbers, because strep is so common in kids, and I think I saw that the rapid test is .... well, this is what I saw:

The clinical issue is that rapid strep tests have very high specificity – in the range of 98 percent to 99 percent – so there are very few false positives. However, the sensitivity of most current rapid strep tests ranges from 90 percent to 95 percent, so there is a greater chance of false negatives.

So in the case of the strep rapid test, it's hitting 98-99% specificity, which is good, but does't seem *that* much better than the 95% specificity of the Covid antibody test, and the sensitivity of both tests seem relatively similar (around 90%). Which may be why I'd heard that the Covid test, like strep, is more likely to yield false negatives than false positives, even if the false positive rate is still statistically something to be aware of.

Here we go: Texas reintroducing some restrictions on businesses. Bars close today, restaurant dining to 50% pic.twitter.com/y6Ok8kLPoE

— Christopher Hooks (@cd_hooks) June 26, 2020

Wow, they haven’t even closed bars yet, til now? This whole country is in denial

It's a step, but the resistance to a mask mandate is absurd.

Bars and restaurants had been closed, but were steadily reopening bit by bit since May

2020 headlines:

On Facebook, she denounced a Starbucks worker who asked her to wear a mask. It backfired — he got 32,000 dollars in tips.

"she" then started a gofundme for Turning Point USA, which got $96,500 as of last night.

not really, but that's how this fucking country works these days

i didn't know the medical center in houston that is almost full is billed as the largest in the world!

I'm so fucking upset about all this right now, 3 fucking months of staying inside and not doing shit all for nothing because our idiot leaders cannot do the bare fucking minimum, fuck FUCK!!!!!

PHOENIX — A drive-up testing site equipped for several hundred people in West Phoenix was swarmed on Saturday by about 1,000 people, leaving some baking in their cars for hours.

A nearby testing station has already reached capacity for this weekend, appointments vanishing within minutes. Hospitals are filling up. Restaurants are again shutting down, more than a month after Arizona reopened its economy under the mantra “Return Stronger.”

Arizona has emerged as an epicenter of the early summer coronavirus crisis as the outbreak has expanded, flaring across new parts of the country and, notably, infecting more young people.

Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, is recording as many as 2,000 cases a day, “eclipsing the New York City boroughs even on their worst days,” warned a Wednesday brief by disease trackers at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, which observed, “Arizona has lost control of the epidemic.”

But physicians, public health experts, advocates and local officials say the crisis was predictable in Arizona, where local ordinances requiring masks were forbidden until Gov. Doug Ducey (R) reversed course last week. State leaders did not take the necessary precautions or model safe behavior, these observers maintain, even in the face of compelling evidence and repeated pleas from authoritative voices.

“We have failed on so many levels,” said Dana Marie Kennedy, the Arizona director of AARP, who said her organization has yet to receive a response to four letters outlining concerns to the governor. She is working on a fifth.

Neither the governor’s office nor the state health department responded to requests for comment.

At critical junctures, blunders by top officials undermined faith in the data purportedly driving decision-making, according to experts monitoring Arizona’s response. And when forbearance was most required, as the state began to reopen despite continued community transmission, an abrupt and uniform approach — without transparent benchmarks or latitude for stricken areas to hold back — led large parts of the public to believe the pandemic was over.

And now, Arizona is facing more per capita cases than recorded by any country in Europe or even by hard-hit Brazil. Among states with at least 20 people hospitalized for covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, no state has seen its rate of hospitalizations increase more rapidly since Memorial Day.

How Arizona ‘lost control of the epidemic’

doesn't even need to mention that the president decided to hold a campaign rally with hitler youth in an indoor 3,000 church just a few days, even though all of the above was already exceedingly clear, and few of the hitler youth wore masks, in deference to the notoriously non-tacky and tasteful aesthetics and non-vanity of the president, and no one ever asked them to, either, at least not from the stage

they should be scared, they all deserve to fucking die

― time is running out to pitch in $5 (Karl Malone)

I just don't want this post to vanish under the fold without a resounding "KARL OTM"

heh, thanks sleeve

i immediately wanted to rescind it. i am a bad place, generally, and am going to cut myself off before i get really fucking annoying

self-care is revolutionary, man, practice it <3

No they deserve to die and I hope they burn in hell

http://www.activeresponsetraining.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/let-the-hate-flow-through-you2-768x498-620x402.jpg

i meant "i am in a bad place", but "i am a bad place" is better, and i request that you send all the dead assholes to my place when they're done here

get in my fucking lodge, republicans

caek do you teach medical students? in my experience our stats training was woeful and I had to basically self-teach what I didn't remember from undergrad

does this mean that generally speaking the more prevalent the illness, the higher the PPV, even if the specificity/sensitivity is relatively high?

yes

you can fill out this table with some simple round numbers and see how changing the prevalence, sens/spec, etc, one at a time changes the PPVs and NPVs

whoops https://www.medcalc.org/calc/diagnostic_test.php

So that would just have to shake out over time the more prevalent covid becomes, right? That is, the PPV is lower than 50% because it's not that widespread yet, so statistically, on paper, it's likely that a lot of those positives are false positives. But that's based on projection, right? It's also possible, if less statistically likely, that in practice all of those positives are in fact true positives?