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SheffJeff

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  8. When will this shit end?

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    Posted

    9 minutes ago, thrillhouse188 said:

    There was also a particularly nasty tweet directed at Chrissy Teigen/John Legend that they should rethink their views on abortion after she suffered a miscarriage.

    That is abhorrent.

  9. Best Songs at Glastonbury

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    Posted

    In 2014 I was watching Beans On Toast on the hell stage when there was the power cut so he took whoever would fit into the heaven room and finished his set there with no mics or amps.  Was truly special and he did the explicit version of 'I Can't Get a Gig at Glastonbury This Year' which I'd not heard before.

    Also prior to 2017 glastonbury I'd been stuck in Singapore for 6 weeks and the only thing that had kept me going was the thought of Glastonbury.  The weekend before I'd finally accepted it wasn't happening then on the Tuesday we were given the OK to fly so I landed Thursday morning and drove straight to Glastonbury, via decathalon & Tesco.  When Kae Tempest finished her set on the Friday with 'Peoples Faces' I dropped to the floor in tears which isn't like me.  It felt like that song somehow soothed/sucked all the stress that had been built up in me over the previous 6 weeks and I was me again.  I will always love Kae for that set and that moment. 

  10. When will this shit end?

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    Posted · Edited by SheffJeff
    Drunken typo

    27 minutes ago, Toilet Duck said:

    So, rather than just dismiss this as conspiracy theory nonsense, let's actually talk it through. Kary Mullis was a smart guy, obviously, he wouldn't have won the Nobel prize otherwise (though he was also a bit of an oddball too...check out his company Star Relics where he tried to make money amplifying bits of DNA from Elvis's socks!). This interview was a long time time ago, though still relevant, unfortunately he is no longer with us. He was one of the scientists who believed that HIV was not the cause of AIDS (there's a grain of truth in there, "necessary but not sufficient" is how we describe it now, but it also wasn't as black and white as he and Peter Duesberg made it out to be (he claimed it was just an unfortunate bystander virus))...and that's the problem with many "conspiracy theories"...there is often a grain of truth in there somewhere, but it gets amplified to become the entire story, when science, and biology in particular, is generally never that simple (it's all grey areas, thresholds, spectra, and billions of interactions in complex systems rather than quantal features...unless you are talking about something that is really black and white..ie dead or alive!). 

    Anyway, back to the point at hand. Yes, PCR is so sensitive that it will amplify up bits of RNA that are left over from a recent infection (actually it amplifies DNA, we have to convert the RNA back into DNA to amplify it for COVID). If you cycle the reaction enough times, you will be able to amplify tiny quantities of RNA that may not be infectious at all. There are calls to use the cycle threshold as a measure of viral load, but the way the test is set up, this isn't a very accurate measure as it is prone to vary wildly depending on how much RNA you put into the reaction in the first place, which is a function of how the sample was taken...therefore, you can't really extrapolate across testing sites and come up with an accurate answer. We have our own in-house testing site for our students and we are working up a quantitative PCR that will accurately measure viral load, but it's more complicated than the test that is being used worldwide (and difficult to do on a scale of 100s of millions of tests)...and even then, there's still a problem with that, namely we have no idea what viral load is infectious...we also don't know whether you are at the tail end of the infection or the start (and will your viral load increase and become infectious?...we are talking about a replicating virus, so you would need a quantitative PCR test every day for a few days to see what direction your "viral load" was going in...which is logistically challenging, especially if you have tested positive and should be isolating!)...The other reason we have been using PCR is that up to now, we haven't had any option. A PCR test is dead simple to design, all you need is the genomic sequence of the thing you want to detect. This was published for SARS-CoV-2 back in January, and everyone went off and made PCR tests immediately (and started the process of making RNA-based vaccines too!). So, short of any other option, this was the best we had available.

    Knowing someone is positive for SARS-CoV-2 is important. When they come into hospital, the healthcare workers who are looking after them can get vaccinated for other respiratory viruses and causes of pneumonia, but they can't yet for COVID, so they need to know what the status of the patient is and assume if they have a positive test that they may be infectious, thus they are managed as such. So, the results are neither scientifically, nor clinically meaningless. Far from it in fact. There's two ways to interpret a positive result...1)maybe infectious 2) maybe not...but unless you know for sure, the prudent thing to do is err on the side of caution. There's still far too much we don't know. 

    However, in addition to designing the PCR tests, as the different genes were identified and the structure of the spike protein in particular was solved, new tests started to be developed based on this information. Antibody tests. These allow for the use of the spike protein as bait to detect circulating antibodies to the virus in our blood and are used for seroprevalence studies to estimate how many people may have had the virus (which is useful to study the dynamics of the outbreak). And once we started to characterise the actual antibodies, antigen tests became possible. The antibody tests were designed first as we knew what the different genes did pretty quickly (since it's a coronavirus and the structure of the genome is similar to other coronaviruses), therefore picking the spike gene and making protein out of it to be used to detect circulating antibodies was straightforward enough. Identifying what the best antibodies were to detect the virus (the reverse assay) took longer as it required more detailed analysis (antibody characterisation is more complex than making protein from a gene sequence). But these were identified too and now form the basis of the new rapid tests that are rolling out. These are very accurate, but not infallible. However, they are useful as screening tests (and are way more accurate than other screening tests we routinely use, such as mammography for breast cancer). The nice thing about them is they detect viral protein, rather than viral RNA, so they are more likely to be identifying intact virus. As such, they allow us to switch the question from "am I infected" to "am I infectious" (not with 100% certainty, but better than we can at the moment). At this stage of the pandemic, this becomes a more relevant question. However, while the tests have been designed and validated, they still need to be made in sufficient numbers for us to use them, hence they haven't replaced PCR tests yet. There are hundreds of millions of them coming on stream now, so I would expect them to be deployed in many scenarios (I know you don't like the idea of having to have a negative test to do things, but it might be where we land for a while until vaccines help us reach a degree of protection in the population). There was no conspiracy though to use PCR to artificially inflate case numbers, it just happened to be the only test we had. We will now have different ones, so we can use them differently. It just takes time to develop these things!

     

    I do wish just for one day I had half of your knowledge though I do suspect my first thought would then be 'so I know where we can get some of Elvis's DNA... let's clone the fucker'.

  13. When will this shit end?

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    Posted

    1 minute ago, steviewevie said:

    (I don't understand anything ToiletDuck says)

    Nor me but he's good at dumbing things down for us simple souls... there was something the other day where an analogy of a door and a door knob was used which made things clearer for me, can't remember what that was though.

  14. When will this shit end?

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    Posted

    1 hour ago, Toilet Duck said:

    CDC in the US has published IFRs stratified by age group as well (based on a number of key publications). It's nothing we don't already know mind you...however, they have included several planning scenarios (1-4 are the lower and upper bounds of disease severity and viral transmissibility (moderate to very high severity and transmissibility) 5 is the current best estimate)...there's some other interesting estimates in there too, like the mean ratio of estimated cases versus actual case counts (11-fold difference, IQR of 6-24). If we can get a vaccine that works well in over 70s (or a treatment), then everything changes. 

    image.thumb.png.b6e7e15045557696811d9710c304d952.png

    Sorry toilet duck but can you dumb this down for thickos like me? My friends wife (who's one of the anti mask brigade) posted this data on her Instagram yesterday suggesting its a 0.054% fatality rate for the over 70s where as this suggests its the infection fatality ratio? Not sure what the the difference is but I assume its of huge importance... sorry for being simple. 

  15. When will this shit end?

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    Posted

    3 minutes ago, Fuzzy Afro said:

    It’s pretty wrong that this is the case, but islamophobia would never be treated as seriously by our media as anti Semitism and these attitudes would bleed into society. There are many many people out there who think islamophobia is a good thing. 

    The fact that there's 'acceptable' racism in any society highlights how fucked we really are.

  16. When will this shit end?

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    Posted

    11 minutes ago, FestivalJamie said:

    To be perfectly honest with you, it was just the anti-semitism issues and also having a second referendum and I was fed up of the whole Brexit thing going round and round in circles( it’s been going on for years).

    Im young, I should have probably abstained from voting, although it wouldn’t make any difference as my local area has a labour council anyway. In a perfect world I would vote for Lib Dem’s as I am more for a middle ground approach rather than far left and far right, I just want everything to be balanced and everyone to be happy basically haha (I look up to Angela merkel a lot and wish we had someone like her).

    My vote was probably naive, especially considering I want to potentially live and work in germany in the future and Brexit (especially a no deal!) screws me over with that a lot... so now I’m clinging onto hopes of a polish passport. But I was just so fed up of Brexit on the news every day (although I’m more fed up of the pandemic than I was of Brexit chat tbh).

    But to be perfectly honest, Boris has handled this dreadfully, but from personal opinion Jeremy Corbin just seemed a bit crazy and chaotic and I can’t visualise him handling the pandemic *much* better than Boris has. No doubt I think kier would have handled it so much better than either of them but unfortunately he’s come along a bit too late. 

    i thought the government were handling it better now than they did in March but this whole university and schools fiasco along with the testing problems just makes me realise how dire the situation is in this country, and now we’ve got Brexit to look forward to.. (stitched myself up on that one). I just hope we get a deal or something so we have a good relationship with the Eu and can freely travel and work and live in other countries, clutching at straws now.

     

     

    I don't want to go over the whole anti semitism vs anti zionism argument but BJ is a blatant islamaphobe which is one of the many, many reasons he shouldn't be in power.

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  17. When will this shit end?

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    Posted

    32 minutes ago, ace56blaa said:

    Oh god, At the beginning of the pandemic, I thought Rishi was a stand out amongst a sea of fraudsters, but Rishi has become just as bumbling as the rest of them, yes his policies and financial help have done good. But disturbing how many people fall in love with a politician, because he's brave enough to do his job properly and do the bare minimum to help people in a pandemic.

    Since then he has talking speaking exactly like bojo in court and starts every conference or speech with a ten minute summary of how ground breaking and world beating and how much money they spent of furlough and other measures. When in reality a lot of other countries didn't need to spend as much on financial help specifically for a pandemic because they already had great benfit systems in place already or just improved their already in place infrastructure. 

    Also how quickly did Rishi change his tune from "we won't leave anyone behind" to "I can't save every job" and refusing to meet with the millions of self employed people he has excluded from furlough.

    Reminds me of an Iain Banks quote...

    DADvavgWAAEAw28.jpg

    • Upvote 1

  18. When will this shit end?

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    Posted

    48 minutes ago, ace56blaa said:

    Sorry do you have a link to the specific site-page or the whole document, i just want to read all the data of this for myself, so guessing this doesn't include home transmissions or community transmissions and also what does it mean by an outbreak? 

    Like there have far more outbreaks at school recently but will normally be a couple of students then the rest isolating, whereas i've seen outbreaks at workplaces where a huge number of the staff test positive. 

    Also how much does not having an efficient track and trace in place at that time come into affect, apparently a lot of places didn't even ask for details and then how many people got the virus from socializing but then the outbreak was reported elsewhere.

    Like for example my housemate had 5 people test positive at his work because they had a party. Is that a workplace outbreak or a community outbreak?

    Interesting how schools is the biggest amount on here, what was the breakdown before schools opened.
     

    The only reference to this pie chart I can find appears to be from the morning advertiser website which claims to be the pub trade bible so is no doubt biased. In fact I think the data may have been compiled by pub company bosses but its not clear.

    https://www.morningadvertiser.co.uk/Article/2020/09/21/Will-there-be-a-second-lockdown-for-pubs

     

  20. When will this shit end?

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    Posted

    39 minutes ago, Fuzzy Afro said:

    Let’s suppose that the natural R number, in absence of any social distancing regulations and in absence of isolating those who test positive, is 3.0. It could be slightly lower of higher, but in early March before we started being more careful, the epidemic was roughly tripling every 5 days which would imply R is 3.0.

     

    That would mean that at least two-thirds of the population needs to be immune for herd immunity to be achieved. 
     

    Note that herd immunity doesn’t mean “no one can ever catch it”, it just means that any outbreak will eventually burn itself out because it won’t come into contact with enough susceptible people to infect.

     

    You can think of the effective R number as: Natural R x %age of population susceptible 

     

    Now if we believe this theory that as many as 50% of people are naturally protected, then we are a lot closer to the magic number of 66.7% than we think (given roughly 8% have been infected)

     

    I have pretty good reason to believe that natural immunity does exist. I don’t know if it’s anywhere near as high as 50%, but I know people who have repeatedly been exposed to covid and have not become infected despite trying to catch it deliberately. 

    Why on earth would they try to catch it deliberately?

  22. When will this shit end?

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    Posted

    @sdsm It is getting tiring pal, this is a very useful thread with contributions from very well informed people that has helped me along with a number of others I'm sure get through these very strange times we find ourselves living in. Yet it keeps getting hijacked and diluted by your posts and ungrounded grievances with other members. I know its been said before but why not just ignore this thread and enjoy/contribute elsewhere on this lovely forum. Or at least explain why you disagree with a view point rather than down vote with no explanation.

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  23. When will this shit end?

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    Posted

    2 hours ago, zero000 said:

    Rapid testing isn’t also the silver bullet it’s made out to be. It’s less accurate than the PCR version and could lead to a huge number of false positives if rolled out at the 10m a day “moonshot” scheme. We’re talking potentially 600,000 people per week being wrong classed as positive, assuming 1% false positives. They’re probably going to need to follow up these tests with a PCR tests to get an accurate picture.

    Would it not be 100000 false positives if its 1% of 10m or am I missing something? Thats still a lot I know but I'd be happy with 9.9m people being tested correctly a day.

  24. When will this shit end?

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    Posted

    1 hour ago, onthebeach said:

    A glimmer of a bit of hope in a sh*tty day - I seem to remember reading before that a % of people probably have some immunity from previous Coronavirus infections 

    https://www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m3563.full

     

    I've often wondered whether Asian countries have coped better with covid 19 as they've had more exposure to coranviruses (in recent history anyway) so may have developed some sort of level of immunity. Probably a load of bollox though and its more likely down to the fact that they have better systems in place because they've been had to have systems in place.

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