When will this shit end?

[ace56blaa]

4 minutes ago, Pinhead said:

The very definition of a career politician, no?

Yep. - just funny how anyone votes for people who clearly have no interest in actually running a country, except to run it into the ground for their own wallets sake.

Edited September 30, 2020 by ace56blaa

[steviewevie]

latest on Russian vaccine...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/30/a-save-the-world-mentality-russia-places-huge-bet-on-covid-vaccine

[Mr.Tease]

16 minutes ago, steviewevie said:

I don't know...they don't want massive unemployment before the next election, especially in those northern red wall areas.

Seemed to work out fine for them during the Thatcher years. As long as they keep pushing the nationalism, xenophobia and racism, people will happily vote against their own interests

[eFestivals]

15 minutes ago, ace56blaa said:

Well they are going to get mass unemployment - Especially in red wall northern areas which are under tighter restrictions

not really sure about that (the 2nd part).

I would think those red wall areas will be less affected than the average, as they're not really hospitality-industry hot-spots, but the opposite - likely to have fewer hospitality jobs overall.

[Mr.Tease]

14 minutes ago, ace56blaa said:

Yep. - just funny how anyone votes for people who clearly have no interest in actually running a country, except to run it into the ground for their own wallets sake.

Yep, but bigotry and imaginary enemies mean people do this enthusiastically 

 

[squirrelarmy]

2 minutes ago, eFestivals said:

not really sure about that (the 2nd part).

I would think those red wall areas will be less affected than the average, as they're not really hospitality-industry hot-spots, but the opposite - likely to have fewer hospitality jobs overall.

Got to disagree there. There’s masses of hospitality jobs in the North. Lots of music venues, clubs, tourist destinations. Many festivals and gigs. You also have the whole east coast to consider plus the Lake and Peak Districts. 
 

Outside of London, the next three biggest destinations for events and nights out are Newcastle, Leeds and Manchester. 
 

Then you have Blackpool and the many coastal towns which depend on tourism. 
 

We like to drink and party a lot up here! 

[stuartbert two hats]

6 minutes ago, eFestivals said:

not really sure about that (the 2nd part).

I would think those red wall areas will be less affected than the average, as they're not really hospitality-industry hot-spots, but the opposite - likely to have fewer hospitality jobs overall.

We do go out up north you know?

[steviewevie]

4 minutes ago, Mr.Tease said:

Seemed to work out fine for them during the Thatcher years. As long as they keep pushing the nationalism, xenophobia and racism, people will happily vote against their own interests

true...but back then the hardest hit were areas that never vote tory...plus she had the falklands war that saved her. Now those northern (ex) industrial areas voted tory because of brexit, and labour took them for granted etc, and the Johnson/Cummings wants to keep them...which is why they went all keynsian on the economy and to the right on cultural/social stuff. Mass unemployment in those areas will screw all that up. But, this time I think we'll get unemployment more widespread....probably affecting younger people in cities more...and again, not tory voters.

[Quark]

1 minute ago, stuartbert two hats said:

We do go out up north you know?

I've seen the beers you can get in your house. You don't need to go out.

[eFestivals]

4 minutes ago, squirrelarmy said:

Got to disagree there. There’s masses of hospitality jobs in the North. Lots of music venues, clubs, tourist destinations. Many festivals and gigs. You also have the whole east coast to consider plus the Lake and Peak Districts. 

there's masses of hospitality jobs all round the country - but there's a higher proportion in the (bigger) cities and holiday destinations (the coast).

Cities and the coast isn't where those lost red wall seats tend to be.

Edited September 30, 2020 by eFestivals

[Toilet Duck]

26 minutes ago, gizmoman said:

I quoted Hancock because he has stated the less than 1% figure, if it was less than 0.1% i'm sure he would have said. (not that I believe a word he says!) My posts are at odds with what most on here think, in my view the reaction to this has been far in excess of what was needed, in short, the cure is worse than the disease, there is a tendency on this thread to micro analyse the daily figures, graphs etc. and it's easy to get an inflated fear of the disease and ignore all the other problems the lockdowns and restrictions are causing. We need to look at the bigger picture and the long term harm being done (health & economy) I'm not particularly concerned for my own situation, but I am worried for my kids future and the future for society in general, particularly civil liberties, the government have passed a law which gives them far more powers than is necessary to deal with this problem and they now cannot be held to account by either their own MPs or the public via protest. Once governments take on new powers they are usually loath to let them go. Am I paranoid? Maybe, but as they saying goes, just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they're not after you!

So, there's two things going on here. The first is exactly as @stuartbert two hats has stated, depending on the prevalence of the disease the false positives as a ratio of the true positives changes (so suggesting that most positive cases are false is just incorrect). Way back at the start of this thread (or maybe one of the other ones), I posted a twitter thread from a colleague that explained all this better than I can!. This can be further tipped towards true positives if you are testing individuals with symptoms. However, the other way to reduce false positives is to run the test more than once. If, for example, 1% of the 20m tests that have been run so far are false positives (ie, just under half of the documented cases), then if you run them again, the chances of the exact same samples being false positives again are pretty slim (unless they are contaminated, in which case, it's not down to the error rate of the test). This is in fact how the test is run (and is the standard WHO protocol for running the COVID PCR test...indeed it's how we run it at our in-house testing facility). Samples are tested twice in independent runs, the results are entered into a matrix, unequivocal results (ie positive or negative in both runs) are reported as such, equivocal (ie, the results from the separate runs don't match) are run again. A combination of disease prevalence, triaging who gets tested and running the test more than once reduces the false positive rate significantly (and would be how you would better use the rapid tests too, by performing them repeatedly).

Edited September 30, 2020 by Toilet Duck
Typos!

[RobertProsineckisLighter]

28 minutes ago, Mr.Tease said:

Remember when all those hundreds of thousands of people signed up to the nhs volunteer helper scheme at the start of this in March? 

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/03/nhs-coronavirus-crisis-volunteers-frustrated-at-lack-of-tasks

After balls up after balls up, what makes you think they could even begin to organise a system whereby people are forced to volunteer while on furlough, when they couldn't even assign enough tasks to those that actively volunteered? 

I think if you're furloughed and can afford to (a lot can't as the loss of 20% earnings is significant) you're better off spending the time re-training or doing a course, but it's not always that simple. I could as there was a relatively straightforward course I could do to switch to working online in future, but a lot of people don't have such a simple way to convert their work. 

I'm not defending the cock up after cock up, but at the start of this situation I was working for a local authority and was heavily involved in the Covid response work we put out a call for volunteers and actually ended up with more volunteers than we knew what to do with. 

These volunteers were doing things like delivering food parcels, making social isolation calls, collecting shopping and other bits and pieces for the most vuberabke, the council even proactively called and door knocked several thousand properties to ensure everything was ok - there just wasn't the anticipated demand.

 

Which is a good thing.

[philipsteak]

1 hour ago, Fuzzy Afro said:

They should extend furlough for certain sectors but with the caveat that those furloughed don’t just get to sit at home, and instead get drafted in to help with the covid effort (e.g. they can take shopping to people who are self-isolating) 

As someone quite likely to be furloughed again if it happens, I wouldn't object to that. I actually did do this (but delivering hot lunches rather than shopping. There were others doing that too though) when furloughed before. Was incredibly satisfying. As well as giving a bit of structure to my week. It all worked really well around here but it was all organised locally. It wasn't part of the national volunteer thing which sounded fairly poor. 

[Fuzzy Afro]

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2814-7
 

Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine passes phase 1 and 2 trials, advances to phase 3.

 

@Toilet Duck - I thought Pfizer was already in phase 3, so is this a “backup” vaccine they’ve created in case the other one doesn’t work? 

[Mr.Tease]

19 minutes ago, RobertProsineckisLighter said:

I'm not defending the cock up after cock up, but at the start of this situation I was working for a local authority and was heavily involved in the Covid response work we put out a call for volunteers and actually ended up with more volunteers than we knew what to do with. 

These volunteers were doing things like delivering food parcels, making social isolation calls, collecting shopping and other bits and pieces for the most vuberabke, the council even proactively called and door knocked several thousand properties to ensure everything was ok - there just wasn't the anticipated demand.

 

Which is a good thing.

I was hoping that's what had happened - it just seemed to fizzle out in the news and not be mentioned again! 

[JoeyT]

On the bright side tomorrow is October which is the month we've been told we will be getting the results of the various vaccine trials in phase 3.

I'm not sure if I'll hold my breath on us getting anything as I thought originally we would get more info in September but I don't believe that came to fruition?

So question is if any of these are successful / give good results do they quite literally get rolled out straight away? If the mass production which has ran alongside the trials has also been successful then that's the logic isn't it?

[Fuzzy Afro]

3 minutes ago, JoeyT said:

On the bright side tomorrow is October which is the month we've been told we will be getting the results of the various vaccine trials in phase 3.

I'm not sure if I'll hold my breath on us getting anything as I thought originally we would get more info in September but I don't believe that came to fruition?

So question is if any of these are successful / give good results do they quite literally get rolled out straight away? If the mass production which has ran alongside the trials has also been successful then that's the logic isn't it?

I believe that they can never fully tell when the results will be ready because you need to have all the trial members go out into society until a certain number have tested positive - and you just hope that they all, or at least the vast majority, come from the placebo group. So you’re effectively waiting for people to test positive and you never know exactly how long it will take. I think that’s how it works but @Toilet Duck can hopefully confirm 

[steviewevie]

 

[steviewevie]

7 minutes ago, JoeyT said:

On the bright side tomorrow is October which is the month we've been told we will be getting the results of the various vaccine trials in phase 3.

I'm not sure if I'll hold my breath on us getting anything as I thought originally we would get more info in September but I don't believe that came to fruition?

So question is if any of these are successful / give good results do they quite literally get rolled out straight away? If the mass production which has ran alongside the trials has also been successful then that's the logic isn't it?

...and how would they be distributed, globally?

[fatyeti24]

2 minutes ago, steviewevie said:

...and how would they be distributed, globally?

crop dusting.

[Gilb]

8 minutes ago, steviewevie said:

...and how would they be distributed, globally?

Chemtrails...after all that's how the dormant virus got to us in the first place then activated by 5G signals. 

[squirrelarmy]

7 minutes ago, fatyeti24 said:

crop dusting.

Wouldn’t it be easier to just add it to the water supply. Drink our daily dose of vaccine. 

[Ozanne]

12 minutes ago, steviewevie said:

 

This goes along with the data I posted yesterday, hospitals admissions rising in the North will likely lead to a rise in the ICU cases as well. It goes to show that whilst in the certain areas the virus might not be rife it’s still causing big issues elsewhere in the country. 

[Toilet Duck]

25 minutes ago, Fuzzy Afro said:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2814-7
 

Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine passes phase 1 and 2 trials, advances to phase 3.

 

@Toilet Duck - I thought Pfizer was already in phase 3, so is this a “backup” vaccine they’ve created in case the other one doesn’t work? 

Howdy,

they have moved to phased 3. This is just the peer reviewed paper describing their phase 1 and phase 2 data. That process takes a while (even for accelerated review!). They moved in to phase 3 with this vaccine a while back (and is one of the ones that there US is hoping will get EUA pretty soon...they have more interim analyses built into their trial than the Oxford/AZ candidate does, so will report earlier, but their trial is powered exactly the same...needs 150 cases in the control arm, 15,000 people in the control arm, so about 1% need to contract the virus to compare with the vaccinated arm). They do have a backup vaccine, made using the more traditional vaccine development route, but this is the one they licensed in from BioNTech in Germany (an mRNA vaccine). 

[gizmoman]

48 minutes ago, Toilet Duck said:

So, there's two things going on here. The first is exactly as @stuartbert two hats has stated, depending on the prevalence of the disease the false positives as a ratio of the true positives changes (so suggesting that most positive cases are false is just incorrect). Way back at the start of this thread (or maybe one of the other ones), I posted a twitter thread from a colleague that explained all this better than I can!. This can be further tipped towards true positives if you are testing individuals with symptoms. However, the other way to reduce false positives is to run the test more than once. If, for example, 1% of the 20m tests that have been run so far are false positives (ie, just under half of the documented cases), then if you run them again, the chances of the exact same samples being false positives again are pretty slim (unless they are contaminated, in which case, it's not down to the error rate of the test). This is in fact how the test is run (and is the standard WHO protocol for running the COVID PCR test...indeed it's how we run it at our in-house testing facility). Samples are tested twice in independent runs, the results are entered into a matrix, unequivocal results (ie positive or negative in both runs) are reported as such, equivocal (ie, the results from the separate runs don't match) are run again. A combination of disease prevalence, triaging who gets tested and running the test more than once reduces the false positive rate significantly (and would be how you would better use the rapid tests too, by performing them repeatedly).

I've been following this subject (like most on here) pretty intently for the last 6 months and this is the first time anyone has explained the test is run twice! If Hancock, when questioned had just said "we run the test twice to minimise any errors" there would be much less room for speculation and suspicion. thanks again for all your info.