The Coronavirus Thread

[Brian Peacock]

Amateurs.

[Cunt]

Report on the news how some group of scientists here are testing covid-19 in the wastewater. Shows promise.

I've wondered why they don't do more of their tracking there. I bet you could (given sensitive enough tests) detect disease down to the street, then the house. Little test-fish swimming up the effluent...if they are 'nano-fish', they could even swim up the posterior of the infected animal.

[Tero]

It would not be useful, joking aside. Coronavirus does not spread by the fecal oral route.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fecal–oral_route

[Brian Peacock]

True, it doesn't spread that way, but it could be used as an indicator.

[Cunt]

It would not be useful, joking aside. Coronavirus does not spread by the fecal oral route.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fecal–oral_route

If I had a solid (hehe) presence/absence test, and could detect the virus in effluent, it WOULD be useful, even if it isn't a vector for spreading disease (because we mainly handle our effluent correctly)

[Tero]

It's been found in air particles far away from patients. So what?

It would only be useful in monitoring a large building at actime. You could quarantee the whole building. But you would still need to test all in it to release it.

[Cunt]

It's been found in air particles far away from patients. So what?

It would only be useful in monitoring a large building at actime. You could quarantee the whole building. But you would still need to test all in it to release it.

You aren't thinking big enough. If you could track it up the pipes, you could identify the specific toilet being used by the infected subject.

So it depends on testing infrastructure. I would suggest a sensor which could install in a standard 4" cleanout, but the presence/absence test doesn't exist, so I doubt it is possible.

[Tero]

If you monitored those toilets closely enough, maybe you could see some of those crotches you are so interested in.

[JimC]

Now, no need to get crotchety, Tero...

[JimC]

At Hong Kong Airport:

Meanwhile, Intelligent Sterilisation Robots have been deployed in public toilets and other busy areas around the terminal.

Equipped with ultraviolet light and air sterilisers, the autonomous robots can kill up to 99.99 per cent of bacteria in the air and on surfaces within their immediate vicinity in 10 minutes, the airport said.

The accompanying photo had an eerie resemblance to a Dalek. It would be so cool if they were given a sound-track saying "Exterminate, exterminate..."

[Scot Dutchy]

What I have been saying about the data? It is virtually impossible to make comparisons.

Coronavirus deaths: how does Britain compare with other countries?

It’s tempting to try to construct a league table, but we’ll have to wait months, if not years, for the true picture

At prime minister’s questions on Wednesday, Keir Starmer said he had added up a total of 27,241 coronavirus deaths so far, leaving the UK “possibly on track to have the worst death rate in Europe”.

Is he right? Unfortunately, measuring the impact of the virus is a fiendishly complex task. It’s nothing like keeping score in a game. Starmer, as a lawyer, would know that we have to define our terms carefully. And so, assuming we want to make a comparison based on death rates, we first need to decide what a death rate is.

You would think it would be easy for a bean-counting statistician to count deaths – the one certain thing (apart from taxes). But it is remarkably difficult. I have stopped taking much notice of the number given out at the daily press conferences, as it is only based on reports from hospitals, oscillates wildly around weekends, and recently included deaths that occurred a month ago. And this week the number of UK deaths jumped up by nearly 5,000 to 26,097 in one day – rather close to Starmer’s count – by retrospectively including non-hospital deaths that had tested positive for the virus.

But even this is too low, as it does not include the many deaths of people who were not tested. The Office for National Statistics data on death registrations is the last word, although inevitably delayed by around 10 days, and these figures would be expected to take the current total to significantly more than 30,000. But we should be very cautious in comparing even this uncertain total with those of other countries.

Also which regimes do you trust? I would say very few. Asian countries are well known for fiddling. African countries? You cant trust anything there. American states;depends which colour they are.

And Covid-19 is a disease of crowded areas – New York is rather different from Reykjavik. An obsessive comparison is being made between Norway and Sweden: Sweden’s more relaxed social distancing policies may or may not have been instrumental in their current death rate being 233 per million, compared with Norway’s 38.

Even if we reach some sort of stable situation – if we can imagine it – will we ever know the direct and indirect health effects of the epidemic, taking into account reduced road accidents, the benefits of reduced pollution, the effects of recession and so on? Many studies will try to disentangle all these, but my cold, statistical approach is to wait until the end of the year, and the years after that, when we can count the excess deaths. Until then, this grim contest won’t produce any league tables we can rely on.

You will never be able to say if lock down worked or not as you cant trust the data. Also the numbers are so low anyway.

[Galaxian]

BTW: what have you been doing to pass the time during lockdown? Cunt's been virtually racing people online, Sean's built himself a chicken coup to practice the guitar in, Svarty's memorising the entire Judge Dredd canon, pErvy's been training for a shark surfing challenge, lak's been driving round late at night shouting obscenities at people three streets over, Jim's been experimenting with different amounts of tonic water, and I've picked up my brushes for the first time in years.

Apart from off-planet excursions, I've been working, doing useful service for society... that's why I don't live on this site, like some.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MY8Nfzcn1qQ


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCc2JsAUkwU


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnmMNdi ... nmMNdiCz_s

[rainbow]

Apart from off-planet excursions, I've been working, doing useful service for society... that's why I don't live on this site, like some.

Have your alien masters got you on janitorial duty?

[Cunt]

...

I read your words, but haven't bothered with your videos.

It means you sound like an idiot here, since you make grand claims, then point to unwatched videos for your 'evidence'.

Still enjoy reading you, but if you were trying to make a point, you should maybe do without the vids. If you can't make your own case with words, you might not have one...

[Brian Peacock]

BTW: what have you been doing to pass the time during lockdown? Cunt's been virtually racing people online, Sean's built himself a chicken coup to practice the guitar in, Svarty's memorising the entire Judge Dredd canon, pErvy's been training for a shark surfing challenge, lak's been driving round late at night shouting obscenities at people three streets over, Jim's been experimenting with different amounts of tonic water, and I've picked up my brushes for the first time in years.

Apart from off-planet excursions, I've been working, doing useful service for society... that's why I don't live on this site, like some...

Yeah, but some of us are really old, and/or retired, and some of us are infirm, and some of us are old and infirm, so cut us some slack eh? It might look like we're living on the site but most of the time we're either dozing or looking for that thing we just put down a moment ago but now can't remember what it was or where we left it. What useful work have you been doing for society, besides preparing for the arrival of the invading hulk fleet of course?