Thread by @saifedean

80%: Potential False-Positive Rate Among the 'Asymptomatic Infected Individuals' in Close Contacts of COVID-19 Patients

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32133832/?fbcl…

Majority of testing has so far been done on sick ppl & those in contact with them. The more you test, the more positives you will get, regardless of underlying transmission & infection dynamics. This means infection data is a better measure of the extent of testing, not infection

Death rate data is measured based on people who are being tested, and these are overwhelmingly sick, and most of them with many other conditions. Extrapolating to the general population seems odd.

jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/…

Icelanders did their statistics unidiotically: Test a random sample of the entire population & then look at infection & death rates. If infection rates are steadily increasing then the disease is spreading. Detection =/= infection.

cleantechnica.com/2020/03/21/ice…

Icelanders found 0.86% of the population has the virus.
~50% of virus carriers show no symptoms.
~50% show mild cold symptoms.
Out of 409 cases detected, six are hospitalized, one in ICU, and one died.

This Italian town tested its entire population of 3,000+, twice, 10 days apart. If they had simply kept adding numbers of detected infections, like everyone else does, their data would have shown continuously increasing infection, but instead:

newsletters.cbc.ca/q/1mKcjG3KIss5…

The most interesting thing we learn from Vo and Iceland is that comprehensive testing allows us to see the likelihood of getting sick from contracting the virus.

Contrary to what your favorite hysterics inform you, catching the virus is NOT a death sentence.

In three months, 7,500 deaths have been attributed to COVID-19, around 2,500/month, and most of these had other serious illnesses.

Meanwhile, 2.6 million people die from pneumonia every year, averaging ~200,000/month, or 80x the deaths from COVID-19.

ourworldindata.org/pneumonia#pneu…

This, of course, is when stat-molesters jump in to inform me that pneumonia is known, but COVID-19 is new & its spread could be exponential

BUT, you'd need to base this on something far less moronic than using infection & death rates among the sick to project to the population

So far we know:
-tests have large error margin
-positive tests only associated with small chance of being sick
-vast majority of COVID-19 cases have other serious diseases
-We have 80x more pneumonia cases than COVID-19

Are these good reasons to suspend the lives of billions?

Paranoid hysterics have an endless list of potential scenarios and exponential horrors that might happen from the virus.

One wonders why they don't apply the same level of hysterical paranoia to the consequences of suspending economic production?

Will this virus overload hospitals?

Perhaps, but nowhere near as much as what would happen from the majority of the hospitals' supply chain being massively disrupted by hysteria.

Yet panicking about a virus makes your brain look much bigger than worrying about stupid markets

For example, take this hysteric idiot:

Millions of deaths is a settled matter of fact & refusing to suspend your life can only mean you want it to happen.

But not destroying the livelihood of millions is "inscrutably indeterminate chance of improvement in the economic outlook."

Being hysterical makes you think like an idiot, it doesn't make you infallible, nor does it oblige others to respect your emotional instability or your dumb math.

Onus is on you to illustrate clearly how your hysteria is justified, not on others to ruin their lives for it.

Until you can transparently demonstrate a systematic & reliable mechanism for sampling, testing & tracking infection, illness & death, all of your projections are creative fiction, suitable only for the trash Hollywood movies that conditioned you to be this hysterical.

Coca-Cola makes & distributes billions of bottles of poison around the world every day.

How hard can it be to make & distribute 1 million test kits & collect data over 3 months?

Who decided that the world can afford to shut down but cannot afford to mass produce test kits?

Iceland, Vo, and now the UK:

Just because you found a virus in someone who was dying doesn't mean anyone who catches the virus will get sick or die. All humans always have many viruses.

Catching a virus isn't a death sentence.

ft.com/content/5ff646…

Apocalyptic R0 estimates from Imperial College's WHO-funded think tank have been a major source of terror & hysteria in the media & among experts for months.

They're based on this bloke's thousands of lines of 13-year old C code, and this publication & review process:

This is the full Oxford study mentioned in the FT article above:

Coronavirus may have infected half of UK population

dropbox.com/s/oxmu2rwsnhi9…

The 'gold standard' for COVID-19 testing is the PCR test.

The CDC's instructions suggest it may not be entirely reliable, but offers no data on its accuracy. Please share if you find any.

fda.gov/media/134922/d…