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23 Nov, 5 tweets, 2 min read
Shocking scenes at Randox's lab in last week's @C4Dispatches report.

Staff crammed together on 12 hour shifts, huge stacks of boxes waiting to be unpacked, delays processing tests, samples accidentally thrown away, faulty tubes leaking, sealed tubes jumbled together in boxes...
It's no surprise Randox seems to have one of the worst void rates in the Lighthouse Lab network.

Especially after previous scandals at the company, and cases where covid tests had to be binned or shipped overseas when they couldn't keep up.

google.com/amp/s/amp.belf…
And yet despite these failings there don't seem to be significant numbers of false positives.

The same lab handles tests from Premiership Rugby. In late August / early September, when they were running over capacity, their positivity rate was under 0.1%.

If a lab this shambolic still doesn't produce significant false positives, we can be fairly confident they're not a big problem.

See also Milton Keynes, which had an FPR below 0.05% when a whistleblower contacted Health & Safety about serious concerns.

lockdownsceptics.org/false-positive…
Of course, what would really be useful is for data to be released for individual labs and testing routes so we can compare their results.

A leak to the Sunday Times in September showed this data is tracked internally.

But we don't get to see it.

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More from @_johnbye

John Bye Profile picture
24 Nov
The latest ONS report shows another rise in excess deaths in the week to November 13th.

All causes deaths were 18% above the five year average, meaning 1,917 extra deaths.

Still far above the highest number of deaths we've seen in any of the last five years. Image
And excess deaths are still following almost exactly the same curve as all measures of covid-19 deaths (due to, involving, and within 28 days of a test).

This is not a coincidence. Image
As usual, the vast majority of death certificates in that week which mentioned covid-19 had it listed as the underlying cause of death - 88%.

In other words, people are mostly dying "from" covid-19, not "with" it. Image
Read 7 tweets
John Bye Profile picture
22 Nov
The @DailyMailUK and @RossjournoClark have published another article downplaying the second wave, which got a government health warning from @DHSCgovuk, who said it was "misleading".

That's putting it mildly.

Here are a few of the issues I spotted...
1) They claim half of all hospitals don't have any covid-19 patients.

That's because they counted mental health units, cosmetic surgeries, community health centres and specialist units like Moorfields Eye Hospital. These would NEVER treat covid patients.

2) They claim 1,293 less hospital beds are occupied than last November.

But they're comparing one day (November 5th) in 2020 to the average for a whole quarter (October to December) in 2019!

NOT the November average, as they say.

This clearly isn't a useful comparison.
Read 14 tweets
John Bye Profile picture
20 Nov
So where we are is:

1) Priti Patel claims she didn't know that shouting and swearing at people working for you is bad.

2) Boris Johnson is fine with this kind of behaviour from his ministers.

3) His adviser on ministerial standards isn't, and has promptly resigned.
Lest we forget, Patel is no stranger to breaching ministerial standards, after she was caught having secret meetings with the Israeli government while supposedly on holiday, and was forced to resign from her job as International Development Secretary.

bbc.co.uk/news/amp/uk-po…
And now the senior civil servant whose departure from the Home Office sparked the investigation has weighed in, saying that, contrary to Patel's claims that she didn't know she was upsetting people, he'd talked to her repeatedly about her behaviour.

Read 5 tweets
John Bye Profile picture
6 Nov
Biden is almost 4 million votes ahead nationwide, but the outcome of the US election came down to a few thousand votes in 4 states.

Thanks to the electoral college, 33 of 50 states didn't get a single visit from either candidate.

There was no point even contesting most states!
It's not like this is a new problem.

The electoral college was a fine idea in theory, 230 years ago. But it broke down within a few years.

After two centuries of tinkering with local and national rules it's just a confusing mess that bears no resemblance to the original idea.
In an increasingly polarised two party system, where 48 out of 50 states give all their electors to the candidate who gets the most votes, it's horribly broken.

All the effort usually goes into fighting a handful of "battleground states" while everyone else is taken for granted.
Read 6 tweets
John Bye Profile picture
5 Nov
This week's Test & Trace report is out, showing cases continuing to rise last week, despite a dip in testing.

Test turnaround times continued to improve, but both testing and contact tracing are still performing far below the levels they need to reach to be effective.
The government claimed big increases in lab capacity last week, but the number of tests done and people tested in England actually dipped slightly compared to the previous week.

Despite this more people tested positive, leading to another rise in positivity rates.
In fact, the only Pillar 2 testing that went up was "Satellite" tests, which is mostly regular screening of asymptomatic care home staff and residents.

If you strip repeat tests out, the positivity rate for people tested for the first time in the community reached almost 24%!
Read 16 tweets
John Bye Profile picture
4 Nov
Here we go again. The government just released updated guidance for schools, a few hours before it takes effect as the second lockdown begins.
At the end of August the government updated (pretty much all of) their guidance for schools a few days before schools reopened after the summer. Leaving them with the bank holiday weekend to prepare.

And then in September they pulled the same trick on universities.

Read 5 tweets

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