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John Bye Profile picture
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22 Dec, 6 tweets, 3 min read
2,800 lorries are now stranded in Kent, with many drivers not even having access to basic facilities. The government appears to have done nothing to help them.
Meanwhile a Sikh charity that's more used to aiding victims of wars and natural disasters is stepping in to provide bottled water and hundreds of hot meals for stranded drivers.

The good news is France has agreed to reopen the border.

The bad news is this only applies to EU nationals and residents, and they must have had a negative PCR test within the last 72 hours.

So it may be a couple of days before things get moving.

CORRECTION: I missed the bit at the end that says in the absence of a PCR test, you can instead use an antigen test which is sensitive to the new strain of the virus, from a list provided by the French health ministry.

This does include the Innova LFTs.

uk.ambafrance.org/Antigen-tests-…
So it looks like the government finally has a use for the millions of lateral flow tests they bought from Innova, after care homes and directors of public health refused to back their use over concerns that they may miss many people who have the virus.

I wonder if the French are aware that the Innova test missed almost a third of people with higher viral load (PCR positive at below Ct 25) during trials in Liverpool?

If so, it's curious they're allowing that as proof that someone doesn't have the virus.

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More from @_johnbye

John Bye Profile picture
21 Dec
In case you wonder why everyone's so alarmed, daily case numbers in London, the South East and the East of England are rising VERY rapidly.

Much faster than the second wave in the North and Midlands in the autumn.

And the rest of the country seems to be edging up again now too. Image
Hospital admissions in those areas are now rising rapidly as well, with the East of England actually seeing the most new admissions when you adjust for population. Image
Both the East of England and South East have now passed the number of covid patients they had in hospitals at the peak of the first wave.

London is half way to its first wave peak and rising rapidly.

And the first wave was in the spring, when hospitals are generally quieter. Image
Read 4 tweets
John Bye Profile picture
12 Dec
The full results of the Liverpool LFT trial have been released.

False positives are much lower than expected, but false negatives much worse.

Liverpool has now paused plans to use the tests on care home visitors, following Sheffield and Manchester.

gov.uk/government/pub…
The good news is the LFTs only gave 2 false positives out of 3,199 tests checked by PCR. That gives a false positive rate of 0.07%, far less than the 0.38% reported in initial tests.

The bad news is they missed 23 of the 45 PCR positives, giving a 51% false negative rate!
We already knew the Innova LFTs were less sensitive than PCR, but they were meant to catch 95% of people with "higher viral load".

In the Liverpool trial though they missed 15% of people who were positive at below 20 cycles on PCR, and 47% of people positive at 20-25 cycles!
Read 16 tweets
John Bye Profile picture
10 Dec
You'd think the Brexit Party would have other things on their mind at the moment, but instead they seem to have latched onto a misleading story about false positives.

Unsurprisingly it doesn't show what they think it shows.
For starters, Cambridge are using pooled testing, which none of the regular test system is.

This means mixing several samples together to reduce the number of tests you need to run, then if a pool is positive you individually test everyone in that pool to see who had the virus.
But a recent study suggests pooling causes false positives.

They tested 17,945 pools. 2,084 of them were positive. When they tested the people in those pools individually, they didn't get any positives from 92.

92 ÷ 17,945 = 0.5% false positive rate.

medrxiv.org/content/10.110…
Read 9 tweets
John Bye Profile picture
9 Dec
Covid sceptics like to dismiss most people dying from the virus as so old they were about to die anyway and somehow don't count.

Ambient music pioneer Harold Budd was 84 when he died yesterday.

His latest album was released last Friday.

He also composed a soundtrack this year.
We'll sadly never know how much more music he might have written had covid-19 not come along.

But people reaching that age have in many ways already beaten the odds. Life expectancy for an 85 year old male is about another 6 years, in both the UK and US.

ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulati… Image
Behind the statistics, every death from covid-19 is tragic.

Just because someone was old or had pre-existing conditions making them more vulnerable to covid doesn't mean they couldn't have led a full, happy and productive life for many more years if the virus hadn't intervened.
Read 4 tweets
John Bye Profile picture
4 Dec
This week's Test & Trace report shows cases falling sharply in the week to November 25th, thanks to lockdown 2.0.

There's also a sudden big improvement in contact tracing performance (which turns out to be smoke and mirrors), and some odd revisions to old pillar 1 testing data.
Cases in England were falling sharply towards the end of November, with both the number and percentage of people testing positive falling by about a quarter compared to the previous week.

There's a small drop in the number of tests done, but it may well be due to reduced demand.
In case there's any doubt about the effectiveness of lockdowns, regional data shows clearly that all areas where cases were level or still rising when lockdown 2.0 began started falling in perfect unison about a week later.

The question now is whether that can be sustained.
Read 15 tweets
John Bye Profile picture
2 Dec
This week's ONS weekly deaths report again shows deaths well above normal in the week to November 20th.

All causes deaths were 21% above the five year average, meaning 2,169 extra deaths.

And still well outside the normal range (showing by the dotted lines on the graph below). Image
Excess deaths are also still tracking the same curve as all measures of covid-19 deaths. Image
And as usual, most death certificates mentioning covid-19 listed it as the underlying cause of death (ie, they died "from" it not "with" it).

87.5% in the latest week. Image
Read 5 tweets

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