Same arsehole:
Unsure whether heâs just an obnoxious idiot, or if heâs actively trolling for hate clicks. Probably the latter.
Not exactly happy Friday music.
ââŠafter I got over that first hump of shyness or whatever, I was able to kind of get into the murdering kind of frantic mode.â -Francis
Yep, thatâs some real high-grade nightmare fuel.
It is sad to see California in the third group, especially since Newsom is about to open things up:
This Sunday is Norwayâs big national holiday, â17 Maiâ. Here is what it usually looks like:
The celebration had been canceled, but the PM and royal family just partly uncanceled it.
âWe have an expectation that people are now so well-informed that they know how to comply with the authoritiesâ recommendations to prevent the spread of infection,â says Chief of Staff Harald Nilssen of the Oslo Police District.
Weâll see.
Annnnd the test that the WH uses isâŠ
All of the current tests are first generation. This cannot be overemphasized. It is so incredibly rare that we (medicine) get it perfectly right the first time around. It is usually iterative improvements. All of these are the first god damn iteration. The sensitivity and specificity are not going to be perfect, or often even acceptable. They are what we have for now, but they are not what anyone would call âgoodâ.
CBS news video about the racial contention around the events
No shock at all. None.
We agree on that, too.
In this case, we have a different situation, though.
I did not call for banning links to peer-revied science.
I asked (still do) not to share the SCMP piece on the BBS, which is not BB. This is a community thing. Not an editorial/auhorâs piece. FTR, if any of the BB authors/editors shared such a shit piece of corona pop sci, I would be dissapointed and say so express my righteous anger in the comments. 
The article did not include a link to the original publication. It furthermore claimed that there is more evidence, again without a link. And when I checked for that evidence, it was also fishy, and not science. Then I read the short comm and was sceptical.
If the general public is confused, the least I can do is to call out terrible reporting when I take note. In this case, I am also sceptical about the evidence presented in the original publication, and presented my reasoning. I do this stuff here on the community forum as well as with my personal contacts whenever possible. I did this in March
The âfactâ that Covid-19 was in France in December already went up and down the newsfeeds. Just try google news:
This is google news. German sources only. I counted: 42 out of them can be considered âtrustedâ news outlets (:cough: and I even count the Kronen Zeitung amongst those
), the rest is stuff like RT and Sputnik news. This doesnât fit on one screen.
I stand by my âfucking nightmare of a PR disasterâ stance, and Iâll try to explain a bit why I am angry about the press coverage for this study.
I think that the news telling people that Covid-19 was in Europe already in December or even November feeds right into the conspiracy bullshit that this virus came out of a lab, was spread using the international military games, and was already in the population much before the lockdown measures were coming into place everywhere.
Even if you donât go full nutter on this there will be plenty of people who did have respiratory and other symptoms between November and March. We call it the influenza season, but this is a general respiratory disease season. I was already discussing with people who say they suspect that they already had it in febuary.
With we are right in the middle of the herd immunity discussion which will not be resolved until we test large amounts of people for (I think multiple!) specific IG-G antibodies.
On a personal note:
I was myself in an ER on the 22nd of December after a month of corticosteroids which didnât help with my cough, and was diagnosed as âwe donât know whatâs the reason, but thereâs definitely something wrong, you should see a pulmonologistâ. I again fell ill on February 20th, I know how it feels to be uncertain about being infected. In Feburary, I knew about the virus already. I actually met my sibling who just had returned from China (not Wuhan) during that period, but after falling ill.
I also know about the uncertainty if I had infected others. After meeting my sibling, and still having one of the worst colds since 2010 (but not with symptoms discussed as differential diagnostic traits) and co-hosted a conference I had helped to organise for >80 people.
Shortly afterwards, some colleagues I had close contact with fell ill with the same symptoms I had. (Which were not like Covid-19, but still hard on them.)
I learned from that. This also influences my perception and reaction to news as well as new scientific evidence in regard to SARS-CoV-2.
I hope this personal note also explains why I am so insistent in my opinion that we should not spread news articles like this one from the South China Morning Post. While I canât keep up with everything, this case caught my attention quickly.
Ok, mabe to early to faucipalm, I need to ask instead:
do people in Finland wear masks already even though they are not compulsory?
And, FTR: my last visit to Finland was in the last millenium. Back then, the people I had contact to were even more distanced than people in Germany and (parts of) Switzerland. And we arenât exactly keen on people coming into our personal spaceâŠ
I canât answer for Finland, but here in Norway they are not compulsory, discouraged rather, and I see maybe one mask-wearer every 3 days or so. This does not bother me at all outdoors, since it is easy to maintain large distances there (and this was a social norm in Norway even before the virus), but I do get a bit stressed in stores by the no-mask norm.
Upthread @vermes82 posted an article which said that with social distancing policies in Finland community contacts were down to an average of 2.5/day per person. That kind of shocked me, as I think this is a very high number, though it depends on what they include in the count.
I appreciate where you are coming from, but feeding conspiracies is pretty unavoidable, at least in the US. Maybe this is more of a unique problem in Germany.
The narrative that everyone with a cold or flu last fall really had Covid had a lot of traction in the US as well, and probably did contribute to the delayed shutdowns in most of the country. However, that is well past, I donât see it having that kind of effect anymore. Today I am more worried about the influence of some tweets a week ago by Muge Cevik at St. Andrews. The tweets themselves were OK, but as newspapers started to run stories on them, first in the UK and then in the US, they have increasingly been distorted into an anti-social-distancing message.
Here is a relatively sane article based on them, from what is probably the best newspaper in the US; I post it in part because it includes a link to her tweets:
Itâs also the wrong test to use to fight the spread of the infection. The body doesnât produce detectable antibody levels for up to 10-14 days post-infection. By the time a case is detected using serological testing, theyâve already gone through their peak infectious period. Itâs like trying to hit a major league fastball while wearing VR goggles with a 5 second lag.
