Coronavirus

[wheres the pies]

useless cunts can’t even get the time right for there press conference now at 17hrs 

[wheres the pies]

Fuck press conference now at 18.30 hrs bojo will need time to wake up from his afternoon nap 

[exile]

5 minutes ago, wheres the pies said:

Fuck press conference now at 18.30 hrs bojo will need time to wake up from his afternoon nap 

Is he watching the rugby?

[wheres the pies]

9 minutes ago, exile said:

Is he watching the rugby?

After scoffing 2 bottles of red at lunchtime he needs time to recover 

[slasher]

I wish people would stop talking about the virus like its an actual guy eg 'the virus doesn't care about this', or 'the virus doesn't differentiate between this or that.' 

It's a bacterial infection, not some fuckin Bond villain with a dastardly, cunning plan ya cunts! 👊

[phart]

it's a virus not a bacteria

If we're getting pedantic about terms 😛

[phart]

Went onto twitter and the people who don't believe the scientists are going on about how the news conference had "complex graphs" designed to confound etc.

Those graphs are simple as fuck. They aren't complex information at all. It's wild to me folk think they're complex.

[wheres the pies]

1 hour ago, slasher said:

I wish people would stop talking about the virus like its an actual guy eg 'the virus doesn't care about this', or 'the virus doesn't differentiate between this or that.' 

It's a bacterial infection, not some fuckin Bond villain with a dastardly, cunning plan ya cunts! 👊

Hello slasher no seen you on here for a wee while hope your well my son 👍

[slasher]

1 hour ago, phart said:

it's a virus not a bacteria

If we're getting pedantic about terms 😛

I'm pedantic? 

You're a fuckin hoot ya cunt! 😂

44 minutes ago, wheres the pies said:

Hello slasher no seen you on here for a wee while hope your well my son 👍

I'm grand m8, hope you and yours are all well 👍

[Grim Jim]

Quote

Folks – so sorry that you’ve had to hear about all this from the newspapers today

🙄

[Orraloon]

8 minutes ago, slasher said:

I'm pedantic? 

You're a fuckin hoot ya cunt! 😂

 

You slagged folk off for saying something ignorant then you then in your very next sentence you said something equally as ignorant.

I think phart was just trying to point out your mistake.

[slasher]

6 minutes ago, Orraloon said:

You slagged folk off for saying something ignorant then you then in your very next sentence you said something equally as ignorant.

I think phart was just trying to point out your mistake.

Not sure if every cunt on here has lost their sense of humour or not but you get extra wanker points for jumping on board 👍

[phart]

I was being tongue in cheek. I thought two emoji's would be enough to convey that, never read the room right though.

[phart]

I should stop reading social media i think. I never used to bother with it.

One thing you suddenly get understanding of is why the tobacco industry was able to successfully survive. Just need a minority of contrarian scientist then amplify their message.

A couple of good books on it

[phart]

 

[phart]

I was out for a walk and listening to a Real London podcast interviewing the theoretical physicist Sean Carrol (Caltech) and he mentioned a study about how they gave people the same fairly complex maths problem but disguised it in non-political language and then in political language.

The political question side of the same problem absolutely derailed peoples ability to solve the problem in comparison with the non-political. The problem was hard enough that 60% of folk got it wrong anyway.

" Survey respondents performed wildly differently on what was in essence the same basic problem, simply depending upon whether they had been told that it involved guns or whether they had been told that it involved a new skin cream. What’s more, it turns out that highly numerate liberals and conservatives were even more—not less—susceptible to letting politics skew their reasoning than were those with less mathematical ability."

This is no easy problem for most people to solve: Across all conditions of the study, 59 percent of respondents got the answer wrong. That is, in significant part, because trying to intuit the right answer by quickly comparing two numbers will lead you astray; you have to take the time to compute the ratios.

Not surprisingly, Kahan’s study found that the more numerate you are, the more likely you are to get the answer to this “skin cream” problem right. Moreover, it found no substantial difference between highly numerate Democrats and highly numerate Republicans in this regard. The better members of both political groups were at math, the better they were at solving the skin cream problem.

 

Most strikingly, highly numerate liberal Democrats did almost perfectly when the right answer was that the concealed weapons ban does indeed work to decrease crime (version C of the experiment)—an outcome that favors their pro-gun-control predilections. But they did much worse when the correct answer was that crime increases in cities that enact the ban (version D of the experiment).

The opposite was true for highly numerate conservative Republicans: They did just great when the right answer was that the ban didn’t work (version D), but poorly when the right answer was that it did (version C).

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/09/new-study-politics-makes-you-innumerate/

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2319992

Edited November 1, 2020 by phart

[phart]

So anyway knowing all this i'm totally at a loss to what the best path is through all this mess. It's wrecking my head. Been pretty much isolated for 8 full months now as well. Maybe i'm starting to crack at the seams.

It's all a bit demoralising, god knows how bad it must be for folk in dire financial straits or in the depths of despair.

[Orraloon]

2 hours ago, phart said:

 

I've been reading a wee bit about the discussion around whether it could be possible to use these Ct values to try to estimate the level of "infectiousness" in patients. It seems that there could be potential in this, but also lots of problems. One of which would be ensuring the standardisation of sampling in order to be comparing like with like. Also, the Lighthouse labs can't (or maybe just don't ???) report Ct values but the NHS labs do.

Unfortunately it seems to be hard enough for folk to get their heads round false positives and false negatives that trying to explain Ct values to the general public might be verging on the impossible. 

Folk I've spoken to about testing, seem to find it hard to understand that getting a positive PCR test, in itself, doesn't mean that they definitely have the virus. And getting a negative PCR test doesn't mean that they don't have it. It comes down to probabilities. The PCR test is just one part of the clinical judgement.

[phart]

19 minutes ago, Orraloon said:

I've been reading a wee bit about the discussion around whether it could be possible to use these Ct values to try to estimate the level of "infectiousness" in patients. It seems that there could be potential in this, but also lots of problems. One of which would be ensuring the standardisation of sampling in order to be comparing like with like. Also, the Lighthouse labs can't (or maybe just don't ???) report Ct values but the NHS labs do.

Unfortunately it seems to be hard enough for folk to get their heads round false positives and false negatives that trying to explain Ct values to the general public might be verging on the impossible. 

Folk I've spoken to about testing, seem to find it hard to understand that getting a positive PCR test, in itself, doesn't mean that they definitely have the virus. And getting a negative PCR test doesn't mean that they don't have it. It comes down to probabilities. The PCR test is just one part of the clinical judgement.

I've lost the tweet now but someone was explaining what else goes into it as well.

I think they use it for infectiveness in US. Pretty sure i heard a conversation between one of their scientists and a radio station where they need two 40 cycle clears for them to be cleared as not infectious, this was in the context of Trump holding events in the white house after his hospitalisation.

I'm not very educated on these things though.

 

[Orraloon]

2 minutes ago, phart said:

I've lost the tweet now but someone was explaining what else goes into it as well.

I think they use it for infectiveness in US. Pretty sure i heard a conversation between one of their scientists and a radio station where they need two 40 cycle clears for them to be cleared as not infectious, this was in the context of Trump holding events in the white house after his hospitalisation.

I'm not very educated on these things though.

 

Aye, that's right 40 cycles is the cut off for pass or fail in this particular test. If you do two tests, a day apart, that reduces the probability of false positives or false negatives significantly. But the other side of that is that if they do 3 or 4 tests for every person that fair eats into the testing capacity. I would imagine Trump was getting tested every day. 

Possibly the first test Trump has ever passed?

 

[phart]

7 minutes ago, Orraloon said:

Aye, that's right 40 cycles is the cut off for pass or fail in this particular test. If you do two tests, a day apart, that reduces the probability of false positives or false negatives significantly. But the other side of that is that if they do 3 or 4 tests for every person that fair eats into the testing capacity. I would imagine Trump was getting tested every day. 

Possibly the first test Trump has ever passed?

 

He never took the test, that was what they were commenting on how his handlers were saying he wasn't infectious but they couldn't provide the two tests.

[Orraloon]

13 minutes ago, phart said:

He never took the test, that was what they were commenting on how his handlers were saying he wasn't infectious but they couldn't provide the two tests.

Ah, right. I wasn't following that.

He might have been worried that a test would show that he never had COVID in the first place. 

 

[phart]

On 10/30/2020 at 7:52 PM, Dave78 said:

In the absence of evidence that they're bots / paid trolls, you have to assume that they're genuine but couldn't be arsed finding a unique username, so just used Twitter's suggested one:

 

 

 

 

Social Media Conversations in Support of Herd Immunity are Driven by Bots

Posted on Oct.30, 2020 in Uncategorized by Disinformation Research Group

Key highlights

• Approximately half of the profiles pushing the case for herd immunity are artificial accounts. These bot or bot-like accounts are generally characterized as engaging in abnormally high levels of retweets and low content diversity.

https://fas.org/blogs/fas/2020/10/social-media-conversations-in-support-of-herd-immunity-are-driven-by-bots/

[ThistleWhistle]

19 hours ago, phart said:

So anyway knowing all this i'm totally at a loss to what the best path is through all this mess. It's wrecking my head. Been pretty much isolated for 8 full months now as well. Maybe i'm starting to crack at the seams.

It's all a bit demoralising, god knows how bad it must be for folk in dire financial straits or in the depths of despair.

Keep your chin up fella - what you're doing for your gran is mint mate.  

It's only a small crumb of comfort but we seem to be keeping some semblance of sanity up here.  I read the 'Oatcake' from a Stoke side and the locals down there with this, Brexit and a tory government are on the verge of losing their shit all over the shop.  Couple of triggers one way or another and can easily see civil unrest down there.    

[ThistleWhistle]

Full lockdown coming?  I'll go effective from 9th for three weeks as a circuit breaker whilst furlough is in play and confirmed.  Rationale behind my estimate of that date is purely because I've got two carpets being fitted on the 10th.