re: Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) ***W.H.O. DECLARES A GLOBAL PANDEMIC***

Boom. This is what I have been hoping for. This is why it was so frustrating arguing with buckeyevol who only wants to focus on false positive antibody tests, now we have to consider the false negatives. Which may be significantly higher!

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9.9 million out of 11 million

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1.1 million residents were unable to be found for testing? Haha.

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I think it’s safe to say they are at herd immunity somehow

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Just a random engineer here, and not a doctor or statistician, but 300 out of 9,900,000 is significantly above "herd immunity" levels. To me, it is not close to being accurate.

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So what science do they have concerns about?

Are they concerned the stuff doesn’t help but the science said it did or that the stuff helps but the science said it didn’t?

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It's in regards to this negative HCQ paper.

Which main point was:

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We were unable to confirm a benefit of hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine, when used alone or with a macrolide, on in-hospital outcomes for COVID-19. Each of these drug regimens was associated with decreased in-hospital survival and an increased frequency of ventricular arrhythmias when used for treatment of COVID-19.

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Edit to add: This study caused the WHO to shutdown all of its clinical trials, around the world, looking at HCQ as a treatment.

After doing some more digging, the issue seems cover two papers and has to do with the data company Surgisphere, which provided the worldwide data for the studies and whose CEO was an author on the papers.

The other paper was in the New England Journal of Medicine.



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A Guardian investigation can reveal the US-based company Surgisphere, whose handful of employees appear to include a science fiction writer and an adult-content model

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I think more info should be provided about this employee.

This may be the best article on the Surgisphere stuff.

LINK

But I think it's unwise to speculate that they are somehow in cahoots with some big drug company, as their database was also the basis for a paper that found ivermectin (a very cheap, common, generic drug) to be hugely beneficial against COVID-19, with the result that places like Peru and Bolivia practically decided to give almost their entire populations ivermectin.

Instead of a conspiracy, the more likely thing seems to be bad database management on the part of Surgisphere. To me, it looks like incompetence.

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Instead of a conspiracy, the more likely thing seems to be bad database management on the part of Surgisphere. To me, it looks like incompetence.

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It's not incompetence if many of the problems point to totally fabricated data.

This MD was on it from the start.

Epidemiologist Who Triggered Worldwide Lockdowns Admits: Without Instituting Full Lockdown, Sweden Essentially Getting Same Effect

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Ferguson said:

"It is interesting that adopting a policy which is short of a full lockdown – they have closed secondary schools and universities and there is a significant amount of social distancing, but it’s not a full lockdown – they have got quite a long way to the same effect...Lockdown is a very crude policy and what we’d like to do is have a much more targeted approach that does not have the same economic impacts."

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He mentions Sweden did a 'significant' amount of social distancing, but if you look at the Google Mobility Trends chart, Sweden only slowed down slightly.

What a disaster.

New York Times opinion piece from Hong Kong scientist discussing how it's a better tactic to stop superspreaders/events.

Direct link to their discussed preprint.

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In our study, just 20% of cases, all of them involving social gatherings, accounted for an astonishing 80% of transmissions... No less astonishing was this corollary finding: 70% of the people infected did not pass on the virus to anyone.

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Yep, 2 things helped the virus get out of control: super spreader events and hospitals that were overran and workers started spreading the disease to everyone around them.

Unfortunately, lots of fun places (sports events, festivals, clubs) could be super spreader events so Im not sure what to think there. Hopefully between those that have antibodies already and the 40-50% of the population that have T cell immunity, we will be fine.

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With the current situation involving protests and riots that are being justified and allowed, there is zero scientific, social, or political justification for keeping anything shutdown.

It is not possible to hold both views simultaneously.

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Agreed. It should be back to normal life immediately with no restrictions. The whole shutdown strategy is the biggest travesty of the last 50 years. A total fail all around.