Let me be as blunt as I can: are you okay with the government response, generally speaking, to those test results?
We're going in circles because we disagree on the fundamental issue: labs/doctors/scientists do indeed have a responsibility to correct the record if/when they see media and government misusing the information they provide. Important facts are being buried or ignored completely. Censorship has made it quite difficult to correct the record or add proper context in case you haven't noticed. What do you think that's all about?
We're not talking about simple differences of opinion that we can choose to accept or ignore here, we're being forced to live with the repercussions and they're quite extreme in some cases. This isn't a scientific study about the value of eggs to your daily diet.
You're singularly focused on how to thoroughly track the spread of the virus and I'm telling you that's a completely separate issue from the manner in which we're reacting to the oversimplified numbers being reported. We're unnecessarily crushing economies, negatively impacting the education of our youth and, ironically, sacrificing hundreds of thousands of lives in our attempt to protect public health.
No, we're going round in circles because the issue you're interested is addressing in different to the issue I'm interested in addressing. You seem to want to me to talk about the media and how they have abdicated their responsibility and how the governments have abdicated their responsibility. And I am interested in the actual threat posed by the virus as a scientific question, and the actual tools we have to control it, as a scientific question. And I objected to the seeming assertion that from a scientific perspective PCR tests are the wrong tool to track the virus, because I felt this was founded on a misunderstanding of how the tests actually work, based on a NYT article that was misinterpreted to claim that detecting a "dead" virus as an infection is a false positive.
And I think frankly I should be able to make that correction (or be corrected myself, if I am mistaken), without getting into a long drawn out discussion about the coronavirus strategy of world governments and the role of the media. And one of the reasons I think it is important to keep the issues separate is to avoid letting our opinions about the lockdowns or the media feed back into factual questions about how the virus is spreading. If you think your government or the media is overexaggerating the threat of the coronavirus as a tool to control you, it is only natural to look back into the statistics and "find" discrepancies that support your opinion.
Because if you want my actual opinion, I think the true threat the virus poses is unknown. We don't know the true hospitalisation or death rates, because that depends on knowing the incidence of the virus in the population, which we can only imperfectly estimate. Neither do we know the extent of the natural population immunity if any exists. Neither do we know the extent to which differences in the rate at which the virus spreads in different populations are due to technological differences, or biological differences or cultural differences. So it comes down to a question of choice under uncertainty, which is never clean or easy.
I find it funny that people bring up Sweden as an example of how it's ok to let the virus spread, when that was the opposite of their policy, which was rather to give individuals
personal responsibility for preventing the spread of the virus. So we don't know to what extent infection rates have been kept down there because of existing population immunity, population immunity resulting from the first round of spread, or successful implementation of voluntary social distancing. The lesson from Sweden may well be that
social distancing can contain the virus in the right cultural conditions. (And maybe those conditions are missing right now in the rest of Europe).
So I would say that any person who just
knows what the correct policy is, doesn't appreciate their, and our, lack of collective knowledge.
, and not use knowledge, put your efforts elsewhere . Your voice is not heard here ...
