To be very angry the government is lying to us.

[user1468867871]

Followers of Professor Sikora ( head of Rutherford Cancer Centres) were shocked when he revealed last night that the government has been lying to us. They have been hugely inflating numbers of people dying from COVID. They have been trawling the database of dead people and anyone who dies and has had a Covid test is being recorded as dying with Covid. This is because they seriously over estimated how dangerous the virus was at the beginning. Cancer patient have been denied treatment, children missing education and millions unemployed because the modeling was wrong and they’ve doubled down.
mobile.twitter.com/ProfKarolSikora/status/1283851195396902912

I imagine that very few people on this thread would trust the current tragic excuse for a government to organise a dollies’ tea party. And this way of collecting data probably does now need adjusting because we’ve reached the point where it could make a noticeable difference (it wouldn’t before).

But accusing them of systematically manipulating the data to make it look as if the disease is worse than it is and UK deaths have been amongst the worst in the world makes no sense whatsoever. It only makes them look bad.

Excess deaths in a year is going to be much more enlightening than month by month during a plague

Hang on, you expected your government to tell the truth?! Wow you've been naive 😂

However I don't believe that they have inflated the numbers deliberately. Its in their interests to pretend that it's gone away really, not make the numbers larger. Otherwise it's going to make the future very shit. Why would they want to scare people into staying home and not spend money? They want you to spend money. They don't want you at home, even if it's potentially bad for your health.

People have died from covid 19, that is indisputible. We are being asked to social distance and wear a mask to stop the spread of a potentially deadly virus. Who gives a fuck who said what? Would it be better to be like Trump and play it down? I don't understand the constant threads moaning about safety measures and gleefully putting up any info they can find to discredit Covid numbers. Just follow the guidelines and get on with your life as best you can.

@BeijingBikini

The excess deaths are not going to all be from Covid though. Many will be due to the lockdown policy and not getting adequate healthcare for heart attacks, strokes, cancer, dementia e.t.c. Sounds like hospitals were never overrun or even at risk from it, I've heard several stories that they were in fact quite empty during the peak.

It’s like Y2K all over again. Lots of people do lots of things to mitigate or prevent a bad thing. Bad thing doesn’t happen. Idiots on the Internet say, ‘See, there was never anything to worry about. All over-reaction’. The NHS wasn’t overwhelmed because of lockdown. The excess death toll is huge. Yes, I accept maybe some people died because of health care changes (these were caused by Covid, not lockdown - no lockdown would have caused the same issues) but equally some causes of death will have been reduced - car accidents, extreme sports etc. However, the vast majority of them will have been people who died because they contracted covid.

The NHS wasn’t overwhelmed because of lockdown

But you have absolutely no evidence of that. There is 0 evidence, apart from a discredited model from a scientist who has consistently been wrong, that the NHS would have been overwhelmed without a lockdown. Look at Sweden. No lockdown, hospitals not overwhelmed, and they actually have even less hospital beds per capita than we do.

@BeijingBikini

The NHS wasn’t overwhelmed because of lockdown

But you have absolutely no evidence of that. There is 0 evidence, apart from a discredited model from a scientist who has consistently been wrong, that the NHS would have been overwhelmed without a lockdown. Look at Sweden. No lockdown, hospitals not overwhelmed, and they actually have even less hospital beds per capita than we do.

What do you think caused the peak?

Well obviously covid caused the covid peak But "without lockdown the NHS would have been swamped" is complete speculation; there is no way to know what would have happened (unless you believe Neil Ferguson's consistently dodgy modelling), but based on countries that did not have a lockdown, most likely we would not have been overwhelmed. I think the decision to cancel all routine care and terrify everyone into staying at home caused a significant proportion of excess deaths, as people did not turn up to A&E even for serious conditions. The A&E statistics for April/May are all on the government websites, as are the ones for the amount of cancer screening and treatment that got cancelled.

I know an ITU dr from one of the worst hit hospitals in London and they absolutely were overwhelmed. He still finds it incredibly difficult to process, even now numbers are falling and they are readying for another spike in the autumn.

@parallax80

The nasopharyngeal swab test has in the region of 30% false negative rate, so it would be expected that for every 100 negative tests, 30 people would actually have Covid.

The two ways of determining this more clearly are:

1. if the person is alive, they can be intubated, ventilated and have more invasive samples taken to test for covid (not 100% accurate)
2. if they are dead they can have a post-mortem for tissue sampling and testing (not 100% accurate, lack of histopathologists to carry out PM would mean deaths would wait months before certification, many families are not keen on their relative having a post-mortem)

Is this right? I thought it was that for every 100 people with covid 70 would get a positive test and 30 would have a negative test. Which isn’t quite the same thing. It would come to about 2% of all negative tests I think.

Obviously if you’ve got 642 new infections a day this is still 275 people a day getting a negative test when they have covid and not having their contacts traced or continuing self-isolating.

Yes you’re right Rafa and parallax is wrong (probably just typing in haste).

Clearly if you traveled to a hitherto undiscovered region of the Amazon or the International Space Station and tested one hundred people who’d had no contact with the outside world and got 100 negative results then you could rely on them all being correct. But if you went to a COVID ward and did 100 tests you might get 30 negative results and those would probably all be wrong - the doctors would rightly ignore them. It makes Test and Trace in hotspots quite a hit and miss strategy.

I’d interested to see if the false neg rate was still 30% when the tests were self administered vs being done by someone trained to take the swab.

I suspect the whole U.K. test and trace strategy is still a bit hit and miss regardless of the accuracy of the test.

Yes apologies, post nights! It should read for every 100 tests in Covid, 30 would be positive but have a negative test.

As above the actual usefulness of a negative depends on the pre-test probability / prevelance.

We had loads of people with multiple negative NP swabs who were positive on broncheoalveolar lavage.