Social distancing, .. what's that?

[artie]

@thepeg It may be true that in the past you needed to isolate and cultivate bacteria in order to identify them but that is rarely the case these days as you now have technologies that don't require them.

Had another quick squint at your post.
Please tell us about these technologies that can prove a virus without isolating and cultivating it? and please don't try to confuse a virus with bacteria. They are two completely different things.

 

[Rorschach]

I have a bad feeling that we are squandering a good opportunity here to let the virus spread while it is doing no harm and come the winter we will regret that decision.

 

[Bacms]

Had another quick squint at your post.
Please tell us about these technologies that can prove a virus without isolating and cultivating it? and please don't try to confuse a virus with bacteria. They are two completely different things.

Three main methods based on HTS are currently used for viral whole-genome sequencing: metagenomic sequencing, target enrichment sequencing and PCR amplicon sequencing, each showing benefits and drawbacks (Houldcroft et al., 2017)⁠.

 

[siggy_7]

I really despair when reading threads like this. There are tens of thousands of really bright people around the world who have spent their lives working in the relevant specialist fields working on this problem. What thought process occurs in the layman to reach the conclusion that they can possibly know better? I get that trust in government institutions is low - blame that on the clots at the top - but on committees like SAGE there are a lot of really bright people doing the best anyone possibly can to inform decision making. It's not just Covid, we see the same behavioural pattern repeated across wide ranges of topics. I genuinely think that our naivety in providing the technology and platforms to allow the type of disinformation seen here to spread will be our undoing as a species.

 

[transatlantic]

 

[AJB Temple]

I disagree. Many members of the public are perfectly intelligent. Some of us have degrees and PhDs. As scientists are making judgements and advising politicians who then impose restrictions on us, we are perfectly entitled to seek to understand the position and question it. Scientists frequently disagree and frequently are unable to provide perfect or even accurate or unambiguous diagnosis. Blind faith in scientists may well be misguided.

 

[Woody2Shoes]

The point about testing is that these do not test for COVID19, only for a (any) coronavirus. So as everybody does many types of coronavirus in them, every test should give a positive result. However for workers in health and the police, the results are invariably negative!
Mmmmm.

I am aware of a melon and a mango having been tested both returning positive.
Also new unopened sterile kits sent off and returning positive.
Yet more Mmmmm.

The reason why there is no test for COVID19 is because the patents on COVID19 expressly forbid any form investigation whatsoever of COVID19. Therefore no test can legally be developed anyway.

 

[Woody2Shoes]

....Blind faith in scientists may well be misguided....

I have blind faith in science - and a lot of faith in scientists. The alternatives are generally poor....

 

[doctor Bob]

I really despair when reading threads like this. There are tens of thousands of really bright people around the world who have spent their lives working in the relevant specialist fields working on this problem. What thought process occurs in the layman to reach the conclusion that they can possibly know better? I get that trust in government institutions is low - blame that on the clots at the top - but on committees like SAGE there are a lot of really bright people doing the best anyone possibly can to inform decision making. It's not just Covid, we see the same behavioural pattern repeated across wide ranges of topics. I genuinely think that our naivety in providing the technology and platforms to allow the type of disinformation seen here to spread will be our undoing as a species.

I get your point, therefore in theory then we should have no say and the place would run better. Why does this approach never work though?

 

[siggy_7]

I disagree. Many members of the public are perfectly intelligent. Some of us have degrees and PhDs. As scientists are making judgements and advising politicians who then impose restrictions on us, we are perfectly entitled to seek to understand the position and question it. Scientists frequently disagree and frequently are unable to provide perfect or even accurate or unambiguous diagnosis. Blind faith in scientists may well be misguided.

To be clear, I am not advocating a position of blindly following science. I myself am not an expert in medical science but take a keen interest in following what is going on with Covid in an attempt to further my understanding. That members of the public wish to learn and be better informed about the decisions being taken is to be commended. If nothing else, it makes for more informed choices at the ballot box. Where I take issue is with people who have limited/no scientific training or understanding of the scientific method, yet see fit to wildly misinterpret expert disagreement to fit their own, often poorly informed, opinions with wholly inappropriate levels of certainty, to the great detriment of society. See anti-vaxxers, climate change deniers et al.

 

[AJB Temple]

I have blind faith in science - and a lot of faith in scientists. The alternatives are generally poor....

The problem is, who do you believe. Scientists disagree about the best way to handle C19. There are opposing factions on climate change. People choose who they listen to and that in itself may reflect subconscious or conscious bias.

 

[doctor Bob]

I'm very sceptical of it all now.

 

[siggy_7]

I get your point, therefore in theory then we should have no say and the place would run better. Why does this approach never work though?

As per my post above, I'm not advocating blind submission to a higher power in some totalitarian nightmare. I am highlighting as issues an aversion to accepting expert opinion that disagrees with one's own combined with an extraordinary amount of over-confidence in the untrained individual that they must be right and the overwhelming weight of expert opinion is wrong, without solid evidence understood in its proper context to support their view.

I think a large part of the issue stems from limited education - when scientists talk about confidence and uncertainty, how many people really understand from experience what this means, for example?

Edit - corrected typos.

 

[Woody2Shoes]

The problem is, who do you believe. Scientists disagree about the best way to handle C19. There are opposing factions on climate change. People choose who they listen to and that in itself may reflect subconscious or conscious bias.

I think that while there is insufficient/incomplete information there will always be different ways to interpret it, but as time goes on - and more information becomes available - the number of different possible interpretations is reduced. Most of the disagreement over the short-term management of covid is between the scientists and the politicians (98% of whom genuinely don't know what they don't know).

 

[Woody2Shoes]

Funny that PPE should have been such a source of problems when so many of our cabinet have a degree in it p)...

 

[Rorschach]

Funny how a lot of the laymen on here said months and months ago that this was all blown out of proportion though and are now being proved correct.

Every opinion I have talked about has had a scientist backing it up, I posted the videos and sources of my information.

 

[siggy_7]

You're entirely missing the point. The fact that excess deaths due to Covid are in any way comparable to levels of other serious seasonal disease such as influenza strains is down to the efforts made to limit the spread of the virus. We don't have a parallel UK to trial an experiment of taking no precautions and seeing what happened compared to how we have fared, but all the models I have seen painted very grim outcomes from such a scenario. Scientists disagree on models and results - that's the nature of dealing in those fields - that doesn't make the course of action we have taken the wrong one. The consensus opinion I have seen is that we were too slow to act initially, took steps to limit the spread much later than we should and suffered the consequences, but the steps we have taken were in time to prevent an even worse outcome. We are now trying to feel our way through opening things up as much as possible whilst taking every precaution to limit transmission whilst we await development of a vaccine that will hopefully limit community transmission. Details of our strategy are being poorly handled and questioned (test and trace, for example) but the overall strategy in big picture terms is not in any significant scientific question as far as I can tell.

Analogous in some ways to the Millenium bug - remember that? Oh, how everyone laughed afterwards and said it was such a waste of money, but the point was that the precautions taken had been effective in preventing a worse outcome. Of course, expert opinions vary on just what that alternative might have looked like, but the general point is that disaster was averted by effective planning and mitigation.

 

[siggy_7]

Every opinion I have talked about has had a scientist backing it up, I posted the videos and sources of my information.

You mean like Andrew Wakefield was cited in the context of the safety of the MMR vaccine? Beware of placing trust in individuals, no matter their qualifications. By all means listen to their arguments, but the more they are an outlier to consensus the more one should be sceptical and scrutinise their evidence and motive. The enormous success of the scientific method is in building consensus through scepticism and peer review - consensus in the scientific community should not be easily thrown aside (although not treated as sacred).

 

[doctor Bob]

Analogous in some ways to the Millenium bug - remember that? Oh, how everyone laughed afterwards and said it was such a waste of money, but the point was that the precautions taken had been effective in preventing a worse outcome. Of course, expert opinions vary on just what that alternative might have looked like, but the general point is that disaster was averted by effective planning and mitigation.

I don't believe you ................ I say this because my video continued to work, they said it wouldn't but it did.

 

[Selwyn]

I really despair when reading threads like this. There are tens of thousands of really bright people around the world who have spent their lives working in the relevant specialist fields working on this problem. What thought process occurs in the layman to reach the conclusion that they can possibly know better? I get that trust in government institutions is low - blame that on the clots at the top - but on committees like SAGE there are a lot of really bright people doing the best anyone possibly can to inform decision making. It's not just Covid, we see the same behavioural pattern repeated across wide ranges of topics. I genuinely think that our naivety in providing the technology and platforms to allow the type of disinformation seen here to spread will be our undoing as a species.

But the scientists on sage are purporting a range of views. It is the politicians who are deciding which tack to take