It’s the same swab that you stick up your nose and to the back of your throat (not in that order!).
Quote from: Stu Littlefair on August 11, 2020, 09:09:01 amIt’s the same swab that you stick up your nose and to the back of your throat (not in that order!). Not at the two drive through tests I've had....
Not according to the governments own datahttps://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/casesAccording to this data cases have been rising steadily since around the 6th July. You can also see numbers in hospital, which are flat.... ....The false positive rate is unknown, and incredibly hard to measure. the fraction testing positive can never drop below this value, so it must be less than a percent or so.However it’s suspicious when no matter how many tests you run, the same fraction comes back positive. That’s more or less what’s happening now.
It would be very interesting to be a fly on the wall at a meeting of SPI-M right now because I’m not sure what’s going on with UK numbers. It looks like cases have been steadily rising since the start of July. And yet there’s been no sign of an uptick in hospitalisation or deaths. Even in the US, where initial spread was amongst the youth, deaths started to rise ~3 weeks after cases did.
Usually you’d expect a 2–3 week lag between cases and hospitalisations at most. One explanation is that the case rise starts amongst the young and later spreads to the more vulnerable. That’s plausible, but like I said, in America that argument was also used and the rise in cases showed up as deaths 3 weeks later, like clockwork.
That could all be wrong - depending on how large the false positive rate really is, but it would be interesting to know if this is being considered at govt level...
Off now anyway to drop my 16 year old off to a beach party with 150 other kids. They have promised to socially distance and as it’s not a pub it must be fine.
You should only be socialising in groups of up to 2 households (including your support bubble) indoors and outdoors or up to 6 people from different households when outdoors.
You must not have visitors to your home, or your gardenYou must not visit anyone else in their home or their gardenYou cannot mix with other households in indoor venues like pubs and restaurantsYou can still meet in public outdoor spaces, including outdoor seating or beer gardens, in groups of no more than 6 people, unless the group includes only people from 2 householdsYou can still meet in public spaces, like parks, where you can still meet up to 5 other people as long as you maintain social distancingYou can still travel to workYou can still go on holiday with your household members, but you must not travel to other parts of the county or country to meet up with other peopleYou also must not visit a care home, unless it is an exceptional circumstance
I'm sure others have pointed it out ad nauseum, but the rules don't make sense. You can go to the pub beer garden with your family, you can meet them in a park, but you can't meet them in their garden?
If one of the rules doesn't make sense, then it undermines the rest of them. I've (generally) given up on listening to government guidance, sure i'm no expert on COVID, but from my relatively un-informed background, it seems like the guidelines weren't drawn up by them anyway.
That isn't to say i'm meeting up with randoms 24/7, but popping into my parents garden the other day (calderdale), chance of catching anything form them would be very slim, and on the way back, the bars down the road are absolutely heaving with no social distancing whatsoever, but apparently it is more appropriate to meet my parents in their? I understand the guidelines (laws?) must be flexible, but I honestly can't get over how shit this has been handled regarding communicating regulations with the general public. I'm one of the "vulnerable" types, so it has been steady for me to understand what I can and can't do up until recently, and now I don't trust govt. advice/rules/laws(?) and i'm not overly interested in staying up to date with exactly what I can/can't do as a result. If I feel like that I can only imagine many others giving even less of a fuck.Been a while since i've had a good rant.I read somewhere that the UK has been preparing for this kind of event for over a decade (no reference), with policy reviews in the last 5 years. Imagine if we hadn't!
My youngest is due his GCSE results which I think will be looked at in the same way although neither him or I are actually bothered as he is going on to 6th form to do A levels and has a place regardless. I took the announcement yesterday as This. Your going to be given a grade that is based on teachers assessment and algorithms based on the schools and national statistics. If your not happy with this result you can defer to what you got in your mocks. If your still not happy with that you can resit in the autumn. All seems fair to me. Can’t really see what other options they have?
We called this week for the UK government to ensure any exam resits were free to the student, and we welcome confirmation that this will be the case.However, the rest of the triple lock approach is wrong. The use of mock exams results risks making a mockery of the whole system, given the lack of a standard approach to mock exams and the fact they are not taken by all candidates.This is a botched attempt at a solution which does not fix the problem created by the classist, racist moderation system, that students’ results will be based on where they live not a true reflection of their own abilities.We still believe that England should follow Scotland in scrapping moderated grades. With its triple lock policy, all the government has done is lock in inequality.
very much being done on the hoof as it’s pretty unprecedented