I've not really paid too much attention to the testing saga, but just watching BBC Breakfast this morning it's starting to make sense. Basically loads of people without symptoms want a test, just because they fancy getting a test. It's like the public's bizarre desire to sit in A&E on a Saturday night.
This is caused by children and young people getting a seasonal cold and the parents fear of covid. In my family my sons daughter (8) has had a cold and a test which was negative after a four day wait and my daughter's son (11) has also had a cold and been told to stay off school and if worse after 48 hours have a test
I was listening to 5 live this morning and an expert on testing provided a detailed explanation of the process and logistics and confirmed that over 200,000 tests a day were being conducted and 20 million completed. If that stat is correct nearly one third of the nation have had a test.
It is clear that the test rules need to be reviewed and tests prioritised across the UK. The idea of some to open hospital labs to these tests is the wrong thing to do as it is prioritising many unnecessary and non urgent tests over life threatening cancer and other essential non covid related tests.
Tests are something the anti HMG proponents can attack the government on but the simple truth is no government of any political persuasion would have any other answer than the one proposed by Hancock of prioritising tests
Many people, specifically front line workers in the NHS and care will quite correctly have had multiple tests. So 20m tests does not equiperate to 20m tested or anything like it. Approximately 100k tests are being given to these front line workers every day. Most will be repeats but that is necessary.
I had multiple tests last week simply because my doctors don’t trust the test. Not sure why.
There is a high false negative rate.
Tests conducted on NHS patients in hospital go to the hospital labs, not to Dido's empire.
There are also false positives. So if you test someone five times and only the fifth comes back positive then what have you achieved with the tests? Why not forget about the tests and be led by the symptoms?
Re: tests. One woman said that when she put unemployed on her application form, she wasn't given a test, so she put key worker and was given one.
And the media are indulging people like her. Instead of asking the government what are they doing to stop people like her making it harder for those with a genuine need, they asking the government why everyone can't get a test whenever they feel like getting one.
Perhaps the rule of six breach snoopers could be encouraged to snoop on test scroungers in their spare time? Wanting to know whether or not you have a lethal, contagious disease seems to me a pretty laudable aspiration. I think a poster upthread suggested satirically that people were getting tested purely for shits n giggles, and was taken literally.
Do people really queue for hours for a ‘laugh’ or have a cotton wool swab stuck up their nose for a giggle? Is it fun to spend hours on the internet trying to book an appointment?
Would the US Congress be happy if the UK government failed in its duty to provide food? I seem to recall an echo in Irish history about that sort of failing.
The government's position on this has been chaotic and stupid. Grown ups have now made it clear that the provisions of the Bill do not breach the agreement at all. They give us the capacity to act if the EU breaches the agreement and sought to hold us to ransom by its provisions. The government has made it clear that the provisions of the bill will not be used pre-emptively. Why the legislation was not presented in this way in the first instance so as to avoid this completely ridiculous row is simply beyond me. Presumably some idiot thought he was being clever. He really wasn't and this letter is just one example of that.
The EU hasn't threatened to blockade UK food nor does it shows any intention of doing so. That's a slander invented by a morally and intellectually bankrupt government to shore up its position. Even if the EU did decide for this Act of War, the proposed bill does zero to address the problem.
It is clear Barnier has and he stepped over the mark but Boris reaction was equalled wrong
In what way is it clear? Seriously. I have seen absolutely no evidence of it, but it could be because I am not looking in the right places. I do not understand how the EU could blockade Northern Ireland, for starters. And if the legislaiotn is all about preventing a blockade, why is state aid a big part of it?
There are now (at least) two sources for the “blockade” story:
It’s entirely possible the EU was simply pointing out the consequences of failure to ratify UK SPS regulation rather than making a “threat” per se - but it feels like the EU could have handled this more diplomatically - and as @DavidL has pointed the U.K. has completely mishandled communication of its response.
Would the US Congress be happy if the UK government failed in its duty to provide food? I seem to recall an echo in Irish history about that sort of failing.
The government's position on this has been chaotic and stupid. Grown ups have now made it clear that the provisions of the Bill do not breach the agreement at all. They give us the capacity to act if the EU breaches the agreement and sought to hold us to ransom by its provisions. The government has made it clear that the provisions of the bill will not be used pre-emptively. Why the legislation was not presented in this way in the first instance so as to avoid this completely ridiculous row is simply beyond me. Presumably some idiot thought he was being clever. He really wasn't and this letter is just one example of that.
The EU hasn't threatened to blockade UK food nor does it shows any intention of doing so. That's a slander invented by a morally and intellectually bankrupt government to shore up its position. Even if the EU did decide for this Act of War, the proposed bill does zero to address the problem.
It is clear Barnier has and he stepped over the mark but Boris reaction was equalled wrong
In what way is it clear? Seriously. I have seen absolutely no evidence of it, but it could be because I am not looking in the right places. I do not understand how the EU could blockade Northern Ireland, for starters. And if the legislaiotn is all about preventing a blockade, why is state aid a big part of it?
He's used to playing tough man and expecting the UK to roll over and play dead. Instead the UK is standing up for itself. Good.
In legislating to break international law and renege on treaty commitments, the UK is making it much harder to secure a trade deal with the EU and the US. These tweets are not evidence to the contrary, they are evidence-free claims that could easily be tested in the disputes procedures the WA envisages.
The reality is that the UK government either signed up to something it did not understand or never had any intention of implementing. Either way it lied to the international community, to Parliament and to the British people. You may think that is good, but if you do you are clearly not someone who believes in democracy and the rule of law.
DaveyBoy - Schroedinger Cake, I like it. Can the cake be inside Boris' stomach and on the table at the same time? Sums up the magical thinking of so much of what they're doing.
Or will they seek to adapt to the new reality? Realpolitik involves dealing with the world as it is not as you want it to be. Realpolitik means if Britain England wants something doing we need to do it ourselves
England has, for the 1200 years of its unified existence, been part of a larger union for all but a about 10% of that time. We have hardly ever “stood alone”. That accounts for our comparative success as a nation. Since the 10th Century we have been in the Danish Empire, followed after a brief hiatus by the Norman Empire, then the Angevin Empire, then personal & political Unions with the other nations on these islands, then the British Empire and then the EU.
You’re a follower of Ayn Rand - she said people have direct contact with reality only through sense perception. You objectivists believe that even if everyone believes in the Loch Ness monster that doesn’t make it exist - ergo if everyone else believes something that exists only in their mind there is no obligation on you to. However Rand never explained the phenomenon of money - odd given how important it was to her. Civilisation rests on humans in large numbers believing in things existing purely in the imagination, such as governments, laws, morality, limited liability companies, civil rights...and money.
You argued the other day (using an anti-German slur) that there was no moral imperative on people in this country to honour laws. Individuals and nations must obey their own moral imperative with thought only for themselves you say. However Ayn Rand, never satisfactory explained why, given money is so key to her philosophy, why we should honour its value given it is a shared imaginary construct dependent on cooperation? Currencies, even gold, have no inherent utility. You can’t eat or clothe yourself in £5 notes. Currencies have value because because parties engaging in exchange cooperatively agree on an imagined value. Lose that shared belief, we are back to a barter system. So to accept the value of the £/$/€/¥ is to implicitly accept the need for humanity to cooperate with one another and share a fundamental belief in imaginary value, otherwise your position is logically inconsistent,
Money is only one example of the need for human cooperation based on mutually shared ideals. It is nonsense to say any nation or person can be self sufficient. Very few countries can exist without outside help - even North Korea has to use the black market to scrape by. Examine the USA’s total success in wars with major allies (WW2, the American Revolution) to, at best, incomplete success in those without (1812, Vietnam, Iraq pt 2). England will have to adapt to the new reality as we always have throughout our 1200 year history, not the rest of the world, who will be cooperating as we vainly attempt to stand aside.
It should be noted that all the congressmen who signed that letter to Boris are from Irish American heavy Massachussetts and New York and all are Democrats with the sole exception of Pete King who is one of the only Republican congressmen left in New York.
Therefore if the internal market bill passes and Biden is elected US President in November and Pelosi is re elected as Speaker of the House of Representatives there is literally zero chance of a US UK FTA, the US will instead shift to a deal with the EU. Boris will then have to focus on deals with Commonwealth nations and build on his FTA with Japan and forget the US for the time being.
Trump of course backed Brexit and likes Boris and Boris could explain to him that his plans mean no hard border within Ireland as well as no hard border between GB and NI however Biden, whose mother was of Irish heritage and the strong lobby of Irish Americans within the Democratic Party will stand firmly behind Dublin and Brussels and tell Boris and the UK government they can forget a trade deal as Pelosi so vocally reminded us in this rant against the British government and as the Biden campaign reminded us (retweeted by Sinn Fein NI leader Michelle O'Neil).
The UK would move from being sent 'to the back of the queue' in Obama's words, to being effectively 'thrown off the bus' under a Biden presidency
I've not really paid too much attention to the testing saga, but just watching BBC Breakfast this morning it's starting to make sense. Basically loads of people without symptoms want a test, just because they fancy getting a test. It's like the public's bizarre desire to sit in A&E on a Saturday night.
This is caused by children and young people getting a seasonal cold and the parents fear of covid. In my family my sons daughter (8) has had a cold and a test which was negative after a four day wait and my daughter's son (11) has also had a cold and been told to stay off school and if worse after 48 hours have a test
I was listening to 5 live this morning and an expert on testing provided a detailed explanation of the process and logistics and confirmed that over 200,000 tests a day were being conducted and 20 million completed. If that stat is correct nearly one third of the nation have had a test.
It is clear that the test rules need to be reviewed and tests prioritised across the UK. The idea of some to open hospital labs to these tests is the wrong thing to do as it is prioritising many unnecessary and non urgent tests over life threatening cancer and other essential non covid related tests.
Tests are something the anti HMG proponents can attack the government on but the simple truth is no government of any political persuasion would have any other answer than the one proposed by Hancock of prioritising tests
Well said.
My wife works on the front line of a care home. She's had a blood antibody test and is getting a swab antigen test every single week. The care home has boxes and boxes of swab kits and all staff and residents have to get tested every single week. They are getting prioritised.
For someone healthy who has the sniffles and wants to get tested not being able to do so may be irritating. If the care staff etc cease to be tested in order to add more capacity for "the worried well" then would that be an improvement? I think no.
Approximately a quarter of a million daily tests are happening but half of that is immediately accounted for by routine testing of NHS staff and care staff and residents.
It’s not just “irritating”, in some cases having a test or not is the difference between being able to go to work (and getting paid) or not.
If you have any symptoms, you have to report it to your employer. You then cant go to work unless you have a negative test or you wait the 10 days or whatever. Not every employer is paying full wages during that time. A lot will get nothing for the first few days, and then SSP (which is literally nothing) for the remainder.
Describing it as “irritating” is just showing how out of touch you are.
The person quoted before who lied on their form changing it from unemployed to key worker, what work were they going to?
Not being able to go to work is bad, I never said otherwise. But if care workers cease to be prioritised then thousands of residents could start dying again.
I've not really paid too much attention to the testing saga, but just watching BBC Breakfast this morning it's starting to make sense. Basically loads of people without symptoms want a test, just because they fancy getting a test. It's like the public's bizarre desire to sit in A&E on a Saturday night.
This is caused by children and young people getting a seasonal cold and the parents fear of covid. In my family my sons daughter (8) has had a cold and a test which was negative after a four day wait and my daughter's son (11) has also had a cold and been told to stay off school and if worse after 48 hours have a test
I was listening to 5 live this morning and an expert on testing provided a detailed explanation of the process and logistics and confirmed that over 200,000 tests a day were being conducted and 20 million completed. If that stat is correct nearly one third of the nation have had a test.
It is clear that the test rules need to be reviewed and tests prioritised across the UK. The idea of some to open hospital labs to these tests is the wrong thing to do as it is prioritising many unnecessary and non urgent tests over life threatening cancer and other essential non covid related tests.
Tests are something the anti HMG proponents can attack the government on but the simple truth is no government of any political persuasion would have any other answer than the one proposed by Hancock of prioritising tests
Many people, specifically front line workers in the NHS and care will quite correctly have had multiple tests. So 20m tests does not equiperate to 20m tested or anything like it. Approximately 100k tests are being given to these front line workers every day. Most will be repeats but that is necessary.
I had multiple tests last week simply because my doctors don’t trust the test. Not sure why.
There is a high false negative rate.
Tests conducted on NHS patients in hospital go to the hospital labs, not to Dido's empire.
There are also false positives. So if you test someone five times and only the fifth comes back positive then what have you achieved with the tests? Why not forget about the tests and be led by the symptoms?
IIUC the PCR test shouldn't produce false positives unless the lab bollockses it up and contaminates your negative sample with somebody else's positive one, although this has been known.
You don't want to be led purely by the symptoms because: 1) Part of what you're trying to find out is whether the person is going to infect somebody else 2) The symptoms may only show up later 3) Some of the symptoms look similar to the symptoms for other illnesses which require different treatments, so testing helps you treat the right thing
The firm where my son works, which does a lot of business across Europe, and outside, although less so, has weekly testing. By a separate testing organisation, on a private basis.
Would the US Congress be happy if the UK government failed in its duty to provide food? I seem to recall an echo in Irish history about that sort of failing.
The government's position on this has been chaotic and stupid. Grown ups have now made it clear that the provisions of the Bill do not breach the agreement at all. They give us the capacity to act if the EU breaches the agreement and sought to hold us to ransom by its provisions. The government has made it clear that the provisions of the bill will not be used pre-emptively. Why the legislation was not presented in this way in the first instance so as to avoid this completely ridiculous row is simply beyond me. Presumably some idiot thought he was being clever. He really wasn't and this letter is just one example of that.
The EU hasn't threatened to blockade UK food nor does it shows any intention of doing so. That's a slander invented by a morally and intellectually bankrupt government to shore up its position. Even if the EU did decide for this Act of War, the proposed bill does zero to address the problem.
It is clear Barnier has and he stepped over the mark but Boris reaction was equalled wrong
In what way is it clear? Seriously. I have seen absolutely no evidence of it, but it could be because I am not looking in the right places. I do not understand how the EU could blockade Northern Ireland, for starters. And if the legislaiotn is all about preventing a blockade, why is state aid a big part of it?
There are now (at least) two sources for the “blockade” story:
It’s entirely possible the EU was simply pointing out the consequences of failure to ratify UK SPS regulation rather than making a “threat” per se - but it feels like the EU could have handled this more diplomatically - and as @DavidL has pointed the U.K. has completely mishandled communication of its response.
It's not just a communication issue. The legislation itself is hugely problematic. There is no conditionality in it. There is nothing that says it is there in case all other routes to solve disagreements have been exhausted. INstead, it gives the government the right to tear up the UK's treaty commitments at any point and for any reason that the government deems fit in a way that cannot be challenged.
I've not really paid too much attention to the testing saga, but just watching BBC Breakfast this morning it's starting to make sense. Basically loads of people without symptoms want a test, just because they fancy getting a test. It's like the public's bizarre desire to sit in A&E on a Saturday night.
This is caused by children and young people getting a seasonal cold and the parents fear of covid. In my family my sons daughter (8) has had a cold and a test which was negative after a four day wait and my daughter's son (11) has also had a cold and been told to stay off school and if worse after 48 hours have a test
I was listening to 5 live this morning and an expert on testing provided a detailed explanation of the process and logistics and confirmed that over 200,000 tests a day were being conducted and 20 million completed. If that stat is correct nearly one third of the nation have had a test.
It is clear that the test rules need to be reviewed and tests prioritised across the UK. The idea of some to open hospital labs to these tests is the wrong thing to do as it is prioritising many unnecessary and non urgent tests over life threatening cancer and other essential non covid related tests.
Tests are something the anti HMG proponents can attack the government on but the simple truth is no government of any political persuasion would have any other answer than the one proposed by Hancock of prioritising tests
Many people, specifically front line workers in the NHS and care will quite correctly have had multiple tests. So 20m tests does not equiperate to 20m tested or anything like it. Approximately 100k tests are being given to these front line workers every day. Most will be repeats but that is necessary.
I had multiple tests last week simply because my doctors don’t trust the test. Not sure why.
There is a high false negative rate.
Tests conducted on NHS patients in hospital go to the hospital labs, not to Dido's empire.
There are also false positives. So if you test someone five times and only the fifth comes back positive then what have you achieved with the tests? Why not forget about the tests and be led by the symptoms?
IIUC the PCR test shouldn't produce false positives unless the lab bollockses it up and contaminates your negative sample with somebody else's positive one, although this has been known.
You don't want to be led purely by the symptoms because: 1) Part of what you're trying to find out is whether the person is going to infect somebody else 2) The symptoms may only show up later 3) Some of the symptoms look similar to the symptoms for other illnesses which require different treatments, so testing helps you treat the right thing
Yes but Foxy was particularly talking about NHS patients in hospital. The assumption, surely, would be that cross contamination is possible with or without a test.
I've not really paid too much attention to the testing saga, but just watching BBC Breakfast this morning it's starting to make sense. Basically loads of people without symptoms want a test, just because they fancy getting a test. It's like the public's bizarre desire to sit in A&E on a Saturday night.
This is caused by children and young people getting a seasonal cold and the parents fear of covid. In my family my sons daughter (8) has had a cold and a test which was negative after a four day wait and my daughter's son (11) has also had a cold and been told to stay off school and if worse after 48 hours have a test
I was listening to 5 live this morning and an expert on testing provided a detailed explanation of the process and logistics and confirmed that over 200,000 tests a day were being conducted and 20 million completed. If that stat is correct nearly one third of the nation have had a test.
It is clear that the test rules need to be reviewed and tests prioritised across the UK. The idea of some to open hospital labs to these tests is the wrong thing to do as it is prioritising many unnecessary and non urgent tests over life threatening cancer and other essential non covid related tests.
Tests are something the anti HMG proponents can attack the government on but the simple truth is no government of any political persuasion would have any other answer than the one proposed by Hancock of prioritising tests
Not true, Big_G. As I’ve pointed out several times, a government planning ahead for schools reopening could (for example) have allocated resources to implementing pooled testing for schools (or indeed healthcare workers). Difficult to do from a standing start, now that the labs are operating beyond capacity, but it would potentially allow the processing of 5-10 times the number of tests.
I've not really paid too much attention to the testing saga, but just watching BBC Breakfast this morning it's starting to make sense. Basically loads of people without symptoms want a test, just because they fancy getting a test. It's like the public's bizarre desire to sit in A&E on a Saturday night.
This is caused by children and young people getting a seasonal cold and the parents fear of covid. In my family my sons daughter (8) has had a cold and a test which was negative after a four day wait and my daughter's son (11) has also had a cold and been told to stay off school and if worse after 48 hours have a test
I was listening to 5 live this morning and an expert on testing provided a detailed explanation of the process and logistics and confirmed that over 200,000 tests a day were being conducted and 20 million completed. If that stat is correct nearly one third of the nation have had a test.
It is clear that the test rules need to be reviewed and tests prioritised across the UK. The idea of some to open hospital labs to these tests is the wrong thing to do as it is prioritising many unnecessary and non urgent tests over life threatening cancer and other essential non covid related tests.
Tests are something the anti HMG proponents can attack the government on but the simple truth is no government of any political persuasion would have any other answer than the one proposed by Hancock of prioritising tests
Many people, specifically front line workers in the NHS and care will quite correctly have had multiple tests. So 20m tests does not equiperate to 20m tested or anything like it. Approximately 100k tests are being given to these front line workers every day. Most will be repeats but that is necessary.
I had multiple tests last week simply because my doctors don’t trust the test. Not sure why.
There is a high false negative rate.
Tests conducted on NHS patients in hospital go to the hospital labs, not to Dido's empire.
There are also false positives. So if you test someone five times and only the fifth comes back positive then what have you achieved with the tests? Why not forget about the tests and be led by the symptoms?
PCR false positives are very rare, and only become significant in a Moonshot type scenario.
If the governing Barbados Labour Party wishes to remove their constitutional monarch that is up to them (out of the 54 Commonwealth nations only 16 still still have the Queen as Head of State anyway) however the whole point of a constitutional monarch is the governing is almost entirely done by parliament anyway
I've not really paid too much attention to the testing saga, but just watching BBC Breakfast this morning it's starting to make sense. Basically loads of people without symptoms want a test, just because they fancy getting a test. It's like the public's bizarre desire to sit in A&E on a Saturday night.
This is caused by children and young people getting a seasonal cold and the parents fear of covid. In my family my sons daughter (8) has had a cold and a test which was negative after a four day wait and my daughter's son (11) has also had a cold and been told to stay off school and if worse after 48 hours have a test
I was listening to 5 live this morning and an expert on testing provided a detailed explanation of the process and logistics and confirmed that over 200,000 tests a day were being conducted and 20 million completed. If that stat is correct nearly one third of the nation have had a test.
It is clear that the test rules need to be reviewed and tests prioritised across the UK. The idea of some to open hospital labs to these tests is the wrong thing to do as it is prioritising many unnecessary and non urgent tests over life threatening cancer and other essential non covid related tests.
Tests are something the anti HMG proponents can attack the government on but the simple truth is no government of any political persuasion would have any other answer than the one proposed by Hancock of prioritising tests
Many people, specifically front line workers in the NHS and care will quite correctly have had multiple tests. So 20m tests does not equiperate to 20m tested or anything like it. Approximately 100k tests are being given to these front line workers every day. Most will be repeats but that is necessary.
I had multiple tests last week simply because my doctors don’t trust the test. Not sure why.
There is a high false negative rate.
Tests conducted on NHS patients in hospital go to the hospital labs, not to Dido's empire.
There are also false positives. So if you test someone five times and only the fifth comes back positive then what have you achieved with the tests? Why not forget about the tests and be led by the symptoms?
IIUC the PCR test shouldn't produce false positives unless the lab bollockses it up and contaminates your negative sample with somebody else's positive one, although this has been known.
You don't want to be led purely by the symptoms because: 1) Part of what you're trying to find out is whether the person is going to infect somebody else 2) The symptoms may only show up later 3) Some of the symptoms look similar to the symptoms for other illnesses which require different treatments, so testing helps you treat the right thing
Yes but Foxy was particularly talking about NHS patients in hospital. The assumption, surely, would be that cross contamination is possible with or without a test.
On "the PCR test shouldn't produce false positives"
If the governing Barbados Labour Party wishes to remove their constitutional monarch that is up to them (out of the 54 Commonwealth nations only 16 still still have the Queen as Head of State anyway) however the whole point of a constitutional monarch is the governing is almost entirely done by parliament anyway
This all ends with Irish reunification. Might as well get on with it.
Or a return to the troubles first. Which is POLITICALLY most unattractive to Johnson and Cummings? I would guess reunification.
I think cheering Irish reunification at this moment in time is the last thing anyone should be doing
It's inevitable. Brexit just compressed the timeline.
Irish reunification and Scottish Independence are the end game. Just get on with it, and do it as amicably as possible. We all have to live on these islands.
No trade deal Brexit followed by Scottish independence of course guarantees tariffs on all Scottish exports to England and Wales and vice versa if Scotland rejoins the EU and as there will also be tariffs on all goods and services from the Republic of Ireland to England and Wales too that would apply to Northern Ireland in the event of Irish unity too.
I've not really paid too much attention to the testing saga, but just watching BBC Breakfast this morning it's starting to make sense. Basically loads of people without symptoms want a test, just because they fancy getting a test. It's like the public's bizarre desire to sit in A&E on a Saturday night.
This is caused by children and young people getting a seasonal cold and the parents fear of covid. In my family my sons daughter (8) has had a cold and a test which was negative after a four day wait and my daughter's son (11) has also had a cold and been told to stay off school and if worse after 48 hours have a test
I was listening to 5 live this morning and an expert on testing provided a detailed explanation of the process and logistics and confirmed that over 200,000 tests a day were being conducted and 20 million completed. If that stat is correct nearly one third of the nation have had a test.
It is clear that the test rules need to be reviewed and tests prioritised across the UK. The idea of some to open hospital labs to these tests is the wrong thing to do as it is prioritising many unnecessary and non urgent tests over life threatening cancer and other essential non covid related tests.
Tests are something the anti HMG proponents can attack the government on but the simple truth is no government of any political persuasion would have any other answer than the one proposed by Hancock of prioritising tests
Many people, specifically front line workers in the NHS and care will quite correctly have had multiple tests. So 20m tests does not equiperate to 20m tested or anything like it. Approximately 100k tests are being given to these front line workers every day. Most will be repeats but that is necessary.
I had multiple tests last week simply because my doctors don’t trust the test. Not sure why.
There is a high false negative rate.
Tests conducted on NHS patients in hospital go to the hospital labs, not to Dido's empire.
There are also false positives. So if you test someone five times and only the fifth comes back positive then what have you achieved with the tests? Why not forget about the tests and be led by the symptoms?
IIUC the PCR test shouldn't produce false positives unless the lab bollockses it up and contaminates your negative sample with somebody else's positive one, although this has been known.
You don't want to be led purely by the symptoms because: 1) Part of what you're trying to find out is whether the person is going to infect somebody else 2) The symptoms may only show up later 3) Some of the symptoms look similar to the symptoms for other illnesses which require different treatments, so testing helps you treat the right thing
Yes but Foxy was particularly talking about NHS patients in hospital. The assumption, surely, would be that cross contamination is possible with or without a test.
On "the PCR test shouldn't produce false positives"
Would the US Congress be happy if the UK government failed in its duty to provide food? I seem to recall an echo in Irish history about that sort of failing.
The government's position on this has been chaotic and stupid. Grown ups have now made it clear that the provisions of the Bill do not breach the agreement at all. They give us the capacity to act if the EU breaches the agreement and sought to hold us to ransom by its provisions. The government has made it clear that the provisions of the bill will not be used pre-emptively. Why the legislation was not presented in this way in the first instance so as to avoid this completely ridiculous row is simply beyond me. Presumably some idiot thought he was being clever. He really wasn't and this letter is just one example of that.
The EU hasn't threatened to blockade UK food nor does it shows any intention of doing so. That's a slander invented by a morally and intellectually bankrupt government to shore up its position. Even if the EU did decide for this Act of War, the proposed bill does zero to address the problem.
It is clear Barnier has and he stepped over the mark but Boris reaction was equalled wrong
In what way is it clear? Seriously. I have seen absolutely no evidence of it, but it could be because I am not looking in the right places. I do not understand how the EU could blockade Northern Ireland, for starters. And if the legislaiotn is all about preventing a blockade, why is state aid a big part of it?
There are now (at least) two sources for the “blockade” story:
It’s entirely possible the EU was simply pointing out the consequences of failure to ratify UK SPS regulation rather than making a “threat” per se - but it feels like the EU could have handled this more diplomatically - and as @DavidL has pointed the U.K. has completely mishandled communication of its response.
Trouble is that there is a strand of Brexit thinking that includes a visceral sense of "You can't make us". Filling in these forms would be to acknowledge that, in certain situations, they can make us, and the UK government doesn't seem emotionally ready to do that yet.
You’re a follower of Ayn Rand - she said people have direct contact with reality only through sense perception. You objectivists believe that even if everyone believes in the Loch Ness monster that doesn’t make it exist - ergo if everyone else believes something that exists only in their mind there is no obligation on you to. However Rand never explained the phenomenon of money - odd given how important it was to her. Civilisation rests on humans in large numbers believing in things existing purely in the imagination, such as governments, laws, morality, limited liability companies, civil rights...and money.
You argued the other day (using an anti-German slur) that there was no moral imperative on people in this country to honour laws. Individuals and nations must obey their own moral imperative with thought only for themselves you say. However Ayn Rand, never satisfactory explained why, given money is so key to her philosophy, why we should honour its value given it is a shared imaginary construct dependent on cooperation?
Never explained it? I tried to copy and paste this here but it hit the character limit (so that still exists it seems). Read this.
I've not really paid too much attention to the testing saga, but just watching BBC Breakfast this morning it's starting to make sense. Basically loads of people without symptoms want a test, just because they fancy getting a test. It's like the public's bizarre desire to sit in A&E on a Saturday night.
I share your bewilderment and was reflecting on this phenomenon yesterday.
I can see why I may fancy a test to discover whether I have ever had the virus (though this would be mainly curiosity) but why would I want one to see if I have it now? If I had symptoms what would a test achieve? - I`d be isolating in the remotest room of our house, as already discussed with my family, anyway. If I didn`t have symptoms I`m not eligible for a test and would be wasting time and money. Am I missing something?
I think that people want at test "because it`s there", make up symptoms they don`t have (or that they are imagining), and may, I suspect, have a tinge of disappointment when the result comes back "negative". Bizarre.
Does anyone know whether protections are in place to stop people repeatedly going for tests just for the heck of it?
I actually think the opposite to you. Tests on symptomatic people do feel a lot less important than tests on possibly pre-symptomatic people.
The key thing that has helped covid spread is the lengthy pre-symptomatic phase of 3-9 days (typically 5-7) of covid, where people have been infected, are infectious, but not yet feeling ill (and therefore are quite happy to go around as normal and thus unknowingly expose others). Diseases where you feel ill rapidly can have less spread, as when people feel ill, they're less likely to be socialising or mingling with others, anyway.
If you have reason to believe you've been exposed, you could well be in the pre-symptomatic-yet-infectious phase of the disease. The most significant part of spreading it.
If you've got symptoms, you should, as you said, be self-isolating, anyway. So you're not contributing to the spread of the disease, and what would a test achieve? You try to get a test (probably a day plus) and then wait 1-4 days for the result. And you're told that a single negative result shouldn't be used as a reason to exit self-isolation, so what was the point of it?
If we could focus the tests on non-symptomatic people (who would, one assumes, have some reason to think they've been exposed), we might be able to get them done and returned faster. Getting them to self-isolate during the pre-symptomatic period. Far more useful.
This all ends with Irish reunification. Might as well get on with it.
Or a return to the troubles first. Which is POLITICALLY most unattractive to Johnson and Cummings? I would guess reunification.
I think cheering Irish reunification at this moment in time is the last thing anyone should be doing
It's inevitable. Brexit just compressed the timeline.
Irish reunification and Scottish Independence are the end game. Just get on with it, and do it as amicably as possible. We all have to live on these islands.
No trade deal Brexit followed by Scottish independence of course guarantees tariffs on all Scottish exports to England and Wales and vice versa if Scotland rejoins the EU and as there will also be tariffs on all goods and services from the Republic of Ireland to England and Wales too that would apply to Northern Ireland in the event of Irish unity too.
Of course. Brexit means increasing trade barriers, that much has always been obvious.
I've not really paid too much attention to the testing saga, but just watching BBC Breakfast this morning it's starting to make sense. Basically loads of people without symptoms want a test, just because they fancy getting a test. It's like the public's bizarre desire to sit in A&E on a Saturday night.
This is caused by children and young people getting a seasonal cold and the parents fear of covid. In my family my sons daughter (8) has had a cold and a test which was negative after a four day wait and my daughter's son (11) has also had a cold and been told to stay off school and if worse after 48 hours have a test
I was listening to 5 live this morning and an expert on testing provided a detailed explanation of the process and logistics and confirmed that over 200,000 tests a day were being conducted and 20 million completed. If that stat is correct nearly one third of the nation have had a test.
It is clear that the test rules need to be reviewed and tests prioritised across the UK. The idea of some to open hospital labs to these tests is the wrong thing to do as it is prioritising many unnecessary and non urgent tests over life threatening cancer and other essential non covid related tests.
Tests are something the anti HMG proponents can attack the government on but the simple truth is no government of any political persuasion would have any other answer than the one proposed by Hancock of prioritising tests
Well said.
My wife works on the front line of a care home. She's had a blood antibody test and is getting a swab antigen test every single week. The care home has boxes and boxes of swab kits and all staff and residents have to get tested every single week. They are getting prioritised.
For someone healthy who has the sniffles and wants to get tested not being able to do so may be irritating. If the care staff etc cease to be tested in order to add more capacity for "the worried well" then would that be an improvement? I think no.
Approximately a quarter of a million daily tests are happening but half of that is immediately accounted for by routine testing of NHS staff and care staff and residents.
It’s not just “irritating”, in some cases having a test or not is the difference between being able to go to work (and getting paid) or not.
If you have any symptoms, you have to report it to your employer. You then cant go to work unless you have a negative test or you wait the 10 days or whatever. Not every employer is paying full wages during that time. A lot will get nothing for the first few days, and then SSP (which is literally nothing) for the remainder.
Describing it as “irritating” is just showing how out of touch you are.
The person quoted before who lied on their form changing it from unemployed to key worker, what work were they going to?
Not being able to go to work is bad, I never said otherwise. But if care workers cease to be prioritised then thousands of residents could start dying again.
Lost wages is bad, lost lives is surely worse?
Although I don't agree with a lot of your posts on testing Philip I have to say I agree re the unemployed person fiddling the test criteria was despicable when there is a struggling to cope. Just selfish. There was a worse example given in the same report. A family who had returned from a Spanish holiday, had self isolated for 10 days and were all perfectly well, but wanted a test just to be sure. What? Why the hell are you wasting the testing resources when others really do need them. They have no reason for being tested at all. And if you are that concerned then why the hell did you go on holiday to Spain in the first place. They should not have a test and when they do they should have to pay for it.
That "its an election year" doesn't change the basic political realities. The Americans will not reward us for shitting on the Good Friday Agreement.
I know that the supremacy of Britain England seems to be an article of faith amongst some. They're about to have a quick education in realpolitik
So what do you think will happen if we refuse to back down? The EU and USA will be sour with us forever? Without actually dealing with the problems?
Or will they seek to adapt to the new reality? Realpolitik involves dealing with the world as it is not as you want it to be. Realpolitik means if Britain England wants something doing we need to do it ourselves and not expect anyone else to do it for us.
Every year in the US is an election year (except probably the first year in the 4 year presidential election cycle). So we would need a deal done next year and that requires it going through congress and Congress have already said that with the new NI that's not happening.
And politicians want to be elected - so they aren't going to vote for something that loses them Irish votes (and there are a lot of Irish votes in the US, including millions who haven't ever been to Ireland).
The Republicans won more English American votes than Irish American votes in 2016 for Congress, however the Democrats won more Irish American votes than English American votes and although Trump narrowly won the Irish American vote he still did better with English Americans than Irish Americans
I've not really paid too much attention to the testing saga, but just watching BBC Breakfast this morning it's starting to make sense. Basically loads of people without symptoms want a test, just because they fancy getting a test. It's like the public's bizarre desire to sit in A&E on a Saturday night.
This is caused by children and young people getting a seasonal cold and the parents fear of covid. In my family my sons daughter (8) has had a cold and a test which was negative after a four day wait and my daughter's son (11) has also had a cold and been told to stay off school and if worse after 48 hours have a test
I was listening to 5 live this morning and an expert on testing provided a detailed explanation of the process and logistics and confirmed that over 200,000 tests a day were being conducted and 20 million completed. If that stat is correct nearly one third of the nation have had a test.
It is clear that the test rules need to be reviewed and tests prioritised across the UK. The idea of some to open hospital labs to these tests is the wrong thing to do as it is prioritising many unnecessary and non urgent tests over life threatening cancer and other essential non covid related tests.
Tests are something the anti HMG proponents can attack the government on but the simple truth is no government of any political persuasion would have any other answer than the one proposed by Hancock of prioritising tests
Many people, specifically front line workers in the NHS and care will quite correctly have had multiple tests. So 20m tests does not equiperate to 20m tested or anything like it. Approximately 100k tests are being given to these front line workers every day. Most will be repeats but that is necessary.
I had multiple tests last week simply because my doctors don’t trust the test. Not sure why.
There is a high false negative rate.
Tests conducted on NHS patients in hospital go to the hospital labs, not to Dido's empire.
There are also false positives. So if you test someone five times and only the fifth comes back positive then what have you achieved with the tests? Why not forget about the tests and be led by the symptoms?
IIUC the PCR test shouldn't produce false positives unless the lab bollockses it up and contaminates your negative sample with somebody else's positive one, although this has been known.
You don't want to be led purely by the symptoms because: 1) Part of what you're trying to find out is whether the person is going to infect somebody else 2) The symptoms may only show up later 3) Some of the symptoms look similar to the symptoms for other illnesses which require different treatments, so testing helps you treat the right thing
Yes but Foxy was particularly talking about NHS patients in hospital. The assumption, surely, would be that cross contamination is possible with or without a test.
On "the PCR test shouldn't produce false positives"
Would the US Congress be happy if the UK government failed in its duty to provide food? I seem to recall an echo in Irish history about that sort of failing.
The government's position on this has been chaotic and stupid. Grown ups have now made it clear that the provisions of the Bill do not breach the agreement at all. They give us the capacity to act if the EU breaches the agreement and sought to hold us to ransom by its provisions. The government has made it clear that the provisions of the bill will not be used pre-emptively. Why the legislation was not presented in this way in the first instance so as to avoid this completely ridiculous row is simply beyond me. Presumably some idiot thought he was being clever. He really wasn't and this letter is just one example of that.
The EU hasn't threatened to blockade UK food nor does it shows any intention of doing so. That's a slander invented by a morally and intellectually bankrupt government to shore up its position. Even if the EU did decide for this Act of War, the proposed bill does zero to address the problem.
It is clear Barnier has and he stepped over the mark but Boris reaction was equalled wrong
In what way is it clear? Seriously. I have seen absolutely no evidence of it, but it could be because I am not looking in the right places. I do not understand how the EU could blockade Northern Ireland, for starters. And if the legislaiotn is all about preventing a blockade, why is state aid a big part of it?
There are now (at least) two sources for the “blockade” story:
It’s entirely possible the EU was simply pointing out the consequences of failure to ratify UK SPS regulation rather than making a “threat” per se - but it feels like the EU could have handled this more diplomatically - and as @DavidL has pointed the U.K. has completely mishandled communication of its response.
Trouble is that there is a strand of Brexit thinking that includes a visceral sense of "You can't make us". Filling in these forms would be to acknowledge that, in certain situations, they can make us, and the UK government doesn't seem emotionally ready to do that yet.
Yes, that's what I thought. After experience of filling in forms for jobseekers allowance it's clear that the British state views form-filling as an act of submission.
If the governing Barbados Labour Party wishes to remove their constitutional monarch that is up to them (out of the 54 Commonwealth nations only 16 still still have the Queen as Head of State anyway) however the whole point of a constitutional monarch is the governing is almost entirely done by parliament anyway
Gough Whitlam says hello.
Malcolm Fraser's Liberals trounced Whitlam's Labour Party in the December 1975 general election in Australia after he was removed by the governor general in 1975 so there is no evidence Australians wanted Whitlam to stay
Re your comments on US Trade Deal, I agree. Put simply, Biden doesn't like Brexit and would see no reason to help us out of the quagmire.
Brexit fans better hope Trump wins.
What's your take on the current state of polling? It seems to be going nowhere to me. Every now and again Trump gets a small string of decent results and you start to think something is happening, then you get a couple of good Biden ones (like Monmouth for Florida yesterday) and it's 'as you were'. There seem to be so few 'undecideds' that it's hard to see much movement over the remaining weeks which is disappointingly dull if nothing else.
Would the US Congress be happy if the UK government failed in its duty to provide food? I seem to recall an echo in Irish history about that sort of failing.
The government's position on this has been chaotic and stupid. Grown ups have now made it clear that the provisions of the Bill do not breach the agreement at all. They give us the capacity to act if the EU breaches the agreement and sought to hold us to ransom by its provisions. The government has made it clear that the provisions of the bill will not be used pre-emptively. Why the legislation was not presented in this way in the first instance so as to avoid this completely ridiculous row is simply beyond me. Presumably some idiot thought he was being clever. He really wasn't and this letter is just one example of that.
The EU hasn't threatened to blockade UK food nor does it shows any intention of doing so. That's a slander invented by a morally and intellectually bankrupt government to shore up its position. Even if the EU did decide for this Act of War, the proposed bill does zero to address the problem.
Firstly, they have made it clear that for so long as NI remains in the SM what is delivered there has to meet the standards of the SM. Secondly, they are unaccountably dragging their heels about continuing the accreditation and regulation of UK food manufacturers which is completely acceptable to them today and for the last several years. Thirdly, in the event that the EU objected to the delivery of food from non accredited (by them) sources it gives us the power in law to override that requirement. So it does address a hypothetical problem. Why it was necessary to address it now rather than when and if it ever arose remains a mystery hidden within a conundrum.
Your first point is a core intention of the Withdrawal Agreement, which incidentally most people in Northern Ireland support. Johnson could have rejected the whole thing but signed up for it. There can be no complaints there.
Your second point. There is a procedure for accreditation that the UK needs to go through, which it hasn't done yet but which it says it will do ahead of transition expiry. There are remedies within the WA if it thinks the EU is being unreasonable should the latter refuse accreditation. It's a technical exercise and as long as there is no divergence on Day 1 there shouldn't be a problem.
Third point. What Johnson and the Conservatives are talking about is an Act of War by the EU. Anyone could carry out such hypotheticals at any time. The USA could launch 100 nuclear missiles at the UK tomorrow, but we don't go around saying we must take preventative measures. That's not much less likely than the EU blockading us. Even if we give this hypothetical more consideration than it deserves, discarding the entire Withdrawal Agreement is the least of any fallout from that particular war.
Would the US Congress be happy if the UK government failed in its duty to provide food? I seem to recall an echo in Irish history about that sort of failing.
The government's position on this has been chaotic and stupid. Grown ups have now made it clear that the provisions of the Bill do not breach the agreement at all. They give us the capacity to act if the EU breaches the agreement and sought to hold us to ransom by its provisions. The government has made it clear that the provisions of the bill will not be used pre-emptively. Why the legislation was not presented in this way in the first instance so as to avoid this completely ridiculous row is simply beyond me. Presumably some idiot thought he was being clever. He really wasn't and this letter is just one example of that.
The EU hasn't threatened to blockade UK food nor does it shows any intention of doing so. That's a slander invented by a morally and intellectually bankrupt government to shore up its position. Even if the EU did decide for this Act of War, the proposed bill does zero to address the problem.
It is clear Barnier has and he stepped over the mark but Boris reaction was equalled wrong
In what way is it clear? Seriously. I have seen absolutely no evidence of it, but it could be because I am not looking in the right places. I do not understand how the EU could blockade Northern Ireland, for starters. And if the legislaiotn is all about preventing a blockade, why is state aid a big part of it?
There are now (at least) two sources for the “blockade” story:
It’s entirely possible the EU was simply pointing out the consequences of failure to ratify UK SPS regulation rather than making a “threat” per se - but it feels like the EU could have handled this more diplomatically - and as @DavidL has pointed the U.K. has completely mishandled communication of its response.
Trouble is that there is a strand of Brexit thinking that includes a visceral sense of "You can't make us". Filling in these forms would be to acknowledge that, in certain situations, they can make us, and the UK government doesn't seem emotionally ready to do that yet.
I agree with that, there is a "sheer bloody mindedness" streak in a lot of people, we only need to look at the social distancing attitude to corrobroate that. Sadly if things were to go tits up in January they would find someone else to blame.
That "its an election year" doesn't change the basic political realities. The Americans will not reward us for shitting on the Good Friday Agreement.
I know that the supremacy of Britain England seems to be an article of faith amongst some. They're about to have a quick education in realpolitik
So what do you think will happen if we refuse to back down? The EU and USA will be sour with us forever? Without actually dealing with the problems?
Or will they seek to adapt to the new reality? Realpolitik involves dealing with the world as it is not as you want it to be. Realpolitik means if Britain England wants something doing we need to do it ourselves and not expect anyone else to do it for us.
Every year in the US is an election year (except probably the first year in the 4 year presidential election cycle). So we would need a deal done next year and that requires it going through congress and Congress have already said that with the new NI that's not happening.
And politicians want to be elected - so they aren't going to vote for something that loses them Irish votes (and there are a lot of Irish votes in the US, including millions who haven't ever been to Ireland).
The Republicans won more English American votes than Irish American votes in 2016 for Congress, however the Democrats won more Irish American votes than English American votes and although Trump narrowly won the Irish American vote he still did better with English Americans than Irish Americans
The English American lobby consists solely of Andrew Sullivan and John Oliver, and they cancel each other out. For whatever reason English American heritage isn't really a thing in the same way that Irish American is.
Re your comments on US Trade Deal, I agree. Put simply, Biden doesn't like Brexit and would see no reason to help us out of the quagmire.
Brexit fans better hope Trump wins.
What's your take on the current state of polling? It seems to be going nowhere to me. Every now and again Trump gets a small string of decent results and you start to think something is happening, then you get a couple of good Biden ones (like Monmouth for Florida yesterday) and it's 'as you were'. There seem to be so few 'undecideds' that it's hard to see much movement over the remaining weeks which is disappointingly dull if nothing else.
Yep, why else is Farage going over to campaign for Trump as he did in 2016 (remember Trump backed Brexit even before Leave won when Obama was threatening to send us 'to the back of the queue') and why else is Boris now saying Trump has 'made America great again'? Biden like Obama and Hillary has little time for Brexit and would put the EU and Dublin ahead of us and key Leave campaigners are realising that if Biden is elected President and the Democrats retain the House and the internal market bill passes any US UK trade proposals will be ripped up by Pelosi and the White House before they are barely even set to paper.
My view is as it has always been, it will be very close, on the latest Fox polling add the don't knows to Trump and it would be 51% to Biden and 48% to Trump and as long as 2016 gold standard rustbelt pollster Trafalgar keep having Trump ahead in Michigan and Wisconsin he has a chance (though even Trafalgar are suggesting Pennsylvania will go to Biden)
I've not really paid too much attention to the testing saga, but just watching BBC Breakfast this morning it's starting to make sense. Basically loads of people without symptoms want a test, just because they fancy getting a test. It's like the public's bizarre desire to sit in A&E on a Saturday night.
This is caused by children and young people getting a seasonal cold and the parents fear of covid. In my family my sons daughter (8) has had a cold and a test which was negative after a four day wait and my daughter's son (11) has also had a cold and been told to stay off school and if worse after 48 hours have a test
I was listening to 5 live this morning and an expert on testing provided a detailed explanation of the process and logistics and confirmed that over 200,000 tests a day were being conducted and 20 million completed. If that stat is correct nearly one third of the nation have had a test.
It is clear that the test rules need to be reviewed and tests prioritised across the UK. The idea of some to open hospital labs to these tests is the wrong thing to do as it is prioritising many unnecessary and non urgent tests over life threatening cancer and other essential non covid related tests.
Tests are something the anti HMG proponents can attack the government on but the simple truth is no government of any political persuasion would have any other answer than the one proposed by Hancock of prioritising tests
Many people, specifically front line workers in the NHS and care will quite correctly have had multiple tests. So 20m tests does not equiperate to 20m tested or anything like it. Approximately 100k tests are being given to these front line workers every day. Most will be repeats but that is necessary.
I had multiple tests last week simply because my doctors don’t trust the test. Not sure why.
There is a high false negative rate.
Tests conducted on NHS patients in hospital go to the hospital labs, not to Dido's empire.
There are also false positives. So if you test someone five times and only the fifth comes back positive then what have you achieved with the tests? Why not forget about the tests and be led by the symptoms?
PCR false positives are very rare, and only become significant in a Moonshot type scenario.
Most PCR false positives are a result of cross contamination. They are more of an issue in pooled testing (which is why that capacity ought to have been built up when the labs were under less pressure).
And the 'moonshot' is utter bollocks. Mass testing is possible, but could, and ought to be done much more cheaply, if it is to be done.
I've not really paid too much attention to the testing saga, but just watching BBC Breakfast this morning it's starting to make sense. Basically loads of people without symptoms want a test, just because they fancy getting a test. It's like the public's bizarre desire to sit in A&E on a Saturday night.
This is caused by children and young people getting a seasonal cold and the parents fear of covid. In my family my sons daughter (8) has had a cold and a test which was negative after a four day wait and my daughter's son (11) has also had a cold and been told to stay off school and if worse after 48 hours have a test
I was listening to 5 live this morning and an expert on testing provided a detailed explanation of the process and logistics and confirmed that over 200,000 tests a day were being conducted and 20 million completed. If that stat is correct nearly one third of the nation have had a test.
It is clear that the test rules need to be reviewed and tests prioritised across the UK. The idea of some to open hospital labs to these tests is the wrong thing to do as it is prioritising many unnecessary and non urgent tests over life threatening cancer and other essential non covid related tests.
Tests are something the anti HMG proponents can attack the government on but the simple truth is no government of any political persuasion would have any other answer than the one proposed by Hancock of prioritising tests
Many people, specifically front line workers in the NHS and care will quite correctly have had multiple tests. So 20m tests does not equiperate to 20m tested or anything like it. Approximately 100k tests are being given to these front line workers every day. Most will be repeats but that is necessary.
I had multiple tests last week simply because my doctors don’t trust the test. Not sure why.
There is a high false negative rate.
Tests conducted on NHS patients in hospital go to the hospital labs, not to Dido's empire.
There are also false positives. So if you test someone five times and only the fifth comes back positive then what have you achieved with the tests? Why not forget about the tests and be led by the symptoms?
IIUC the PCR test shouldn't produce false positives unless the lab bollockses it up and contaminates your negative sample with somebody else's positive one, although this has been known.
You don't want to be led purely by the symptoms because: 1) Part of what you're trying to find out is whether the person is going to infect somebody else 2) The symptoms may only show up later 3) Some of the symptoms look similar to the symptoms for other illnesses which require different treatments, so testing helps you treat the right thing
Yes but Foxy was particularly talking about NHS patients in hospital. The assumption, surely, would be that cross contamination is possible with or without a test.
On "the PCR test shouldn't produce false positives"
That`s interesting: "traces of old virus could partly explain why the number of cases is rising while hospital admissions remain stable".
I thought it was widely known that you could, potentially, pick up virus fragments that were not viable for infection. I guess the point is that if you're mass testing then yes, you could potentially be picking up positives from people who were infected some time ago and/or have some non-viable fragments on the swab, which might inflate the numbers. However, that should - at present - be a fairly static background level from when infections were peaking in the spring - it may mean current tests over-estimate, but it shouldn't mean that this weeks tests over-estimate compared to last week's tests by any meaningful amount. If test positives are still going up then real cases are likely going up.
If we'd listened, that "pro-having cake and pro-eating" gag entirely explain's Johnson's unsuitability for office and predicts where we are now. Should've listened.
I've not really paid too much attention to the testing saga, but just watching BBC Breakfast this morning it's starting to make sense. Basically loads of people without symptoms want a test, just because they fancy getting a test. It's like the public's bizarre desire to sit in A&E on a Saturday night.
This is caused by children and young people getting a seasonal cold and the parents fear of covid. In my family my sons daughter (8) has had a cold and a test which was negative after a four day wait and my daughter's son (11) has also had a cold and been told to stay off school and if worse after 48 hours have a test
I was listening to 5 live this morning and an expert on testing provided a detailed explanation of the process and logistics and confirmed that over 200,000 tests a day were being conducted and 20 million completed. If that stat is correct nearly one third of the nation have had a test.
It is clear that the test rules need to be reviewed and tests prioritised across the UK. The idea of some to open hospital labs to these tests is the wrong thing to do as it is prioritising many unnecessary and non urgent tests over life threatening cancer and other essential non covid related tests.
Tests are something the anti HMG proponents can attack the government on but the simple truth is no government of any political persuasion would have any other answer than the one proposed by Hancock of prioritising tests
Many people, specifically front line workers in the NHS and care will quite correctly have had multiple tests. So 20m tests does not equiperate to 20m tested or anything like it. Approximately 100k tests are being given to these front line workers every day. Most will be repeats but that is necessary.
I had multiple tests last week simply because my doctors don’t trust the test. Not sure why.
There is a high false negative rate.
Tests conducted on NHS patients in hospital go to the hospital labs, not to Dido's empire.
There are also false positives. So if you test someone five times and only the fifth comes back positive then what have you achieved with the tests? Why not forget about the tests and be led by the symptoms?
IIUC the PCR test shouldn't produce false positives unless the lab bollockses it up and contaminates your negative sample with somebody else's positive one, although this has been known.
You don't want to be led purely by the symptoms because: 1) Part of what you're trying to find out is whether the person is going to infect somebody else 2) The symptoms may only show up later 3) Some of the symptoms look similar to the symptoms for other illnesses which require different treatments, so testing helps you treat the right thing
Yes but Foxy was particularly talking about NHS patients in hospital. The assumption, surely, would be that cross contamination is possible with or without a test.
On "the PCR test shouldn't produce false positives"
Would the US Congress be happy if the UK government failed in its duty to provide food? I seem to recall an echo in Irish history about that sort of failing.
The government's position on this has been chaotic and stupid. Grown ups have now made it clear that the provisions of the Bill do not breach the agreement at all. They give us the capacity to act if the EU breaches the agreement and sought to hold us to ransom by its provisions. The government has made it clear that the provisions of the bill will not be used pre-emptively. Why the legislation was not presented in this way in the first instance so as to avoid this completely ridiculous row is simply beyond me. Presumably some idiot thought he was being clever. He really wasn't and this letter is just one example of that.
The EU hasn't threatened to blockade UK food nor does it shows any intention of doing so. That's a slander invented by a morally and intellectually bankrupt government to shore up its position. Even if the EU did decide for this Act of War, the proposed bill does zero to address the problem.
It is clear Barnier has and he stepped over the mark but Boris reaction was equalled wrong
In what way is it clear? Seriously. I have seen absolutely no evidence of it, but it could be because I am not looking in the right places. I do not understand how the EU could blockade Northern Ireland, for starters. And if the legislaiotn is all about preventing a blockade, why is state aid a big part of it?
There are now (at least) two sources for the “blockade” story:
It’s entirely possible the EU was simply pointing out the consequences of failure to ratify UK SPS regulation rather than making a “threat” per se - but it feels like the EU could have handled this more diplomatically - and as @DavidL has pointed the U.K. has completely mishandled communication of its response.
I think we need to choose terms carefully. The UK government hasn't mishandled the response. It is dishonest in pursuit of an agenda.
Basically the UK has to have BINO or else the nation to screwed.
Which really should have been the situation from the start. Free from the political integration of the EU, but part of the common and single market.
EFTA or EEA membership should have been the compromise.
But Theresa May and the ERG stopped this route to avoiding economic damage. That's the key fact of the years 2017-20 of the Brexit debate, and will be remembered in that way, too.
Basically the UK has to have BINO or else the nation to screwed.
Which really should have been the situation from the start. Free from the political integration of the EU, but part of the common and single market.
EFTA or EEA membership should have been the compromise.
But Theresa May and the ERG stopped this route to avoiding economic damage. That's the key fact of the years 2017-20, and will be remembered in that way, too.
If we get PM Starmer after the next general election we will almost certainly shift to an EEA style FTA with the EU but obviously while the Tories are in government they are not going to risk half their voters shifting back to Farage and the Brexit Party by failing to deliver what most Leavers think to be a proper Brexit
I've not really paid too much attention to the testing saga, but just watching BBC Breakfast this morning it's starting to make sense. Basically loads of people without symptoms want a test, just because they fancy getting a test. It's like the public's bizarre desire to sit in A&E on a Saturday night.
I share your bewilderment and was reflecting on this phenomenon yesterday.
I can see why I may fancy a test to discover whether I have ever had the virus (though this would be mainly curiosity) but why would I want one to see if I have it now? If I had symptoms what would a test achieve? - I`d be isolating in the remotest room of our house, as already discussed with my family, anyway. If I didn`t have symptoms I`m not eligible for a test and would be wasting time and money. Am I missing something?
I think that people want at test "because it`s there", make up symptoms they don`t have (or that they are imagining), and may, I suspect, have a tinge of disappointment when the result comes back "negative". Bizarre.
Does anyone know whether protections are in place to stop people repeatedly going for tests just for the heck of it?
I actually think the opposite to you. Tests on symptomatic people do feel a lot less important than tests on possibly pre-symptomatic people.
The key thing that has helped covid spread is the lengthy pre-symptomatic phase of 3-9 days (typically 5-7) of covid, where people have been infected, are infectious, but not yet feeling ill (and therefore are quite happy to go around as normal and thus unknowingly expose others). Diseases where you feel ill rapidly can have less spread, as when people feel ill, they're less likely to be socialising or mingling with others, anyway.
If you have reason to believe you've been exposed, you could well be in the pre-symptomatic-yet-infectious phase of the disease. The most significant part of spreading it.
If you've got symptoms, you should, as you said, be self-isolating, anyway. So you're not contributing to the spread of the disease, and what would a test achieve? You try to get a test (probably a day plus) and then wait 1-4 days for the result. And you're told that a single negative result shouldn't be used as a reason to exit self-isolation, so what was the point of it?
If we could focus the tests on non-symptomatic people (who would, one assumes, have some reason to think they've been exposed), we might be able to get them done and returned faster. Getting them to self-isolate during the pre-symptomatic period. Far more useful.
The pooled testing I've mentioned would have been useful for this approach - particularly when the overall rate of infection in the community is low. Test ten batches of ten people at a time, and perhaps only one batch would show infection. Those ten could isolate until quickly retested. You thus multiply your testing capacity several times.
I've not really paid too much attention to the testing saga, but just watching BBC Breakfast this morning it's starting to make sense. Basically loads of people without symptoms want a test, just because they fancy getting a test. It's like the public's bizarre desire to sit in A&E on a Saturday night.
This is caused by children and young people getting a seasonal cold and the parents fear of covid. In my family my sons daughter (8) has had a cold and a test which was negative after a four day wait and my daughter's son (11) has also had a cold and been told to stay off school and if worse after 48 hours have a test
I was listening to 5 live this morning and an expert on testing provided a detailed explanation of the process and logistics and confirmed that over 200,000 tests a day were being conducted and 20 million completed. If that stat is correct nearly one third of the nation have had a test.
It is clear that the test rules need to be reviewed and tests prioritised across the UK. The idea of some to open hospital labs to these tests is the wrong thing to do as it is prioritising many unnecessary and non urgent tests over life threatening cancer and other essential non covid related tests.
Tests are something the anti HMG proponents can attack the government on but the simple truth is no government of any political persuasion would have any other answer than the one proposed by Hancock of prioritising tests
Well said.
My wife works on the front line of a care home. She's had a blood antibody test and is getting a swab antigen test every single week. The care home has boxes and boxes of swab kits and all staff and residents have to get tested every single week. They are getting prioritised.
For someone healthy who has the sniffles and wants to get tested not being able to do so may be irritating. If the care staff etc cease to be tested in order to add more capacity for "the worried well" then would that be an improvement? I think no.
Approximately a quarter of a million daily tests are happening but half of that is immediately accounted for by routine testing of NHS staff and care staff and residents.
It’s not just “irritating”, in some cases having a test or not is the difference between being able to go to work (and getting paid) or not.
If you have any symptoms, you have to report it to your employer. You then cant go to work unless you have a negative test or you wait the 10 days or whatever. Not every employer is paying full wages during that time. A lot will get nothing for the first few days, and then SSP (which is literally nothing) for the remainder.
Describing it as “irritating” is just showing how out of touch you are.
The person quoted before who lied on their form changing it from unemployed to key worker, what work were they going to?
Not being able to go to work is bad, I never said otherwise. But if care workers cease to be prioritised then thousands of residents could start dying again.
Lost wages is bad, lost lives is surely worse?
Although I don't agree with a lot of your posts on testing Philip I have to say I agree re the unemployed person fiddling the test criteria was despicable when there is a struggling to cope. Just selfish. There was a worse example given in the same report. A family who had returned from a Spanish holiday, had self isolated for 10 days and were all perfectly well, but wanted a test just to be sure. What? Why the hell are you wasting the testing resources when others really do need them. They have no reason for being tested at all. And if you are that concerned then why the hell did you go on holiday to Spain in the first place. They should not have a test and when they do they should have to pay for it.
Pure Kafka: we'll prosecute you for behaving as if you did not have the virus, and also prosecute you for trying to establish whether you have it or not.
If we'd listened, that "pro-having cake and pro-eating" gag entirely explain's Johnson's unsuitability for office and predicts where we are now. Should've listened.
Plenty of people were listening. Too many were willing to ignore the signs. No impartial and well informed observer could be surprised at Johnson's behaviour. He has been a liar, a narcisist, lazy and incompetent all his life. It is a testament to the degradation of the Tories as a political party and the pernicious influence of Brexit that they chose him as leader, and a sad reflection on the voters that they gave him a majority - although Labour Party members are also to blame for putting up such an unpalletable alternative. Such a miserable time to be British.
I've not really paid too much attention to the testing saga, but just watching BBC Breakfast this morning it's starting to make sense. Basically loads of people without symptoms want a test, just because they fancy getting a test. It's like the public's bizarre desire to sit in A&E on a Saturday night.
This is caused by children and young people getting a seasonal cold and the parents fear of covid. In my family my sons daughter (8) has had a cold and a test which was negative after a four day wait and my daughter's son (11) has also had a cold and been told to stay off school and if worse after 48 hours have a test
I was listening to 5 live this morning and an expert on testing provided a detailed explanation of the process and logistics and confirmed that over 200,000 tests a day were being conducted and 20 million completed. If that stat is correct nearly one third of the nation have had a test.
It is clear that the test rules need to be reviewed and tests prioritised across the UK. The idea of some to open hospital labs to these tests is the wrong thing to do as it is prioritising many unnecessary and non urgent tests over life threatening cancer and other essential non covid related tests.
Tests are something the anti HMG proponents can attack the government on but the simple truth is no government of any political persuasion would have any other answer than the one proposed by Hancock of prioritising tests
Well said.
My wife works on the front line of a care home. She's had a blood antibody test and is getting a swab antigen test every single week. The care home has boxes and boxes of swab kits and all staff and residents have to get tested every single week. They are getting prioritised.
For someone healthy who has the sniffles and wants to get tested not being able to do so may be irritating. If the care staff etc cease to be tested in order to add more capacity for "the worried well" then would that be an improvement? I think no.
Approximately a quarter of a million daily tests are happening but half of that is immediately accounted for by routine testing of NHS staff and care staff and residents.
It’s not just “irritating”, in some cases having a test or not is the difference between being able to go to work (and getting paid) or not.
If you have any symptoms, you have to report it to your employer. You then cant go to work unless you have a negative test or you wait the 10 days or whatever. Not every employer is paying full wages during that time. A lot will get nothing for the first few days, and then SSP (which is literally nothing) for the remainder.
Describing it as “irritating” is just showing how out of touch you are.
The person quoted before who lied on their form changing it from unemployed to key worker, what work were they going to?
Not being able to go to work is bad, I never said otherwise. But if care workers cease to be prioritised then thousands of residents could start dying again.
Lost wages is bad, lost lives is surely worse?
Although I don't agree with a lot of your posts on testing Philip I have to say I agree re the unemployed person fiddling the test criteria was despicable when there is a struggling to cope. Just selfish. There was a worse example given in the same report. A family who had returned from a Spanish holiday, had self isolated for 10 days and were all perfectly well, but wanted a test just to be sure. What? Why the hell are you wasting the testing resources when others really do need them. They have no reason for being tested at all. And if you are that concerned then why the hell did you go on holiday to Spain in the first place. They should not have a test and when they do they should have to pay for it.
At the end of the day though, it's fairly fruitless getting exercised over the behaviour of particular individuals, however egregious their behaviour. Any testing regime has to allow for people trying to game it - just as the efforts to reduce social mixing have to take into account those who treat such guidance or instructions with contempt.
That "its an election year" doesn't change the basic political realities. The Americans will not reward us for shitting on the Good Friday Agreement.
I know that the supremacy of Britain England seems to be an article of faith amongst some. They're about to have a quick education in realpolitik
So what do you think will happen if we refuse to back down? The EU and USA will be sour with us forever? Without actually dealing with the problems?
Or will they seek to adapt to the new reality? Realpolitik involves dealing with the world as it is not as you want it to be. Realpolitik means if Britain England wants something doing we need to do it ourselves and not expect anyone else to do it for us.
Every year in the US is an election year (except probably the first year in the 4 year presidential election cycle). So we would need a deal done next year and that requires it going through congress and Congress have already said that with the new NI that's not happening.
And politicians want to be elected - so they aren't going to vote for something that loses them Irish votes (and there are a lot of Irish votes in the US, including millions who haven't ever been to Ireland).
The Republicans won more English American votes than Irish American votes in 2016 for Congress, however the Democrats won more Irish American votes than English American votes and although Trump narrowly won the Irish American vote he still did better with English Americans than Irish Americans
The English American lobby consists solely of Andrew Sullivan and John Oliver, and they cancel each other out. For whatever reason English American heritage isn't really a thing in the same way that Irish American is.
I've not really paid too much attention to the testing saga, but just watching BBC Breakfast this morning it's starting to make sense. Basically loads of people without symptoms want a test, just because they fancy getting a test. It's like the public's bizarre desire to sit in A&E on a Saturday night.
This is caused by children and young people getting a seasonal cold and the parents fear of covid. In my family my sons daughter (8) has had a cold and a test which was negative after a four day wait and my daughter's son (11) has also had a cold and been told to stay off school and if worse after 48 hours have a test
I was listening to 5 live this morning and an expert on testing provided a detailed explanation of the process and logistics and confirmed that over 200,000 tests a day were being conducted and 20 million completed. If that stat is correct nearly one third of the nation have had a test.
It is clear that the test rules need to be reviewed and tests prioritised across the UK. The idea of some to open hospital labs to these tests is the wrong thing to do as it is prioritising many unnecessary and non urgent tests over life threatening cancer and other essential non covid related tests.
Tests are something the anti HMG proponents can attack the government on but the simple truth is no government of any political persuasion would have any other answer than the one proposed by Hancock of prioritising tests
Many people, specifically front line workers in the NHS and care will quite correctly have had multiple tests. So 20m tests does not equiperate to 20m tested or anything like it. Approximately 100k tests are being given to these front line workers every day. Most will be repeats but that is necessary.
I had multiple tests last week simply because my doctors don’t trust the test. Not sure why.
There is a high false negative rate.
Tests conducted on NHS patients in hospital go to the hospital labs, not to Dido's empire.
There are also false positives. So if you test someone five times and only the fifth comes back positive then what have you achieved with the tests? Why not forget about the tests and be led by the symptoms?
IIUC the PCR test shouldn't produce false positives unless the lab bollockses it up and contaminates your negative sample with somebody else's positive one, although this has been known.
You don't want to be led purely by the symptoms because: 1) Part of what you're trying to find out is whether the person is going to infect somebody else 2) The symptoms may only show up later 3) Some of the symptoms look similar to the symptoms for other illnesses which require different treatments, so testing helps you treat the right thing
Yes but Foxy was particularly talking about NHS patients in hospital. The assumption, surely, would be that cross contamination is possible with or without a test.
On "the PCR test shouldn't produce false positives"
That`s interesting: "traces of old virus could partly explain why the number of cases is rising while hospital admissions remain stable".
I thought it was widely known that you could, potentially, pick up virus fragments that were not viable for infection. I guess the point is that if you're mass testing then yes, you could potentially be picking up positives from people who were infected some time ago and/or have some non-viable fragments on the swab, which might inflate the numbers. However, that should - at present - be a fairly static background level from when infections were peaking in the spring - it may mean current tests over-estimate, but it shouldn't mean that this weeks tests over-estimate compared to last week's tests by any meaningful amount. If test positives are still going up then real cases are likely going up.
Yes, but not as much as may appear. That the supposed rise in infections is not leading to a similar rise in hospitalisations is a head-scratcher and I have five possibles now on my list:
1) infections are not actually going up; the numbers are rising because of increased testing/particular cohort testing 2) the virus is mutating to a less serious form 3) variolation: infections caught via the increased use of masks is resulting in a lower dose which the body can cope with 4) some of the positive test results are picking up remnants of previous virus infections thus creating an incorrect assumption that the virus is spreading above R=1 5) hospitalisation numbers are the issue: medics are sending people home to manage the virus whereas in the spring they would have been admitted to hospital.
Any others? Could be a combination of these I guess.
I've not really paid too much attention to the testing saga, but just watching BBC Breakfast this morning it's starting to make sense. Basically loads of people without symptoms want a test, just because they fancy getting a test. It's like the public's bizarre desire to sit in A&E on a Saturday night.
This is caused by children and young people getting a seasonal cold and the parents fear of covid. In my family my sons daughter (8) has had a cold and a test which was negative after a four day wait and my daughter's son (11) has also had a cold and been told to stay off school and if worse after 48 hours have a test
I was listening to 5 live this morning and an expert on testing provided a detailed explanation of the process and logistics and confirmed that over 200,000 tests a day were being conducted and 20 million completed. If that stat is correct nearly one third of the nation have had a test.
It is clear that the test rules need to be reviewed and tests prioritised across the UK. The idea of some to open hospital labs to these tests is the wrong thing to do as it is prioritising many unnecessary and non urgent tests over life threatening cancer and other essential non covid related tests.
Tests are something the anti HMG proponents can attack the government on but the simple truth is no government of any political persuasion would have any other answer than the one proposed by Hancock of prioritising tests
Well said.
My wife works on the front line of a care home. She's had a blood antibody test and is getting a swab antigen test every single week. The care home has boxes and boxes of swab kits and all staff and residents have to get tested every single week. They are getting prioritised.
For someone healthy who has the sniffles and wants to get tested not being able to do so may be irritating. If the care staff etc cease to be tested in order to add more capacity for "the worried well" then would that be an improvement? I think no.
Approximately a quarter of a million daily tests are happening but half of that is immediately accounted for by routine testing of NHS staff and care staff and residents.
It’s not just “irritating”, in some cases having a test or not is the difference between being able to go to work (and getting paid) or not.
If you have any symptoms, you have to report it to your employer. You then cant go to work unless you have a negative test or you wait the 10 days or whatever. Not every employer is paying full wages during that time. A lot will get nothing for the first few days, and then SSP (which is literally nothing) for the remainder.
Describing it as “irritating” is just showing how out of touch you are.
The person quoted before who lied on their form changing it from unemployed to key worker, what work were they going to?
Not being able to go to work is bad, I never said otherwise. But if care workers cease to be prioritised then thousands of residents could start dying again.
Lost wages is bad, lost lives is surely worse?
Although I don't agree with a lot of your posts on testing Philip I have to say I agree re the unemployed person fiddling the test criteria was despicable when there is a struggling to cope. Just selfish. There was a worse example given in the same report. A family who had returned from a Spanish holiday, had self isolated for 10 days and were all perfectly well, but wanted a test just to be sure. What? Why the hell are you wasting the testing resources when others really do need them. They have no reason for being tested at all. And if you are that concerned then why the hell did you go on holiday to Spain in the first place. They should not have a test and when they do they should have to pay for it.
Pure Kafka: we'll prosecute you for behaving as if you did not have the virus, and also prosecute you for trying to establish whether you have it or not.
Would the US Congress be happy if the UK government failed in its duty to provide food? I seem to recall an echo in Irish history about that sort of failing.
The government's position on this has been chaotic and stupid. Grown ups have now made it clear that the provisions of the Bill do not breach the agreement at all. They give us the capacity to act if the EU breaches the agreement and sought to hold us to ransom by its provisions. The government has made it clear that the provisions of the bill will not be used pre-emptively. Why the legislation was not presented in this way in the first instance so as to avoid this completely ridiculous row is simply beyond me. Presumably some idiot thought he was being clever. He really wasn't and this letter is just one example of that.
The EU hasn't threatened to blockade UK food nor does it shows any intention of doing so. That's a slander invented by a morally and intellectually bankrupt government to shore up its position. Even if the EU did decide for this Act of War, the proposed bill does zero to address the problem.
It is clear Barnier has and he stepped over the mark but Boris reaction was equalled wrong
In what way is it clear? Seriously. I have seen absolutely no evidence of it, but it could be because I am not looking in the right places. I do not understand how the EU could blockade Northern Ireland, for starters. And if the legislaiotn is all about preventing a blockade, why is state aid a big part of it?
There are now (at least) two sources for the “blockade” story:
It’s entirely possible the EU was simply pointing out the consequences of failure to ratify UK SPS regulation rather than making a “threat” per se - but it feels like the EU could have handled this more diplomatically - and as @DavidL has pointed the U.K. has completely mishandled communication of its response.
Trouble is that there is a strand of Brexit thinking that includes a visceral sense of "You can't make us". Filling in these forms would be to acknowledge that, in certain situations, they can make us, and the UK government doesn't seem emotionally ready to do that yet.
Very astute point. The most obvious consequence of Brexit will be an orgy of form filling.
Also I don't think the government, despite its rhetoric of sovereign independent state has emotionally accepted third country status in Europe. If the EU disappeared the UK would deal with other European countries as equals. But as long as those countries are represented by the EU consortium, the UK will be lesser status in the European set up. The UK can't deal with the EU as a sovereign equal because the EU isn't a sovereign state, it's a supranational body representing its members' interest. It can't deal directly with members because they are represented by the EU.
I've not really paid too much attention to the testing saga, but just watching BBC Breakfast this morning it's starting to make sense. Basically loads of people without symptoms want a test, just because they fancy getting a test. It's like the public's bizarre desire to sit in A&E on a Saturday night.
This is caused by children and young people getting a seasonal cold and the parents fear of covid. In my family my sons daughter (8) has had a cold and a test which was negative after a four day wait and my daughter's son (11) has also had a cold and been told to stay off school and if worse after 48 hours have a test
I was listening to 5 live this morning and an expert on testing provided a detailed explanation of the process and logistics and confirmed that over 200,000 tests a day were being conducted and 20 million completed. If that stat is correct nearly one third of the nation have had a test.
It is clear that the test rules need to be reviewed and tests prioritised across the UK. The idea of some to open hospital labs to these tests is the wrong thing to do as it is prioritising many unnecessary and non urgent tests over life threatening cancer and other essential non covid related tests.
Tests are something the anti HMG proponents can attack the government on but the simple truth is no government of any political persuasion would have any other answer than the one proposed by Hancock of prioritising tests
Many people, specifically front line workers in the NHS and care will quite correctly have had multiple tests. So 20m tests does not equiperate to 20m tested or anything like it. Approximately 100k tests are being given to these front line workers every day. Most will be repeats but that is necessary.
I had multiple tests last week simply because my doctors don’t trust the test. Not sure why.
There is a high false negative rate.
Tests conducted on NHS patients in hospital go to the hospital labs, not to Dido's empire.
There are also false positives. So if you test someone five times and only the fifth comes back positive then what have you achieved with the tests? Why not forget about the tests and be led by the symptoms?
IIUC the PCR test shouldn't produce false positives unless the lab bollockses it up and contaminates your negative sample with somebody else's positive one, although this has been known.
You don't want to be led purely by the symptoms because: 1) Part of what you're trying to find out is whether the person is going to infect somebody else 2) The symptoms may only show up later 3) Some of the symptoms look similar to the symptoms for other illnesses which require different treatments, so testing helps you treat the right thing
Yes but Foxy was particularly talking about NHS patients in hospital. The assumption, surely, would be that cross contamination is possible with or without a test.
On "the PCR test shouldn't produce false positives"
That`s interesting: "traces of old virus could partly explain why the number of cases is rising while hospital admissions remain stable".
This is typical wishful thinking which we find in many self-declared "sceptical" analyses of science issues with a bearing on public policy.
In a thought experiment you can construct a scenario where a constant infection rate looks like an increase in the infection rate due to the identification of old traces of the virus. It's a plausible hypothesis if all you know is that the hospitalization rate is stable and cases are rising (though there are other explanations and the hospitalization rate is now rising anyway).
However, when you look at the geographical pattern of positive cases in the UK it does not fit that benign scenario. We see localised outbreaks of the virus, which is a different pattern to one we'd expect if the increase in cases were due to false positives detecting dead virus. The plausible hypothesis is falsified by the consideration of additional data.
And yet, because the idea is so reassuring it refuses to die. I'd imagine that in a decades time there will still be people explaining that the Coronavirus was exaggerated because the test detected dead viruses.
There are, doubtless, problems with the test we're using, but I think false negatives in the pre-symptomatic phase are more problematic than false positives later, and it's wishful thinking to believe otherwise.
First bit of misinformation given by Govt who in response to complaints about people being given ridiculous places to travel to: Both Boris and Matt H quote median distance actually travelled. This completely ignores all the people given Aberdeen and elsewhere as the test site to go to who obviously decline impractical distances to travel to. So response is accurate, but actually useless.
That "its an election year" doesn't change the basic political realities. The Americans will not reward us for shitting on the Good Friday Agreement.
I know that the supremacy of Britain England seems to be an article of faith amongst some. They're about to have a quick education in realpolitik
So what do you think will happen if we refuse to back down? The EU and USA will be sour with us forever? Without actually dealing with the problems?
Or will they seek to adapt to the new reality? Realpolitik involves dealing with the world as it is not as you want it to be. Realpolitik means if Britain England wants something doing we need to do it ourselves and not expect anyone else to do it for us.
Every year in the US is an election year (except probably the first year in the 4 year presidential election cycle). So we would need a deal done next year and that requires it going through congress and Congress have already said that with the new NI that's not happening.
And politicians want to be elected - so they aren't going to vote for something that loses them Irish votes (and there are a lot of Irish votes in the US, including millions who haven't ever been to Ireland).
The Republicans won more English American votes than Irish American votes in 2016 for Congress, however the Democrats won more Irish American votes than English American votes and although Trump narrowly won the Irish American vote he still did better with English Americans than Irish Americans
Presumably these ancestry numbers are self-reported, in which case they probably tell us as much about the respondent's sense of identity as actual background. Most white Americans have a tangle of ancestors from a range of European countries as well as a bit of native American and African thrown in for some of them. I would hazard a guess that Americans self identifying as Irish are politically to the left of those identifying as English even when their actual ancestry is quite similar.
I've not really paid too much attention to the testing saga, but just watching BBC Breakfast this morning it's starting to make sense. Basically loads of people without symptoms want a test, just because they fancy getting a test. It's like the public's bizarre desire to sit in A&E on a Saturday night.
This is caused by children and young people getting a seasonal cold and the parents fear of covid. In my family my sons daughter (8) has had a cold and a test which was negative after a four day wait and my daughter's son (11) has also had a cold and been told to stay off school and if worse after 48 hours have a test
I was listening to 5 live this morning and an expert on testing provided a detailed explanation of the process and logistics and confirmed that over 200,000 tests a day were being conducted and 20 million completed. If that stat is correct nearly one third of the nation have had a test.
It is clear that the test rules need to be reviewed and tests prioritised across the UK. The idea of some to open hospital labs to these tests is the wrong thing to do as it is prioritising many unnecessary and non urgent tests over life threatening cancer and other essential non covid related tests.
Tests are something the anti HMG proponents can attack the government on but the simple truth is no government of any political persuasion would have any other answer than the one proposed by Hancock of prioritising tests
Well said.
My wife works on the front line of a care home. She's had a blood antibody test and is getting a swab antigen test every single week. The care home has boxes and boxes of swab kits and all staff and residents have to get tested every single week. They are getting prioritised.
For someone healthy who has the sniffles and wants to get tested not being able to do so may be irritating. If the care staff etc cease to be tested in order to add more capacity for "the worried well" then would that be an improvement? I think no.
Approximately a quarter of a million daily tests are happening but half of that is immediately accounted for by routine testing of NHS staff and care staff and residents.
It’s not just “irritating”, in some cases having a test or not is the difference between being able to go to work (and getting paid) or not.
If you have any symptoms, you have to report it to your employer. You then cant go to work unless you have a negative test or you wait the 10 days or whatever. Not every employer is paying full wages during that time. A lot will get nothing for the first few days, and then SSP (which is literally nothing) for the remainder.
Describing it as “irritating” is just showing how out of touch you are.
The person quoted before who lied on their form changing it from unemployed to key worker, what work were they going to?
Not being able to go to work is bad, I never said otherwise. But if care workers cease to be prioritised then thousands of residents could start dying again.
Lost wages is bad, lost lives is surely worse?
Although I don't agree with a lot of your posts on testing Philip I have to say I agree re the unemployed person fiddling the test criteria was despicable when there is a struggling to cope. Just selfish. There was a worse example given in the same report. A family who had returned from a Spanish holiday, had self isolated for 10 days and were all perfectly well, but wanted a test just to be sure. What? Why the hell are you wasting the testing resources when others really do need them. They have no reason for being tested at all. And if you are that concerned then why the hell did you go on holiday to Spain in the first place. They should not have a test and when they do they should have to pay for it.
Pure Kafka: we'll prosecute you for behaving as if you did not have the virus, and also prosecute you for trying to establish whether you have it or not.
But for months we have been told by the govt that testing capacity is the most important thing and that increasing the number of tests is the overarching aim and test...test...test...
The public could be forgiven for gaining the impression that the govt wanted us to....test!
But no. To go out and test - because that would be 62m minus that family who can be accounted for - is now seen as anti-social as farting in a lift.
I've not really paid too much attention to the testing saga, but just watching BBC Breakfast this morning it's starting to make sense. Basically loads of people without symptoms want a test, just because they fancy getting a test. It's like the public's bizarre desire to sit in A&E on a Saturday night.
This is caused by children and young people getting a seasonal cold and the parents fear of covid. In my family my sons daughter (8) has had a cold and a test which was negative after a four day wait and my daughter's son (11) has also had a cold and been told to stay off school and if worse after 48 hours have a test
I was listening to 5 live this morning and an expert on testing provided a detailed explanation of the process and logistics and confirmed that over 200,000 tests a day were being conducted and 20 million completed. If that stat is correct nearly one third of the nation have had a test.
It is clear that the test rules need to be reviewed and tests prioritised across the UK. The idea of some to open hospital labs to these tests is the wrong thing to do as it is prioritising many unnecessary and non urgent tests over life threatening cancer and other essential non covid related tests.
Tests are something the anti HMG proponents can attack the government on but the simple truth is no government of any political persuasion would have any other answer than the one proposed by Hancock of prioritising tests
Well said.
My wife works on the front line of a care home. She's had a blood antibody test and is getting a swab antigen test every single week. The care home has boxes and boxes of swab kits and all staff and residents have to get tested every single week. They are getting prioritised.
For someone healthy who has the sniffles and wants to get tested not being able to do so may be irritating. If the care staff etc cease to be tested in order to add more capacity for "the worried well" then would that be an improvement? I think no.
Approximately a quarter of a million daily tests are happening but half of that is immediately accounted for by routine testing of NHS staff and care staff and residents.
It’s not just “irritating”, in some cases having a test or not is the difference between being able to go to work (and getting paid) or not.
If you have any symptoms, you have to report it to your employer. You then cant go to work unless you have a negative test or you wait the 10 days or whatever. Not every employer is paying full wages during that time. A lot will get nothing for the first few days, and then SSP (which is literally nothing) for the remainder.
Describing it as “irritating” is just showing how out of touch you are.
The person quoted before who lied on their form changing it from unemployed to key worker, what work were they going to?
Not being able to go to work is bad, I never said otherwise. But if care workers cease to be prioritised then thousands of residents could start dying again.
Lost wages is bad, lost lives is surely worse?
Although I don't agree with a lot of your posts on testing Philip I have to say I agree re the unemployed person fiddling the test criteria was despicable when there is a struggling to cope. Just selfish. There was a worse example given in the same report. A family who had returned from a Spanish holiday, had self isolated for 10 days and were all perfectly well, but wanted a test just to be sure. What? Why the hell are you wasting the testing resources when others really do need them. They have no reason for being tested at all. And if you are that concerned then why the hell did you go on holiday to Spain in the first place. They should not have a test and when they do they should have to pay for it.
Pure Kafka: we'll prosecute you for behaving as if you did not have the virus, and also prosecute you for trying to establish whether you have it or not.
No idea what you are saying IshmaelZ. Clarify?
Hard to be clearer, surely? People taking the thoroughly responsible, understandable and in-line-with-modern-theories-of-screening-generally view that it would be great to be tested for a disease they might very well have are being demonised on this thread as irresponsible lowlife scrounging system-gamers because Dido and those who appointed her are too useless to construct a fit-for-purpose screening system.
I've not really paid too much attention to the testing saga, but just watching BBC Breakfast this morning it's starting to make sense. Basically loads of people without symptoms want a test, just because they fancy getting a test. It's like the public's bizarre desire to sit in A&E on a Saturday night.
This is caused by children and young people getting a seasonal cold and the parents fear of covid. In my family my sons daughter (8) has had a cold and a test which was negative after a four day wait and my daughter's son (11) has also had a cold and been told to stay off school and if worse after 48 hours have a test
I was listening to 5 live this morning and an expert on testing provided a detailed explanation of the process and logistics and confirmed that over 200,000 tests a day were being conducted and 20 million completed. If that stat is correct nearly one third of the nation have had a test.
It is clear that the test rules need to be reviewed and tests prioritised across the UK. The idea of some to open hospital labs to these tests is the wrong thing to do as it is prioritising many unnecessary and non urgent tests over life threatening cancer and other essential non covid related tests.
Tests are something the anti HMG proponents can attack the government on but the simple truth is no government of any political persuasion would have any other answer than the one proposed by Hancock of prioritising tests
Well said.
My wife works on the front line of a care home. She's had a blood antibody test and is getting a swab antigen test every single week. The care home has boxes and boxes of swab kits and all staff and residents have to get tested every single week. They are getting prioritised.
For someone healthy who has the sniffles and wants to get tested not being able to do so may be irritating. If the care staff etc cease to be tested in order to add more capacity for "the worried well" then would that be an improvement? I think no.
Approximately a quarter of a million daily tests are happening but half of that is immediately accounted for by routine testing of NHS staff and care staff and residents.
It’s not just “irritating”, in some cases having a test or not is the difference between being able to go to work (and getting paid) or not.
If you have any symptoms, you have to report it to your employer. You then cant go to work unless you have a negative test or you wait the 10 days or whatever. Not every employer is paying full wages during that time. A lot will get nothing for the first few days, and then SSP (which is literally nothing) for the remainder.
Describing it as “irritating” is just showing how out of touch you are.
The person quoted before who lied on their form changing it from unemployed to key worker, what work were they going to?
Not being able to go to work is bad, I never said otherwise. But if care workers cease to be prioritised then thousands of residents could start dying again.
Lo st wages is bad, lost lives is surely worse?
Although I don't agree with a lot of your posts on testing Philip I have to say I agree re the unemployed person fiddling the test criteria was despicable when there is a struggling to cope. Just selfish. There was a worse example given in the same report. A family who had returned from a Spanish holiday, had self isolated for 10 days and were all perfectly well, but wanted a test just to be sure. What? Why the hell are you wasting the testing resources when others really do need them. They have no reason for being tested at all. And if you are that concerned then why the hell did you go on holiday to Spain in the first place. They should not have a test and when they do they should have to pay for it.
Very well said.
We take for granted in this country that we don't pay for healthcare but that leads to almost infinite demand and people taking the piss like this.
It is worth keeping some perspective: Currently close to a quarter of a million tests per day are being taken which is more per capita than almost any other major developed country in the entire world. Of those about half go to "the front line" and the other half are for everyone else, but people are saying that's not enough. Though when Boris spoke about getting capacity up to a million tests per day (the "moonshot") he was laughed at and everyone said that was ridiculous.
So if a quarter of a million daily tests in insufficient and a million tests per day is ludicrously expensive and ridiculous, then where should the line be drawn?
Would the US Congress be happy if the UK government failed in its duty to provide food? I seem to recall an echo in Irish history about that sort of failing.
The government's position on this has been chaotic and stupid. Grown ups have now made it clear that the provisions of the Bill do not breach the agreement at all. They give us the capacity to act if the EU breaches the agreement and sought to hold us to ransom by its provisions. The government has made it clear that the provisions of the bill will not be used pre-emptively. Why the legislation was not presented in this way in the first instance so as to avoid this completely ridiculous row is simply beyond me. Presumably some idiot thought he was being clever. He really wasn't and this letter is just one example of that.
The EU hasn't threatened to blockade UK food nor does it shows any intention of doing so. That's a slander invented by a morally and intellectually bankrupt government to shore up its position. Even if the EU did decide for this Act of War, the proposed bill does zero to address the problem.
It is clear Barnier has and he stepped over the mark but Boris reaction was equalled wrong
In what way is it clear? Seriously. I have seen absolutely no evidence of it, but it could be because I am not looking in the right places. I do not understand how the EU could blockade Northern Ireland, for starters. And if the legislaiotn is all about preventing a blockade, why is state aid a big part of it?
There are now (at least) two sources for the “blockade” story:
It’s entirely possible the EU was simply pointing out the consequences of failure to ratify UK SPS regulation rather than making a “threat” per se - but it feels like the EU could have handled this more diplomatically - and as @DavidL has pointed the U.K. has completely mishandled communication of its response.
Trouble is that there is a strand of Brexit thinking that includes a visceral sense of "You can't make us". Filling in these forms would be to acknowledge that, in certain situations, they can make us, and the UK government doesn't seem emotionally ready to do that yet.
Very astute point. The most obvious consequence of Brexit will be an orgy of form filling.
Also I don't think the government, despite its rhetoric of sovereign independent state has emotionally accepted third country status in Europe. If the EU disappeared the UK would deal with other European countries as equals. But as long as those countries are represented by the EU consortium, the UK will be lesser status in the European set up. The UK can't deal with the EU as a sovereign equal because the EU isn't a sovereign state, it's a supranational body representing its members' interest. It can't deal directly with members because they are represented by the EU.
Incidentally this was the comment Angela Merkel made about Brexit back in 2016. The UK would find its third country status difficult.
That "its an election year" doesn't change the basic political realities. The Americans will not reward us for shitting on the Good Friday Agreement.
I know that the supremacy of Britain England seems to be an article of faith amongst some. They're about to have a quick education in realpolitik
So what do you think will happen if we refuse to back down? The EU and USA will be sour with us forever? Without actually dealing with the problems?
Or will they seek to adapt to the new reality? Realpolitik involves dealing with the world as it is not as you want it to be. Realpolitik means if Britain England wants something doing we need to do it ourselves and not expect anyone else to do it for us.
Every year in the US is an election year (except probably the first year in the 4 year presidential election cycle). So we would need a deal done next year and that requires it going through congress and Congress have already said that with the new NI that's not happening.
And politicians want to be elected - so they aren't going to vote for something that loses them Irish votes (and there are a lot of Irish votes in the US, including millions who haven't ever been to Ireland).
The Republicans won more English American votes than Irish American votes in 2016 for Congress, however the Democrats won more Irish American votes than English American votes and although Trump narrowly won the Irish American vote he still did better with English Americans than Irish Americans
The English American lobby consists solely of Andrew Sullivan and John Oliver, and they cancel each other out. For whatever reason English American heritage isn't really a thing in the same way that Irish American is.
The amount of self identified English Americans is roughly the same as Irish Americans but English Americans tend to be concentrated in more Republican states eg the state with the highest percentage of English Americans is Utah while Irish Americans tend to be concentrated in safe Democratic states eg the state with the highest percentage of Irish Americans is Massachussetts
I've not really paid too much attention to the testing saga, but just watching BBC Breakfast this morning it's starting to make sense. Basically loads of people without symptoms want a test, just because they fancy getting a test. It's like the public's bizarre desire to sit in A&E on a Saturday night.
This is caused by children and young people getting a seasonal cold and the parents fear of covid. In my family my sons daughter (8) has had a cold and a test which was negative after a four day wait and my daughter's son (11) has also had a cold and been told to stay off school and if worse after 48 hours have a test
I was listening to 5 live this morning and an expert on testing provided a detailed explanation of the process and logistics and confirmed that over 200,000 tests a day were being conducted and 20 million completed. If that stat is correct nearly one third of the nation have had a test.
It is clear that the test rules need to be reviewed and tests prioritised across the UK. The idea of some to open hospital labs to these tests is the wrong thing to do as it is prioritising many unnecessary and non urgent tests over life threatening cancer and other essential non covid related tests.
Tests are something the anti HMG proponents can attack the government on but the simple truth is no government of any political persuasion would have any other answer than the one proposed by Hancock of prioritising tests
Many people, specifically front line workers in the NHS and care will quite correctly have had multiple tests. So 20m tests does not equiperate to 20m tested or anything like it. Approximately 100k tests are being given to these front line workers every day. Most will be repeats but that is necessary.
I had multiple tests last week simply because my doctors don’t trust the test. Not sure why.
There is a high false negative rate.
Tests conducted on NHS patients in hospital go to the hospital labs, not to Dido's empire.
There are also false positives. So if you test someone five times and only the fifth comes back positive then what have you achieved with the tests? Why not forget about the tests and be led by the symptoms?
IIUC the PCR test shouldn't produce false positives unless the lab bollockses it up and contaminates your negative sample with somebody else's positive one, although this has been known.
You don't want to be led purely by the symptoms because: 1) Part of what you're trying to find out is whether the person is going to infect somebody else 2) The symptoms may only show up later 3) Some of the symptoms look similar to the symptoms for other illnesses which require different treatments, so testing helps you treat the right thing
Yes but Foxy was particularly talking about NHS patients in hospital. The assumption, surely, would be that cross contamination is possible with or without a test.
On "the PCR test shouldn't produce false positives"
That`s interesting: "traces of old virus could partly explain why the number of cases is rising while hospital admissions remain stable".
I thought it was widely known that you could, potentially, pick up virus fragments that were not viable for infection. I guess the point is that if you're mass testing then yes, you could potentially be picking up positives from people who were infected some time ago and/or have some non-viable fragments on the swab, which might inflate the numbers. However, that should - at present - be a fairly static background level from when infections were peaking in the spring - it may mean current tests over-estimate, but it shouldn't mean that this weeks tests over-estimate compared to last week's tests by any meaningful amount. If test positives are still going up then real cases are likely going up.
Yes, but not as much as may appear. That the supposed rise in infections is not leading to a similar rise in hospitalisations is a head-scratcher and I have five possibles now on my list:
1) infections are not actually going up; the numbers are rising because of increased testing/particular cohort testing 2) the virus is mutating to a less serious form 3) variolation: infections caught via the increased use of masks is resulting in a lower dose which the body can cope with 4) some of the positive test results are picking up remnants of previous virus infections thus creating an incorrect assumption that the virus is spreading above R=1 5) hospitalisation numbers are the issue: medics are sending people home to manage the virus whereas in the spring they would have been admitted to hospital.
Any others? Could be a combination of these I guess.
6) The infection is not yet spreading to older people or those with serious medical conditions who are most likely to be hospitalised. But it may well do soon.
I think we need a new dictum, "Philip Thompson Applies".
That's for someone whose utterances are not only predictable, but are usually repeated around 7000 times.
Ask him whether Johnson wrote a letter to Tusk in October.
That might break the internet.
Or ask him why he voted for someone who enables genocide. That usually results in tumbleweed.
Grieve and other MPs wrote the letter and put it into law. Johnson sent the letter he didn't write as required by law.
I didn't vote for someone who enables genocide, I absolutely despise Claire Fox. I voted for there not to be any MEPs at all - and there aren't any. So therefore she's not elected anymore.
I've not really paid too much attention to the testing saga, but just watching BBC Breakfast this morning it's starting to make sense. Basically loads of people without symptoms want a test, just because they fancy getting a test. It's like the public's bizarre desire to sit in A&E on a Saturday night.
This is caused by children and young people getting a seasonal cold and the parents fear of covid. In my family my sons daughter (8) has had a cold and a test which was negative after a four day wait and my daughter's son (11) has also had a cold and been told to stay off school and if worse after 48 hours have a test
I was listening to 5 live this morning and an expert on testing provided a detailed explanation of the process and logistics and confirmed that over 200,000 tests a day were being conducted and 20 million completed. If that stat is correct nearly one third of the nation have had a test.
It is clear that the test rules need to be reviewed and tests prioritised across the UK. The idea of some to open hospital labs to these tests is the wrong thing to do as it is prioritising many unnecessary and non urgent tests over life threatening cancer and other essential non covid related tests.
Tests are something the anti HMG proponents can attack the government on but the simple truth is no government of any political persuasion would have any other answer than the one proposed by Hancock of prioritising tests
Well said.
My wife works on the front line of a care home. She's had a blood antibody test and is getting a swab antigen test every single week. The care home has boxes and boxes of swab kits and all staff and residents have to get tested every single week. They are getting prioritised.
For someone healthy who has the sniffles and wants to get tested not being able to do so may be irritating. If the care staff etc cease to be tested in order to add more capacity for "the worried well" then would that be an improvement? I think no.
Approximately a quarter of a million daily tests are happening but half of that is immediately accounted for by routine testing of NHS staff and care staff and residents.
It’s not just “irritating”, in some cases having a test or not is the difference between being able to go to work (and getting paid) or not.
If you have any symptoms, you have to report it to your employer. You then cant go to work unless you have a negative test or you wait the 10 days or whatever. Not every employer is paying full wages during that time. A lot will get nothing for the first few days, and then SSP (which is literally nothing) for the remainder.
Describing it as “irritating” is just showing how out of touch you are.
The person quoted before who lied on their form changing it from unemployed to key worker, what work were they going to?
Not being able to go to work is bad, I never said otherwise. But if care workers cease to be prioritised then thousands of residents could start dying again.
Lo st wages is bad, lost lives is surely worse?
Although I don't agree with a lot of your posts on testing Philip I have to say I agree re the unemployed person fiddling the test criteria was despicable when there is a struggling to cope. Just selfish. There was a worse example given in the same report. A family who had returned from a Spanish holiday, had self isolated for 10 days and were all perfectly well, but wanted a test just to be sure. What? Why the hell are you wasting the testing resources when others really do need them. They have no reason for being tested at all. And if you are that concerned then why the hell did you go on holiday to Spain in the first place. They should not have a test and when they do they should have to pay for it.
Very well said.
We take for granted in this country that we don't pay for healthcare but that leads to almost infinite demand and people taking the piss like this.
It is worth keeping some perspective: Currently close to a quarter of a million tests per day are being taken which is more per capita than almost any other major developed country in the entire world. Of those about half go to "the front line" and the other half are for everyone else, but people are saying that's not enough. Though when Boris spoke about getting capacity up to a million tests per day (the "moonshot") he was laughed at and everyone said that was ridiculous.
So if a quarter of a million daily tests in insufficient and a million tests per day is ludicrously expensive and ridiculous, then where should the line be drawn?
"Taking the piss" = wanting to be tested for a disease which the government tells you day in, day out you may very well have?
The insistence on their entirely irrelevant unemployed status puts you slap in the middle of UKIP/BNP territory.
I've not really paid too much attention to the testing saga, but just watching BBC Breakfast this morning it's starting to make sense. Basically loads of people without symptoms want a test, just because they fancy getting a test. It's like the public's bizarre desire to sit in A&E on a Saturday night.
This is caused by children and young people getting a seasonal cold and the parents fear of covid. In my family my sons daughter (8) has had a cold and a test which was negative after a four day wait and my daughter's son (11) has also had a cold and been told to stay off school and if worse after 48 hours have a test
I was listening to 5 live this morning and an expert on testing provided a detailed explanation of the process and logistics and confirmed that over 200,000 tests a day were being conducted and 20 million completed. If that stat is correct nearly one third of the nation have had a test.
It is clear that the test rules need to be reviewed and tests prioritised across the UK. The idea of some to open hospital labs to these tests is the wrong thing to do as it is prioritising many unnecessary and non urgent tests over life threatening cancer and other essential non covid related tests.
Tests are something the anti HMG proponents can attack the government on but the simple truth is no government of any political persuasion would have any other answer than the one proposed by Hancock of prioritising tests
Many people, specifically front line workers in the NHS and care will quite correctly have had multiple tests. So 20m tests does not equiperate to 20m tested or anything like it. Approximately 100k tests are being given to these front line workers every day. Most will be repeats but that is necessary.
I had multiple tests last week simply because my doctors don’t trust the test. Not sure why.
There is a high false negative rate.
Tests conducted on NHS patients in hospital go to the hospital labs, not to Dido's empire.
There are also false positives. So if you test someone five times and only the fifth comes back positive then what have you achieved with the tests? Why not forget about the tests and be led by the symptoms?
IIUC the PCR test shouldn't produce false positives unless the lab bollockses it up and contaminates your negative sample with somebody else's positive one, although this has been known.
You don't want to be led purely by the symptoms because: 1) Part of what you're trying to find out is whether the person is going to infect somebody else 2) The symptoms may only show up later 3) Some of the symptoms look similar to the symptoms for other illnesses which require different treatments, so testing helps you treat the right thing
Yes but Foxy was particularly talking about NHS patients in hospital. The assumption, surely, would be that cross contamination is possible with or without a test.
On "the PCR test shouldn't produce false positives"
That`s interesting: "traces of old virus could partly explain why the number of cases is rising while hospital admissions remain stable".
I thought it was widely known that you could, potentially, pick up virus fragments that were not viable for infection. I guess the point is that if you're mass testing then yes, you could potentially be picking up positives from people who were infected some time ago and/or have some non-viable fragments on the swab, which might inflate the numbers. However, that should - at present - be a fairly static background level from when infections were peaking in the spring - it may mean current tests over-estimate, but it shouldn't mean that this weeks tests over-estimate compared to last week's tests by any meaningful amount. If test positives are still going up then real cases are likely going up.
Yes, but not as much as may appear. That the supposed rise in infections is not leading to a similar rise in hospitalisations is a head-scratcher and I have five possibles now on my list:
1) infections are not actually going up; the numbers are rising because of increased testing/particular cohort testing 2) the virus is mutating to a less serious form 3) variolation: infections caught via the increased use of masks is resulting in a lower dose which the body can cope with 4) some of the positive test results are picking up remnants of previous virus infections thus creating an incorrect assumption that the virus is spreading above R=1 5) hospitalisation numbers are the issue: medics are sending people home to manage the virus whereas in the spring they would have been admitted to hospital.
Any others? Could be a combination of these I guess.
6) The infection is not yet spreading to older people or those with serious medical conditions who are most likely to be hospitalised. But it may well do soon.
I've not really paid too much attention to the testing saga, but just watching BBC Breakfast this morning it's starting to make sense. Basically loads of people without symptoms want a test, just because they fancy getting a test. It's like the public's bizarre desire to sit in A&E on a Saturday night.
This is caused by children and young people getting a seasonal cold and the parents fear of covid. In my family my sons daughter (8) has had a cold and a test which was negative after a four day wait and my daughter's son (11) has also had a cold and been told to stay off school and if worse after 48 hours have a test
I was listening to 5 live this morning and an expert on testing provided a detailed explanation of the process and logistics and confirmed that over 200,000 tests a day were being conducted and 20 million completed. If that stat is correct nearly one third of the nation have had a test.
It is clear that the test rules need to be reviewed and tests prioritised across the UK. The idea of some to open hospital labs to these tests is the wrong thing to do as it is prioritising many unnecessary and non urgent tests over life threatening cancer and other essential non covid related tests.
Tests are something the anti HMG proponents can attack the government on but the simple truth is no government of any political persuasion would have any other answer than the one proposed by Hancock of prioritising tests
Well said.
My wife works on the front line of a care home. She's had a blood antibody test and is getting a swab antigen test every single week. The care home has boxes and boxes of swab kits and all staff and residents have to get tested every single week. They are getting prioritised.
For someone healthy who has the sniffles and wants to get tested not being able to do so may be irritating. If the care staff etc cease to be tested in order to add more capacity for "the worried well" then would that be an improvement? I think no.
Approximately a quarter of a million daily tests are happening but half of that is immediately accounted for by routine testing of NHS staff and care staff and residents.
It’s not just “irritating”, in some cases having a test or not is the difference between being able to go to work (and getting paid) or not.
If you have any symptoms, you have to report it to your employer. You then cant go to work unless you have a negative test or you wait the 10 days or whatever. Not every employer is paying full wages during that time. A lot will get nothing for the first few days, and then SSP (which is literally nothing) for the remainder.
Describing it as “irritating” is just showing how out of touch you are.
The person quoted before who lied on their form changing it from unemployed to key worker, what work were they going to?
Not being able to go to work is bad, I never said otherwise. But if care workers cease to be prioritised then thousands of residents could start dying again.
Lo st wages is bad, lost lives is surely worse?
Although I don't agree with a lot of your posts on testing Philip I have to say I agree re the unemployed person fiddling the test criteria was despicable when there is a struggling to cope. Just selfish. There was a worse example given in the same report. A family who had returned from a Spanish holiday, had self isolated for 10 days and were all perfectly well, but wanted a test just to be sure. What? Why the hell are you wasting the testing resources when others really do need them. They have no reason for being tested at all. And if you are that concerned then why the hell did you go on holiday to Spain in the first place. They should not have a test and when they do they should have to pay for it.
Very well said.
We take for granted in this country that we don't pay for healthcare but that leads to almost infinite demand and people taking the piss like this.
It is worth keeping some perspective: Currently close to a quarter of a million tests per day are being taken which is more per capita than almost any other major developed country in the entire world. Of those about half go to "the front line" and the other half are for everyone else, but people are saying that's not enough. Though when Boris spoke about getting capacity up to a million tests per day (the "moonshot") he was laughed at and everyone said that was ridiculous.
So if a quarter of a million daily tests in insufficient and a million tests per day is ludicrously expensive and ridiculous, then where should the line be drawn?
"Taking the piss" = wanting to be tested for a disease which the government tells you day in, day out you may very well have?
The insistence on their entirely irrelevant unemployed status puts you slap in the middle of UKIP/BNP territory.
People may or may not have many different diseases at any one time. We don't test everyone for every disease they may or may not have unlimitedly. Never have done, never will do.
There is a reason care staff and key workers are prioritised. That is not a UKIP/BNP reason.
I've not really paid too much attention to the testing saga, but just watching BBC Breakfast this morning it's starting to make sense. Basically loads of people without symptoms want a test, just because they fancy getting a test. It's like the public's bizarre desire to sit in A&E on a Saturday night.
This is caused by children and young people getting a seasonal cold and the parents fear of covid. In my family my sons daughter (8) has had a cold and a test which was negative after a four day wait and my daughter's son (11) has also had a cold and been told to stay off school and if worse after 48 hours have a test
I was listening to 5 live this morning and an expert on testing provided a detailed explanation of the process and logistics and confirmed that over 200,000 tests a day were being conducted and 20 million completed. If that stat is correct nearly one third of the nation have had a test.
It is clear that the test rules need to be reviewed and tests prioritised across the UK. The idea of some to open hospital labs to these tests is the wrong thing to do as it is prioritising many unnecessary and non urgent tests over life threatening cancer and other essential non covid related tests.
Tests are something the anti HMG proponents can attack the government on but the simple truth is no government of any political persuasion would have any other answer than the one proposed by Hancock of prioritising tests
Well said.
My wife works on the front line of a care home. She's had a blood antibody test and is getting a swab antigen test every single week. The care home has boxes and boxes of swab kits and all staff and residents have to get tested every single week. They are getting prioritised.
For someone healthy who has the sniffles and wants to get tested not being able to do so may be irritating. If the care staff etc cease to be tested in order to add more capacity for "the worried well" then would that be an improvement? I think no.
Approximately a quarter of a million daily tests are happening but half of that is immediately accounted for by routine testing of NHS staff and care staff and residents.
It’s not just “irritating”, in some cases having a test or not is the difference between being able to go to work (and getting paid) or not.
If you have any symptoms, you have to report it to your employer. You then cant go to work unless you have a negative test or you wait the 10 days or whatever. Not every employer is paying full wages during that time. A lot will get nothing for the first few days, and then SSP (which is literally nothing) for the remainder.
Describing it as “irritating” is just showing how out of touch you are.
The person quoted before who lied on their form changing it from unemployed to key worker, what work were they going to?
Not being able to go to work is bad, I never said otherwise. But if care workers cease to be prioritised then thousands of residents could start dying again.
Lost wages is bad, lost lives is surely worse?
Although I don't agree with a lot of your posts on testing Philip I have to say I agree re the unemployed person fiddling the test criteria was despicable when there is a struggling to cope. Just selfish. There was a worse example given in the same report. A family who had returned from a Spanish holiday, had self isolated for 10 days and were all perfectly well, but wanted a test just to be sure. What? Why the hell are you wasting the testing resources when others really do need them. They have no reason for being tested at all. And if you are that concerned then why the hell did you go on holiday to Spain in the first place. They should not have a test and when they do they should have to pay for it.
Pure Kafka: we'll prosecute you for behaving as if you did not have the virus, and also prosecute you for trying to establish whether you have it or not.
But for months we have been told by the govt that testing capacity is the most important thing and that increasing the number of tests is the overarching aim and test...test...test...
The public could be forgiven for gaining the impression that the govt wanted us to....test!
But no. To go out and test - because that would be 62m minus that family who can be accounted for - is now seen as anti-social as farting in a lift.
I agree with that. I am a critics of the Govt testing shambles (as I guess you know). But surely this twat knows this morning that it is currently a shambles and that people who really need tests can't get them, yet there he goes pootling along with his family to get a test when he has no reason whatsoever to believe he has it. In fact he has every reason to believe he hasn't having self isolated and having no symptoms whatsoever.
Autobiographical note: I am alive today because I had a test for cancer which a consultant oncologist told me not to bother with because there was such a low risk that I had cancer. I had the test anyway. On the NHS. Scrounging c--t.
I've not really paid too much attention to the testing saga, but just watching BBC Breakfast this morning it's starting to make sense. Basically loads of people without symptoms want a test, just because they fancy getting a test. It's like the public's bizarre desire to sit in A&E on a Saturday night.
This is caused by children and young people getting a seasonal cold and the parents fear of covid. In my family my sons daughter (8) has had a cold and a test which was negative after a four day wait and my daughter's son (11) has also had a cold and been told to stay off school and if worse after 48 hours have a test
I was listening to 5 live this morning and an expert on testing provided a detailed explanation of the process and logistics and confirmed that over 200,000 tests a day were being conducted and 20 million completed. If that stat is correct nearly one third of the nation have had a test.
It is clear that the test rules need to be reviewed and tests prioritised across the UK. The idea of some to open hospital labs to these tests is the wrong thing to do as it is prioritising many unnecessary and non urgent tests over life threatening cancer and other essential non covid related tests.
Tests are something the anti HMG proponents can attack the government on but the simple truth is no government of any political persuasion would have any other answer than the one proposed by Hancock of prioritising tests
Well said.
My wife works on the front line of a care home. She's had a blood antibody test and is getting a swab antigen test every single week. The care home has boxes and boxes of swab kits and all staff and residents have to get tested every single week. They are getting prioritised.
For someone healthy who has the sniffles and wants to get tested not being able to do so may be irritating. If the care staff etc cease to be tested in order to add more capacity for "the worried well" then would that be an improvement? I think no.
Approximately a quarter of a million daily tests are happening but half of that is immediately accounted for by routine testing of NHS staff and care staff and residents.
It’s not just “irritating”, in some cases having a test or not is the difference between being able to go to work (and getting paid) or not.
If you have any symptoms, you have to report it to your employer. You then cant go to work unless you have a negative test or you wait the 10 days or whatever. Not every employer is paying full wages during that time. A lot will get nothing for the first few days, and then SSP (which is literally nothing) for the remainder.
Describing it as “irritating” is just showing how out of touch you are.
The person quoted before who lied on their form changing it from unemployed to key worker, what work were they going to?
Not being able to go to work is bad, I never said otherwise. But if care workers cease to be prioritised then thousands of residents could start dying again.
Lo st wages is bad, lost lives is surely worse?
Although I don't agree with a lot of your posts on testing Philip I have to say I agree re the unemployed person fiddling the test criteria was despicable when there is a struggling to cope. Just selfish. There was a worse example given in the same report. A family who had returned from a Spanish holiday, had self isolated for 10 days and were all perfectly well, but wanted a test just to be sure. What? Why the hell are you wasting the testing resources when others really do need them. They have no reason for being tested at all. And if you are that concerned then why the hell did you go on holiday to Spain in the first place. They should not have a test and when they do they should have to pay for it.
Very well said.
We take for granted in this country that we don't pay for healthcare but that leads to almost infinite demand and people taking the piss like this.
It is worth keeping some perspective: Currently close to a quarter of a million tests per day are being taken which is more per capita than almost any other major developed country in the entire world. Of those about half go to "the front line" and the other half are for everyone else, but people are saying that's not enough. Though when Boris spoke about getting capacity up to a million tests per day (the "moonshot") he was laughed at and everyone said that was ridiculous.
So if a quarter of a million daily tests in insufficient and a million tests per day is ludicrously expensive and ridiculous, then where should the line be drawn?
"Taking the piss" = wanting to be tested for a disease which the government tells you day in, day out you may very well have?
The insistence on their entirely irrelevant unemployed status puts you slap in the middle of UKIP/BNP territory.
People may or may not have many different diseases at any one time. We don't test everyone for every disease they may or may not have unlimitedly. Never have done, never will do.
There is a reason care staff and key workers are prioritised. That is not a UKIP/BNP reason.
If everyone in the country was tested then we would be much nearer to being able to go back to "normal".
Isn't that what the government wants and has been messaging* us about?
I've not really paid too much attention to the testing saga, but just watching BBC Breakfast this morning it's starting to make sense. Basically loads of people without symptoms want a test, just because they fancy getting a test. It's like the public's bizarre desire to sit in A&E on a Saturday night.
This is caused by children and young people getting a seasonal cold and the parents fear of covid. In my family my sons daughter (8) has had a cold and a test which was negative after a four day wait and my daughter's son (11) has also had a cold and been told to stay off school and if worse after 48 hours have a test
I was listening to 5 live this morning and an expert on testing provided a detailed explanation of the process and logistics and confirmed that over 200,000 tests a day were being conducted and 20 million completed. If that stat is correct nearly one third of the nation have had a test.
It is clear that the test rules need to be reviewed and tests prioritised across the UK. The idea of some to open hospital labs to these tests is the wrong thing to do as it is prioritising many unnecessary and non urgent tests over life threatening cancer and other essential non covid related tests.
Tests are something the anti HMG proponents can attack the government on but the simple truth is no government of any political persuasion would have any other answer than the one proposed by Hancock of prioritising tests
Well said.
My wife works on the front line of a care home. She's had a blood antibody test and is getting a swab antigen test every single week. The care home has boxes and boxes of swab kits and all staff and residents have to get tested every single week. They are getting prioritised.
For someone healthy who has the sniffles and wants to get tested not being able to do so may be irritating. If the care staff etc cease to be tested in order to add more capacity for "the worried well" then would that be an improvement? I think no.
Approximately a quarter of a million daily tests are happening but half of that is immediately accounted for by routine testing of NHS staff and care staff and residents.
It’s not just “irritating”, in some cases having a test or not is the difference between being able to go to work (and getting paid) or not.
If you have any symptoms, you have to report it to your employer. You then cant go to work unless you have a negative test or you wait the 10 days or whatever. Not every employer is paying full wages during that time. A lot will get nothing for the first few days, and then SSP (which is literally nothing) for the remainder.
Describing it as “irritating” is just showing how out of touch you are.
The person quoted before who lied on their form changing it from unemployed to key worker, what work were they going to?
Not being able to go to work is bad, I never said otherwise. But if care workers cease to be prioritised then thousands of residents could start dying again.
Lo st wages is bad, lost lives is surely worse?
Although I don't agree with a lot of your posts on testing Philip I have to say I agree re the unemployed person fiddling the test criteria was despicable when there is a struggling to cope. Just selfish. There was a worse example given in the same report. A family who had returned from a Spanish holiday, had self isolated for 10 days and were all perfectly well, but wanted a test just to be sure. What? Why the hell are you wasting the testing resources when others really do need them. They have no reason for being tested at all. And if you are that concerned then why the hell did you go on holiday to Spain in the first place. They should not have a test and when they do they should have to pay for it.
Very well said.
We take for granted in this country that we don't pay for healthcare but that leads to almost infinite demand and people taking the piss like this.
It is worth keeping some perspective: Currently close to a quarter of a million tests per day are being taken which is more per capita than almost any other major developed country in the entire world. Of those about half go to "the front line" and the other half are for everyone else, but people are saying that's not enough. Though when Boris spoke about getting capacity up to a million tests per day (the "moonshot") he was laughed at and everyone said that was ridiculous.
So if a quarter of a million daily tests in insufficient and a million tests per day is ludicrously expensive and ridiculous, then where should the line be drawn?
"Taking the piss" = wanting to be tested for a disease which the government tells you day in, day out you may very well have?
The insistence on their entirely irrelevant unemployed status puts you slap in the middle of UKIP/BNP territory.
People may or may not have many different diseases at any one time. We don't test everyone for every disease they may or may not have unlimitedly. Never have done, never will do.
There is a reason care staff and key workers are prioritised. That is not a UKIP/BNP reason.
If everyone in the country was tested then we would be much nearer to being able to go back to "normal".
Isn't that what the government wants and has been messaging* us about?
*ha haha hahahahahaha hahahahahahahahahahaha
And if we had the capacity to do 67 million tests then great.
We don't. Nobody does. No country can or has done that.
Re your comments on US Trade Deal, I agree. Put simply, Biden doesn't like Brexit and would see no reason to help us out of the quagmire.
Brexit fans better hope Trump wins.
What's your take on the current state of polling? It seems to be going nowhere to me. Every now and again Trump gets a small string of decent results and you start to think something is happening, then you get a couple of good Biden ones (like Monmouth for Florida yesterday) and it's 'as you were'. There seem to be so few 'undecideds' that it's hard to see much movement over the remaining weeks which is disappointingly dull if nothing else.
Yep, why else is Farage going over to campaign for Trump as he did in 2016 (remember Trump backed Brexit even before Leave won when Obama was threatening to send us 'to the back of the queue') and why else is Boris now saying Trump has 'made America great again'? Biden like Obama and Hillary has little time for Brexit and would put the EU and Dublin ahead of us and key Leave campaigners are realising that if Biden is elected President and the Democrats retain the House and the internal market bill passes any US UK trade proposals will be ripped up by Pelosi and the White House before they are barely even set to paper.
My view is as it has always been, it will be very close, on the latest Fox polling add the don't knows to Trump and it would be 51% to Biden and 48% to Trump and as long as 2016 gold standard rustbelt pollster Trafalgar keep having Trump ahead in Michigan and Wisconsin he has a chance (though even Trafalgar are suggesting Pennsylvania will go to Biden)
Thanks Hyufd. Pennsylvania seems to be the most crucial State and it's a little while since we had a poll. Maybe last nite's TV appearance will help Trump.
I've not really paid too much attention to the testing saga, but just watching BBC Breakfast this morning it's starting to make sense. Basically loads of people without symptoms want a test, just because they fancy getting a test. It's like the public's bizarre desire to sit in A&E on a Saturday night.
This is caused by children and young people getting a seasonal cold and the parents fear of covid. In my family my sons daughter (8) has had a cold and a test which was negative after a four day wait and my daughter's son (11) has also had a cold and been told to stay off school and if worse after 48 hours have a test
I was listening to 5 live this morning and an expert on testing provided a detailed explanation of the process and logistics and confirmed that over 200,000 tests a day were being conducted and 20 million completed. If that stat is correct nearly one third of the nation have had a test.
It is clear that the test rules need to be reviewed and tests prioritised across the UK. The idea of some to open hospital labs to these tests is the wrong thing to do as it is prioritising many unnecessary and non urgent tests over life threatening cancer and other essential non covid related tests.
Tests are something the anti HMG proponents can attack the government on but the simple truth is no government of any political persuasion would have any other answer than the one proposed by Hancock of prioritising tests
Well said.
My wife works on the front line of a care home. She's had a blood antibody test and is getting a swab antigen test every single week. The care home has boxes and boxes of swab kits and all staff and residents have to get tested every single week. They are getting prioritised.
For someone healthy who has the sniffles and wants to get tested not being able to do so may be irritating. If the care staff etc cease to be tested in order to add more capacity for "the worried well" then would that be an improvement? I think no.
Approximately a quarter of a million daily tests are happening but half of that is immediately accounted for by routine testing of NHS staff and care staff and residents.
It’s not just “irritating”, in some cases having a test or not is the difference between being able to go to work (and getting paid) or not.
If you have any symptoms, you have to report it to your employer. You then cant go to work unless you have a negative test or you wait the 10 days or whatever. Not every employer is paying full wages during that time. A lot will get nothing for the first few days, and then SSP (which is literally nothing) for the remainder.
Describing it as “irritating” is just showing how out of touch you are.
The person quoted before who lied on their form changing it from unemployed to key worker, what work were they going to?
Not being able to go to work is bad, I never said otherwise. But if care workers cease to be prioritised then thousands of residents could start dying again.
Lost wages is bad, lost lives is surely worse?
Although I don't agree with a lot of your posts on testing Philip I have to say I agree re the unemployed person fiddling the test criteria was despicable when there is a struggling to cope. Just selfish. There was a worse example given in the same report. A family who had returned from a Spanish holiday, had self isolated for 10 days and were all perfectly well, but wanted a test just to be sure. What? Why the hell are you wasting the testing resources when others really do need them. They have no reason for being tested at all. And if you are that concerned then why the hell did you go on holiday to Spain in the first place. They should not have a test and when they do they should have to pay for it.
Pure Kafka: we'll prosecute you for behaving as if you did not have the virus, and also prosecute you for trying to establish whether you have it or not.
No idea what you are saying IshmaelZ. Clarify?
Hard to be clearer, surely? People taking the thoroughly responsible, understandable and in-line-with-modern-theories-of-screening-generally view that it would be great to be tested for a disease they might very well have are being demonised on this thread as irresponsible lowlife scrounging system-gamers because Dido and those who appointed her are too useless to construct a fit-for-purpose screening system.
See my response to Topping. They didn't need a test. They know it is currently a shambles, yet they are happy to deprive those that need a test. Plain selfish. If everything was running ok then I have no issues. It isn't.
I've not really paid too much attention to the testing saga, but just watching BBC Breakfast this morning it's starting to make sense. Basically loads of people without symptoms want a test, just because they fancy getting a test. It's like the public's bizarre desire to sit in A&E on a Saturday night.
This is caused by children and young people getting a seasonal cold and the parents fear of covid. In my family my sons daughter (8) has had a cold and a test which was negative after a four day wait and my daughter's son (11) has also had a cold and been told to stay off school and if worse after 48 hours have a test
I was listening to 5 live this morning and an expert on testing provided a detailed explanation of the process and logistics and confirmed that over 200,000 tests a day were being conducted and 20 million completed. If that stat is correct nearly one third of the nation have had a test.
It is clear that the test rules need to be reviewed and tests prioritised across the UK. The idea of some to open hospital labs to these tests is the wrong thing to do as it is prioritising many unnecessary and non urgent tests over life threatening cancer and other essential non covid related tests.
Tests are something the anti HMG proponents can attack the government on but the simple truth is no government of any political persuasion would have any other answer than the one proposed by Hancock of prioritising tests
Many people, specifically front line workers in the NHS and care will quite correctly have had multiple tests. So 20m tests does not equiperate to 20m tested or anything like it. Approximately 100k tests are being given to these front line workers every day. Most will be repeats but that is necessary.
I had multiple tests last week simply because my doctors don’t trust the test. Not sure why.
There is a high false negative rate.
Tests conducted on NHS patients in hospital go to the hospital labs, not to Dido's empire.
There are also false positives. So if you test someone five times and only the fifth comes back positive then what have you achieved with the tests? Why not forget about the tests and be led by the symptoms?
IIUC the PCR test shouldn't produce false positives unless the lab bollockses it up and contaminates your negative sample with somebody else's positive one, although this has been known.
You don't want to be led purely by the symptoms because: 1) Part of what you're trying to find out is whether the person is going to infect somebody else 2) The symptoms may only show up later 3) Some of the symptoms look similar to the symptoms for other illnesses which require different treatments, so testing helps you treat the right thing
Yes but Foxy was particularly talking about NHS patients in hospital. The assumption, surely, would be that cross contamination is possible with or without a test.
On "the PCR test shouldn't produce false positives"
That`s interesting: "traces of old virus could partly explain why the number of cases is rising while hospital admissions remain stable".
I thought it was widely known that you could, potentially, pick up virus fragments that were not viable for infection. I guess the point is that if you're mass testing then yes, you could potentially be picking up positives from people who were infected some time ago and/or have some non-viable fragments on the swab, which might inflate the numbers. However, that should - at present - be a fairly static background level from when infections were peaking in the spring - it may mean current tests over-estimate, but it shouldn't mean that this weeks tests over-estimate compared to last week's tests by any meaningful amount. If test positives are still going up then real cases are likely going up.
Yes, but not as much as may appear. That the supposed rise in infections is not leading to a similar rise in hospitalisations is a head-scratcher and I have five possibles now on my list:
1) infections are not actually going up; the numbers are rising because of increased testing/particular cohort testing 2) the virus is mutating to a less serious form 3) variolation: infections caught via the increased use of masks is resulting in a lower dose which the body can cope with 4) some of the positive test results are picking up remnants of previous virus infections thus creating an incorrect assumption that the virus is spreading above R=1 5) hospitalisation numbers are the issue: medics are sending people home to manage the virus whereas in the spring they would have been admitted to hospital.
Any others? Could be a combination of these I guess.
6) The infection is not yet spreading to older people or those with serious medical conditions who are most likely to be hospitalised. But it may well do soon.
Hasn't this already been demonstrated?
Yes, I was merely adding it to Stocky's list, as invited to do, for the sake of completeness.
I've not really paid too much attention to the testing saga, but just watching BBC Breakfast this morning it's starting to make sense. Basically loads of people without symptoms want a test, just because they fancy getting a test. It's like the public's bizarre desire to sit in A&E on a Saturday night.
This is caused by children and young people getting a seasonal cold and the parents fear of covid. In my family my sons daughter (8) has had a cold and a test which was negative after a four day wait and my daughter's son (11) has also had a cold and been told to stay off school and if worse after 48 hours have a test
I was listening to 5 live this morning and an expert on testing provided a detailed explanation of the process and logistics and confirmed that over 200,000 tests a day were being conducted and 20 million completed. If that stat is correct nearly one third of the nation have had a test.
It is clear that the test rules need to be reviewed and tests prioritised across the UK. The idea of some to open hospital labs to these tests is the wrong thing to do as it is prioritising many unnecessary and non urgent tests over life threatening cancer and other essential non covid related tests.
Tests are something the anti HMG proponents can attack the government on but the simple truth is no government of any political persuasion would have any other answer than the one proposed by Hancock of prioritising tests
Well said.
My wife works on the front line of a care home. She's had a blood antibody test and is getting a swab antigen test every single week. The care home has boxes and boxes of swab kits and all staff and residents have to get tested every single week. They are getting prioritised.
For someone healthy who has the sniffles and wants to get tested not being able to do so may be irritating. If the care staff etc cease to be tested in order to add more capacity for "the worried well" then would that be an improvement? I think no.
Approximately a quarter of a million daily tests are happening but half of that is immediately accounted for by routine testing of NHS staff and care staff and residents.
It’s not just “irritating”, in some cases having a test or not is the difference between being able to go to work (and getting paid) or not.
If you have any symptoms, you have to report it to your employer. You then cant go to work unless you have a negative test or you wait the 10 days or whatever. Not every employer is paying full wages during that time. A lot will get nothing for the first few days, and then SSP (which is literally nothing) for the remainder.
Describing it as “irritating” is just showing how out of touch you are.
The person quoted before who lied on their form changing it from unemployed to key worker, what work were they going to?
Not being able to go to work is bad, I never said otherwise. But if care workers cease to be prioritised then thousands of residents could start dying again.
Lo st wages is bad, lost lives is surely worse?
Although I don't agree with a lot of your posts on testing Philip I have to say I agree re the unemployed person fiddling the test criteria was despicable when there is a struggling to cope. Just selfish. There was a worse example given in the same report. A family who had returned from a Spanish holiday, had self isolated for 10 days and were all perfectly well, but wanted a test just to be sure. What? Why the hell are you wasting the testing resources when others really do need them. They have no reason for being tested at all. And if you are that concerned then why the hell did you go on holiday to Spain in the first place. They should not have a test and when they do they should have to pay for it.
Very well said.
We take for granted in this country that we don't pay for healthcare but that leads to almost infinite demand and people taking the piss like this.
It is worth keeping some perspective: Currently close to a quarter of a million tests per day are being taken which is more per capita than almost any other major developed country in the entire world. Of those about half go to "the front line" and the other half are for everyone else, but people are saying that's not enough. Though when Boris spoke about getting capacity up to a million tests per day (the "moonshot") he was laughed at and everyone said that was ridiculous.
So if a quarter of a million daily tests in insufficient and a million tests per day is ludicrously expensive and ridiculous, then where should the line be drawn?
Again the obsession with numbers.
Tests are only useful if the right people are tested at the right time, and the right action taken. The problem is fundamentally one of logistics and organisation, and is not something this T and T is doing well.
The problem is that as a matter of deliberate policy, primary health care were kept out of the loop in favour of Tory cronies.
GP practice nurses and pharmacists should be doing the swabbing, and integrating results with the health records, even if using offside labs.
Re your comments on US Trade Deal, I agree. Put simply, Biden doesn't like Brexit and would see no reason to help us out of the quagmire.
Brexit fans better hope Trump wins.
What's your take on the current state of polling? It seems to be going nowhere to me. Every now and again Trump gets a small string of decent results and you start to think something is happening, then you get a couple of good Biden ones (like Monmouth for Florida yesterday) and it's 'as you were'. There seem to be so few 'undecideds' that it's hard to see much movement over the remaining weeks which is disappointingly dull if nothing else.
Can Trump sign a trade deal without Congress having a say (even if it is usually nodded through). As he can't, it actually doesn't matter who wins the election as there won't be a deal if Irish leaning congressmen hate the deal.
The English American lobby consists solely of Andrew Sullivan and John Oliver, and they cancel each other out. For whatever reason English American heritage isn't really a thing in the same way that Irish American is.
There is no such thing, as much as @HYUFD would like to pretend otherwise, as an "English American" voting bloc. Until the American Revolution most white Americans identified as "English" - in the leadup to the American Revolution they asserted their "natural rights of Englishmen". The majority of the Founding Fathers were of English extraction. By the time of the American Revolution, they decided not to identify as English anymore. England (the English/British state anyway) was the opressor.
The unified bloc that did continue to identify with England, the United Empire Loyalists, largely emigrated to what is now Ontario to create the nucleus of English-speaking Canada. Ontario residents will not be voting in the 2020 election. Back in the US, to identify as "English-American" could be, until well into the mid-19C, considered literally treasonous - the War of 1812 and a couple of close calls during the US Civil War proving that.
As a result English Americans form the bulk of those white respondents in census returns who identify as purely "American" even though they are not of Native American decent. English-Americans have never formed a cohesive voting bloc. The first four American Presidents were "English-Americans". When the 1812 War was declared, opposition to it was not determined on ethnic grounds. The president during the war of 1812, Madison, and its most enthusiastic proponent, Thomas Jefferson (a was a noted scholar and enthusiast of Old English and Anglo-Saxon history whose dad, Peter, named Jefferson's birthplace "Shadwell" after the East London district where he was christened) were "English Americans". By contrast, the US never fought an exestential war against Italy, Ireland or any country in Africa. Thus it is quite possible to be Italian-American, Irish-American and Afro-American and still be "American". It was hard to be Japanese or German-American after WW2, difficulties that still persist to this day. So there isn't really a "German-AMerican" bloc either.
I have some skin in this game. My wife's family strongly identifies Irish-American of Catholic decent (they converted to Congregationalism a generation or two ago due to witnessing some poor priestly behaviour but still consider themselves, as my Wife puts it, "culturally Irish Catholic") and I spend a lot of time there - pandemics permitting. My in-laws had generally been quite Anglophile, until Priti Patel's infamous comments. I have never, in all the many months I have spent in the States visiting family and friends, encountered an American Citizen that described themselves as English-American. Italian and Irish tricolours are commonplace on front lawns throughout the States. You will struggle, ever, to find a similarly placed Union Flag or Cross of St George. @HYUDF is simply wrong in his analysis here.
I've not really paid too much attention to the testing saga, but just watching BBC Breakfast this morning it's starting to make sense. Basically loads of people without symptoms want a test, just because they fancy getting a test. It's like the public's bizarre desire to sit in A&E on a Saturday night.
This is caused by children and young people getting a seasonal cold and the parents fear of covid. In my family my sons daughter (8) has had a cold and a test which was negative after a four day wait and my daughter's son (11) has also had a cold and been told to stay off school and if worse after 48 hours have a test
I was listening to 5 live this morning and an expert on testing provided a detailed explanation of the process and logistics and confirmed that over 200,000 tests a day were being conducted and 20 million completed. If that stat is correct nearly one third of the nation have had a test.
It is clear that the test rules need to be reviewed and tests prioritised across the UK. The idea of some to open hospital labs to these tests is the wrong thing to do as it is prioritising many unnecessary and non urgent tests over life threatening cancer and other essential non covid related tests.
Tests are something the anti HMG proponents can attack the government on but the simple truth is no government of any political persuasion would have any other answer than the one proposed by Hancock of prioritising tests
Well said.
My wife works on the front line of a care home. She's had a blood antibody test and is getting a swab antigen test every single week. The care home has boxes and boxes of swab kits and all staff and residents have to get tested every single week. They are getting prioritised.
For someone healthy who has the sniffles and wants to get tested not being able to do so may be irritating. If the care staff etc cease to be tested in order to add more capacity for "the worried well" then would that be an improvement? I think no.
Approximately a quarter of a million daily tests are happening but half of that is immediately accounted for by routine testing of NHS staff and care staff and residents.
It’s not just “irritating”, in some cases having a test or not is the difference between being able to go to work (and getting paid) or not.
If you have any symptoms, you have to report it to your employer. You then cant go to work unless you have a negative test or you wait the 10 days or whatever. Not every employer is paying full wages during that time. A lot will get nothing for the first few days, and then SSP (which is literally nothing) for the remainder.
Describing it as “irritating” is just showing how out of touch you are.
The person quoted before who lied on their form changing it from unemployed to key worker, what work were they going to?
Not being able to go to work is bad, I never said otherwise. But if care workers cease to be prioritised then thousands of residents could start dying again.
Lost wages is bad, lost lives is surely worse?
Although I don't agree with a lot of your posts on testing Philip I have to say I agree re the unemployed person fiddling the test criteria was despicable when there is a struggling to cope. Just selfish. There was a worse example given in the same report. A family who had returned from a Spanish holiday, had self isolated for 10 days and were all perfectly well, but wanted a test just to be sure. What? Why the hell are you wasting the testing resources when others really do need them. They have no reason for being tested at all. And if you are that concerned then why the hell did you go on holiday to Spain in the first place. They should not have a test and when they do they should have to pay for it.
Pure Kafka: we'll prosecute you for behaving as if you did not have the virus, and also prosecute you for trying to establish whether you have it or not.
No idea what you are saying IshmaelZ. Clarify?
Hard to be clearer, surely? People taking the thoroughly responsible, understandable and in-line-with-modern-theories-of-screening-generally view that it would be great to be tested for a disease they might very well have are being demonised on this thread as irresponsible lowlife scrounging system-gamers because Dido and those who appointed her are too useless to construct a fit-for-purpose screening system.
See my response to Topping. They didn't need a test. They know it is currently a shambles, yet they are happy to deprive those that need a test. Plain selfish. If everything was running ok then I have no issues. It isn't.
And the fact is the system was working as intended prioritising those who actually need the test. Lying and pretending to be a key worker isn't a solution.
I've not really paid too much attention to the testing saga, but just watching BBC Breakfast this morning it's starting to make sense. Basically loads of people without symptoms want a test, just because they fancy getting a test. It's like the public's bizarre desire to sit in A&E on a Saturday night.
This is caused by children and young people getting a seasonal cold and the parents fear of covid. In my family my sons daughter (8) has had a cold and a test which was negative after a four day wait and my daughter's son (11) has also had a cold and been told to stay off school and if worse after 48 hours have a test
I was listening to 5 live this morning and an expert on testing provided a detailed explanation of the process and logistics and confirmed that over 200,000 tests a day were being conducted and 20 million completed. If that stat is correct nearly one third of the nation have had a test.
It is clear that the test rules need to be reviewed and tests prioritised across the UK. The idea of some to open hospital labs to these tests is the wrong thing to do as it is prioritising many unnecessary and non urgent tests over life threatening cancer and other essential non covid related tests.
Tests are something the anti HMG proponents can attack the government on but the simple truth is no government of any political persuasion would have any other answer than the one proposed by Hancock of prioritising tests
Well said.
My wife works on the front line of a care home. She's had a blood antibody test and is getting a swab antigen test every single week. The care home has boxes and boxes of swab kits and all staff and residents have to get tested every single week. They are getting prioritised.
For someone healthy who has the sniffles and wants to get tested not being able to do so may be irritating. If the care staff etc cease to be tested in order to add more capacity for "the worried well" then would that be an improvement? I think no.
Approximately a quarter of a million daily tests are happening but half of that is immediately accounted for by routine testing of NHS staff and care staff and residents.
It’s not just “irritating”, in some cases having a test or not is the difference between being able to go to work (and getting paid) or not.
If you have any symptoms, you have to report it to your employer. You then cant go to work unless you have a negative test or you wait the 10 days or whatever. Not every employer is paying full wages during that time. A lot will get nothing for the first few days, and then SSP (which is literally nothing) for the remainder.
Describing it as “irritating” is just showing how out of touch you are.
The person quoted before who lied on their form changing it from unemployed to key worker, what work were they going to?
Not being able to go to work is bad, I never said otherwise. But if care workers cease to be prioritised then thousands of residents could start dying again.
Lost wages is bad, lost lives is surely worse?
Although I don't agree with a lot of your posts on testing Philip I have to say I agree re the unemployed person fiddling the test criteria was despicable when there is a struggling to cope. Just selfish. There was a worse example given in the same report. A family who had returned from a Spanish holiday, had self isolated for 10 days and were all perfectly well, but wanted a test just to be sure. What? Why the hell are you wasting the testing resources when others really do need them. They have no reason for being tested at all. And if you are that concerned then why the hell did you go on holiday to Spain in the first place. They should not have a test and when they do they should have to pay for it.
Pure Kafka: we'll prosecute you for behaving as if you did not have the virus, and also prosecute you for trying to establish whether you have it or not.
But for months we have been told by the govt that testing capacity is the most important thing and that increasing the number of tests is the overarching aim and test...test...test...
The public could be forgiven for gaining the impression that the govt wanted us to....test!
But no. To go out and test - because that would be 62m minus that family who can be accounted for - is now seen as anti-social as farting in a lift.
I agree with that. I am a critics of the Govt testing shambles (as I guess you know). But surely this twat knows this morning that it is currently a shambles and that people who really need tests can't get them, yet there he goes pootling along with his family to get a test when he has no reason whatsoever to believe he has it. In fact he has every reason to believe he hasn't having self isolated and having no symptoms whatsoever.
I can believe he thought something along the lines of: tests are in short supply so I doubt I'll get one but I'll give it a go - oh look! We can get one. Hurrah!
He probably didn't think that if he was given a test then that would be depriving someone else of one because he probably thought that the govt would ensure that those that needed them had them ahead of others or were prioritised.
I really couldn’t care less about getting a trade deal with the US because (a) this is unlikely to benefit us; (b) I simply don’t trust this government to negotiate one which would benefit us; and (c) they’d probably renege on it a few months later anyway.
But it’s fun seeing those who place such store by it realise that actions over NI might have consequences in the US.
On the food standards issue I read somewhere last night that the British government was going to provide all the necessary information (which as others have pointed out is no more than the current EU standards we have been following for years) as required. So, with luck, this should not be an issue. I hope so anyway.
Autobiographical note: I am alive today because I had a test for cancer which a consultant oncologist told me not to bother with because there was such a low risk that I had cancer. I had the test anyway. On the NHS. Scrounging c--t.
Mr Z: I had a similar experience with a GP, who said, and it's burned on my memory; 'I can assure you you haven't got cancer; you're far too well.' With great reluctance he sent me for a colonoscopy; I had two cancer sites 'up there', not just one.
So upwards of 10 years ago I had the operation and 4 years ago the local Oncology people told me I was, at last, clear.
Two of the many things that Brexiteers don't understand are US politics and the US attitude to the UK. Living in the US for five years, I never heard the phrase "special relationship" uttered by any American. The only Americans who support Brexit are right wing nut jobs like Steve Bannon who think the EU is a communist plot. Of the small percentage of Americans who even know or care, most think that the whole thing is insane.
It's remarkable that all the Americans you met thought exactly like you.
I've not really paid too much attention to the testing saga, but just watching BBC Breakfast this morning it's starting to make sense. Basically loads of people without symptoms want a test, just because they fancy getting a test. It's like the public's bizarre desire to sit in A&E on a Saturday night.
This is caused by children and young people getting a seasonal cold and the parents fear of covid. In my family my sons daughter (8) has had a cold and a test which was negative after a four day wait and my daughter's son (11) has also had a cold and been told to stay off school and if worse after 48 hours have a test
I was listening to 5 live this morning and an expert on testing provided a detailed explanation of the process and logistics and confirmed that over 200,000 tests a day were being conducted and 20 million completed. If that stat is correct nearly one third of the nation have had a test.
It is clear that the test rules need to be reviewed and tests prioritised across the UK. The idea of some to open hospital labs to these tests is the wrong thing to do as it is prioritising many unnecessary and non urgent tests over life threatening cancer and other essential non covid related tests.
Tests are something the anti HMG proponents can attack the government on but the simple truth is no government of any political persuasion would have any other answer than the one proposed by Hancock of prioritising tests
Many people, specifically front line workers in the NHS and care will quite correctly have had multiple tests. So 20m tests does not equiperate to 20m tested or anything like it. Approximately 100k tests are being given to these front line workers every day. Most will be repeats but that is necessary.
I had multiple tests last week simply because my doctors don’t trust the test. Not sure why.
There is a high false negative rate.
Tests conducted on NHS patients in hospital go to the hospital labs, not to Dido's empire.
There are also false positives. So if you test someone five times and only the fifth comes back positive then what have you achieved with the tests? Why not forget about the tests and be led by the symptoms?
IIUC the PCR test shouldn't produce false positives unless the lab bollockses it up and contaminates your negative sample with somebody else's positive one, although this has been known.
You don't want to be led purely by the symptoms because: 1) Part of what you're trying to find out is whether the person is going to infect somebody else 2) The symptoms may only show up later 3) Some of the symptoms look similar to the symptoms for other illnesses which require different treatments, so testing helps you treat the right thing
Yes but Foxy was particularly talking about NHS patients in hospital. The assumption, surely, would be that cross contamination is possible with or without a test.
On "the PCR test shouldn't produce false positives"
That`s interesting: "traces of old virus could partly explain why the number of cases is rising while hospital admissions remain stable".
I thought it was widely known that you could, potentially, pick up virus fragments that were not viable for infection. I guess the point is that if you're mass testing then yes, you could potentially be picking up positives from people who were infected some time ago and/or have some non-viable fragments on the swab, which might inflate the numbers. However, that should - at present - be a fairly static background level from when infections were peaking in the spring - it may mean current tests over-estimate, but it shouldn't mean that this weeks tests over-estimate compared to last week's tests by any meaningful amount. If test positives are still going up then real cases are likely going up.
Yes, but not as much as may appear. That the supposed rise in infections is not leading to a similar rise in hospitalisations is a head-scratcher and I have five possibles now on my list:
1) infections are not actually going up; the numbers are rising because of increased testing/particular cohort testing 2) the virus is mutating to a less serious form 3) variolation: infections caught via the increased use of masks is resulting in a lower dose which the body can cope with 4) some of the positive test results are picking up remnants of previous virus infections thus creating an incorrect assumption that the virus is spreading above R=1 5) hospitalisation numbers are the issue: medics are sending people home to manage the virus whereas in the spring they would have been admitted to hospital.
Any others? Could be a combination of these I guess.
6) The infection is not yet spreading to older people or those with serious medical conditions who are most likely to be hospitalised. But it may well do soon.
Hasn't this already been demonstrated?
Yes, I was merely adding it to Stocky's list, as invited to do, for the sake of completeness.
I've not really paid too much attention to the testing saga, but just watching BBC Breakfast this morning it's starting to make sense. Basically loads of people without symptoms want a test, just because they fancy getting a test. It's like the public's bizarre desire to sit in A&E on a Saturday night.
This is caused by children and young people getting a seasonal cold and the parents fear of covid. In my family my sons daughter (8) has had a cold and a test which was negative after a four day wait and my daughter's son (11) has also had a cold and been told to stay off school and if worse after 48 hours have a test
I was listening to 5 live this morning and an expert on testing provided a detailed explanation of the process and logistics and confirmed that over 200,000 tests a day were being conducted and 20 million completed. If that stat is correct nearly one third of the nation have had a test.
It is clear that the test rules need to be reviewed and tests prioritised across the UK. The idea of some to open hospital labs to these tests is the wrong thing to do as it is prioritising many unnecessary and non urgent tests over life threatening cancer and other essential non covid related tests.
Tests are something the anti HMG proponents can attack the government on but the simple truth is no government of any political persuasion would have any other answer than the one proposed by Hancock of prioritising tests
Many people, specifically front line workers in the NHS and care will quite correctly have had multiple tests. So 20m tests does not equiperate to 20m tested or anything like it. Approximately 100k tests are being given to these front line workers every day. Most will be repeats but that is necessary.
I had multiple tests last week simply because my doctors don’t trust the test. Not sure why.
There is a high false negative rate.
Tests conducted on NHS patients in hospital go to the hospital labs, not to Dido's empire.
There are also false positives. So if you test someone five times and only the fifth comes back positive then what have you achieved with the tests? Why not forget about the tests and be led by the symptoms?
IIUC the PCR test shouldn't produce false positives unless the lab bollockses it up and contaminates your negative sample with somebody else's positive one, although this has been known.
You don't want to be led purely by the symptoms because: 1) Part of what you're trying to find out is whether the person is going to infect somebody else 2) The symptoms may only show up later 3) Some of the symptoms look similar to the symptoms for other illnesses which require different treatments, so testing helps you treat the right thing
Yes but Foxy was particularly talking about NHS patients in hospital. The assumption, surely, would be that cross contamination is possible with or without a test.
On "the PCR test shouldn't produce false positives"
That`s interesting: "traces of old virus could partly explain why the number of cases is rising while hospital admissions remain stable".
I thought it was widely known that you could, potentially, pick up virus fragments that were not viable for infection. I guess the point is that if you're mass testing then yes, you could potentially be picking up positives from people who were infected some time ago and/or have some non-viable fragments on the swab, which might inflate the numbers. However, that should - at present - be a fairly static background level from when infections were peaking in the spring - it may mean current tests over-estimate, but it shouldn't mean that this weeks tests over-estimate compared to last week's tests by any meaningful amount. If test positives are still going up then real cases are likely going up.
5) hospitalisation numbers are the issue: medics are sending people home to manage the virus whereas in the spring they would have been admitted to hospital.
My impression is that in the Spring the opposite was the case - because the focus was on "Protect the NHS" people were only being admitted when they were already quite ill - which may in part account for our relatively higher death rates.
I've not really paid too much attention to the testing saga, but just watching BBC Breakfast this morning it's starting to make sense. Basically loads of people without symptoms want a test, just because they fancy getting a test. It's like the public's bizarre desire to sit in A&E on a Saturday night.
This is caused by children and young people getting a seasonal cold and the parents fear of covid. In my family my sons daughter (8) has had a cold and a test which was negative after a four day wait and my daughter's son (11) has also had a cold and been told to stay off school and if worse after 48 hours have a test
I was listening to 5 live this morning and an expert on testing provided a detailed explanation of the process and logistics and confirmed that over 200,000 tests a day were being conducted and 20 million completed. If that stat is correct nearly one third of the nation have had a test.
It is clear that the test rules need to be reviewed and tests prioritised across the UK. The idea of some to open hospital labs to these tests is the wrong thing to do as it is prioritising many unnecessary and non urgent tests over life threatening cancer and other essential non covid related tests.
Tests are something the anti HMG proponents can attack the government on but the simple truth is no government of any political persuasion would have any other answer than the one proposed by Hancock of prioritising tests
Well said.
My wife works on the front line of a care home. She's had a blood antibody test and is getting a swab antigen test every single week. The care home has boxes and boxes of swab kits and all staff and residents have to get tested every single week. They are getting prioritised.
For someone healthy who has the sniffles and wants to get tested not being able to do so may be irritating. If the care staff etc cease to be tested in order to add more capacity for "the worried well" then would that be an improvement? I think no.
Approximately a quarter of a million daily tests are happening but half of that is immediately accounted for by routine testing of NHS staff and care staff and residents.
It’s not just “irritating”, in some cases having a test or not is the difference between being able to go to work (and getting paid) or not.
If you have any symptoms, you have to report it to your employer. You then cant go to work unless you have a negative test or you wait the 10 days or whatever. Not every employer is paying full wages during that time. A lot will get nothing for the first few days, and then SSP (which is literally nothing) for the remainder.
Describing it as “irritating” is just showing how out of touch you are.
The person quoted before who lied on their form changing it from unemployed to key worker, what work were they going to?
Not being able to go to work is bad, I never said otherwise. But if care workers cease to be prioritised then thousands of residents could start dying again.
Lo st wages is bad, lost lives is surely worse?
Although I don't agree with a lot of your posts on testing Philip I have to say I agree re the unemployed person fiddling the test criteria was despicable when there is a struggling to cope. Just selfish. There was a worse example given in the same report. A family who had returned from a Spanish holiday, had self isolated for 10 days and were all perfectly well, but wanted a test just to be sure. What? Why the hell are you wasting the testing resources when others really do need them. They have no reason for being tested at all. And if you are that concerned then why the hell did you go on holiday to Spain in the first place. They should not have a test and when they do they should have to pay for it.
Very well said.
We take for granted in this country that we don't pay for healthcare but that leads to almost infinite demand and people taking the piss like this.
It is worth keeping some perspective: Currently close to a quarter of a million tests per day are being taken which is more per capita than almost any other major developed country in the entire world. Of those about half go to "the front line" and the other half are for everyone else, but people are saying that's not enough. Though when Boris spoke about getting capacity up to a million tests per day (the "moonshot") he was laughed at and everyone said that was ridiculous.
So if a quarter of a million daily tests in insufficient and a million tests per day is ludicrously expensive and ridiculous, then where should the line be drawn?
Again the obsession with numbers.
Tests are only useful if the right people are tested at the right time, and the right action taken. The problem is fundamentally one of logistics and organisation, and is not something this T and T is doing well.
The problem is that as a matter of deliberate policy, primary health care were kept out of the loop in favour of Tory cronies.
GP practice nurses and pharmacists should be doing the swabbing, and integrating results with the health records, even if using offside labs.
I agree with you that the right people need to be tested, which is why there is screening in place. People boasting about how they 'beat the system' by lying on the screening isn't a solution.
As for the idea that all the potentially COVID-contagious people should be descending upon GP practice nurses and pharmacists in order to get the test . . . isn't that the polar opposite of what has been the intention? The intention has been deliberately to not do what you're suggesting because if the pharmacists are swamped with COVID-contagious people who are getting tested then how does that help the GP practice or pharmacy operate as normal?
I've not really paid too much attention to the testing saga, but just watching BBC Breakfast this morning it's starting to make sense. Basically loads of people without symptoms want a test, just because they fancy getting a test. It's like the public's bizarre desire to sit in A&E on a Saturday night.
This is caused by children and young people getting a seasonal cold and the parents fear of covid. In my family my sons daughter (8) has had a cold and a test which was negative after a four day wait and my daughter's son (11) has also had a cold and been told to stay off school and if worse after 48 hours have a test
I was listening to 5 live this morning and an expert on testing provided a detailed explanation of the process and logistics and confirmed that over 200,000 tests a day were being conducted and 20 million completed. If that stat is correct nearly one third of the nation have had a test.
It is clear that the test rules need to be reviewed and tests prioritised across the UK. The idea of some to open hospital labs to these tests is the wrong thing to do as it is prioritising many unnecessary and non urgent tests over life threatening cancer and other essential non covid related tests.
Tests are something the anti HMG proponents can attack the government on but the simple truth is no government of any political persuasion would have any other answer than the one proposed by Hancock of prioritising tests
Well said.
My wife works on the front line of a care home. She's had a blood antibody test and is getting a swab antigen test every single week. The care home has boxes and boxes of swab kits and all staff and residents have to get tested every single week. They are getting prioritised.
For someone healthy who has the sniffles and wants to get tested not being able to do so may be irritating. If the care staff etc cease to be tested in order to add more capacity for "the worried well" then would that be an improvement? I think no.
Approximately a quarter of a million daily tests are happening but half of that is immediately accounted for by routine testing of NHS staff and care staff and residents.
It’s not just “irritating”, in some cases having a test or not is the difference between being able to go to work (and getting paid) or not.
If you have any symptoms, you have to report it to your employer. You then cant go to work unless you have a negative test or you wait the 10 days or whatever. Not every employer is paying full wages during that time. A lot will get nothing for the first few days, and then SSP (which is literally nothing) for the remainder.
Describing it as “irritating” is just showing how out of touch you are.
The person quoted before who lied on their form changing it from unemployed to key worker, what work were they going to?
Not being able to go to work is bad, I never said otherwise. But if care workers cease to be prioritised then thousands of residents could start dying again.
Lo st wages is bad, lost lives is surely worse?
Although I don't agree with a lot of your posts on testing Philip I have to say I agree re the unemployed person fiddling the test criteria was despicable when there is a struggling to cope. Just selfish. There was a worse example given in the same report. A family who had returned from a Spanish holiday, had self isolated for 10 days and were all perfectly well, but wanted a test just to be sure. What? Why the hell are you wasting the testing resources when others really do need them. They have no reason for being tested at all. And if you are that concerned then why the hell did you go on holiday to Spain in the first place. They should not have a test and when they do they should have to pay for it.
Very well said.
We take for granted in this country that we don't pay for healthcare but that leads to almost infinite demand and people taking the piss like this.
It is worth keeping some perspective: Currently close to a quarter of a million tests per day are being taken which is more per capita than almost any other major developed country in the entire world. Of those about half go to "the front line" and the other half are for everyone else, but people are saying that's not enough. Though when Boris spoke about getting capacity up to a million tests per day (the "moonshot") he was laughed at and everyone said that was ridiculous.
So if a quarter of a million daily tests in insufficient and a million tests per day is ludicrously expensive and ridiculous, then where should the line be drawn?
"Taking the piss" = wanting to be tested for a disease which the government tells you day in, day out you may very well have?
The insistence on their entirely irrelevant unemployed status puts you slap in the middle of UKIP/BNP territory.
People may or may not have many different diseases at any one time. We don't test everyone for every disease they may or may not have unlimitedly. Never have done, never will do.
There is a reason care staff and key workers are prioritised. That is not a UKIP/BNP reason.
If everyone in the country was tested then we would be much nearer to being able to go back to "normal".
Isn't that what the government wants and has been messaging* us about?
*ha haha hahahahahaha hahahahahahahahahahaha
And if we had the capacity to do 67 million tests then great.
We don't. Nobody does. No country can or has done that.
We've done 20m so far haven't we? So we're in the ballpark. No one has done it yet because we started with zero tests six months ago. And we're building up. And the govt has told us incessantly how important tests are. So it is entirely understandable that people think they should use their initiative and go and get one, especially if they have been exposed to different environments.
Autobiographical note: I am alive today because I had a test for cancer which a consultant oncologist told me not to bother with because there was such a low risk that I had cancer. I had the test anyway. On the NHS. Scrounging c--t.
I'm not accusing them of scrounging I am accusing them of being selfish. The system is in melt down. There are many who actually need a test who can't get them. They are preventing these people from getting a test. Do you think we should all go and get a test and break the system completely. Why did they need a test? Their circumstances were actually lower than just about anyone in the country having self isolated after a holiday and having no symptoms.
Let's all go and get a test for no reason and really break the system.
If we get testing up to that level then fine, but it isn't currently. The person was a selfish prat.
I've not really paid too much attention to the testing saga, but just watching BBC Breakfast this morning it's starting to make sense. Basically loads of people without symptoms want a test, just because they fancy getting a test. It's like the public's bizarre desire to sit in A&E on a Saturday night.
This is caused by children and young people getting a seasonal cold and the parents fear of covid. In my family my sons daughter (8) has had a cold and a test which was negative after a four day wait and my daughter's son (11) has also had a cold and been told to stay off school and if worse after 48 hours have a test
I was listening to 5 live this morning and an expert on testing provided a detailed explanation of the process and logistics and confirmed that over 200,000 tests a day were being conducted and 20 million completed. If that stat is correct nearly one third of the nation have had a test.
It is clear that the test rules need to be reviewed and tests prioritised across the UK. The idea of some to open hospital labs to these tests is the wrong thing to do as it is prioritising many unnecessary and non urgent tests over life threatening cancer and other essential non covid related tests.
Tests are something the anti HMG proponents can attack the government on but the simple truth is no government of any political persuasion would have any other answer than the one proposed by Hancock of prioritising tests
Well said.
My wife works on the front line of a care home. She's had a blood antibody test and is getting a swab antigen test every single week. The care home has boxes and boxes of swab kits and all staff and residents have to get tested every single week. They are getting prioritised.
For someone healthy who has the sniffles and wants to get tested not being able to do so may be irritating. If the care staff etc cease to be tested in order to add more capacity for "the worried well" then would that be an improvement? I think no.
Approximately a quarter of a million daily tests are happening but half of that is immediately accounted for by routine testing of NHS staff and care staff and residents.
It’s not just “irritating”, in some cases having a test or not is the difference between being able to go to work (and getting paid) or not.
If you have any symptoms, you have to report it to your employer. You then cant go to work unless you have a negative test or you wait the 10 days or whatever. Not every employer is paying full wages during that time. A lot will get nothing for the first few days, and then SSP (which is literally nothing) for the remainder.
Describing it as “irritating” is just showing how out of touch you are.
The person quoted before who lied on their form changing it from unemployed to key worker, what work were they going to?
Not being able to go to work is bad, I never said otherwise. But if care workers cease to be prioritised then thousands of residents could start dying again.
Lost wages is bad, lost lives is surely worse?
Although I don't agree with a lot of your posts on testing Philip I have to say I agree re the unemployed person fiddling the test criteria was despicable when there is a struggling to cope. Just selfish. There was a worse example given in the same report. A family who had returned from a Spanish holiday, had self isolated for 10 days and were all perfectly well, but wanted a test just to be sure. What? Why the hell are you wasting the testing resources when others really do need them. They have no reason for being tested at all. And if you are that concerned then why the hell did you go on holiday to Spain in the first place. They should not have a test and when they do they should have to pay for it.
Pure Kafka: we'll prosecute you for behaving as if you did not have the virus, and also prosecute you for trying to establish whether you have it or not.
But for months we have been told by the govt that testing capacity is the most important thing and that increasing the number of tests is the overarching aim and test...test...test...
The public could be forgiven for gaining the impression that the govt wanted us to....test!
But no. To go out and test - because that would be 62m minus that family who can be accounted for - is now seen as anti-social as farting in a lift.
I agree with that. I am a critics of the Govt testing shambles (as I guess you know). But surely this twat knows this morning that it is currently a shambles and that people who really need tests can't get them, yet there he goes pootling along with his family to get a test when he has no reason whatsoever to believe he has it. In fact he has every reason to believe he hasn't having self isolated and having no symptoms whatsoever.
I can believe he thought something along the lines of: tests are in short supply so I doubt I'll get one but I'll give it a go - oh look! We can get one. Hurrah!
He probably didn't think that if he was given a test then that would be depriving someone else of one because he probably thought that the govt would ensure that those that needed them had them ahead of others or were prioritised.
I've not really paid too much attention to the testing saga, but just watching BBC Breakfast this morning it's starting to make sense. Basically loads of people without symptoms want a test, just because they fancy getting a test. It's like the public's bizarre desire to sit in A&E on a Saturday night.
This is caused by children and young people getting a seasonal cold and the parents fear of covid. In my family my sons daughter (8) has had a cold and a test which was negative after a four day wait and my daughter's son (11) has also had a cold and been told to stay off school and if worse after 48 hours have a test
I was listening to 5 live this morning and an expert on testing provided a detailed explanation of the process and logistics and confirmed that over 200,000 tests a day were being conducted and 20 million completed. If that stat is correct nearly one third of the nation have had a test.
It is clear that the test rules need to be reviewed and tests prioritised across the UK. The idea of some to open hospital labs to these tests is the wrong thing to do as it is prioritising many unnecessary and non urgent tests over life threatening cancer and other essential non covid related tests.
Tests are something the anti HMG proponents can attack the government on but the simple truth is no government of any political persuasion would have any other answer than the one proposed by Hancock of prioritising tests
Well said.
My wife works on the front line of a care home. She's had a blood antibody test and is getting a swab antigen test every single week. The care home has boxes and boxes of swab kits and all staff and residents have to get tested every single week. They are getting prioritised.
For someone healthy who has the sniffles and wants to get tested not being able to do so may be irritating. If the care staff etc cease to be tested in order to add more capacity for "the worried well" then would that be an improvement? I think no.
Approximately a quarter of a million daily tests are happening but half of that is immediately accounted for by routine testing of NHS staff and care staff and residents.
It’s not just “irritating”, in some cases having a test or not is the difference between being able to go to work (and getting paid) or not.
If you have any symptoms, you have to report it to your employer. You then cant go to work unless you have a negative test or you wait the 10 days or whatever. Not every employer is paying full wages during that time. A lot will get nothing for the first few days, and then SSP (which is literally nothing) for the remainder.
Describing it as “irritating” is just showing how out of touch you are.
The person quoted before who lied on their form changing it from unemployed to key worker, what work were they going to?
Not being able to go to work is bad, I never said otherwise. But if care workers cease to be prioritised then thousands of residents could start dying again.
Lost wages is bad, lost lives is surely worse?
Although I don't agree with a lot of your posts on testing Philip I have to say I agree re the unemployed person fiddling the test criteria was despicable when there is a struggling to cope. Just selfish. There was a worse example given in the same report. A family who had returned from a Spanish holiday, had self isolated for 10 days and were all perfectly well, but wanted a test just to be sure. What? Why the hell are you wasting the testing resources when others really do need them. They have no reason for being tested at all. And if you are that concerned then why the hell did you go on holiday to Spain in the first place. They should not have a test and when they do they should have to pay for it.
Pure Kafka: we'll prosecute you for behaving as if you did not have the virus, and also prosecute you for trying to establish whether you have it or not.
But for months we have been told by the govt that testing capacity is the most important thing and that increasing the number of tests is the overarching aim and test...test...test...
The public could be forgiven for gaining the impression that the govt wanted us to....test!
But no. To go out and test - because that would be 62m minus that family who can be accounted for - is now seen as anti-social as farting in a lift.
I agree with that. I am a critics of the Govt testing shambles (as I guess you know). But surely this twat knows this morning that it is currently a shambles and that people who really need tests can't get them, yet there he goes pootling along with his family to get a test when he has no reason whatsoever to believe he has it. In fact he has every reason to believe he hasn't having self isolated and having no symptoms whatsoever.
I can believe he thought something along the lines of: tests are in short supply so I doubt I'll get one but I'll give it a go - oh look! We can get one. Hurrah!
He probably didn't think that if he was given a test then that would be depriving someone else of one because he probably thought that the govt would ensure that those that needed them had them ahead of others or were prioritised.
For people who are honest on their forms to get one then that's fair enough.
If people lie and say they are a key worker when they're really unemployer, or pretend to have symptoms they don't have, then that's different do you not agree?
The screening questions are exactly intended to do as you suggest, to ensure they go to those who need them most.
Comments
https://twitter.com/JamesCrisp6/status/1305821897343602688?s=20
https://twitter.com/DavidGHFrost/status/1305121862255599623?s=20
It’s entirely possible the EU was simply pointing out the consequences of failure to ratify UK SPS regulation rather than making a “threat” per se - but it feels like the EU could have handled this more diplomatically - and as @DavidL has pointed the U.K. has completely mishandled communication of its response.
The reality is that the UK government either signed up to something it did not understand or never had any intention of implementing. Either way it lied to the international community, to Parliament and to the British people. You may think that is good, but if you do you are clearly not someone who believes in democracy and the rule of law.
You’re a follower of Ayn Rand - she said people have direct contact with reality only through sense perception. You objectivists believe that even if everyone believes in the Loch Ness monster that doesn’t make it exist - ergo if everyone else believes something that exists only in their mind there is no obligation on you to. However Rand never explained the phenomenon of money - odd given how important it was to her. Civilisation rests on humans in large numbers believing in things existing purely in the imagination, such as governments, laws, morality, limited liability companies, civil rights...and money.
You argued the other day (using an anti-German slur) that there was no moral imperative on people in this country to honour laws. Individuals and nations must obey their own moral imperative with thought only for themselves you say. However Ayn Rand, never satisfactory explained why, given money is so key to her philosophy, why we should honour its value given it is a shared imaginary construct dependent on cooperation? Currencies, even gold, have no inherent utility. You can’t eat or clothe yourself in £5 notes. Currencies have value because because parties engaging in exchange cooperatively agree on an imagined value. Lose that shared belief, we are back to a barter system. So to accept the value of the £/$/€/¥ is to implicitly accept the need for humanity to cooperate with one another and share a fundamental belief in imaginary value, otherwise your position is logically inconsistent,
Money is only one example of the need for human cooperation based on mutually shared ideals. It is nonsense to say any nation or person can be self sufficient. Very few countries can exist without outside help - even North Korea has to use the black market to scrape by. Examine the USA’s total success in wars with major allies (WW2, the American Revolution) to, at best, incomplete success in those without (1812, Vietnam, Iraq pt 2). England will have to adapt to the new reality as we always have throughout our 1200 year history, not the rest of the world, who will be cooperating as we vainly attempt to stand aside.
Therefore if the internal market bill passes and Biden is elected US President in November and Pelosi is re elected as Speaker of the House of Representatives there is literally zero chance of a US UK FTA, the US will instead shift to a deal with the EU. Boris will then have to focus on deals with Commonwealth nations and build on his FTA with Japan and forget the US for the time being.
Trump of course backed Brexit and likes Boris and Boris could explain to him that his plans mean no hard border within Ireland as well as no hard border between GB and NI however Biden, whose mother was of Irish heritage and the strong lobby of Irish Americans within the Democratic Party will stand firmly behind Dublin and Brussels and tell Boris and the UK government they can forget a trade deal as Pelosi so vocally reminded us in this rant against the British government and as the Biden campaign reminded us (retweeted by Sinn Fein NI leader Michelle O'Neil).
The UK would move from being sent 'to the back of the queue' in Obama's words, to being effectively 'thrown off the bus' under a Biden presidency
https://twitter.com/Channel4News/status/1304113778515161089?s=20
https://twitter.com/moneillsf/status/1303580732095426561?s=20
Not being able to go to work is bad, I never said otherwise. But if care workers cease to be prioritised then thousands of residents could start dying again.
Lost wages is bad, lost lives is surely worse?
You don't want to be led purely by the symptoms because:
1) Part of what you're trying to find out is whether the person is going to infect somebody else
2) The symptoms may only show up later
3) Some of the symptoms look similar to the symptoms for other illnesses which require different treatments, so testing helps you treat the right thing
Edited for poor English.
As I’ve pointed out several times, a government planning ahead for schools reopening could (for example) have allocated resources to implementing pooled testing for schools (or indeed healthcare workers).
Difficult to do from a standing start, now that the labs are operating beyond capacity, but it would potentially allow the processing of 5-10 times the number of tests.
See Carl Heneghan:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-54000629
Filling in these forms would be to acknowledge that, in certain situations, they can make us, and the UK government doesn't seem emotionally ready to do that yet.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-nireland-poll/poll-shows-northern-ireland-majority-against-united-ireland-idUSKBN20C0WI?il=0
http://faculty.citadel.edu/sobel/Entrepreneurship Class Readings/11. Rand - Francisco d'Anconia's Speech on Money.pdf
The key thing that has helped covid spread is the lengthy pre-symptomatic phase of 3-9 days (typically 5-7) of covid, where people have been infected, are infectious, but not yet feeling ill (and therefore are quite happy to go around as normal and thus unknowingly expose others). Diseases where you feel ill rapidly can have less spread, as when people feel ill, they're less likely to be socialising or mingling with others, anyway.
If you have reason to believe you've been exposed, you could well be in the pre-symptomatic-yet-infectious phase of the disease. The most significant part of spreading it.
If you've got symptoms, you should, as you said, be self-isolating, anyway. So you're not contributing to the spread of the disease, and what would a test achieve? You try to get a test (probably a day plus) and then wait 1-4 days for the result. And you're told that a single negative result shouldn't be used as a reason to exit self-isolation, so what was the point of it?
If we could focus the tests on non-symptomatic people (who would, one assumes, have some reason to think they've been exposed), we might be able to get them done and returned faster. Getting them to self-isolate during the pre-symptomatic period. Far more useful.
EFTA or EEA membership should have been the compromise.
Feels like we’re screwed whatever happens with this government.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/trump-and-the-white-vote
Re your comments on US Trade Deal, I agree. Put simply, Biden doesn't like Brexit and would see no reason to help us out of the quagmire.
Brexit fans better hope Trump wins.
What's your take on the current state of polling? It seems to be going nowhere to me. Every now and again Trump gets a small string of decent results and you start to think something is happening, then you get a couple of good Biden ones (like Monmouth for Florida yesterday) and it's 'as you were'. There seem to be so few 'undecideds' that it's hard to see much movement over the remaining weeks which is disappointingly dull if nothing else.
Your second point. There is a procedure for accreditation that the UK needs to go through, which it hasn't done yet but which it says it will do ahead of transition expiry. There are remedies within the WA if it thinks the EU is being unreasonable should the latter refuse accreditation. It's a technical exercise and as long as there is no divergence on Day 1 there shouldn't be a problem.
Third point. What Johnson and the Conservatives are talking about is an Act of War by the EU. Anyone could carry out such hypotheticals at any time. The USA could launch 100 nuclear missiles at the UK tomorrow, but we don't go around saying we must take preventative measures. That's not much less likely than the EU blockading us. Even if we give this hypothetical more consideration than it deserves, discarding the entire Withdrawal Agreement is the least of any fallout from that particular war.
My view is as it has always been, it will be very close, on the latest Fox polling add the don't knows to Trump and it would be 51% to Biden and 48% to Trump and as long as 2016 gold standard rustbelt pollster Trafalgar keep having Trump ahead in Michigan and Wisconsin he has a chance (though even Trafalgar are suggesting Pennsylvania will go to Biden)
And the 'moonshot' is utter bollocks. Mass testing is possible, but could, and ought to be done much more cheaply, if it is to be done.
Test ten batches of ten people at a time, and perhaps only one batch would show infection. Those ten could isolate until quickly retested.
You thus multiply your testing capacity several times.
That might break the internet.
Or ask him why he voted for someone who enables genocide. That usually results in tumbleweed.
Any testing regime has to allow for people trying to game it - just as the efforts to reduce social mixing have to take into account those who treat such guidance or instructions with contempt.
1) infections are not actually going up; the numbers are rising because of increased testing/particular cohort testing
2) the virus is mutating to a less serious form
3) variolation: infections caught via the increased use of masks is resulting in a lower dose which the body can cope with
4) some of the positive test results are picking up remnants of previous virus infections thus creating an incorrect assumption that the virus is spreading above R=1
5) hospitalisation numbers are the issue: medics are sending people home to manage the virus whereas in the spring they would have been admitted to hospital.
Any others? Could be a combination of these I guess.
Also I don't think the government, despite its rhetoric of sovereign independent state has emotionally accepted third country status in Europe. If the EU disappeared the UK would deal with other European countries as equals. But as long as those countries are represented by the EU consortium, the UK will be lesser status in the European set up. The UK can't deal with the EU as a sovereign equal because the EU isn't a sovereign state, it's a supranational body representing its members' interest. It can't deal directly with members because they are represented by the EU.
In a thought experiment you can construct a scenario where a constant infection rate looks like an increase in the infection rate due to the identification of old traces of the virus. It's a plausible hypothesis if all you know is that the hospitalization rate is stable and cases are rising (though there are other explanations and the hospitalization rate is now rising anyway).
However, when you look at the geographical pattern of positive cases in the UK it does not fit that benign scenario. We see localised outbreaks of the virus, which is a different pattern to one we'd expect if the increase in cases were due to false positives detecting dead virus. The plausible hypothesis is falsified by the consideration of additional data.
And yet, because the idea is so reassuring it refuses to die. I'd imagine that in a decades time there will still be people explaining that the Coronavirus was exaggerated because the test detected dead viruses.
There are, doubtless, problems with the test we're using, but I think false negatives in the pre-symptomatic phase are more problematic than false positives later, and it's wishful thinking to believe otherwise.
First bit of misinformation given by Govt who in response to complaints about people being given ridiculous places to travel to: Both Boris and Matt H quote median distance actually travelled. This completely ignores all the people given Aberdeen and elsewhere as the test site to go to who obviously decline impractical distances to travel to. So response is accurate, but actually useless.
But for months we have been told by the govt that testing capacity is the most important thing and that increasing the number of tests is the overarching aim and test...test...test...
The public could be forgiven for gaining the impression that the govt wanted us to....test!
But no. To go out and test - because that would be 62m minus that family who can be accounted for - is now seen as anti-social as farting in a lift.
We take for granted in this country that we don't pay for healthcare but that leads to almost infinite demand and people taking the piss like this.
It is worth keeping some perspective: Currently close to a quarter of a million tests per day are being taken which is more per capita than almost any other major developed country in the entire world. Of those about half go to "the front line" and the other half are for everyone else, but people are saying that's not enough. Though when Boris spoke about getting capacity up to a million tests per day (the "moonshot") he was laughed at and everyone said that was ridiculous.
So if a quarter of a million daily tests in insufficient and a million tests per day is ludicrously expensive and ridiculous, then where should the line be drawn?
I didn't vote for someone who enables genocide, I absolutely despise Claire Fox. I voted for there not to be any MEPs at all - and there aren't any. So therefore she's not elected anymore.
The insistence on their entirely irrelevant unemployed status puts you slap in the middle of UKIP/BNP territory.
There is a reason care staff and key workers are prioritised. That is not a UKIP/BNP reason.
Isn't that what the government wants and has been messaging* us about?
*ha haha hahahahahaha hahahahahahahahahahaha
We don't. Nobody does. No country can or has done that.
Tests are only useful if the right people are tested at the right time, and the right action taken. The problem is fundamentally one of logistics and organisation, and is not something this T and T is doing well.
The problem is that as a matter of deliberate policy, primary health care were kept out of the loop in favour of Tory cronies.
GP practice nurses and pharmacists should be doing the swabbing, and integrating results with the health records, even if using offside labs.
https://twitter.com/nick_gutteridge/status/1306147421861404673?s=20
The unified bloc that did continue to identify with England, the United Empire Loyalists, largely emigrated to what is now Ontario to create the nucleus of English-speaking Canada. Ontario residents will not be voting in the 2020 election. Back in the US, to identify as "English-American" could be, until well into the mid-19C, considered literally treasonous - the War of 1812 and a couple of close calls during the US Civil War proving that.
As a result English Americans form the bulk of those white respondents in census returns who identify as purely "American" even though they are not of Native American decent. English-Americans have never formed a cohesive voting bloc. The first four American Presidents were "English-Americans". When the 1812 War was declared, opposition to it was not determined on ethnic grounds. The president during the war of 1812, Madison, and its most enthusiastic proponent, Thomas Jefferson (a was a noted scholar and enthusiast of Old English and Anglo-Saxon history whose dad, Peter, named Jefferson's birthplace "Shadwell" after the East London district where he was christened) were "English Americans". By contrast, the US never fought an exestential war against Italy, Ireland or any country in Africa. Thus it is quite possible to be Italian-American, Irish-American and Afro-American and still be "American". It was hard to be Japanese or German-American after WW2, difficulties that still persist to this day. So there isn't really a "German-AMerican" bloc either.
I have some skin in this game. My wife's family strongly identifies Irish-American of Catholic decent (they converted to Congregationalism a generation or two ago due to witnessing some poor priestly behaviour but still consider themselves, as my Wife puts it, "culturally Irish Catholic") and I spend a lot of time there - pandemics permitting. My in-laws had generally been quite Anglophile, until Priti Patel's infamous comments. I have never, in all the many months I have spent in the States visiting family and friends, encountered an American Citizen that described themselves as English-American. Italian and Irish tricolours are commonplace on front lawns throughout the States. You will struggle, ever, to find a similarly placed Union Flag or Cross of St George. @HYUDF is simply wrong in his analysis here.
He probably didn't think that if he was given a test then that would be depriving someone else of one because he probably thought that the govt would ensure that those that needed them had them ahead of others or were prioritised.
But it’s fun seeing those who place such store by it realise that actions over NI might have consequences in the US.
On the food standards issue I read somewhere last night that the British government was going to provide all the necessary information (which as others have pointed out is no more than the current EU standards we have been following for years) as required. So, with luck, this should not be an issue. I hope so anyway.
With great reluctance he sent me for a colonoscopy; I had two cancer sites 'up there', not just one.
So upwards of 10 years ago I had the operation and 4 years ago the local Oncology people told me I was, at last, clear.
The GP has left the practice, I'm pleased to say.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/covid-cases-surge-among-middle-aged-as-test-shortage-worsens-rcbd97gj6
Note the significant increase in admissions, contrary to what was claimed.
As for the idea that all the potentially COVID-contagious people should be descending upon GP practice nurses and pharmacists in order to get the test . . . isn't that the polar opposite of what has been the intention? The intention has been deliberately to not do what you're suggesting because if the pharmacists are swamped with COVID-contagious people who are getting tested then how does that help the GP practice or pharmacy operate as normal?
Let's all go and get a test for no reason and really break the system.
If we get testing up to that level then fine, but it isn't currently. The person was a selfish prat.
If people lie and say they are a key worker when they're really unemployer, or pretend to have symptoms they don't have, then that's different do you not agree?
The screening questions are exactly intended to do as you suggest, to ensure they go to those who need them most.