The current situation facing all of us is unprecedented. While TKP is generally not a place to discuss "breaking news" or emotionally charged topics, obviously the coronavirus pandemic affects us all. We recognize that TKP is a place many of us turn to for social interaction in these trying times, and discussing the coronavirus can be cathartic for many of us. We hope that we can continue to come together as Hokies to weather this storm.
That said, the explosion of comments in recent discussions has veered from useful to pointless and argumentative. Going forward, only Joe and the moderator team will post new "general discussion" threads on this topic. Others will be deleted. Moderators will lock threads as needed if discussion becomes destructive.
We invite you to use this space to discuss important information related to the coronavirus pandemic, like important advisories, closings, cancelations, and impacts on daily life. We are lucky that our community has many subject matter experts in health, science, public safety, public affairs, and local government, among others. Please continue to share your knowledge!
As always, the Community Guidelines will be enforced by the moderators as best we can. At this point, repeat offenders who continue pointless bickering and whose posts continually incite arguments will be banned, at least temporarily. Doing so is in the interest of keeping TKP a strong and positive community.
Comments
All NFL weekend positive COVID tests come back negative.
I wonder what the national numbers would look like if we could validate test results like the NFL is able to do.
About the same.
This is the exactly the line that is being used politically to drive up mistrust in the numbers.
Any news outlet or politician can say:
"WOW, look at the NFL, really makes you wonder how widespread this issue may be..."
They don't have to provide any evidence of a widespread false positives issue, they don't have to do anything other than say that exact line above or the one you just used to drive up the mistrust. This is achieving the desired result without actually providing any of the evidence.
Easy as pie and a 100% politically driven maneuver.
I feel like this question evokes a political response, but it should not. The question is absolutely valid, based on the evidence reported in this story. I imagine that the overwhelming numbers of tests were correctly done, but there have been lots of parts of the COVID response that have been of suspect quality. From a scientific standpoint, it is a valid question.
I also think its frustrating that questions like this one are automatically used to draw battle lines instead of fueling inquiry and exploration. Nobody actually wants to do the work to find out the answer because then one side would win and the outrage ammunition would be gone.
What, Leonard making comments to bait political knuckledragging in a COVID thread? Shocking, I says, absolutely shocking!
The battle lines already formed one comment below me.
Let me ask a hypothetical: If we looked into our testing numbers and were able to confirm that we were over-counting, would that be bad? What if we confirmed that we were counting correctly? Is that bad? NO! Answering a scientific question is never bad. So why is everyone so mad?
Why does a question like this (which is objectively a scientific inquiry worth investigating) evoke such a strong response? I think it is because people treat questions as opinions, both the speaker and the listener. If we want to have civil discourse again, we NEED to stop doing this. Its destructive and non-helpful.
Its almost like this kind of bullshit has been going on for months now.
Its not about this one post. Its not about this one question. Its about a series of bad faith comments and questions made over the past 3 or 4 months that do nothing but push an agenda with no desire to actually listen to what anyone else is or has been saying this entire time.
My post was about one question, and it's pretty valid. Step outside of your comfort zone and confront it instead of confronting me.
There have been times in these posts that you have not presented yourself as a good-faith actor, and so it is natural that people would not take your posts at face value. If you want people to do that, please be understanding and non-confrontational.
This also applies to literally EVERYONE. If you want people to have a conversation with you, instead of a shouting match, be understanding and non-confrontational.
I agree that scientific inquiry should not be impeded. But context matters in the response to the question being asked. If you take a look at past CV19 discussions on TKP, perhaps you could see the pattern and why people respond the way they do to these comments.
Let's be honest with ourselves. Leonard didn't "ask" this question in the name of objective scientific inquiry. He asked the question to sow doubt on CV19 case #'s in the US. The real problem is that L can "ask" the question, and when confronted with how the outcome of this question is misleading can say "hey it's a valid question, I never said that case #'s were wrong."
Just because a testing facility had a high-profile blunder doesn't mean that vast majority of testing results are false positives or false negatives. You're right - if testing facilities are drastically over counting, and we have less cases than actually reported, then that would be great news! But given many many many people have already asked this question in one form or another since testing has begun (with actual scientific intentions at heart) and the numerous controls in place, I think our testing labs are getting it right.
That's inferring a bad motive. Which is in itself a "bad faith argument".
Another approach might be answering the question from your perspective, or explaining your issue with it without the finger-pointing.
Unsurprisingly, these discussions spiral out of control when people start calling each other names or assessing each other's motives in a personal way.
I don't mean to pick on you, as there are multiple people doing that here. It's as if they had their cannons loaded, and were waiting for a spark.
We've had someone trolling and gaslighting this board for 4 months, and yet the problem is with those who actually point it out?
sure, whatever
Yes, using terms like "knuckledragging" and "gaslighting" to describe people you disagree with is part of the problem.
Seems to me that there is a valid point there regarding testing and test validation. I would assume it's an isolated incident, but it does mean we should review lab testing processes - seems like those kinds of results or trends should be easy enough for a lab to identify, and trigger a re-test by the lab itself. Not sure if that's what happened here.
Sounds like the lab involved identified the unlikely result, re-tested the samples, and confirmed they were false positives. Though that's just from NFL beat writers.
At least that's good.
I will call out the bullshit when I see it. Sorry if my language offends you.
Honestly, and its just time I get this off my chest.... This place has become pretty bad over the last few months. I get it, quarantine has hit us all hard, but there's only so much of the constant BS that I see allowed to stay up on here before I either have to leave or have to say something. Misinformation and disinformation are treated with equal footing as those who are able to come with peer reviewed and verified facts. Anyone who points out the issue is hounded down for not allowing every side to be heard. And throughout the entire time there are political undertones that are hinted toward, touched upon, but kept neatly far enough away from that while they are technically not violating any CGs up front, it is gaslighting the community for replies that undoubtedly will. Its old, its tiresome, and quite frankly its beaten me down.
My usage of this site over the past few months has been tailing off and I suspect it will continue to do so. Granted, I am at a time where things are getting chaotic for myself (wife pregnant with 2nd child, bought a house, just sold our current last week, all after taking a new job late last year and dealing with a major renovation and roof replacement of the house we just sold) but I just find things to be happier in general when I don't come here. And the thing is, its not just me. I have heard similar statements from some of my friends as well. The performance of VT football over the past couple years certainly hasn't helped things, but this offseason, when in my opinion this place has historically been at its best, this year it has been an utter drag where it feels like we spend so much time trying to keep everyone happy with regards to these COVID threads that we've lost our way.
Its sad, I hope we can get back to the funloving TKP ways that we've long been known for, but lately this place feels more like TSL (and the COVID threads more like their incredibly toxic United We Stand forum) than TKP of old. And I know I am saying this while myself not necessarily helping the cause at times, but when we are at Thread XIX with the majority beforehand having needed to be stopped because of CG violations or threads just going completely off the rails, maybe there is actually a problem here.
I will say this, I do think our Mods have been excellent throughout this entire venture. But at a certain point, I do wonder if they are wasting their time in trying to keep these conversations going rather than just pulling the plug on the topic and eradicating the root cause of a lot of issues we are dealing with right now.
It's alright to pick on me - I'm trying to give an explanation to why cannons are loaded with people and that's bound to ruffle feathers not just for Leonard, but the people in his camp. If you were to compile all the subthreads started by L's comments, I think you would see the pattern and why many people are frustrated. 1) It's obvious trolling. Nearly every post is meant to get a rise, which they invariably do. 2) Almost every post has a not-so-trasparent political bent. 3) A prevalent response by L, when confronted about the misinformation posted is "why don't you answer the question rather than attack me." But when the point he is trying to make is debunked (usually pretty thoroughly), there's crickets...
FWIW, I thought I did answer the question from my perspective. It involved finger pointing because the person I was replying to made a comment wondering why fingers get pointed so often.
My take is that the response to CV19 has suffered because of misinformation. How are we supposed to fight CV19 without compliance? How are you supposed to get compliance out of people to go the extra mile out help out their fellow man when they are constantly bombarded by willful misinformation?
Edit: I need to give Leonard credit. I think many of the most stimulating discussions on here have been in response to the stuff that he posts. I have learned an awful lot about the scientific aspects and policy around CV19 in the responses to Leonard's comments.
Not everybody is going to agree all the time.
And there may be times when we look at the same information, and come to different conclusions.
I'm pointing out that one of the problems is assuming everyone outside one's camp has bad intentions, or that any conclusion that differs from one's own is "misinformation".
I come from a perspective of questioning everything. It's not bad to ask the questions. It is bad to assume that everyone we disagree with has the worst motivations.
Please help me understand why it isn't relevant to general population? It seems to have been a specific problem with the testing station, so why couldn't that be happening more often than we know? How would we know?
Because that isn't the purpose of making this statement in context. If they really cared about how widespread of an issue it is they would consult with medical professionals and scientists to understand what is the likelihood of these lab errors occurring to try to get an idea of true frequency.
Just throwing out the possibility of widespread false positives (unlikely) as a means to influence the average person into not trusting the numbers is very much a targeted political maneuver.
The PCR tests are very accurate. Their false positive rate when properly administered and collected is extremely low. The only chance of widespread false positives in terms of national numbers would require a substantial amount of lab errors. A lot more than we can attempt to draw conclusions from this one station that pulled out a lot of false positives for the NFL.
You have said this multiple times. My question is how often are they not properly administered and collected? Is that not a valid question?
For the record, I do not think that it makes a notable difference in the macro sense, like the total number of cases are out of whack. But it could be adding inefficiencies into the whole system in terms of tracing and focus.
I'd venture to guess you're more likely to get a negative result if you don't properly administer the test. But you'll probably never get a peer reviewed study on that because it'd be reckless to purposefully administer the test wrong and if you're testing for it you'd know how to do it right and would obviously go out of your way to fuck the test up.
I'm not politically motivated. I'm a truth seeker. Plain and simple. I couldn't care less about team red-team blue tribalism. It grosses me out, honestly. To look at the microcosm of the NFL test results and muse about how the testing numbers would change if that same meticulousness could be applied to Joe Blow's drive by test shouldn't be offensive in the slightest.
Besides, that same tactic is used all the time by major media outlets. Isolated incidents associated with the virus are reported, and then the media commentates on "how widepsread this issue may be..." without reporting important context. I know you see that.
I'm assuming you mean the national numbers would likely go down with more validation.
I'm less concerned with numbers of positives than I am numbers of deaths (but obviously tracking positive tests is important and useful.) Fewer "true" positives means the virus would be more deadly than you think it is.
Deaths are definitely something to be more concerned about. And, it looks like we're turning a corner there as well.
Are we though?
The frustrating thing is that while the actual death lags the positive test by ~2 weeks, the total death count can lag up to 6-8 weeks.
From CDC provisional death count page:
Worth noting that on 7/4, this list showed the US death count decreasing each week since early May. Those numbers have since been (and continue to be) updated as we learn more/enter more data. Worth noting that the death counts could also decrease as deaths that were falsely attributed to COVID are removed.
Probably the same. False negatives are a thing too.
False negatives are hard by RT-PCR. It's super super sensitive. It is possible, however, that the swabbing or sample preparation failed to yield in a false negative.
About a month ago, my cousin tested negative twice, but was diagnosed by her doctor as having it based on symptoms present, she was in rough shape for about 2.5 - 3 weeks
Leonard vs the coronavirus threads:
What's the record for shortest time for getting the coronavirus thread locked again? Are we about to find out?
Thread V was locked at 40 comments.
Semester is off to a hot start in Blacksburg