HydroxyChloroQuine – HCQ
A month or two ago, Dr. John Campbell had said studies showed HCQ didn’t work. I chose to ignore that as it was studies by folks who didn’t want it to work and several M.D.s reported success.
In this video, a new study from Belgium finds HCQ works. What’s the difference?
The ones that failed used 800 mg in 12 hours, then another 400 mg. Total of 2 grams. Then did 800 mg per day. The recommended dose is 200 to 400 mg / day max. Basically, overdoses in very sick patients is not a good idea.
As usual, no mention of zink status. Sigh. (And yes, I write it both zinc and zink as both are correct in semi-old English).
It looks like using the recommended dose, especially with z-pack and zinc, has it working OK.
.
Since OTC Quercetin or Quinine from the Tonic & Gin are also zink ionophores, that ought to be helpful for folks who can’t get HCQ.
Herd Immunity
From: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
USA Wuhan Covid Cases 28 Aug 2020
With ever increasing places open for business, some States open as normal, Rioters all over doing germ exchange, and a whole lot more: our “second wave” is already in decline from a low bump. Despite folks going to restaurants again in many places, and just ignoring things like admonishes to stay off the beach or be a hermit forever.
IMHO, we’re rapidly approaching herd immunity and it time to get rid of increasing amounts of the restrictions on businesses. This thing is headed out the door already.
Musings from the Chiefio 
Is there a link to the Belgium study?
“Anyone who can only think of one way to spell a word obviously lacks imagination.”
― Mark Twain
zinc, zink, zinque, zinck, and I’m sure I’ve missed a couple of other ways to spell the hard ‘C’ sound.
;o)
zync, zynk, zynque, zynck
Let’s not ignore the ‘i’.
@Corev:
It is a preprint IIRC, and Campbell describes where he found it.
Thanks, EM! I found it.
I just don’t get it, there are many more studies around.
The current, and has been for some time, recommended regime is HCQ+AZ+Zn, why doesn’t DR Cambell know about this?
The previous studies were designed to fail, which I think he may have realised.
@A.C.Osborn:
Campbell trusts too much in the reputation of old groups, now pwned. So The W.H.O. study got higher weight when it came out than did some paper by one M.D. doing it himself. It is the flaw of appeal to authority.
While it can be important to judge credibility by reputation, that always needs a few pounds of salt…especially once China funding is involved.
You can see the light dawning in the video as Campbell tsk tsks at the two ‘reputable’ sources using too high a dose. He puzzles over why. Not yet ready to make the leap to non-reputable political influences.
@H.R.:
How about Zeenk, Zinq, Zeenq, and in a Chinese theme, Xink?
I grew up reading books from various old versions and eras of English, so early on learned things were not always written one way. I was a bit peeved, though, when looking up stuff on the US Constitution that Wiki inserted “sic” after the word “chus” as written. That is a correct and valid way to write “choose” and less lijely to be confused with “chose” (chowes) and needs no error marker. Archaic is not error.
Heard an interesting statistic recently. Uganda, the land of Idi Amin, is Malaria central. So the population there has been taking HCQ for 50 years as a matter of protection from Malaria. Know how many WuFlu cases they have had?
13. Not 13 hundred. Not 13 thousand. 13
OUt of a population of 42 million.
philjourdan, guess what the median age is in Uganda. Hint: it’s low like in most African countries. It’s 15.9 years. COVID-19 is an old folks disease; few old folks, no problem.
E.M.S.
Not sure how to get this through as it is behind a paywall. Cartoon today by Johannes Leak, head cartoonist at The Australian with a split view.
One side of panel is titled Stockholm Syndrome and shows happy people out in the sun enjoying life. The other side is Melbourne Syndrome with fearful (masked) people locked in a cell and kneeling (to pray?) image of Dan Andrews** on small TV with posters Dan knows best etc. pointing out his love of shut downs for Covid.
** State Premier widely known for his chinese connections as Do Pi Dan.
@Scissor – you are only off by 30 years. Still low! But the facts remain.
13 in 42 million. And what is the difference? HCQ is a normal regimine.
@Graeme No.3., Here you go.
https://content.api.news/v3/images/bin/deacc9f6f3d2266c06aa64dbada3ddbf
Much more where that one came from.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/cartoons/johannes-leak-cartoons/image-gallery/de8f7d34d6dcf6dbb2f01239663cedd7
Including the infamous Camel-Joe one.
@philjourdan, interesting, both the low covid death rate and the low population age.
A quick search shows the median age is 15.9 (2018 est.), or 16.7 (2020 est.) — with high infant mortality. How is that even possible?
If you are familiar with population pyramids, this one is for the text books.
https://www.indexmundi.com/uganda/age_structure.html
Birth rate 42.4/1000, death rate 9.9/1000.
Life expectancy at birth 56.3
total fertility rate 5.62 (or 5.8) children born/woman
Age structure. 65+ 2%, 55-64 2.6%.
Conclusion: herd immunity! That virus will have a hard time finding potential victims.
YMMV:
Thank you. I didn’t realise they were published for all to view.
That pyramid was world typical some 120 years ago. The high death rate, especially for infants and later people we call middle aged makes the median (50% point) so low. It wasn’t that long ago that infant mortality in the USA was about 3%. Now it is about 0.6% with an overall death rate of 0.9%. (Reminder, that’s for live births. Abortions, whether spontaneous or induced, don’t count.) Infectious disease and trauma are still among the main causes of death worldwide. If you get past puberty and avoid trauma, you will die of either infectious disease or one of the myriad diseases of long life. To think otherwise is vanity.
Responding to Phil, Scissor says about Uganda – –
Have a look at this:
https://www.populationpyramid.net/uganda/2050/
45M now, in 2050 double to 89 M
Modernity and industrialization brings straight sided population “pyramids” shaped like grain silos.
3rd world impoverished societies have ever wider bases (high birth rate, up to the 9 and 13 of my grandparents during the Irish potato famine diaspora) and narrow tops (poor medical care, poor nutrition, and low public safety leads to many deaths in middle age to older). So a very pyramidal shape and thus the name. Chinese Wuhan Covid will also be killing more old folks in poor countries due to little medical support and making the pyramid shape stronger.
The best way to reduce population growth and births is modernity and middle class wealth. Otherwise nature will use the 4 Horsemen…. War, famine, plague, pestilence.
Oddly, we are afflicted with regular wars, global food production is challenged at present, we have the Chinese Wuhan plague, and locusts wiped out a path from Africa to China. So 3rd World nations seem to be supporting that as destiny.
@philjourdan, you are incorrect. The global median age is about 30. Many countries in Africa have a median age around half of that. COVID-19 to young healthy persons is most often not even noticed or is like a cold.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/05/the-world-s-10-youngest-countries-are-all-in-africa/
YMMV is correct.
@Nancy & John (hey for the record, my sister is Nancy, but no brothers named John)
Big numbers! That is the poor of the world trying to get their retirement under control. Sad, but still 75% of the pop are still in one world poverty.
@ Scissor – we are not talking GMA. We are talking Uganda!
Sorry for the misinformation.
Here’s an interesting graphic from the site referenced by Nancy & John Hultquist.
https://www.populationpyramid.net/hnp/immunization-bcg-tuberculosis-of-one-year-old-children/2015/
There was some speculation that the tuberculosis vaccine works against Covid.
I don’t recall a definitive answer, but the graphic does suggest that there might be something to it.
@YMMV:
Weren’t Brazil and Iran having a bad go of it? Are they not in the T. vax zone?
I’m not of either position, just wondering.
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/bronsonstocking/2020/08/29/it-looks-like-a-lot-of-those-positive-covid-tests-should-have-been-negative-n2575305
@llanfar, that article links to the NY Times (and I won’t register to read it). Here is another article based on it with more details.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8679307/Experts-say-USs-coronavirus-positivity-rate-high-tests-sensitive.html
Health experts say PCR testing – the most widely used diagnostic test for COVID-19 in the US – are too sensitive and need to be adjusted to rule out people who have insignificant amounts of the virus in their systems because they’re likely not contagious.
A solution to today’s testing could be to adjust the cycle threshold used now to decide if a patient is infected to a lower number.
PCR tests analyze genetic matter from the virus in cycles and today’s tests typically take 37 or 40 cycles, but experts say this is too high because it detects very small amounts of the virus that don’t pose a risk.
Doctors say fewer cycle thresholds, meaning the number of cycles needed to detect the virus, hone in on those with greater amounts of the virus who do pose risks.
The test’s threshold is so high it detects people with the live virus and those with few genetic fragments that are leftovers from infection and no longer pose risk, Mina says. It’s like finding a hair in a room after a person left it.
It looks like the article was based on an interview with Dr. Michael Mina.
@E.M.Smith, “Weren’t Brazil and Iran having a bad go of it? Are they not in the T. vax zone?”
Yes, I think this points out the difficulty of drawing conclusions from correlations. There is a difference between first and third world countries, so it must be BCG. What else could it possibly be? /sarc
Even against TB, BCG is not 100% by a long shot, and duration of protection is unknown.
It also works against Leprosy and Cancer. Somewhat.
BCG is prepared from a strain of the attenuated live bovine tuberculosis bacillus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BCG_vaccine
This review concludes that BCG can prevent respiratory infections (pneumonia and influenza) in children and the elderly, but there is no evidence it protects against Covid-19.
https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/does-bcg-vaccination-protect-against-acute-respiratory-infections-and-covid-19-a-rapid-review-of-current-evidence/
This study thinks it might, although from the graphs they give (fig. 2), it doesn’t look like it.
https://news.umich.edu/mandated-tb-vaccination-predicts-flattened-curves-for-covid-19-spread/
But if you look at the preprint itself, there are graphs (Fig. 1) which show it might work.
PDF: https://kitayama.psych.lsa.umich.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Bergetal_All.pdf
They are looking at initial infection growth rates, not final outcomes.
I doubt we will ever know. Even for TB, “Despite nearly a century of use, the BCG vaccine continues to be controversial, and policies and practices vary widely across the world.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3062527/
Oh.
Started daily boron supplements several years ago following the discussion here. Rec dose is 3 mg/day. Take 6. Big change is my dreams returned. Alzheimer’s runs in my family, so I take that pretty seriously. Available from Amazon.
Started zinc supplements in Feb. Also from Amazon. Pretty cheap. DO NOT OVERDOSE. 1/day works.
There have been conflicting stories about Vitamin D. Depending where on the chicken-egg discussion you stand, being deficient makes you more susceptible to the Wuhan Flu. Are you deficient because you are old or in a nursing home? Either? Both? Whatever happens, you need to get out in the sun, soon to be much more difficult to do as we ease into fall and winter. In this part of the world, Vitamin D supps are important.
Final AT story this morning about FDA intentionally suppressing use of HCQ and how many lives it has cost. The banality of evil of the bureaucracy. Cheers –
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/09/did_fda_cause_second_covid_wave_by_suppressing_hydroxychloroquine.html
@Agimarc:
Interesting about dreams. FWIW, I’ve come to the conclusion that our metabolism is expecting a big turnover of food (from a harsh life in the wild needing to burn calories to stay warm) and an annual cycle of feast and famine on much more nutrient dense foods (fish, whole animals, nuts, berries, roots) but we are giving it large amounts of calorie fluff (sugars, starches, grains, refined seed oils) constantly. The result being lots of flab and clogged digestion and arteries along with marginal to deficit micro nutrients of all sorts. No time to “take out the trash” and too little of the important trace stuff.
You might want to look into the theory that Alzheimer’s is a kind of diabetes. IF there’s anything to that, going keto and assuring enough of the stuff used up metabolizing sugars, might help prevent it.
“Runs in families” can be genetic or environmental / cultural. High lead consumption and the resultant mental issues were common in ancient Rome and “ran in families” along with the food choices…. I suspect modern processed high carb diets present a similar problem. FWIW, average human brain size decreased with the onset of grain growing thousands of years ago…
Ketone bodies are used very efficiently by the brain, in addition to glucose. The present dogma is that glucose is the basic fuel and ketones sort of an emergency option. But what if that is backwards? What if normally humans were hungry a lot and doing feast / famine on animal hunts? Normal would be keto diet and ketone burning. Only once a year with fall fruit gorging would the brain be flooded with glucose. Are we, perhaps, pushing our metabolism constantly into an unusual state only intended to pack on the pounds for winter as fast as possible and leaving the trash removsl for a “later” that now never comes?
From Jo Nova, yet another cheap old medicine that appears to work with COVID-19, this time it is cough medicine – bromhexine.
Study is here.
Click to access bi-23240.pdf
http://joannenova.com.au/2020/09/even-cough-syrup-might-actually-work-against-coronavirus/
oops, that was supposed to be just the link.
Can you fix it EM?
@ACO,
A problem with that study is the small sample size and that it uses p-values. Likely to not be very reproducible. That said, for some, the treatment may work.
“Even cough syrup might actually work against Coronavirus”
http://joannenova.com.au/2020/09/even-cough-syrup-might-actually-work-against-coronavirus/
EM –
The intro into the boron threads was that in times of shortage, the body tends to substitute an element chemically similar for what it really needs. Speculation in the article was that aluminum (found in quantity in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients) substitutes for boron when there isn’t enough of it around. If true, with an adequate supply of boron via supplement or dissolved borax, that overabundance of aluminum is rejected. I think there is some truth to that. And I view knowledge that i have been dreaming as positive feedback. Was not there for at least 15-20 years before I started the supplement.
Gary Taubes writes of Alzheimer’s as Diabetes Type III, with some (probably a big) dietary component. With that in mind, I’ve been doing the lo carb routine for 6 years (however poorly) in response. Parents were both overweight. Lost one to Alzheimer’s and one to a weird cancer. Fighting both possibilities with lo carb / hi fat. One of the things we forget is that the wetware is genetically predisposed in any one of a number of directions. Some body types can tolerate lots of insults. Some have to be way careful. Family history is probably the best indicator. Consider it an opening bid rather than a sentence. Mine is not particularly tolerant, so I have to be careful.
I think I see your backwards feast & famine routine. Fruits were only available in relatively short periods of time (a month or so) to our ancestors. Not available other times of the year. Doing the lo carb / hi fat routine, I find it pretty easy to keep weight off in summer, with late summer the easiest. Once we are past mid-Sept, have to be very careful as the days get shorter up here. The impact of things change based on the time of year they are consumed, at least to me. No other data to support it other than certain parts of the year I have to behave myself a lot more than others. And a short exposure to fruit in the right time of the year is much better tolerated than fruits other times of the year. But what the Hell do I know? Pattern recognition or wishful thinking? Either / or or simply yes. Cheers –
agimarc: “being deficient makes you more susceptible to the Wuhan Flu.”
Being deficient in Vit-D handicaps your immune system. Get Vit-D for Covid AND other things.
You can get yourself tested for Vit-D levels. It will probably cost you something.
agimarc: “Final AT story this morning about FDA intentionally suppressing use of HCQ and how many lives it has cost.”
That is interesting. Especially this part:
Also this one:
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/09/why_would_the_fda_ban_a_drug_that_safely_saves_the_lives_of_patients.html
Re YMMV says:
2 September 2020 at 5:27 am
IIRC the study that put Fauci’s name in lights wasn’t a double-blind one either.
I don’t have a reference handy
I have been looking into the President Trump “Bleach” medicine, it is actually chlorine dioxide, also known as MMS.
This antiseptic has been used in the past to cure Malaria, the study however was hushed up and hidden away.
The reference for PT’s commment was a study carried out in Ecuador which had a 100% success rate in 4 days. Very much like Ivermectin.
https://www.naturalnews.com/2020-05-18-researchers-claim-100-percent-cure-rate-vs-covid-19-ecuador-intravenous-chlorine-dioxide.html
There has been a determined effort to downplay and ridicule this study and the use of MMS.
They really are trying to stop anything that works fro gaining any traction in the media.
True enough, old drugs won’t get the ‘new drug smell’ ;p effect; but any rational pharmaceutical company has incentives to look at new uses for old drugs. The push to ‘generics’ has weakened that. Maybe we should look at the rules ;p here, instead of bad-mouthing pharmaceutical companies?
About cough medicine, I ran across this: https://elemental.medium.com/a-supercomputer-analyzed-covid-19-and-an-interesting-new-theory-has-emerged-31cb8eba9d63. Hmm, bradykinin. I don’t recall seeing that chemical brought up before. (Side note: multicellular organisms grow and develop by means of a carefully regulated chemical song and dance; which includes programmed cell death. Deprivation via any means, or excess by any means, is pathological. Individual variation matters in determining what either means in that specific situation.)
@Agimarc:
No idea why your reply here
Went to SPAM, but I found it and fished it out. Must be a wordpress thing.
Per Periodic Poisons:
Note the pairs of elements in a column where the upper is essential and next below it screws things up:
Zn / Cd (VERY toxic as it messes up a lot of Zn dependent pathways)
P / As (Also lethal, with old lace or not)
S / Se (trace essential, high intake toxic) / Te https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tellurium
Ni / Pd (newly found to be slightly toxic)
Ca/ Sr (mildly toxic)
K / Rb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubidium points out it does substitute for K, but only mildly toxic until high doses:
So I think there is evidence for enzymes grabbing ions in the same column with various levels of toxicity or success. That does make the boron aluminum pair interesting. BUT Al is everywhere in minerals and seems inert to digestion. Getting it in might be hard. OTOH, B is very trace so it might not take much on any one day to screw things up over a few decades.
I’m happy with my occasional B via Borax consumption ;-)
While I don’t avoid Al pans, I do prefer Sodium Bicarbonate or Calcium tablets over aluminum hydroxide for stomach acidity issues.
@cdquarles, bradykinin.
Medcram#106 covers that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TECf3xSFbU&t=872s
It also covers improperly filled out death certificates (the 6% figure in the news), Calcifediol as a more effective Vitamin D supplement, and the huge difference that taking it made in one study.
This very short video explains how to reduce false positives when using cheap paper strip tests.
Dr. Mina: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Swwv5ObkfGw
Oh, I am aware of the fact that bradykinin is one more in the large set of immune system’s chemical mediators (via basophils, is well known for its role in hypersensitivity/histamine reactions up to anaphylactic shock).
Given the very small numbers and that the video did mention that more folk with diabetes ended up in the untreated arm (which was about half the size of the treatment arm), plus the use of p-values limits this study’s overall usefulness. That it is suggestive cannot be denied, though unlikely to be reproduced by studies with larger numbers and better matching.
I disagree with the testing, vehemently. We are doing it so wrong. Key is not just a test’s specificity and sensitivity, but the *true prevalence*. We are testing people who, from a medical point of view, shouldn’t be tested. I get, though, that it is politics driving this.
Covid treatment using Calcifediol as a more effective Vitamin D supplement:
Click to access main.pdf
It was a small pilot study and a follow up study is being run. So it is not proof, but it is very suggestive that Vitamin D levels are super important.
From a mechanistic perspective there are good reasons to postulate that vitamin D endocrine system favorably modulates host responses to severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), both in the later hyperinflammatory and early viraemic phases of COVID-19.
cdquarles: “I disagree with the testing, vehemently. We are doing it so wrong. Key is not just a test’s specificity and sensitivity, but the *true prevalence*. We are testing people who, from a medical point of view, shouldn’t be tested. I get, though, that it is politics driving this.”
There are two reasons for testing. One is patients admitted to hospitals, for diagnosis. No problem there. The other reason is to find the contagious virus spreaders, to stop the spread. We are doing it so wrong. I speculate that almost all of the spreading is done by people who don’t know they are infected. So from a public health point of view, everybody should be tested, repeatedly. The problem with doing that (one of the problems) is that there will be too many false positives. The second video above explains how to reduce that. Finding too many is not optimal, but not finding infectious cases is very bad news.
What can the ordinary citizen do? Wait for WHO and other bureaucrats and politicians to make up their mind? Again, hoping they get it right this time? Ha! I want to be able to do my own testing. Start small, check on my friends so we can hang out together. Work up to testing classrooms, so children can continue their education. Or for adults, so they can have business meetings and get back to real work. Then for airlines. Test passengers before they get on the plane. Then border control. Test, wait 15 minutes, then back to normal. Doctors (dentists, opticians, hair dressers, etc) who see live patients might like this too.
https://www.rapidtests.org
Historically, most spreading is done by those who are sick and know they are sick, while they may not know what’s making them be sick. While it is *possible* for asymptomatic people to spread an infectious disease, they’re less likely to do it because they are probably not shedding an amount larger than the minimum infectious dose. Still you do start spreading early, typically a day or two before you notice symptoms. Then you spread for a few days or a few weeks, depending on the infection and your immune response. The better that is, the sooner you cease spreading.
Again, *true prevalence* matters, whether we have fast turn-around times or not. Life finds a way. A virus is the ultimate parasite. It will eventually reach everyone that is susceptible. We should stop worrying about cases where the definition is so loose that most cases are false or medically insignificant. NB that care homes do not fall, generally, into this.
That said, every screening test, especially ones that are highly sensitive should be confirmed by a highly specific test. This will still cost money, time, or both; and with *true prevalence* in mind. What the general public should do is mostly nothing beyond general hygiene. Wash your hands, cover your face when sneezing or coughing, stay home if you are sick unless you need to go to a medical facility. Medical facilities should be doing reasonable infection control procedures. It is way past time to end the ’emergency’.
@cdquarles, interesting points. I’m interested in the facts that support the opinions.
Historically, probably so. This time, I’m not convinced that very much of the spreading is done by those who know they are sick.
Click to access 2020.06.22.20136309v2.full.pdf
“It will eventually reach everyone that is susceptible.” Hard to argue with that! Although it’s still debatable how many are susceptible. Care homes are a good illustration that no matter how strong the precautions, the virus finds a way in. Protecting the general public is out of the question. Not possible. I notice that the trend of comments coming from the top is that this is “the new normal”. Lockdowns forever.
“What the general public should do is mostly nothing beyond general hygiene. Wash your hands, cover your face when sneezing or coughing, stay home if you are sick unless you need to go to a medical facility.” In other words, get herd immunity. Add to that to protect yourself by taking your vitamins and staying healthy. That is better than lockdowns forever.
“It is way past time to end the ’emergency’.” Absolutely.
IMO the cat’s out of the bag and sooner or later EVERYONE will catch this virus, or its mutated offspring (get infected and the immune system does it’s thing, or not) — yes everyone, even the secretive tribes in the Amazonian, or Papua New Guinea, or wherever, as soon as they get contact with the outside world, which they will. Remember how Native Americans where severely affected by diseases the European that they brought with them.
If by this time next year there still is no trustworthy vaccines, then if you have never caught the virus (or any of its mutations) you have no idea about how your immune system will react. Good luck to you and good luck to the people residing in such countries as New Zealand, for they have yet to find out.
That worked in reverse, too. Europeans took syphilis back with them.
Here, though, the higher burden is on folk who think this virus is so much different from viruses that we have seen before. 1000 copies per ml, wow, that’s *very* dilute, in my opinion (that said, there are Shigella species where a few hundred to 1000 cells per gram result in infection, but these are really virulent). 100,000, well, now that’s more likely to be close to the minimum infectious dose. I still suspect it is one to two more orders of magnitude above that. Infectious doses of bacteria are on the order of 10,000,000 to 100,000,000 cells per gram of inoculum. (A gram of pure liquid water occupies about 1ml volume.) On the other hand, bacteria are larger and easier to apply barrier methods (like mucus).
Beyond the limits of a model paper (change the conditions, change the results), it doesn’t look that much different from previous practice without the high frequency testing, just going by previous experience with more limited testing with some follow-up a week or two later, where other evidence indicates the necessity of it.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/could-mass-testing-for-covid-19-do-more-harm-than-good-
“Could mass testing for Covid-19 do more harm than good?”
Their answer is ‘yes’.
The immune system works to neutralise the virus and prevent further infection. The infectious stage lasts about a week. Inactivated RNA, however, degrades slowly: it can be detected weeks after infectiousness has gone.
This page has a well done interactive illustration of the relation between prevalence, sensitivity, and specificity:
https://www.bmj.com/content/369/bmj.m1808/rr-22
Large volume screening at a time of low prevalence has the potential to do more harm than good and some of these strategies should be temporarily suspended.
Prevalence is a measure of how common a disease is in a specified at-risk population. Covid, despite the panic, is not very prevalent. Put a low number into the prevalence box of that calculator and you will see that the number of false positives can be far greater than the number of true positives.
When we wear a mask, it is largely show. We probably will not meet a single person with covid in a whole day. Like seat belts, over 99% of the time, they are unnecessary. That’s low prevalence. With seat belts, that “unlikely event” is bad enough that we accept the bother.
In summary, PCR tests are good for diagnosis, they are not good for public screening; too aggressive, too expensive, too inconvenient. For public screening, the cheap and rapid tests are what is needed. Positives, true or false, can be tested further, and isolated if (and only if) necessary. But there is also a completely different function, where the point is to show who is safe to associate with. So that we can drop the masks and suspicions, at least for a day. For that purpose, we do not need to test everybody; we can be selective. We can end the lockdown mentality.
As a complement in diagnosis, sure, PCR can help. Having been there, I don’t give PCR anywhere near the current credulity it seems to have been given. At this point, pretty much everyone is safe to associate with.
“Good news: masks, means more asymptomatic infections and less severe ones”
http://joannenova.com.au/2020/09/good-news-more-masks-means-more-asymptomatic-infections-and-less-severe-ones/
I was extending my education on utube, listening to Victor Davis Hanson, a 6th generation Californian farmer as well as a scholar of renown. April 6, 2020 interview
He opined that California may have been exposed to the SARS-2 virus at the same time that Wuhan was and that it was the cause of the “Flue ” but not influenza out break that hit California early last winter. That might explain the lite infection and hospitalizations that California has experienced this spring and summer. I have wondered that as well, as I got “something” before Christmas that bedeviled me into June before it relented. Just a low grade sick and congestion for months. ..pg