IOM Covid removing restrictions

[Roger Mexico]

3 minutes ago, Banker said:

Looks like obesity is one of biggest causes of COVID deaths, probably why BoJo is on diet!

https://www.google.com/amp/s/news.sky.com/story/amp/obesity-warning-as-report-shows-nine-out-of-10-covid-19-deaths-have-been-in-countries-with-high-rates-of-obesity-12235256

There is a link with obesity (though it may not be causal - it could be the same risk factors that make people vulnerable to Covid also make them obese), but that's a stupid way of trying to prove it.  Among other things, the countries with more obese people tend to be more affluent and so have better health systems and so more deaths get diagnosed properly.  Pointing to a few obvious exceptions like Japan doesn't change that.

[Newbie]

2 minutes ago, Manx Yeller said:

I'm just a great believer that using their "war" analogy, we should use every weapon we can. As long as you understand why it might not be effective and can mitigate any potential risk it might pose, use it. It's as I questioned the other day regarding genomics, I don't see it as the answer to everything but at the same time, I see no downside to using it so even if it only helps out every now and then, that's better in my mind than not using it.

Except that you may make the situation worse by having 60% of the positive people walking around believing they are negative

Edited to add: To use your war analogy, would you still deploy a weapon that failed 60% of the time and harmed your own troops on those occasions

Edited March 4, 2021 by Newbie

[Roger Mexico]

38 minutes ago, Manx Yeller said:

That can be managed though with the message behind it. If any child is showing symptoms, they stay off school and get the gold standard test, even if the previous flow test said they were ok. Those that go and have no symptoms, test them a couple of times a week. If it highlights any cases then surely that's a good thing. I still can't see the downside of it. If all I'm doing is "reducing the number of carriers a bit", surely that's what we are trying to do?

The trouble is that you're still getting spread and via the school to the wider community.  The only way is to close the school for a while when you try to eradicate the disease generally.  

This is the same point that has to be repeated over and over.  Despite the rhetoric, you can't 'live with' such a virus because you can't control it.  Time and time again we've seen country after country assume they had things under control, relax restrictions and then Covid gets out of control again.

Vaccination may change that though I suspect it may not be the panacea that some seem to believe it is.

[Kopek]

The Liverpool lat. flow test period, which allowed their Govt to put LPool in a lower lockdown position. So a trust was applied then.

There was a suspicion that it was more of a 'slap in the face' for Andy Burnham in Manchester because he was a very naughty boy, causing trouble for Boris!!!

 

[Manx Yeller]

15 minutes ago, Newbie said:

Except that you may make the situation worse by having 60% of the positive people walking around believing they are negative

Edited to add: To use your war analogy, would you still deploy a weapon that failed 60% of the time and harmed your own troops on those occasions

True, my mitigation of explaining the way the test works and the % success rate and hoping the great Manx public would understand, might be a stretch too far!

[snowman]

Has anyone actually apologised yet ?

[Kopek]

A PCR test cannot pick up  bugs you have not picked up yet either?

Tho, when it does say +/ -, it's usually correct.

[Gladys]

36 minutes ago, Kopek said:

Was Josh Stokes not invited to the briefing? ( Maybe Trump banned him for his blog)?  Doh! Quayle I meant.

 

Also, in Howards final brief, He referred to The Primary school in Onchan? Did he let slip of a problem at Onchan School? Or did he down grade Bemahauge to primary school?

Bemahague is St Ninian's lower school, perhaps that is where he got confused.

[Roger Mexico]

Incidentally there's a slight discrepancy in today's figures.  They're claiming a total of 546 cases with 36 new ones.  But yesterday's total cases was 511 so there's a slip up somewhere.

The new cases split 18 - 18 between close contacts and unknown sources, which makes the 21 out of 106 quoted a bit confusing, unless they have been able to link 11 of the 14 previous unknown ones before today to the Steam Packet index case.

Edited March 4, 2021 by Roger Mexico
Clarity

[Manx Yeller]

16 minutes ago, Roger Mexico said:

The trouble is that you're still getting spread and via the school to the wider community.  The only way is to close the school for a while when you try to eradicate the disease generally. 

I'm not sure I understand your point. If we don't test, we won't pick up any asymptomatic cases so it will spread. If we test and even only find one case, that's one less case spreading to the wider community. Surely that's a good thing and what we are attempting to achieve - find people with it and isolate them so they can't pass it on.

[Barlow]

For the sake of my family, the people I care about and the Island as a whole I would feel a lot more secure if Dr Rachel Glover was fully onboard with us.

The Isle of Man is no longer in a position of strength. Any laurels which we may have once rested on have long sunk into the murky, fast-flowing waters of the pandemic

[TheTeapot]

3 minutes ago, Roger Mexico said:

Incidentally there's a slight discrepancy in today's figures.  They're claiming a total of 546 cases with 36 new ones.  But yesterday's total cases was 511 so there's a slip up somewhere.

The new cases split 18 - 18 between close contacts and unknown sources, which makes the 21 out of 106 quoted a bit confusing, unless they have been able to link 11 of the 14 previous ones to the Steam Packet index case.

They could do with sorting those figures out now really. Last years are irrelevant, who cares that youve done 33000 tests of which 30000 were last year.

[Gladys]

42 minutes ago, Roger Mexico said:

But if they'd had the sense to get Rachel to help out with the genomics, then they would have sense not to use their daft and dishonest definition of community cases.  Both arise from the same problems - flattering the egos of a few is seen as more important than the health of the many.

If you use the cluster argument, could we not all be in the Wuhan cluster?  Just a silly definition on which to base a strategy.  Surely, the important thing is that you can backward trace to find other hidden pockets of infection then forward trace from there to find other pockets and so on, testing all the way.  

[Roger Mexico]

1 minute ago, TheTeapot said:

They could do with sorting those figures out now really. Last years are irrelevant, who cares that youve done 33000 tests of which 30000 were last year.

I make it 13,290 this year out of 34,097 in total, though of course there's two separate outbreaks there. 

Today was 416 completed, which is probably a record for a single day (693 on 3 Jan covered four days) but that's still quite a bit less than potential lab capacity as reported by Rachel.

[TheTeapot]

1 minute ago, Roger Mexico said:

I make it 13,290 this year out of 34,097 in total, though of course there's two separate outbreaks there. 

Today was 416 completed, which is probably a record for a single day (693 on 3 Jan covered four days) but that's still quite a bit less than potential lab capacity as reported by Rachel.

Well I was making those figures up, but the point remains. Keep the totals recorded for people to write a thesis on when it all over by all means but its mostly pointless publishing it right now. Same with the total people infected when half of them were a year ago. What matters is what is happening right now, and while I know that info is there, it could be clearer if they tidied it up a bit.