Coronavirus (OLD)

[jfman]

Originally Posted by OLD BOY

You didn't answer my legitimate question and as you well know, I have not advocated vulnerable people being exposed to the virus.

You have no way of knowing who will develop complications. You can risk assess, but that’s not black and white. Neither does it consider the collapse of the health service as and when the epidemic went out of control.

Every country in the world, bar Sweden, didn’t simultaneously decide to impose significant restrictions because Old Boy’s fag packet analysis reckons we can “shield the vulnerable” and be fine.

It’s an idea so bad not a single emerging economy thought to get the jump on its neighbours by staying open. No Southern European country thought to get a jump on France and Germany. And the countries who pushed too far are moving backwards.

To quote Professor Whitty we are near or at the limit of what we can do.

[Pierre]

Originally Posted by nashville

My son and his wife went to Germany today, They were tested as soon as they arrived with sniffer dogs , Thank God they were OK, I wonder if the same will be done in Scotland when they come back, I doubt it,

Impressive, Corona virus sniffer dogs? What’s the accuracy percentage?

Do these dogs have testing kits with them too?

I’m guessing the dogs identify general symptoms of a fever, indicating who deserves closer attention - unless of course they just happened to be doing a drugs sweep at the same time.

[denphone]

Actually the government in this country are doing dog trials to detect Covid 19.

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/c...trial-launches

https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...ns-of-covid-19

Originally Posted by Pierre

Impressive, Corona virus sniffer dogs? What’s the accuracy percentage?

Do these dogs have testing kits with them too?

https://www.news-medical.net/news/20...-accuracy.aspx

Sniffer dogs detect COVID-19 infections with 94 percent accuracy

... To arrive at their findings, the team trained eight detection dogs to sniff out SARS-CoV-2-infected samples for one week. The training aims to hone the smelling power of the dogs to detect saliva or tracheobronchial secretions of infected patients in a randomized, double-blinded, and controlled study.

The trained dogs sniffed the saliva of more than 1,000 people that were either healthy or infected with the virus. The samples of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) patients were distributed at random.

During the study, the dogs achieved an overall average detection rate of 94 percent with 157 correct indications of positive, 792 correct rejections of negative, 33 incorrect indications of negative or incorrect rejections of 30 positive sample presentations.

"These preliminary findings indicate that trained detection dogs can identify respiratory secretion samples from hospitalized and clinically diseased SARS-CoV-2 infected individuals by discriminating between samples from SARS-CoV-2 infected patients and negative controls. This data may form the basis for the reliable screening method of SARS-CoV-2 infected people," the researchers concluded in the study.

[Pierre]

Originally Posted by Hugh

https://www.news-medical.net/news/20...-accuracy.aspx

All we need to do is train up a posse of these hounds and do systematic sweeps throughout town centres, pubs/clubs, schools, factories etc.

Job done.

Originally Posted by Hugh

https://www.news-medical.net/news/20...-accuracy.aspx

I’m not much of a statistician but “94% detection success” seems a bit misleading to me. Passing over a negative sample isn’t a detection as such. What you really need is a very high detection of positive samples, and the dogs failed to spot 30 of the 187 positive samples presented. That’s a positive detection of only 84%.

[Carth]

Dogs probably have the same accuracy percentage as any of the tests available.

IMO

[Mr K]

Originally Posted by denphone

Actually the government in this country are doing dog trials to detect Covid 19.

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/c...trial-launches

https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...ns-of-covid-19

Great, that's more gold plated public sector pensions we'll have to shell out for. Dogs have got it made.

[denphone]

Originally Posted by Mr K

Great, that's more gold plated public sector pensions we'll have to shell out for. Dogs have got it made.

That is because dogs know how to get it done Mr K.

[tweetiepooh]

As I've mentioned before, what you need is a very high accuracy and fast negative test or simply infectivity test. If you know people who are out and about are not infective movement becomes much easier. Of course the downer comes that they remain non-infective.
If dogs can give a good and fast indicator maybe it's possible to then stream populations into further testing/isolation/treatment.

[1andrew1]

Good article on how Turkey is successfully tackling Coronavirus with just 6,000 deaths in a country of 83 million people.

Much of the country's success in containing the disease has been put down to Turkey’s so-called COVID-19 "detectives".
Turkey has managed to test millions of people for the virus and has registered more recoveries from the disease than infections for the past four weeks on the trot.
One of the country's leading doctors told Sky News that Turkey's relatively low mortality rate is down to the extensive testing and tracing network, as well as aggressive treatment in the early stages of the disease...
Every child, relative, acquaintance, workmate and secret lover of every person who tests positive is found and told to isolate for 14 days.
We don't want them to lie to us," says Dr Melek...
"Often we make them remember people, locations, instances they have just completely forgotten. We are truly like detectives."

https://news.sky.com/story/coronavir...ntrol-12041863

[RichardCoulter]

On now:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000lkzq

Jeremy Farrar, one of the scientific advisors to the Government, says, amongst other things, that we started measures to stop the spread of the virus (he dislikes the word 'lockdown') too late, eased these measures too soon and that it was unwise to outsource the work done to monitor viruses.

He also said that the this will not be the last pandemic, so we must learn lessons from this one and that the investigation into how the Government dealt with it must be thorough and open and that we must not underestimate the seriousness of this situation.

[Mad Max]

Get the dugs in....

[RichardCoulter]

Originally Posted by Mad Max

Get the dugs in....

I don't think he was having a dig at the Government as they will have followed the advice of him and his colleagues, so he would be essentially critiscising himself!

Unless the Government didn't take their advice as they have claimed and that's what he was getting at. Hopefully it will all come out in the wash with the enquiry into it.