I know we are tired of Covid19 posts but this is worth a separate one....

I really don't follow you. If Italy have tested all people of a specific area, therefore having a large sample size, you can then potentially work out more accurately what the true mortality rate is. Because previously only people with symptoms have been getting tested, it is skewing the mortality rate somewhat. It appears that the mortality rate could be much lower and you could- if the methods all check out- potentially generalise that to the wider population.

 

Isolating more people is what slows the spread. Testing simply enables you to identify those who need isolating at a given point in time. Testing doesn't in itself save lives, it's the isolation and quarantining that does

 

But you cannot test the entire population simultaneously. Testing a group who show negative but then they come in to contact with asymptomatic carriers the next day negates testing. You seem obsessed that universal testing is the answer but it is not. You are missing the salient point that testing is not a cure. Isolating as many people as possible is and then target testing on people who have to circulate.
Other people on here seem to have grasped the significance of this report but you clearly have chosen a contrary viewpoint. That is your opinion fair enough but I have NOT missed the salient point as you suggest.

 

That's the key point. More testing does obviously help if you are allowing people to go about their business as usual as it allows you to find more people to isolate but it isn't foolproof as you can test me today and find I'm clear and then I touch a door handle on my way out that Corona Clive touched on his way in and I'm now out there walking around with the disease not only blissfully unaware but confident that I'm in the clear and that's quite dangerous.

 

THIS---(Note the credentials of the author.......
Testing is not a panacea
There is understandable frustration and outrage that testing has been slow and often inaccessible in the US. But lack of testing has led some to miss the point of what tests can — and cannot — do.

A surge in people being tested could actually spread disease, because people can become infected by someone else waiting to be tested. Getting tested today is no guarantee you won’t get infected tomorrow — and may give you a false sense of security. Furthermore, emerging data suggests that testing of throat swabs may miss as many as two-thirds of infections.

From my point of view as an infectious disease control physician, it’s dismaying to see both the promises of and demands for widespread testing that, if met, will do little good and possibly some harm. That said, in some contexts testing is absolutely, crucially important:

• In areas with few or no cases, to inform containment and isolation strategies and facilitate contact tracing. Seattle would likely have had a much smaller outbreak if testing there had been widely available sooner.
• In areas with community transmission, to inform treatment and protection of vulnerable groups, especially when there are outbreaks in hospitals, nursing homes, homeless shelters, and prisons.
• In health care facilities treating severely ill patients, to identify those with Covid-19 in order to improve infection control, know when it is safe to discharge patients, and identify participants in clinical trials. For these reasons, every patient in the United States with severe pneumonia should be tested for SARS-Cov-2 infection.
• For epidemiological investigations, to determine how widespread infection is, facilitate surveillance, and inform situational analysis, projections, and investigations, including into how the virus is spreading and how infectious asymptomatic people are. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s initiative of testing for the virus in all patients with influenza-like illness at outpatient health care providers is essential to help understand where the virus is spreading, to whom, and what the trend will be in the coming weeks and months.

In areas where the virus is spreading, there is little benefit, and some potential harm, to testing individuals with mild or no symptoms. In the process of getting tested, these people will take up the time, protective equipment, and lab materials of health facilities. If they’re not infected when they travel to and get care, they may get infected in the process.

This is less of a concern for parking-lot, drive-through testing in the private sector, but whether people with symptoms are positive or not, they must isolate themselves, especially from medically vulnerable people: The test could be falsely negative, or could become positive the next day. Furthermore, in a community-wide outbreak, there’s no way public health workers will be able to identify and track contacts of all people who test positive.

The larger problem is not the limited value of testing of mildly ill patients. It’s the distraction from what’s most important. Just as the CDC was distracted from its core activities by cruise ships and dealing with repatriating travelers to the United States, the urge to test is distracting much of the US response from the actions that can save the most lives

 

I would hope we don't allow flights here from America until they have zero cases when idiots like this are around.

 

Well yes ... but no.
The data gives the total mortality rate of the disease IF everyone gets tested.
If you test everyone, it changes behaviour, so that data is interesting from an academic viewpoint, but unless we’re going to test everyone it’s purely academic.

 

Arrggghh...Jeez!! I hope Donny-Red is either drunk, A WUM, knackered or just trying to annoy me personally . If not then he is not as bright as he thinks he since he is 'swimming against the tide' of on this one. I thought it must be me but that fear was allayed reading the expert views from the professionals, not to mention other posters on the thread who seem to agree with the viewpoint that isolation takes precedence over testing as the answer

 

Testing means that we isolate people who are asymptomatic that we wouldn’t have isolated without testing. That reduces the contamination. It’s a fairly simple process.

 

Let’s keep it simple. S Korea are bucking the international trend by mass testing.
testing leads to more isolation than is being done successfully anywhere else.

A single village in Italy have done the same thing. But instead of seeing that simple truth, some people are looking for an alternative story in those stats.

Of course isolation is the answer, I’ve been saying that for weeks. But people aren’t isolating well enough voluntarily, and mass testing takes the guesswork out of it. Let’s stop asking people politely not to go to the pub, let’s test em and lock em up.

 

That is in a scenario like we currently have where there is no isolation for the general public. It would have made no difference though in the Italian town mentioned in this thread as everyone was isolating anyway.

As already said it also causes a big problem in that it gives a lot of people false confidence in the fact that they are clear when in reality they could have picked up the virus within minutes of leaving the test station

 

No they haven't done the same thing.

Vo isolated everyone. Everyone was on lockdown. They then did tests just to see what the state of play actually was. It don't make any difference to their isolation policy.

South Korea tested people and then spent millions tracking down exactly where they'd been, who they'd met etc and testing and isolating those too.

Two totally different things.

And yes of course identifying exactly who has it and isolating just those is the best solution but it won't give any better results than simply isolating everyone for a month.

And the take away from the experiment in vo isnt that their testing made any difference because it didn't, it's that the numbers of people dying from coronavirus is much much lower than was believed as they have tested people without symptoms and discovered that many more people have the virus than it was believed making the death rate much lower and also that herd immunity can be achieved much quicker was anticipated as it is actually spreading not far more people far quicker than was realised when looking at incomplete data that was created by testing testing only symptomatic people.

 

What behaviour did it change in an town that was locked down?

 

I think some of the posts and the original thread make interesting reading but I have two points regarding the dangers of extrapolation from such a narrow data set.
1. Other factors may be at play, eg average age, base levels of fitness, medical care access, environmental factors etc
2. Having read the excellent article on the bat lady of Wuhan somebody recently posted, I don't think because a virus acted in a certain way in one scenario we can say it will act in the same way somewhere else. they appear capable of adapting/mutating and can also become less virulent over time. I read that remarkably this is common as a virus is genetically sequenced not to keep killing it's host of choice because it's writing it's own death warrant

 

Let’s make it as simple as we can; because internet fora are fab places for picking up on a throwaway point and running with it, or dragging arguments down rabbit holes.

When it comes to the expected number of deaths in the UK population, the following dependencies are central:
UK testing policy (which creates the baseline numbers from which all data is derived)
UK isolation policy and the public’s adherence to it
UK availability of ICU beds
UKs ability to maintain / increase the number of health workers to deal with patients
Future availability of drugs which may improve outcomes
(There’ll be other variables that I couldn’t possibly guess at)

As all countries are unique re the above (and indeed there’ll be regional variations even within the UK) there’s absolutely no correlation between what happened in one village in Italy and what will happen here.

Like I said it’s of academic interest but is in no way relevant to what the UK ‘death rate’ will be.

 

At the risk of creating a further rabbit hole.

You’re seriously misinterpreting what’s happening here.
I don’t disagree with any ‘experts’ I’ve disagreed with some people who believe they can extrapolate an outcome based on an irrelevant dataset.

when it comes to ‘swimming against the tide’ on this, my day job is ‘data analyst’, therefore I’m comfortable with having a different view of the use of data to the population at large. HTH

 

Well I suppose testing tells us that people have indeed died as a result of Covid19. But beyond that it cant be doing much as we are only testing those hospitalised.

 

Yes (ish)
At the risk of being accused of pedantry...

Our current testing strategy gives us ‘the percentage of positively tested patients who die’.

the frustration of statisticians is that people report ‘statistics’ either ignoring caveats, or completely misrepresenting what the data says. The obvious outcome of which is that the majority of people simply don’t believe in ‘statistics’ at all - ‘there are lies, damned lies and statistics’.

 

The way I see it at the moment the key statistics is how many people are hospitalised with the virus. Of course other statistics matter but that's the key because that's is what is going to determine how many die and more importantly how many deaths that could have been avoided we have.

 

And oddly; that’s what our government appears to be concentrating on.

cue everyone complaining that the ‘official statistics’ aren’t telling us how many people are actually ‘infected’ (when they’re obviously not trying to).