what choice do they have but to legislate the rules their communities demand?

sorry – this is a cop out.

It is true leadership to give people what they need, and understand that need goes beyond the immediate; not what they (/ a noisy minority) request.

If someone I know, or even know of, doesn’t catch it soon, I am going to start thinking it’s all bullshit.

@bemused

Same where I live – though a number of the contractors have been whinging about being forced to accept the vaccine (a couple of them, very cross indeed).

Doesn’t entirely apply in the one local village that has attracted Greenies retirees/migrants in numbers, but even there, only the usual suspects are an issue.

Sanna Marin: Finland’s PM sorry for clubbing after Covid contact.

A 9 by 10 on the hot/crazy matrix.

However, like most places which attract “greenies”, “tree huggers” and drop-outs…

We have our fair share of those, but they haven’t appeared to be overly vocal for whatever reason.

Omicron is perhaps the ultimate vaccine.
If not, there are the (so far) shunned and excoriated anti-viral drugs.
We are still living in the Age of Stupid.

One of them noticed that our area had a low rate of vaccination on the RMS website & wanted to know who they were!!!

None of his/her effing business!
Typical unsolicited busybodying from a leftist wanting to stick his or her nose into others’ affairs.

I’m willing to give the Finland lady a pass. 🙂

I’m willing to give the Finland lady a pass.

She desperately needs a brain transplant. Other than that I’d agree with you.

I had my vax and the booster in July. I am now supposed to have another booster to be up to date. But I don’t want any more, there is too much info surfacing about serious side effects. No more vaxxing for me. These are the dumbest times in history, but not yet the worst of times.

Jannie says:
December 16, 2021 at 10:23 pm
I had my vax and the booster in July. I am now supposed to have another booster to be up to date. But I don’t want any more, there is too much info surfacing about serious side effects. No more vaxxing for me. These are the dumbest times in history, but not yet the worst of times.

Unfortunately those, like me who have got vaccinated to keep their job are now likely on a ride we can’t get off.

Today I was told I had to show my proof of vaccination to enter SANTOS Stadium in Adelaide to watch my 11yo play. I was livid and after fucking around for 10 minutes I managed to find it to show the smiling NAZI but the vast majority of people were happy as Larry to show their virtue in digital form.

With the useless Scomo now saying it’s “not compulsory to NOT wear a mask” and “not compulsory to go out” in order to appease the frightened ninnies that walk around with masks still on despite it being 35deg as well as vigorously pushing boosters and jabs for 5yo’s, I cannot see a way off.

They’re too invested and have scared too many people that any reversal is political poison.

We’re done.

It’s amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness. Leo Tolstoy.

FMD… has is the State Library!
https://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/node/210541

So the NSW government has a ‘no vax required policy’ for Museums, Art Galleries and Libraries, but the NSW State versions of all of them require vax.

Its another ‘we’re not forcing passports’ at State level.

Fuck them all.

Hmm. Wouldn’t it be amusing if the govt decided only folks with an approved BMI could access services and entertainment!

Why is the virus surging during summer?
The vaccine is the vector.

Dear Sanna,

As my future bride – apologise for nothing.

UK cases are at a record high at 88,000 on Thursday 16, up from 78,000 the day before, compared with the previous record on 8 January.

Testing is up at 1.6 million on 15 December compared with 1.3 million the day before, as shown on this site:

10,000 cases from 1.6 million tests.

0.625 % positive rate.

What do you think the expected false positive rate is from a PCR test?

From the esteemed BMJ.

https://www.bmj.com/content/373/bmj.n1411/rr

The positive rate in the UK is practically that predicted by the expected false positive rate (they’re not the same thing).

Similarly, Baden et al., 2020, found a 0.6% background positive PCR test result in the 30,420 clinical trial participants for the Moderna vaccine, after initial testing. Study participants for this trial were selected based on being at higher risk for exposure to the virus and the testing was conducted from late July to late October 2020.

Common sense would suggest that a test with 99% specificity would return only about 1 in a 100 false positive results. But this is not how it works. The false positive rate is far higher when disease prevalence is as low as the studies just cited have found. In other words: the Positive Predictive Value of screening testing is very low when background prevalence is low (Bokhorst et al. 2012; Skittrall et al. 2020; Dinnes et al. 2021).

Here’s why: If we test 1,000 people randomly in a population where 1% have the illness at issue, and our test is 99% specific to that illness, we will have one true positive and one false positive for each 100 tests. So testing 1,000 people results in 10 true positives and 10 false positives.

Using the BMJ test accuracy calculator (Watson 2020; see link for the calculator in the references; it’s educational to play with the calculator to see how different inputs affect false results)., we calculated various scenarios using real-world background prevalence data and test accuracy data.

First, we conservatively assumed 1% pre-test probability of active infection, which is, based on the data reviewed above, which is a higher level of active infection than was found in the large vaccine clinical trials.
We also assumed 58% sensitivity and 99% specificity, which are the findings of a recent Cochrane meta-analysis combining 64 published studies of antigen test accuracy, when used to test asymptomatics (Dinnes, J. et al. 2021).

The result in this scenario is 50% false positives (1 true positive and 1 false positive)?—?even with a 99% specificity test. There would theoretically be zero false negatives, so the risk of missing actual infections is not at issue.

50% is the same as random chance. In other words, this 99% specificity test can do no better than a coin flip when declaring a positive result. So screening in this scenario is not warranted because data that is no better than a coin flip is not data?—?it’s random chance.

However, the situation is much worse than this because neither PCR nor antigen tests are close to a 99% specificity level in practice, for various reasons (Braunstein et al. 2021). Lee 2020 performed a lab analysis of the CDC PCR test accuracy, which was widely used in the first months of the pandemic, and found it had a 70% specificity (i.e. 30% false positives) and 80% sensitivity (20% false negatives). This is because of faulty designs built in to the test from the beginning, as various news accounts from the Washington Post, NPR and ProPublica have since revealed.

This level of inaccuracy matches the CDC’s own internal report that found 33% false results when its PCR test was released in late February 2020, as reported on by National Public Radio (Temple-Raston 2020).
Intuitively, and in an emergency situation, we may think that a 70-80% accuracy rate is far from perfect but may still be “good enough.” But this is where common sense and intuition gets us – and the public – into trouble. If we input these figures in the BMJ calculator, we obtain a catastrophic 30 out of 31 false positives.

In other words, at a 1% pre-test probably (background prevalence), just one out of 31 positive test results is a true positive. And, again, we have zero false negatives, so the tests are not missing true positives in this scenario.

This problem relates to more than just misidentifying positive COVID-19 cases; it also is relevant to data on hospitalizations and death rates. After testing became widely available, it became standard practice to test all patients admitted to hospitals in the U.S., regardless of symptoms. While this may have been a necessarily cautious step in order to minimize outbreaks in hospitals, it significantly inflated hospitalizations and deaths attributed to COVID-19. A positive test result was the primary basis for defining COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths since no symptoms were required to designate a COVID-19 hospitalization or death as such.

In other words, since the CDC and WHO case definitions took the unprecedented step of defining a “confirmed case” as simply a positive lab test result, and then most jurisdictions also defined a COVID-19 hospitalization and a COVID-19 death in the same manner, if the large majority of positive test results are false positives, it is necessary to re-examine the pandemic surveillance data chain from the beginning.