[ExI] extropy-chat Digest, Vol 204, Issue 4

spike at rainier66.com spike at rainier66.com
Thu Sep 3 13:42:59 UTC 2020


> On Behalf Of Stuart LaForge via extropy-chat
Subject: Re: [ExI] extropy-chat Digest, Vol 204, Issue 4


Quoting Henry Rivera:

> On Sep 2, 2020, at 10:12 PM, Stuart LaForge via extropy-chat 
> <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>
>> and only infected 260 new cases
>
>
> Maybe. This population is very hard to track... Bikers are diverse I
recognize, but the portion that 
> wants to avoid government intrusion is probably bigger than other 
> subcultures/groups. Based on my experience with bikers...
> Do people agree or think I?m off base? I am speculating and can?t 
> claim I?ve interacted with a representative sample.

>...Very good points all. I do admit my prognostication was perhaps
overly-optimistic in consideration of how "off the grid" a lot of these guys
are...Stuart LaForge
_______________________________________________


Sure but we are talking about two different things.  I know the case rate is
questionable and subject to error.  But the death rate is not.  The coroner
has kits that are tuned to accept a high false positive but not false
negative.  That makes sense: there is no harm if a corpse is identified as a
false positive when it was actually healthy... eh... when it would have been
healthy had not his enraged bride bashed his skull with a ball bat.  But
there is harm if the kit returns a false negative when special handling is
needed to prevent risk to the coroner.  Result: the test kits the coroners
use are tuned to accept false positives but not to accept false negatives.

Those kits aren't used for living patients because they use tissue you can't
get to without cutting their heads open.  Patients don't like it when
doctors want to cut their heads open.  So we use the cotton swabs and get as
far back in the nose as possible, which is better than nothing.  The kits
used for living patients are more balanced with respect to false positive
and false negative, for good reason: there is harm either way.

There is a consequence to all this: nurses don't trust the results.  They
have kits from all over, they aren't told the source (intentionally (because
it is all part of huge study on source reliability.))  They have seen the
same patient tested at the same time with two kits from different sources
returning opposite results.  My own doctor advised me to stand down for now.
So I have never been tested.

In any case... Our biker experiment isn't about cases, it's about
fatalities, because those are less ambiguous.  

By random chance, never mind covid or enraged biker brides with a blunt
instrument and the eagerness to use it on the cheating bastard, just by
random chance, in any group of half a million people we should be seeing
about one fatality of or with covid per day.  But we are not.

So why are we not?

Also note I disregarded their more advanced age, which would have suggested
about half again higher than one fatality a day, but never mind that for
now.  We should be seeing about one a day.  We are not.  That signal is
missing in action.

So... why are we not?

Virus afraid of big ugly tattooed biker types going for the nearby students
instead?  Vitamin D production from extra sunlight on bare skin?  Virus
somehow getting trapped inside masks?  Indoor ventilating recirculating
infected air?  Public toilet seats?  Motorcycle engine noise somehow breaks
the virus' concentration?

The most plausible explanation I see so far is the sunlight and fresh
outdoor air somehow helps protect proles.

spike  



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