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#clojure-uk
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2021-09-23
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dharrigan06:09:49

Good Morning!

djm06:09:39

šŸ‘‹

Ben Hammond09:09:07

my 5 year old daughter just PCR tested negative for covid-19 still got a hacking cough though 8-/

Ben Hammond09:09:22

what is the false -ve rate on those things

Ben Hammond09:09:35

or just failed to poke the swab in far enough...

thomas09:09:00

poor thing... hopefully she gets better soon šŸ˜·

thomas09:09:01

was it done professionally? ie. not an home test.

Ben Hammond09:09:05

I think its the top lip constantly bathed in snot and/or saliva that distressed her the most

Ben Hammond09:09:23

it was done in a car by my wife at a drive-through testing centre

Ben Hammond09:09:30

so not really professionally, no

Ben Hammond09:09:46

we don't seem to do professional swabbing in the uk

Ben Hammond09:09:57

thats a foreign concept

Ben Hammond09:09:21

my brother is in France, and he says the pharmacist alway does the swabbing

thomas09:09:27

well, I assume if the virus is present you'd find it in all the snot as well.

Ben Hammond09:09:36

yeah I suppose so

Ben Hammond09:09:46

hard to know innit

thomas09:09:16

here in NL you can do simple at home test and if they are positive you are supposed to get a proper test done by someone who knows what they are doing.

djm09:09:41

I read something that said the false positive and negative rates ā€œshouldā€ be less than 5%, whatever that means.

Ben Hammond09:09:47

> someone who knows what they are doing seems to be anathema in the UK

thomas09:09:52

not sure how 'professionally' that is though

thomas09:09:02

well, if she has symptoms that could be attributed to covid I'd say you have waited long enough

djm09:09:32

All four of us had the same symptoms as each other. One tested positive, the rest tested negative. False positive rate is estimated at 0.8-4.3% (I couldnā€™t find anything that specific for false negatives), so I wonder if the positive one was wrong.

thomas09:09:09

that is suspicious indeed

djm09:09:22

Itā€™s possible that itā€™s a coincidence - that we all had a cold, and my son also had covid, with no extra symptoms (he coughed a little, so we got him tested just to be on the safe side), but with 30,000+ cases a day at the time, 1% false positives is >300/day šŸ¤·

Ben Hammond09:09:03

cross contamination is surely an issue when it has been scaled up so far

Ben Hammond09:09:30

over and above laboratory condition uncertainty

dharrigan10:09:17

My 4 year old kid has had that cough too for a while, and apparently a few other of his classmates too have it.

dharrigan10:09:35

I think it's the normal "let's shove all the kids together, start of new school term, cough" type of thing

dharrigan10:09:55

but, natch, given the situation, everyone is on tenderhooks if it is covid or not.

Ben Hammond10:09:54

given the new symptonms for delta, how could you possibly tell

Ben Hammond11:09:25

> If we agree that I definitely had something, then the chance I had Covid given that I had cold symptoms was (1.3/(1.3+6.1))*100, or about 17%. Thatā€™s high: almost exactly the chance of rolling a 1 on a six-sided die, something I doĀ https://unherd.com/2021/07/what-warhammer-taught-me-about-life/. Iā€™d be very nervous about, say, going to the pub with that chance of having the virus.

Yuriy Zaytsev11:09:29

I was making the test for my 7 years old son last week and I would say it is hard to make. I have no idea if I made it correctly. He had bad cough as well.

djm12:09:08

The impression that I got was that if you do it wrong itā€™s supposed to come back with no result, rather than negative.