Should People Test More, or Less?

The government is unlikely to support widespread testing since it would reveal a large number of people who have, or had, Covid19, but didn’t get sick. This would undermine the narrative that Covid19 is a very dangerous plague that justifies canceling the education of children, destroying small businesses and closing synagogues (and all religious institutions). When the emperor has no clothes, the last thing he wants is accurate data.

Yes. And those planning to quarantine anyway don’t need to test.

I am genuinely curious: I see many posts with people declaring great insights into public health data, overriding public health experts and potentially contributing to killing people in their own communities and Hillul Hashem. How do you make sure your analysis is correct? Is there any way you can – for your own sake – test your ability to make judgments here? For example, do you have an advanced degree in public health, statistics, biology? This is not a necessary condition, of course. But if not – could you google online, for example, an advanced test in statistics and see if you can pass it?

To start the discussion, here is a multiple choice question:
You go to a street and ask two random people: does the bus N 5 pass on this street. One person said yes, one – no.

What is the probability of bus N 5 passing on this street:
A. 50% B. More than 50% C. less than 50%.

mdd1: People have been dying in vastly greater numbers for millenia (as we reckon time). And they die of a great many things, many of which could be avoided (e.g. if we banned cars, tens of thousands of lives would be saved). Closing down the economy and stripping millions of people of their parnassah and property was not an appropriate response to what is basically a cold (a.k.a. coronavirus) that acts like flu.

Also note the Republicans (or at least Trump) tried to close the border to Chinese travellers but the Democrats screamed loudly and said it was racist. Indeed, Trump is distinguished, much to the objections of the Republican business community, by his opposition to open borders.

Can someone explain to me why they use the percentage of positive tests rather than the percentage of people who are positive?

Se2015 – i agree with you that falsely altering numbers is wrong. I would never give false addresses or advocate for my kids to. There is a problem tho. Just from my first hand knowledge, people who are sick and need to be cleared for work have been solely responsible for 2-5 positives, actually accounting for 1 illness on one person but recorded as 2-5 seperate individuals. Since the health officials are not being careful in thier recording, the numbers are being falsely driven up. If i were to know that we were suffering lockdowns because of it, i might consider helping to drive them back to were they would be more accurate.

Mdd- ignore him. Id never thought him to be a troll but anyone who can deliberate insert “covid is just a cold” into their posts for 6 months may not be worth responding to right now.

Always_Ask_Questions: I really appreciated your post. I find it hysterical that these people who purposely stunt their science education at the fourth grade now come forward and pontificate about a brand new virus that no one knows anything about. What a bunch of funny people. Like how they don’t want to wear masks because they don’t want to look funny but the men walk around in public with white tights and a fur hat in summer with no shame. Funny people.

That said, I would encourage 11219 and all the others to lift these gzeiros which ARE unfairly targeting MY funny people by doing a simple thing: every single person who already had the virus in March/April should go today and get tested. Not a one can be positive. You will dilute the positives and get your percentage to where they claim it needs to be in order for them to leave us alone.

“but I am afraid best predictor would be population activity level, especially inside (schools, bars, shuls), and percentage of people wearing masks ”

Was this also a part of the post graduate level statistics or are you allowing yourself to insert opinions too? You are aware I assume that the numbers that make up the statistics include fudging (florida positives) mistepresentation (no testing on weekends presents alleged spikes on tuesdays) and political manipulation (nobody is allowed to ask if you attended a protest).

The science of numbers does require knowledge not possessed by all our pontificators, but don’t be blinded by the letterheads that submit them.

Se2015- agreed. It’s all very murky.

Sick people definitely should not get tested

@se2015
22 people were hospitalized for covid19 on October 9th in the entire city according to the nyc covid19 data page. 229 people over the last 7 days. Assuming they were all correctly diagnosed and these 229 people were the only ones tested in the five boroughs, do you think they would lockdown 8,336,817 people (nyc population according to wikipedia) because 100 of those tested are positive even though only 0.0027% of the population is hospitalized over the last 7 days with covid?

And morality aside? no! Elaborate! You saying “morality aside” doesn’t automatically make your thoughts about morality as it relates to testing correct.

“And yes — pikuach nefesh (saving lives) overrides jobs!”

I do believe lockdowns and restrictions do have a role in managing the pandemic. However, your comment is short sighted. I spent the summer rotating at an inpatient psychiatric unit in NY. The number of previously stable people (prior to the pandemic) who needed to be admitted because they lost their jobs, life savings, etc was not to be believed. Off the top of my head I can think of close to 10 who attempted suicide and bh failed. This obviously doesnt include the people who never made it to my unit because they were unfortunately successful. Consistently well over 20% of the daily patient were admitted because they couldn’t access their normal out patient psychiatric care, resulting in them relapsing and requiring hospitalization. So while you may be correct that pikuach nefesh overrides jobs, taking away people’s jobs can and does lead to sakanas nifashos.

Rationally Realistic, nobody said that hospitalizations rates are now high in NY — bH, they are not. Cuomo said the measures are meant to prevent things from going bad, because in other countries the second wave also started from small clusters.

bk613. I agree re:psychiatric effects. In fact, I am not sure any of us here is sane :). This underscores that we need to be as rational as we can to sort out lifestyle. So, people who need to work outside and those who need to have children at schools would have priority to move more. Those who have luxury to work from home and teach kids at home – should stay there. Still, many people seem to have psychological need to get to “normal” – whether it is going to a packed bar or davening in a full shul. How do we figure out – who can learn musar and re-direct his efforts from shul packing to teaching his own kids, and who gets a medical OK to go?

Ps of course, it is catch-22: if not going to shul makes you crazy, then you are not obligated to daven until you feel better.

Mdd1 – sorry but that response just shows you are lucky enough not to know anything about the subject. Count your blessings.

DaasYochid – They do not have enough information to produce statistically valuable data and the percentage would likely be a fraction of 1%. “Today, another .012% of NYC residents tested positive for COVID” – would that keep you at home? Because that is, in fact, the percentage of NYC residents who tested positive today. By choosing to use the number of cases, especially without leaving room for the margin of error as they did in past epidemics, they can continue to push a narrative of fear. Fear is the one thing that makes people willingly give up their freedom, which is necessary for them to enact their marxist ideology.

I readily acknowledge that I know nothing about the mental health. However, you must admit that the number of suicides is very small in comparison to the number of Covid victims.
Bk613, all the possibilities that you mention are, to a degree, far-fetched. According to you, people should be allowed to keep their business open and working on Shabbos, because he may not make it financially otherwise, and then … So, working on Shabbos should be mutar because of pikuch nefesh.
Also, Syag and Bk613, according to the Shulchan Aruch we don’t sit shivah for someone who committed suicide, because he is a a big rosha. Any comment? (I know there is a heter to sit if the the public does not know what happened, but me’ikar ha’din — one does not unless the fellow was a real shoteh according to Halochah before he did it).

To answer the question, it depends on what kind of people are currently testing themselves. A New York Post article claims that per capita, white liberal areas in Manhattan test three times as much as white middle class areas in South Brooklyn, and they use anecdotal evidence to show that the Manhattanites are basically being frivolous about their testing while South Brooklynites only test themselves when they’re sick. If this is true about Boro Park and Midwood too, then it would make sense to test more nonsick people in our neighborhoods to reach the same ratio of well people frivolously testing to sick people testing that white liberals have.

If however, there is no deficit of regular well people in our community testing, then encouraging more testing just to artificially lower our rates can potentially be dangerous in many ways. On the other hand, this egregious lockdown on our neighborhoods, which is horrible on every level, makes me want to say that anything should be done to lower our numbers.

There is another concern that people might have, that if we all test, even if the positivity rate goes down, the number of positive people will inevitably go up, and the government/media will decide to drop the current metric and begin using number of positives as a new metric. I personally was nervous about this happening, but I’m beginning to think that De Blasio and Cuomo will have to explain to everyone in two weeks from now how their lockdowns are very successful yada yada yada, and how the positivity rates are down all because of their decisions yada yada yada so they’ll look for any number that’s good news.

DaasYochid – They do not have enough information to produce statistically valuable data

They have the data. And the frum neighborhoods are not necessarily the highest percentage of positive cases yet neighborhoods with higher numbers per 100k didn’t get shut down.

“So is number of infected per 100,000.”

I’m not saying that number isn’t important and you often see tracked in the media. But you’re only reporting results of people actually tested, so it’s less useful in trying to get an idea of how widespread the virus is if the number of tests vary.

Take extreme examples where testing rates are more useful than positives per population:

Area A: 100,000 random tests with 1,000 positives
Area B: 1,000 random tests with 1,000 positives

Or the following:
Day one: 10,000 random tests with 100 positive.
Day two: 5,000 random tests with 50 positive.

In these examples, if you looked only at positive tests per population, you’d get a very distorted view of what’s actually happening.

Decency, they did have rules: social distancing, no gatherings of more than 50 etc. And those were adhered to! Many people were even more machmir on themselves. And yet, their death toll skyrocketed, and was for a long time a couple of times more than in the US. Only because of the bungled US response we only recently overtook them.
Regarding the masks: please spare us the propaganda/fake news from the red-neck websites. They just don’t want to be bothered with rules and the government telling them what to do even if the last one is 100% right.
You can beat the virus by letting it run unchecked and achieving herd immunity, but it will kill many, many people in the process. Do you care about saving people?