Re: Another groaning lock down in Scotland
Reply #31 –
Back to business:
Perhaps you've heard of the latest "lockdown" order from California's governor, Gavin Newsom (Gavin the Craven, as I call him...). We're to resume lockdown between the hours of 20pm to 5am...
It's not a problem for me. But there are some establishments, retail and restaurants, that will feel the pinch -- specially with the holiday season ramping up. And its efficacy is questionable, to say the least.
What bothers me more is the recent history of PCR tests, the main technique for determining COVID-19 infection... Dr. Brooke Herndon, an internist at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, could not stop coughing. For two weeks starting in mid-April last year, she coughed, seemingly nonstop, followed by another week when she coughed sporadically, annoying, she said, everyone who worked with her.
Before long, Dr. Kathryn Kirkland, an infectious disease specialist at Dartmouth, had a chilling thought: Could she be seeing the start of a whooping cough epidemic? By late April, other health care workers at the hospital were coughing, and severe, intractable coughing is a whooping cough hallmark. And if it was whooping cough, the epidemic had to be contained immediately because the disease could be deadly to babies in the hospital and could lead to pneumonia in the frail and vulnerable adult patients there.
It was the start of a bizarre episode at the medical center: the story of the epidemic that wasn’t.
(a NYT article, well worth reading)
What I wonder is, how sure are we of actually diagnosing this new virus?