As coronavirus rages around Europe, Slovakia launches a daring mission to test every adult

A little blue form can change the way you live in Slovakia. The COVID-19 certificates are being issued to everyone who participates in an enormous testing program — designed to reach every Slovakian over the age of 10. That's roughly 3.8 million people.

Those who test negative can avoid a lockdown, but those who refuse to be swabbed are required to stay at home.

For economics student Viktor Frühwald, the decision to get tested was an easy one. "I can go wherever I want because I'm safe," he told the ABC.

Staff at shops, bars and restaurants can ask to see patrons' blue certificates before granting them entry.

"It's an experiment for sure," he said. "[But] it's better for everyone to know if they're infected or not."

Another student, Dorota Bartkova, said she hoped the mass testing program would help her country control the virus. "I think it's a good time for us, for our country to do the screening of the population," she said. "I want to do my part.

"And, of course, I want to be involved in normal life, again, to do shopping and go to work and school."

At a testing centre in the town of Zvolen, Maria Zvalova closes her eyes and winces slightly as a swab is inserted into her nose.

Fifteen minutes later, she is given her blue certificate to prove she tested negative. She said she hoped it would provide some extra freedom and peace of mind. "We are grandparents and our family contact is limited," she said. "Now, it's about my health and the health of my partner."

The Slovakian Government hopes to lead the world in mass testing.

Luxembourg previously announced a similar strategy, although its population is just 600,000 people.

Two rounds of testing were held over the last two weekends with 3.6 million people – two thirds of the population – taking part on the first weekend in November and just over 2 million tested last weekend.

Participants are swabbed through their nose and their sample is analysed using an antigen test, which looks for specific proteins on the surface of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Unlike a PCR test, it does not need laboratory analysis.

However, what Slovakia's antigen test gains in speed, it loses in accuracy. "The test can detect maybe half the real infectious people," said Marek Plesko, a doctor swabbing patients in the central city of Banska Bystrica.

"So, if someone receives a negative test he or she cannot be satisfied they are not a virus spreader."

Slovakia recorded just a handful of daily cases over the European summer, but late last month they surged to more than 3,000 a day. In the latest round of rapid testing, 13,509 samples (0.66 per cent) returned a positive result.

Mask are compulsory in public and social interactions are limited to six people.

Dr Plesko said the mass testing program risked undermining the public health guidance if people put too much faith in the accuracy of the tests and assume they've not infected. "They have to be careful and still comply with regulations."

Dorota Bartkova agreed. "Psychologically, it can affect people and they will not accept the rules," she said. "So I think it would it would be good to present [to] people that it's only screening and the sensitivity of this is not 100 per cent."

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-11-11/slovakias-daring-coronavirus-strategy/12867004

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The economics of plague

Boris Johnson’s decision to lock down England again until December 2, is economically and scientifically bizarre. It is based on advice from the faulty mathematicians at Imperial College, who proved to be hopelessly in error when the COVID-19 pandemic first arrived in March. It will damage the British economy, and probably kill more people than it saves. We seem to have completely lost the calm efficiency with which we faced plague outbreaks in 1665.

The Imperial College forecast of COVID-19 mortality in March, prepared by Neil Ferguson, who had a track record of erroneous forecasts, predicted COVID-19 would take 500,000 lives in Britain in 2020 –ten times the actual number – and resulted in a nationwide lockdown. An initial short lockdown was defensible; we did not know either the mortality or the transmittability of the new disease. However, after an achingly slow and partial reopening, another Imperial College forecast of 4,000 deaths per day has caused Boris Johnson to lock the country down again. This will do untold economic damage; it will also cost lives, as necessary medical tests will not be carried out and fragile personalities left in isolation will succumb.

In March, it was defensible to get the forecast wrong; it is not defensible now. At that time, we did not know the mortality rate from Covid-19; the World Health Organization, another bunch of bunglers, was claiming it to be around 4% and implying the case fatality rate (measuring known cases) in the early outbreak was equivalent to the infection fatality rate (measuring all cases). Now we do know the infection mortality rate, at least to a moderate degree of accuracy; it is between 0.4% and 0.6%, depending on what you assume about the medical treatment available to the patient. The very old suffer higher mortality, but in the cold mathematical calculation, they have fewer years of life to lose, and hence their premature death is less important than that of a younger person. (I speak as one of the vulnerable ones, being old, fat and diabetic.)

The central error in both the Imperial College forecast, apart from the mortality rate, is the mathematical curve that an epidemic follows. Contrary to popular delusions in the mass media, its spread is not exponential. Instead, as the Nobel prize winning Professor Michael Levitt of Stanford University School of Medicine explained, epidemics follow a Gompertz curve, a function identified by Benjamin Gompertz (1779-1865), under which the rate of spread falls exponentially with the current size of the infected population. Hence, instead of spiraling out of control and producing 4,000 deaths per day in Britain’s 70 million population, it naturally slows when the infected population is large, reducing the new infections rate and the death rate.

The most unpleasant feature of the epidemic, however, is that, after the spread has slowed and infections have declined for a few weeks, it can speed up again, because the number of people who are then infectious is much lower. This gives rise to the “waves” of infection seen in all countries since COVID-19 first appeared; while each new “wave” can produce more cases than the previous one (because testing is better), its mortality is less – partly because of improved medical knowledge and partly because the population as a whole has acquired a partial immunity to the infection.

“Experts” will always produce forecasts that require you to up-end the economy and devote your entire attention to their nonsense. In epidemiology as in global warming, they should be ignored, or preferably de-funded.

COVID-19 is not especially lethal, nowhere near as lethal as Ebola or even SARS, the Chinese coronavirus that spread earlier this century. However, it is especially infectious; it spreads more rapidly than most other known viruses and is infectious for up to two weeks before symptoms appear (if they ever do; there are many asymptomatic patients). Since it also appears not to bring its victims long-term immunity, it is likely to recur in large waves for the foreseeable future. Eventually, we will discover a vaccine that is fully effective against it, or effective enough to prevent it spreading rapidly through the populace. However, it appears likely that the first vaccines will not have a high level of efficacy, and hence while dampening the worst epidemics will not eliminate the disease from the population – any more than flu vaccines, even if universally administered, would completely eliminate flu from the population.

One problem that has caused Boris Johnson to lock down Britain is the inadequate capacity of the National Health Service. Since 1948, British health care has been run on a Soviet style central planning model, with market forces playing no role (not that U.S. health care is a perfect free market model, far from it). As a result, Britain has only 6.6 intensive care unit beds per 100,000 population, compared to 34.7 ICU beds per 100,000 in the U.S. and 29.2 per 1200,000 in Germany, a well-run hybrid system that has coped well with COVID-19. Naturally, as in all centrally planned economies, this has produced a severe shortage of beds when the healthcare system is put under the strain of a novel virus. The normal NHS approach, of lining all the patients up in a lengthy queue of several months and ignoring those who die before treatment can be received, works poorly in this case; too many patients die for lack of ICU facilities.

The system has had eight months to prepare for a recurrence of Covid-19. For a fraction of the cost of the idiotic economic bailouts that are now being brought again into action, additional temporary ICU facilities could have been prepared, as they were in New York in April under the magnificent leadership of President Trump (who the world is going to miss badly after January 20). In 1665, the British political system knew that flexibility was required, moving the entire seat of government to Oxford when plague struck. Under the socialist dead weight of the NHS, no such flexibility appears to be possible.

While the world has been spared a pandemic of this nature since 1918’s Spanish influenza, it should be prepared for future recurrences. There remain large parts of the world where living conditions are overcrowded and sanitary conditions poor, and in those areas, diseases can always mutate and spread themselves into the general population. One behavioral change that would mitigate this is a drastic reduction in international air travel – COVID 19 spread throughout the world within weeks because of the ubiquity of mindless international travelers, especially among the student population. While domestic quarantines can do little to limit the spread of a disease once it has entered the population, international ones can certainly slow its initial transmission. The fact that Italy, for example, was full of Chinese workers from Wuhan on temporary visas is a pathological side-effect of excessive globalization that we should prevent.

There is a blessed Darwinian rule of thumb relating to naturally-generated pandemics: either their mortality rate is high, or their infection rate is high but not both. If the disease has a high mortality rate, it is unlikely to be especially infectious, or to have a latency period as long as COVID-19, because it would quickly create a local desert and run out of victims. Thus, lockdowns are almost always futile; a disease like COVID-19 can beat them, and the economic and medical damage done by the lockdown is far greater than its benefit.

https://www.tbwns.com/2020/11/09/the-bears-lair-the-economics-of-plague/

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IN BRIEF

The Fight for Georgia: Democrat candidate Raphael Warnock slammed police, honored Jeremiah "God D—n America" Wright (Daily Wire)

Leftists invite voters to exploit the Peach State's weak residency rules to stuff ballot boxes (Tennessee Star)

Pennsylvania received 10,000 mail-in ballots after polls closed on Election Day thanks to court-sanctioned "grace period" (Washington Examiner)

The Pennsylvania lawsuit explained (Power Line) | A user's guide to the PA challenge (Washington Examiner)

In 353 U.S. counties, 1.8 million more voters registered than eligible citizens (Daily Wire)

Trump legal assault exposes election shenanigans — but faces high hurdles (Washington Times)

Biden in September: I will not declare victory until the election is independently certified (Breitbart)

Lincoln Project backstabbers face backlash for urging people to harass Trump's legal team (Sara Carter)

GOP Senate would leave Biden to pursue tax agenda through administrative action (Washington Examiner)

Biden coronavirus adviser wants U.S. to distribute vaccine globally before it's available to all Americans (Fox)

Black Lives Matter pens letter to Biden and Harris: "We want something for our vote" (Daily Wire)

Mitch McConnell unanimously reelected GOP leader — hopefully long term (NY Post)

California voters reject revamp to property tax system (Fox Business) and expanded "rent control" (NR)

Vatican's Theodore McCarrick report says Pope John Paul II knew of misconduct allegations nearly two decades before cardinal's removal (Washington Post)

Authors retract study showing efficacy of mask mandates — as Biden pushes nationwide requirement (FEE) | On the flip side, CDC report says masks protect wearers and everyone else (NBC)

U.S. gets scolded by tone-deaf China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran on human rights at UN (Examiner)

Japanese town deploys "monster wolf" robots to deter wild bears (OAN)

Policy: Trump's greatest achievement: The president has exposed the rot and corruption of our ruling class (American Mind)

Policy: Why a Biden presidency would be a gift to Iran (FrontPage Mag)

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