Giraffe
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- Jun 20, 2015
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Depends how effective they are. If they are well implemented, they can reduce the spread, and that can reduce the risk from mutations. Strong public health measures have protected people very effectively in some places.
Have you looked at the rates for e.g. Taiwan? Last I looked, fatalities were 10 (for the whole 23+ million population over the whole pandemic).
I think some countries learned to get serious about preventing infection after SARS-1 and MERS, both of which had much higher IFRs than SARS-COV-2.
Some countries may have massaged their numbers less. I assume that Taiwan did not count victims of motorcycle crashes as covid deaths. They probably did not re-lable endstage cancer and COPD as covid. They used a lower cycle threshold than most countries. They never had a lockdown.
CORONAVIRUS/Japanese student with COVID-19 a 'weak positive,' likely not contagious
Only samples with a CT value under 35 are considered positive in Taiwan, while those over 32 are unlikely to be contagious, Chuang said.
Scared of being ’CoViD-19-positive’
In PCR, a positive result is obtained when a small quantity of nucleic acid is amplified with multiple cycles of chain reaction. The question is how many cycles are considered reasonable for a positive result. The cycle threshold (CT) is the cycle number required for a PCR test to be called positive.
An article from the New York Times on Aug. 29, 2020, indicated that in Massachusetts, Nevada, and New York, 90% of the positive CoViD-19 tests had only a barely detectable amount of nucleic acid.
Some required 40 cycles, while most virologists feel that a threshold of 35 cycles is too sensitive. Likewise, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the U.S. found that there was rarely any live virus when the CT was above 33 cycles.
If the CT were lowered to 30, then in Massachusetts, 85 to 90% of the cases “confirmed” to be positive with a CT of 40 in July 2020 would have to be reclassified as negative.
Therefore, the consensus is that a reasonable CT should be between 30 and 35 cycles because it is not practical to have too many “confirmed” cases that do not transmit the disease.