AS I get older, I find myself being annoyed—and annoying other people—more often. My wife says I am masungit. The problem is that every day I see less and less critical thinking. In fact, I see less and less thinking.
People like Cardi B and Ed Sheeran will soon be the go-to sources to discuss “String Theory.” “Bro, your Lola makes the best chicken/pork adobo I’ve ever tasted. So, does she still think the Philips Curve is applicable when nominal interest rates are negative?”
There are probably more people today that believe the Earth is flat than 100 years ago. Airplanes flying from Los Angeles to London do not travel due east as on a flat map. They fly the shortest distance over the North Pole because the Earth is round. Mathematicians knew that concept even before the time of Columbus.
American professional basketball star Kyrie Irving said this in 2018. “I do research on both sides. I’m not against anyone that thinks the Earth is round. I’m not against anyone that thinks it’s flat. I don’t know. I really don’t.” I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
The purpose of monitoring the number of Covid-19 cases is to get a foundation for the number of potential cases that are severe enough to require hospitalization. That is to help adjust public policy to avoid a strain on the health-care system. However, the ultimate concern as in all serious medical issues is the mortality rate.
Yet there are those that are still obsessed with case numbers. The first issue, though, is the accuracy of the testing. All medical tests are classified something like this. “There is 100 percent confidence that the tests are 95 percent accurate.” That is a “good” test. But if we test 10 million people in the NCR, that means there will be some combination of false positives and false negatives for 500,000 people.
Further, a test for Covid-19 is not like “Congratulations Ms. Cruz. You are pregnant.” It is not an unqualified yes or no.
The New York Times reports: “Standard tests are diagnosing huge numbers of people who may be carrying relatively insignificant amounts of the virus. The most widely used diagnostic test, a PCR [Polymerase chain reaction] test, provides a simple yes-no answer to the question of whether a patient is infected.”
But yes-no is not good enough. It is the amount of virus or viral load that determines how contagious a person is and what the next treatment step should be. The test uses “amplification cycles” to find the virus and the fewer number of cycles needed, the more virus in the patient. So, positive or negative does not give a complete picture.
Virologists are now saying that no more than 10 percent of positive cases may actually need to isolate and submit to contact tracing. However, any positive case using a lower cycle threshold—indicating less amount of virus—should then be retested a few hours or days later.
Therefore, “What’s needed are coronavirus tests that are fast, cheap and abundant enough to frequently test everyone who needs it. It will catch the most transmissible people, including the super-spreaders. That alone would drive epidemics practically to zero.”
Instead, we are filling out contact tracing forms in every store we enter. Actually, not me. I am staying home until this quarantine madness ends.
E-mail me at mangun@gmail.com. Visit my web site at www.mangunonmarkets.com. Follow me on Twitter @mangunonmarkets. PSE stock-market information and technical analysis tools provided by the COL Financial Group Inc.