Rank: Elder Joined: 10/4/2006 Posts: 13,823 Location: Nairobi
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mpobiz wrote:masukuma wrote:mpobiz wrote:masukuma wrote:Dahatre wrote:Not @Makales, but that Star story is trash... The Standard story is more measured.. Only 2535 blood donor samples were tested for antibodies. The 2.6 million is an extrapolation from those samples. Statisticians will tell you that this method is often useless as it usually has bias (in this case, people who donate blood do not represent the Kenyan population). The article in the standard points this out: Standard excerpt: "The report indicates, however, that the ideal way of estimating exposure to Covid-19 in the Kenyan population would be visiting randomly selected homesteads to collect and then test blood samples, but this has not been practical under current restrictions."
That said, it is almost a certainty that there are more infected Kenyans than the numbers MOH so breathlessly loves to report every evening… .knowing very well that our testing levels are subpar. The reported cases are not useless but as the disease moves on they become less correct as cases sprout all over. On the extrapolation- it’s true... the stats are wrong but they are a fair indicator of what’s wrong. I stopped looking at the number but I concentrate on the hit rate... it’s a good indicator of the active cases around. On the KEMRI report - Consider a situation where 6 people in a county give blood and in there are 3 brothers from same family. If those 3 have antibodies the extrapolation will state that 50% of the county has the disease. Which was indeed just 1 family. Having said that- this is the closest methodical way we have assessed the spread of Covid in the country. Science is corrected by better science so let’s get some other type of estimation. Where do you get the number to determine the hit rate? from the positive samples divided by the total number of samples. when we begun and you guys were talking about some "bad homa" that took place in December, January etc. the "test-positivity rate" was never above 2%... yesterday it was close to 10%, today it was 6%. we don't have such low hit rates as before. this means it's increasing in our midst - I use that to assess where we are in the curve. Peru at 39.00%, Brazil at 36.68%, Qatar at 22.71%, Mexico at 21.07% and Chile at 20.97 are the top 5 countries. Our testing capabilities are too low to get the right hit rate. I hope we could achieve 100k tests daily like what you are seeing in Brazil and other western countries. That's why KEMRI come up with their own estimates. Those estimates might include the time that has already lapsed with this pandemic and the patterns in other countries. I wish I could post photos here. Yesterday i was in a packed club in parklands. Now as I write this I am somewhere in mombasa road and the atmosphere is just great. My friend who lost his smell and taste sences will be joining us shortly. The hit rate is very high.. but people are not getting sick.. I agree with you on the fact that we need to ramp up our testing - I don't even know if the countries doing 100k are doing PCR tests or some other easier tests ( that come with a possibility of a larger margin of error... read here to understand why the margin of error on sensitivity and specificity matters) it's true that the hit rate is high but there is a caveat...it still is based on suspected cases - I don't think they are doing any random testing in the streets anywhere. I want to see what the hit rate will be after cessation of movement has been removed - will the whole country eventually be like Nairobi and Mombasa? what will the implication of that in the villages? (People who work in the fields... lots of Vitamin D). All Mushrooms are edible! Some Mushroom are only edible ONCE!
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