We are not sure if you recall this:
The “simple message” delivered by WHO’s director, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, on 16 March 2020 is both the most devastatingly idiotic statement made by any high official (yes, even including Matt Hancock) and a harbinger of things to come then and now.
It is idiotic because you cannot interrupt the chain of transmission of an endemic respiratory virus, you cannot correctly identify those who are infectious (and would need isolation) by misusing a test such as PCR, and most countries do not have the infrastructure or training to carry out uncontaminated sampling.
The statement provided the rationale for wasting billions in the UK and worldwide for “screening”. Besides, here are WHO’s principles of screening (page 7)
So you can exercise yourselves to see how many of the principles could be ticked when Dr Tedros made his statement. We’ll give you a hint. Take point 9. In Lombardy, case finding was abandoned a week before Dr Tedros issued his nonsense as the services were overwhelmed and could not cope.
Fast forward to today, and Nature reports that Chinese scientists “characterized 125 virus species, including 36 that were novel and 39 at potentially high risk of cross-species transmission, including zoonotic spillover. Notably, we identified seven species of coronaviruses, expanding their known host range, and documented the cross-species transmission of a novel canine respiratory coronavirus to raccoon dogs and of bat HKU5-like coronaviruses to mink, present at a high abundance in lung tissues. Three subtypes of influenza A virus—H1N2, H5N6 and H6N2—were detected in the lungs of guinea pig, mink and muskrat, respectively.”
This is heavy stuff, eh? Remember the great Danish mink massacre? So we are besieged by possible killers. Tom has great difficulty taking any of this seriously, as he lived for three years in the then New Territories of Hong Kong, where just about every nasty thing that flies, creeps, crawls, or bites has a home. Apart from a close encounter with a king cobra, he never had any problems.
So what’s the bottom line?
If you test, test, test, you will find, find, find. What you may find, find, find is what is around us, but it does not automatically translate into a menace, as the story of influenza, the killer with single-agent pandemic plans, teaches us. But it keeps us all neurotic and searching for the waters of the fountain of Zum Zum.
Remember Von Moltke’s dictum: the unexpected always happens.
This post was written by two old geezers who are reluctant to be tested, as you never know what you might find.
I'm stuck at point No 2, i.e. that there should be an accepted treatment for patients with recognised disease. Does this mean that, regardless of whichever virus we've been tested +ve for, we all get the same 'take some paracetamol, drink lots of fluid and go to bed'? In which case money on testing was wasted.
Of course, when Big Pharma has developed some new, expensive MAB-drugs 'especially for one virus', for which one needs to be tested, 'test-test-test' makes sense! After all, that's 'scientific' - we don't need no old wives herbal brews any longer, especially since some of them can be made at home, just for the cost of sugar and cooking fuel, harvested from the garden or the road verges.
Just because you can test doesn't mean you should test.