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> All staff members preparing to depart to the station had to undergo a PCR test in Belgium two hours before leaving for South Africa, take a PCR test five days
by pezzana 5y ago
> All staff members preparing to depart to the station had to undergo a PCR test in Belgium two hours before leaving for South Africa, take a PCR test five days after their arrival in Cape Town, where they also had to quarantine for ten days. Another test was required when leaving Cape Town for Antarctica and another PCR test had to be undergone five days after arrival.
This is clear evidence that the current paradigm for dealing with the pandemic is ineffective at best.
- aix1 5y agoWhat are some realistic alternatives?
- pezzana 5y agoOne would be to stop sending groups of people to that station. Whether or not that's "realistic" is another question. It really depends on what's at stake, which is not clear yet. But the point is that governments around the world may face a very similar question in the weeks ahead.
- leishman 5y agoGoing back to normal and stopping the theater.
- makk 5y agoDefine normal.
- bmeski 5y agoNo mandates. No vaccine passbooks or apps. Return jobs to employees lost because of vaccine compliance/rebuild small businesses (If this is somehow possible but the damage is already done). No mask requirements. Covid-19 Vaccines are available and treated in the same way as flu vaccines once FDA approved. Yknow, normal.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ryandrake 5y ago
- trophycase 5y agoThis is one of the worst nitpicks I've ever seen in my life. "Normal" implies removing all virus related mandates and restrictions. It's obvious what gp meant
- TMWNN 5y ago
- akomtu 5y agoIIRC, this is a well known rhetoric technique: flood the opponent with irrelevant facts, so he doesnt have time to refute them all. But that's for in person debates, with finite time to respond.
- XzetaU8 5y agoGish gallop? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop
- TheGigaChad 5y ago
- tomrod 5y agoEveryone wants this. We should do it slowly, but we should do it. In the US, omnicron is going fast. Hopefully, and I say this with week old information in a huge information-differential environment that evolves hourly, omnicron itself is a step towards mitigation.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- qbasic_forever 5y agoMandatory vaccines and boosters, plus testing for antibody titer levels.
- _dain_ 5y ago
- Jabbles 5y ago> ineffective I don't think it's clear evidence of this, but you could definitely say it's not 100% effective. Whether it is useful is not something that you cannot determine from this story alone.
- Gigachad 5y agoThe problem is being 99.9% effective just isn't good enough. One person slips through and it's all over. It isn't realistically possible to keep covid out of areas.
- midasuni 5y agoNew Zealand has done a pretty good job over the last two years. Whether the costs outweigh the benefits is a separate question
- TeeMassive 5y agoThey had 1000 community cases today https://www.health.govt.nz/our-work/diseases-and-conditions/covid-19-novel-coronavirus/covid-19-data-and-statistics/covid-19-current-cases https://www.health.govt.nz/our-work/diseases-and-conditions/...
- throwaway788 5y agoThats over the last 21 days. There was 47 community cases yesterday.
- midasuni 5y agoSince vaccinating they’ve relaxed restrictions
- lostlogin 5y agoAnd poorly behaved DJs aside, it’s going ok. Time will tell if the policies in place will deal with Omicron, though.
- freetinker 5y agoI’m not so sure; respectfully disagree. This only talks about process stricture, not efficacy or process compliance/lapse. Plausible hypothesis, but needs more data.
- csunbird 5y agoHuman error/non-compliance is a thing, to be honest. Although, this can also mean the procedures do not work as well.
- freetinker 5y agoGood point. However, one can’t conclude that with any reasonable certainty from the article.
- KennyBlanken 5y agoYep. Likely self-supervised isolation/quarantine and someone broke the rules. That said, omicron is apparently insanely infectious, so it could have been something as simple as a member of the ground crew being inside the plane for a bit to stock or check something.
- avereveard 5y agoOr some asymptomatic carrier administering a set of the test, or some of the cleaning staff coughing in the room before the tests. That they focused on the person action (quarantines, tests) and not the environment (transfer shuttles, testing rooms, bathrooms and dressing rooms) kids hints the latter as a source. After all, you drop your mask during testing, and I've seen places doing it in a small, unventilated room with no pause between each person.
- yosito 5y agoIf I've learned something about people during the pandemic, it's that the average person is far less intelligent and far less compliant than I previously believed. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to find out this was caused by people not complying with protocols. Or at the very least, not having an understanding of the fact that COVID transmission is aerosol, and that breathing reshared air even for a few seconds is a high risk activity.
- micromacrofoot 5y agoit’s only clear if they can verify 100% compliance
- Someone 5y agoNot even then. If they can verify 100% compliance, we can adjust our estimates about the false negative rate of these tests (which we already know not to be perfect) (And maybe not even that. There could have been an infection between the tests “when leaving Cape Town for Antarctica” and actual departure)
- keyle 5y agoIt only takes one slip...
- jobe_br 5y agoTwo options: quarantine bubble failure or incubation longer than .. 15 days? Both are possible, though the former is more likely. 5 day intervals for incubation seem too short for 100% safety. I believe omicron has some data points of longer incubation already.
- baxtr 5y agoMost probably people not staying in quarantine or still get infected in transit somehow.
- ssl232 5y agoThird option: flawed hypothesis. Swabbing the nose or throat and performing subsequent RT-PCR analysis is not an infallable indicator of whether or not someone is free from the virus SARS-CoV-2 or infected with or likely to become infected with the respiratory disease COVID-19. Before 2020 such tests were typically only used as a part of a diagnosis by a medical professional upon consultation, typically also alongside symptoms. The limitations of testing were well understood before 2020 but somehow that all got lost in the panic. Another point is that there are animal reservoirs for SARS-CoV-2. We've known this since well before the zero-covid debacle, making such a plan was doomed to fail, as it did. It's likely that the virus can live in intestinal tracts of animals, including humans, for long periods without being detected and destroyed by the host's immune system. This makes the use of negative nose/throat swab tests as a guarantee of no subsequent infection a fallacy. The way we deal with COVID is to stop testing asymptomatic people and use the plethora of effective early treatment protocols we've developed since as early as December 2019 to vastly reduce the need for hospital treatment in those that do develop symptoms.
- KennyBlanken 5y agoNose swabs reveal whether you're shedding the particles and thus infectious. It doesn't matter if you're infected if you're not shedding the virus. They are also exceptionally reliable. The home test kit I used had a sub-1% false negative rate.
- 5y ago
- qbasic_forever 5y agoThere's a weak link somewhere--I wonder if it's flight crews in this case. If the pilot and other crew for the leg from South Africa to Antarctica weren't also isolating 10 days and tested at the same time, then there's your infection vector.
- tcoff91 5y agoThere’s also the factor that some people have a longer incubation period. Early on in the pandemic there were reports of some people having 21-27 day incubation periods before testing positive and getting sick. I think it’s less common now with delta and omicron but likely still possible in rare instances.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- decebalus1 5y agoRight. Because something needs to be airtight 100% successful with 100% compliance and 100% enforcement or nothing at all. As with American politics, there is no gray area ever. I completely disagree with your statement. The goals of the current paradigm of dealing with the pandemic is to minimize the strain on various processes from a public health perspective. Anything moving the needle is effective. That's why guidelines are like 'gatherings of 20 people or more'. It's to minimize spread, not completely obliterate it. Comparing this incident with public health directives is disingenuous at best. It's the exact same line of thinking about masks. Oh, masks aren't 100% effective in preventing infection. Therefore, they're useless so nobody should wear them, ever. We've also sent some people to the IIS and they didn't test positive. What does that say about the current paradigm?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- tandymodel100 5y agoI'd say "overkill" over ineffective. I do think that if all of these scientists were dying of the virus it was extremely ineffective, but thankfully they are not.