Obscene isn't it.

It’s a tricky one since they exist to be as profitable as possible it just sits awkwardly with so many smaller businesses going broke.

It all seems plausible to me which is why wearing masks and trying to avoid indoors make sense. I think like many though I am frustrated by the misinformation that is put out daily.

Take a look at the Daily Mail today conflicting articles which imply that things are getting better or worse in my area, how on earth or we supposed to know which is correct.

One more point

This idea that there is some profound conspiracy that is revealed by a handful of individuals turning up and filming testing centres and harassing workers (in what we learn is the 'right kind' of harassment) is off the charts mad. There are testing centers into the triple figures. Do you think it's hard to find a time where some are empty? Fringe 'echo chamber' Twitter accounts are hardly going to say "oh look I found a busy one too, here's a recording of that as well". If you truly believe that these tests aren't actually happening and instead the country is littered with empty testing centres that nobody ever goes to as part of some secret government conspiracy that you've uncovered by following a few bats*** social media accounts then that is concerning.

And as others have said, our experience and numbers are mirrored in countless countries so there is nothing out of the ordinary about the number of tests taking place anyway.

Edited by BlueJay (30 Oct 2020 6.47pm)

Artificial intelligence model detects asymptomatic Covid-19 infections through cellphone-recorded coughs

"The team used the 2,500 Covid-associated recordings, along with 2,500 more recordings that they randomly selected from the collection to balance the dataset. They used 4,000 of these samples to train the AI model. The remaining 1,000 recordings were then fed into the model to see if it could accurately discern coughs from Covid patients versus healthy individuals."

"The model identified 98.5 percent of coughs from people confirmed with Covid-19, and of those, it accurately detected all of the asymptomatic coughs."

"The team is working on incorporating the model into a user-friendly app, which if FDA-approved and adopted on a large scale could potentially be a free, convenient, noninvasive prescreening tool to identify people who are likely to be asymptomatic for Covid-19. A user could log in daily, cough into their phone, and instantly get information on whether they might be infected and therefore should confirm with a formal test." [Link]

A neat use of technology.

A timely reminder of seven day rolling rates of new cases for people to get better feel of the situation in their area: [Link]