As has been highlighted earlier in several posts on The BFD the Government’s claims on those who are classed as “Recovered” cannot be believed.
First up, we have had more people classified as recovered than we have had listed as infected fourteen days prior. Secondly the definition of “Recovered” has been changed several times and is now a meaningless statistic based on nothing more than appearance. That is that a person has exhibited no symptoms for 72 hours.
The Center for Disease Control in the US defines “Recovered in this way:
The CDC defines recovery from COVID-19 as an absence of fever, with no use of fever-reducing medication, for three full days; improvement in other symptoms, such as coughing and shortness of breath; a period of seven full days since symptoms first appeared. Two negative swab tests on consecutive days are considered as the all-clear – meaning self-isolation can end and a patient can theoretically begin having contact with others, including at work.
Their testing and diagnosis regime seems to be based on science, while our regime seems to be based on hopes and prayers to whatever deity the clinician believes in.
We certainly aren’t doing the two consecutive negative tests stage at all.
There is no definitive explanation on any Government website that I can find and an awful lot of dodging of legitimate questions from people and outright ignoring of the same questions from the likes the Prime Minister’s Chief Science Advisor.
@ChiefSciAdvisor Kia ora, do you know NZ’s definition for a recovered case? And, does this mean they may be come out of quarantine mode and return to lockdown mode? Thanks in advance.
— Rachel Cunliffe (@cre8d) March 31, 2020
And there still has been no answers. Even from celebrity scientist Siouxie Wiles, who seems to have plenty of time to write articles for The Spinoff and do live Q+A sessions at the NZ Herald, but no time to answer a simple question:
It seems that we can’t get an answer from anyone, yet every single day our media accepts without question a “recovered” figure that doesn’t bear any resemblance to actual infection rates for any corresponding time period in the past.
The World Economic Forum article on Covid-19 states:
… another study, following four medical professionals treated at a Wuhan hospital, revealed that traces of the virus could persist in the body for up to two weeks after symptoms had vanished; as the patients were no longer coughing or sneezing, the potential means of transmission were albeit much reduced. Less optimistic was a study published last week in The Lancet medical journal that showed the virus survived in one Chinese patient’s respiratory tract for 37 days – well above the average of 24 days for those with critical disease status.
This is very important but not important enough to actually tell us the truth. So, using our “she’ll be right” definition is likely to lead to increased transmission of the virus rather than reducing transmission, and worse still also likely to lead to even more time in lockdown. This simply is not good enough.
Could it be that our “recovered” rate is nothing but a sick joke, if you will excuse the pun. We need someone to clarify this, otherwise it is highly likely that we are simply sending people home to infect their families and others.
To that end, we contacted Peter Abernethy the media spokesman for the Ministry of Health and asked what the definition of recovered was. His response:
This is something Dr Ashley Bloomfield has talked about in the daily stand up, which [is] someone free for 14 days after being ill.
So, there you have it, from the horse’s mouth. The definition of “recovered” in New Zealand is not based on tests, or even science. It is an arbitrary time that is increasingly being proven as inadequate.
We also asked if there was any subsequent testing in line with the CDC criteria, his response:
No negative test required.
So, we don’t even follow the CDC guidelines and the truth is we are saying people are “recovered” when they may not be.
Around 12% of those infected do not exhibit any symptoms for 14 days:
… new studies indicate that it takes some people much longer to develop symptoms after they’re exposed – spurring some scientists to raise an alarm that 14 days is not enough. Some public health experts are calling for longer quarantine periods, especially for countries such as the United States, where relatively few people are being tested.
…
A team of scientists from five universities in China and Canada released a study in mid-March that found that nearly 1 in 8 patients had incubation times longer than 14 days, leading them to question whether current quarantine recommendations are optimal.
“As the outbreak is fast-moving in the world, based on this analysis we recommended that an extension of adults’ quarantine period to 17 or 21 days could be more effective,” they wrote.
The Governments figures don’t make sense, unless someone got tested after they felt better. But that makes no sense as you wouldn’t meet the criteria. Yesterday the Government declared that 82 people had recovered, yet 14 days ago the official count of cases was 20 cases. It simply does not add up.
It also seems that the Government has elected to use the WHO definition, which is good I suppose, but our recovered figures still don’t make any sense at all. How can people have recovered if they weren’t even counted as being ill in the first place? Nine days ago the case count was 102 cases, so the government is saying that 82 out of 102 have recovered. How likely is that? Ten days ago there were only 66 cases so the Government is telling us that of the 66 cases 82 of them have recovered? This is some bizarre ‘New Math’ experiment, but we are playing with people’s lives.
One, and an almost unbelievable, explanation is we would need to assume that on the day of testing they stopped having symptoms, AND yet they had a fever and cough etc on that day in order to get tested.
The simplest explanation is that they withheld test results for longer than five days from the public. Tests are being done in minutes overseas. The only problem is that those people would know. So something still isn’t adding up.
Occam’s Razor suggests that the “the simplest solution is most likely the right one”. Which unfortunately means that we are being lied to. That all leads us to a point which explains the draconian lock-down we are experiencing. The Government knows the real figures, but are treating us like children because they think that we can’t handle the truth.
This all reminds me of the movie A Few Good Men: