Random Sampling For Covid-19

The following is a letter by Val Martin which was published in the Anglo Celt newspaper. My guess is that by the end of October most people will have had the virus which is the natural course of events.  The best approach now is the Focused Protection one as advocated in the Great Barrington Declaration.

 

 We are told there is a test for Covid -19 and we receive daily reports on the media of the number of new cases. We have several behaviour and attitudes survey companies in Ireland which carry out statistical surveys on a wide range of topics, but in particular on how people are likely to vote in elections. They report a possible margin of error (usually less than 3%) and confidence limits showing how confident they are of the accuracy of their results. Red C and MRBI come to mind.

A minimum of 900 people are surveyed, but best results are obtained with 1,050, This gives us the likely voting intentions of the entire population and the method is soundly grounded on quantitative methods and principles of costing surveying tools acknowledged by universities world wide. They are not perfect, but are very good indicators of the feelings of the population. They are also used by marketing companies.

Why does our government not test between 1,050 and 3,150 Irish people selected at random and use the data from the results to extrapolate the likely number of people who would test positive if we all were tested? The results could be 100,000, 500,000, 1 million or (as I suspect) one and a half million are positive. If there are 1 in 3 or 1 in 4 positive, it would require a whole new approach to the present one. The present policy is to keep the virus out, originally it was to flatten the curve. If 25% to 35% of the population have or had the virus and would test positive, only special isolation of vulnerable people will work and those who are not as vulnerable can get back to some kind of normality.

It looks like everyone out and about will get the virus in the next few months and by then the horrific economic, social and health costs may destroy the whole country and plunge us into recession the likes of which we never witnessed before. The reason for not doing this obvious survey could be that there is no test for Covid -19 at all, just for a range of Corona viruses and the test is not reliable for Covid – 19. If there is no reliable test we should be told.

I do not trust our government or our mainstream media to be truthful and I fear the virus will be used to bring in other long term restrictions and take away our constitutional rights.