Code S RO10 to be played partially online due to COVID inf…

On July 10 2022 05:31 swarminfestor wrote:


It might be herO for his first GSL title or Dark again. I put Maru in the third list of contenders.

On July 10 2022 02:49 pzlama333 wrote:
I hear that there are more people were caught by Covid as well, not just Maru, but everyone of NV except creator, also Byun, Lambo, Scarlett, Mana, Heromarine, Kelazhur, PiG, and probably more. Some WTL matches were delayed due to this reason as well. I hope they all have a quick recovery.

On July 09 2022 22:22 tskarzyn wrote:
The never-ending testing regimen is anything but sensible, but I'm glad Maru and DRG can participate.

On July 09 2022 22:22 tskarzyn wrote:
The never-ending testing regimen is anything but sensible, but I'm glad Maru and DRG can participate.

On July 10 2022 15:15 Blargh wrote:

???
I see very little relevance here. Do you think they should just never test, even when they're clearly sick, and then just go and infect everyone? Is this like, out of sight, out of mind? Ignorance is bliss? For all you know, they tested themselves (as most people do now with rapid tests).

But I do think given everything, this is the way to go. I think tournaments should do as much as they can to limit the burden on players due to the whole COVID situation. For pro-gamers, being blocked from the tournaments due to COVID is basically the equivalent of not getting sick leave from your job...

On July 10 2022 23:55 tskarzyn wrote:


Correct, I don't think testing is appropriate unless a lack of testing poses a direct risk to a high-risk population. (e.g. nursing home or hospital)

Anyone Maru exposes at a tournament has had 1.5 years to get vaccinated and bring their risk level down to nearly 0. If they are a recovering chemo patient, 83 years old, or simply a neurotic hypochondriac, why are they exposing themselves to all of the risks a crowded tournament hall brings? Onus is on them to calibrate their lifestyle to their risk tolerance, not on everyone else to self quarantine in perpetuity every time they catch what is essentially a seasonal flu at this point.

P.S. As a PSA, false positive rate on antigen tests is 50%, so don't cancel plans to see grandma unless you confirm with a PCR test. Many people do not know this and self-isolate for no reason.

On July 11 2022 09:48 Blargh wrote:

I'm sorry, but the vaccine isn't that strong any more. In fact, the vast majority of people who are testing positive now are of course vaccinated. I work in a place with mandatory vaccines AND boosting, and roughly 50% of the building has tested positive in the last 3 months. This is ontop of wearing masks and everything too. It's not "nearly 0". This is because the vaccines now only offer roughly 4-6 months of immunity against the current variants. Prior infection offers almost zero protection against BA.5 variant. Along with this, current COVID cases are actually substantially higher than reported, almost as many as our peak omicron wave. The death rate may not be nearly as high as it was, but if the flu were as bad and as contagious as COVID, we'd be doing the same thing for that. Also, please don't go out when you have the flu either.

Just testing when you feel sick is a completely normal and reasonable thing to do. I don't know why you think it isn't. It allows us to continue events like these with minimal investment. If you are sick, you should absolutely test, why would you ever think otherwise? You can't call it a seasonal flu when it's as contagious as measles and also, uh, not seasonal.

And no that "PSA" is absolutely not true. The rapid tests have never had high false positives. It makes very little biological sense for them to. These antigens are quite specific and don't react to anything outside of the virus. The biggest reporting of false positives was due to a bad batch of rapid tests, while the overall false positivity rate being a fraction of a percent (~0.05%). However, the rapid tests do have high false negatives now (due in part to the virus no longer being as abundant in the upper resp tract and the variants decreasing the binding to the antigen). I would recommend all people who would like to test to also include a throat swab in with their nasal swab for the test.

On July 11 2022 15:31 tigera6 wrote:
What I am drawing from this, and just my view, is now KRs players might be less inclined to play in offline events where they have to make long trip and be at risk to get Covid, especially during GSL season. These offline tournament (DH, HSC, TSL) are CLEARLY organized around the non-KR players (EU/NA) schedule so even if they get contracted with Covid, they can still take time off and rest before the DH seasons start. But KR players have more to lose, like not being at 100% health, or even get stuck from coming back to KR, and losing prize money from their current GSL tournament. It might just not be worth it for them to do it if this trend continues.

On July 11 2022 11:24 tskarzyn wrote:


Apologies, 50% false positive was not precise enough. This study estimated a false positive rate of ~47% for antigen tests.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8372488/#:~:text=1 (a and b).,-positive rate was 46.28%.

As to protection from the vaccines waning, adverse effects are minimal and deaths are concentrated in people who are already dying from other causes. And yes, the vaccines do not prevent infection, which is why we all need to accept that everyone is going to get this eventually. Look at the hospitalization numbers. It's elderly folks, the morbidly obese, and hypochondriacs. (Anxiety is the one of the highest predictors of whether someone will be hospitalized from COVID.)

On July 11 2022 19:06 Blargh wrote:

I don't care to argue about it further than this post, but it's important to understand some key concepts here.

First... When you say "false positives are 50%", that's 50% of all that tested positives are actually negative. That is NOT 50% of people who were actually negative tested positive.

Second, if hypothetically, you were testing a population of 1,000,000 people that did NOT have COVID, every positive would be a false positive. So the lower the number of cases, the more false positives (relatively). Fortunately, we have an abundance of cases currently, so this is really not an issue. Note, cases are roughly 10x higher than reported, possibly more due to the lack of PCR testing nowadays.

Next... it's not guaranteed that these are even false positives. There's no perfect way to determine true positivity, so you can never know with certainty whether you were actually positive. PCR, the "gold standard", has some amount of error as well. Since these rates are always measured by (# of positives by rapid test / # of positives by PCR), if the (# of positives by PCR) has error (which it does), then this number will always be always be inaccurate by at least that same level of error. Some of that error comes down to it just being done by a person (human error), while other error comes from biological reasons, such as delays between testing and infection. Then another bit of error comes down to the specific test, as some rapid tests are less precise / worse. Though most of the popular ones now are quite good.

Third... Based on data from Omicron onward, I can tell you that the precision of rapid tests (true positive / true and false positives) is closer to 90%, likely more. The vast vast majority of people who test positive right now by rapid test are in fact positive.

Tl;dr is that rapid testing is good, people should do it if they feel sick, and no, no one should go out in public if they are sick with a highly contagious virus (higher than measles) that has notable long-term health consequences.

Source: I study infectious diseases and work with COVID labs....

On July 12 2022 00:37 JimmiC wrote:

But when people call it the Covid flu it is a fast and easy way to tell that likely the rest of their information is not worth taking seriously.

On July 12 2022 00:37 JimmiC wrote:

But when people call it the Covid flu it is a fast and easy way to tell that likely the rest of their information is not worth taking seriously.

On July 12 2022 18:31 Slydie wrote:


Why is that? Flu viruses all started out like pandemics afaik, and some much worse than Covid-19 (the 1918 pandemic killed up to 100 million people). A lot of people and countries are still very worried about Covid-19 and remembers too well how the first strain when there were no vaccines was indeed much more deadly than any recent flu. However, if someone thinks about it as a flu at this point, I am perfectly fine with it.

If the impact of a positive test is worse than the illness itself, including passing it on, why get tested?

Here is a nice 2005 article about historic pandemics. Curiously, they thought higher mortality among younger people was likely in the future, which was not at all the case for Covid-19.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK22148/