Dirty Stinking Government HealthcareFollow

he said it in a way that made it sound like the negative cases were actually positive for another subtype/strain.

I didn't look at the data until people harassed him about it. I read it as two different statistics. I assumed he was saying that 4,855/12,943 "positive" flu cases were H1N1 and that the 12,943 "positive flu" cases represented 37.5% of suspected flu cases.

He's talking about the proportion of positive results... ******* obviously.

Assume the flu

you get 3k/5k as totally confirmed. If you assume the trend continues, you'll end up with something very near 5k/5k This is how "all of the cases" of the flu can be swine. This is very simple, okay? The significant part is not that 12k people had flu-like symptoms. The significant part is how much swine flu is getting to people compared to other crap.

The other 7k "cases" which weren't really "cases" at all but merely suspected of being "cases" are entire irrelevant to the prevalence of swine flu in terms of actual infection proportion. The "cases" you are clinging to are cases of tests, not of flu infection. Do you understand? Good. Do you understand why no one would or should care about cases of tests, but instead cases of actual flu? Good.

No, we are talking about all cases tested in the last week that turned out to indeed be the flu.

The 12,XXX whatever figure is "snot taken from people who came in with flu-like symptoms that doctors sent to a lab to get analyzed for the flu."

The "5000 cases" (ok, not quite all, 99.8% though) refers to those snot samples which actually tested positive for the flu, which were almost entirely of the H1N1 A subtype. 7,XXX whatever snot samples didn't test positive for the flu.

Well great, you've rebounded to some deflection of the fact that your reading comprehension and semantic evaluation is worse than my cat's by deferring responsibility to the speaker. Don't recover gracefully from totally and obstinately misinterpreting meaning by crafting a new and relevant argument in light of it; just try to ***** about her elucidation.

Classy.

If you really want to play The Irritating Linguistic Pedant game, then it's a true statement given some meanings of "cases," because the prepositional phrase after the "cases" term is missing. The operational meaning of potentially ambiguous or malleable language is defined by the first person to use the term: Catwho. The onus is on you to ask for clarity if something is unclear to you, and given the fact that everyone else seemed to get the point, it is highly unlikely that the meaning should be totally incomprehensible or fail to be in accordance with the language.

"All of the 5000 confirmed influenza cases that were tested last week tested positive for H1N1" would have been clearer, certainly.

You cannot possibly be this goddamn stupid



1) All of the nearly 5,000 cases (of the flu) tested in the last week have been H1N1.

2) All of the nearly 5,000 cases (of potential flu) tested in the last week have been H1N1.

It is impossible for any sane human being to fail to see ambiguity,the truth of which may work either way, and the notion that you actually have a decent grasp of linguistic meaning in English is dubious. It is only slightly more possible for a sane human being to conceive of choice 2) as actually making the slightest bit of damn sense, because it's quite obvious that there were not 5000 cases of potential flu.

Were you really, truly so blind that you cant take one number and apply it to the only place it matches?



And you were incorrect, because you overstepped the limits of your precious skepticism because of either pride or just plain carelessness, failing in every way to apply the same epistemological standards to arguments that you'd apply to science. That would have been fine if you had the slightest bit of actual drive towards understanding the potential impact of this flu strain instead of . It is retarded of you to try to **** with semantics even after meaning has been clarified, and that was done long ago.

And that's really what pisses me off about that: you got your misinterpreted meaning fixed, the meaning that apparently only you failed to get the first time around, and then have the gall to blame it on someone else.



You are apparently as unqualified to make judgments as you are assertions. It means that of flu cases revealed by the CDC's tests, that h1n1 is nearly ubiquitous in scope, and has affected a ******** of individuals.

5 pages later, and I still don't know whether I should get the H1N1 flu vaccine or not. Bloody liberals

My husband is a college professor for education students, many of whom are doing junk at elementary schools. He's already had 3 students out sick with the flu in the past few weeks. So that's why we got it.

Anyone hear anything more about Deseree Jennings, the Redskins cheerleader hopeful who is claiming the flu shot gave her dystonia? So far all I've seen is an obviously spliced Inside Edition video and some fringe news sites. Dystonia is a nasty neurological disorder, but it's a known side effect of anti-psychotics, not thimerosol.

I vote no. (we are, at least, democratic liberals).

It's not amazing at all. What's amazing is your suggestion that you are immune to bias...I'd call that delusional.

Pointing out someone else's bias is not an implicit suggestion that I am immune to it.

This is a perfect example of the point I was making. Ya'll are so obsessed with trying to prove me wrong about something that you will go through amazing lengths to change the meaning of one of our statements, or just tack on some assumptions, to try to pin me to some untenable position that I've never held. It truly is amazing.

Edited, Oct 27th 2009 12:18pm by soulshaver

Did you have anything to add to the healthcare debate Elinda, or were you just interested in attacking someone by adding baseless insults?

Edited, Oct 27th 2009 12:27pm by soulshaver