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Escaping the Echo Chamber

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aninkling
Post subject: Re: Escaping the Echo Chamber
Posted: Fri 10 Apr , 2020 4:13 pm
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Joined: Fri 10 Aug , 2012 4:42 pm
 
Just dropped by with some things to think about since I briefly broke my moratorium on the internet. The mainstream news media seems to all be playing the same tune. And doing their usual trick of focusing narrowly on the biggest, most dramatic stories even when they don’t represent the whole. To me, it looks much more complicated, with lots of things to consider in terms of both current and future harm.



1. From what I’m seeing so far, this coronavirus has a huge range of outcomes.
It’s looking like roughly half of those who test positive might have no symptoms, based on info from other countries or cruise ship outbreaks. But this isn’t certain. They’re testing for the virus’s genetic material, not the virus itself, so everyone who tests positive might not really be infected.

Other people have mild symptoms, or a moderate flu-like illness or, in the worst cases, a very serious disease that seems to go downhill very, very fast even when it’s treated with the standard protocols for viral pneumonia. So this seems to be an unusually nasty virus for certain susceptible people. This is not to say everyone, and not even everyone who’s elderly.

It still looks like the early information holds – most serious cases are in those over 60-65 and deaths are concentrated in the elderly, though the media is clearly trying to spook the young into following orders by emphasizing every healthy person who dies. If anyone has been paying attention during flu season, there are a few serious cases and deaths in young healthy people then too. The media also have a little trick of telling you breathlessly that “most of the cases we’ve had are in people under 50” while omitting the condition of those people (How sick are they?) and not considering what percentage of the total cases in their age group they represent. This is not to say that the death rate is going to be zero in people under 50 (no one said that in the first place) but, statistically speaking, it still looks like the chances of skating through are very good unless they have some other problem like lung disease or cancer. I wouldn’t be surprised if smoking is a factor too.


2. The latest media fuss seems to be to scare people about those who have no symptoms but are infected. What none of them seems to mention is that people who have infectious diseases without symptoms usually put out much less virus than someone who’s sick. It’s also important to remember that dose matters. I don’t know what dose it takes to infect someone with this coronavirus but, on general principles, the lower the exposure, the less likely you are to get sick. So, yeah, they could be spreading it. How much of a problem this is, is anybody’s guess.

The little research on fabric masks says they’re crappy in terms of letting viruses through. Surgical masks - which aren’t great either, but better than fabric - are sort of a toss-up as far as usefulness against respiratory viruses, unless you need to block coughs and sneezes (then they’re valuable.). The CDC didn’t recommend people wear them all the time in the swine flu pandemic for good reason and they didn’t recommend them earlier in this pandemic either. Supposedly the thinking now is that they might block coronaviruses breathed out by asymptomatic people, though I know of no research to support this.

And I’m even wondering if fabric masks could be counterproductive, by putting a nice warm, moist, dark (UV-protected) space in front of an asymptomatic person, where viruses can be concentrated and survive longer. Then the person scratches their nose or pulls down the face mask to talk to someone (I’ve seen mask-wearers do this a lot) and, boom, there’s a nice big dose of virus for someone. I don’t know, but I sure hope someone considered this and they didn’t just decide “Hey, Asia does it. Let’s do it too!”. But I do know there’s this study on fabric masks, the only “real world,” properly controlled study I know of :

BMJ Open. 2015 Apr 22;5(4):e006577. doi: 10.1136/bmjopen-2014-006577.
A cluster randomised trial of cloth masks compared with medical masks in healthcare workers.
MacIntyre CR1, Seale H1, Dung TC2, Hien NT2, Nga PT2, Chughtai AA1, Rahman B1, Dwyer DE3, Wang Q4.
Author information
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to compare the efficacy of cloth masks to medical masks in hospital healthcare workers (HCWs). The null hypothesis is that there is no difference between medical masks and cloth masks.
SETTING: 14 secondary-level/tertiary-level hospitals in Hanoi, Vietnam.
PARTICIPANTS: 1607 hospital HCWs aged ≥18 years working full-time in selected high-risk wards.
INTERVENTION: Hospital wards were randomised to: medical masks, cloth masks or a control group (usual practice, which included mask wearing). Participants used the mask on every shift for 4 consecutive weeks.
MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE: Clinical respiratory illness (CRI), influenza-like illness (ILI) and laboratory-confirmed respiratory virus infection.
RESULTS: The rates of all infection outcomes were highest in the cloth mask arm, with the rate of ILI statistically significantly higher in the cloth mask arm (relative risk (RR)=13.00, 95% CI 1.69 to 100.07) compared with the medical mask arm. Cloth masks also had significantly higher rates of ILI compared with the control arm. An analysis by mask use showed ILI (RR=6.64, 95% CI 1.45 to 28.65) and laboratory-confirmed virus (RR=1.72, 95% CI 1.01 to 2.94) were significantly higher in the cloth masks group compared with the medical masks group. Penetration of cloth masks by particles was almost 97% and medical masks 44%.
CONCLUSIONS: This study is the first RCT of cloth masks, and the results caution against the use of cloth masks. This is an important finding to inform occupational health and safety. Moisture retention, reuse of cloth masks and poor filtration may result in increased risk of infection. Further research is needed to inform the widespread use of cloth masks globally. However, as a precautionary measure, cloth masks should not be recommended for HCWs, particularly in high-risk situations, and guidelines need to be updated.
TRIAL REGISTRATION NUMBER:Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry: ACTRN12610000887077.


I also must admit to a morbid sense of curiosity: what is the average person going to do when, rather than sneezing into their elbow, they sneeze into their mask (what doesn't leak out around the edges or spray through the cloth, of course), let's say if they have allergies? Walk around the store for the rest of the time with snot all over their face and the inside of their mask? Or take off the mask, contaminating their hands and face, wipe their face with a tissue, then put the mask back on? I strongly suspect the latter.


3. The media is really pushing the “hospitals are overwhelmed” scenario. Outside some localized areas like New York, I’m not sure if that’s true. I personally know of at least two hospitals in rural areas, one in the Midwest and one on the East Coast, that are underwhelmed though well-prepared. I also know of a major city hospital in Oregon that has been doing fine in keeping up with the cases. And at one time in late March, I looked for news about hospitals in Washington state, out of curiosity to how they were coping after weeks of spread. All I found was that one hospital near the nursing home was close to capacity and news media were warning other hospitals might be overwhelmed in the future. And California had a couple of hundred deaths, the last time I looked, which sounds far, far from overwhelmed.

It seems that others are starting to wonder too. I saw one news article earlier, because someone posted it, but can’t seem to find it again even if I put in all the keywords. The guy who had surveyed hospitals throughout the country didn’t sound like an idiot – not a partisan Republican or Democrat, Yale degree, wrote for a major newspaper at one point. So I’m also wondering if search engines are actively promoting some views and suppressing others. I'm sure Google is.

EDIT: Sorry, I remembered incorrectly. He's actually looking at whether the actual cases match up with the models and finding that they mostly don't, outside the hotspots like New York.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/ex-nyt ... -narrative

(Yeah, I know it's Fox, but it's interesting and the article/ analysis seems reasonable. Wouldn't surprise me, either. I saw one write-up on 538 of the many models' different predictions for COVID-19 and the enormous variation was amazing. Not surprising to me, though. But politicians adore modelers, because they can give them numbers and a "scientific" justification for doing something. All an infectious disease expert can tell you is what typically happens, while cautioning you that not every outbreak and virus is typical. That doesn't give the politician enough cover in case things go south. )

EDIT: Also, something to consider as far as New York's experiences:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/new-york- ... mo-ignored
Quote:
New York City’s 2018 Flu Was a Near-Death Experience for Its Medical System

“When we asked, ‘How much worse could it have been before you couldn’t handle it?’ it was very clear that there wasn’t much left in the system.”

So New York had ample warning 2 years ago. And now their politicians are howling over something that's partly their own fault. They knew there were issues but they ignored it. And I'm sure I'm not the only person who saw what was on the horizon when the COVID cases started appearing in larger numbers outside China, earlier this year. It was exactly the same pattern of events as swine flu in 2009. Any politician that didn't see it and prepare, especially Cuomo (given this story) was an idiot.


Don’t forget that the entire point of this whole “flatten the curve” exercise is just to stretch things out and delay some cases so everyone who needs advanced care can get it. It’s pretty likely that one-size-fits-all for an entire state or an entire large country is not the most effective way to do this.

The virus itself will still be out there waiting when people emerge. And sooner or later, most of us will have to, or we'll end up with massive economic destruction to real people. A vaccine is unlikely to come before that happens.



4. Some people are praising countries like Singapore or Hong Kong for managing to suppress the virus, and suggesting we can all do the same things they did. But islands can sometimes keep diseases out with constant vigilance when no one else can. (Mostly animal diseases, since it’s easier to control animals than people. It takes money and resources for lots of testing, too.) And, as long as the virus exists in the world, these countries are at constant risk unless they either get natural immunity in enough people to slow down virus spread and/or get a decent vaccine. And this strategy simply won’t work in most of the world where you have land borders and constant travel.

Even in South Korea, I’m wondering what’s happening in the remote rural areas where there’s a lot of illicit cross-border trading with China. I know that some areas are so remote and poor that vaccines to control animal disease outbreaks have to be brought into these areas by motorcycle courier. Are they doing the same thing for COVID-19 as the big cities? I wonder.


4. People on the internet are throwing out figures for “herd immunity,” saying things like “oh, but we need X percent of the population immune to stop the virus.” But it probably isn’t realistic to think of stopping the virus, just getting enough immune people to slow it down. In other words, the “we need this much” figures from bloggers are probably meaningless.

What we could really use is a picture of how many people have already been exposed in outbreak areas (by doing a survey for antibodies to the virus), but no one seems to be in any hurry to do this. Instead, it's all silly stuff like proposing that everyone get an antibody test before they are allowed to go out in public (yeah, like that'll be practical and cost-effective, taking blood samples from the entire population, again and again, until they test positive).

And some people on social media seem to think that the 1918 H1N1 virus or the 2009 H1N1 virus disappeared after the pandemics. They didn’t. All the new flu viruses kept circulating in people for many years. And they still caused the same effects as when we first met them; there were just a lot fewer people getting infected at any one time. Another thing that happens with established viruses is that people usually get them for the first time when they’re young and healthy and nothing much happens. This helps protect them later in life when they meet the same virus again. I won’t be at all surprised if that eventually happens with this particular coronavirus.


5. As far as the economic effects on businesses, here are two stories. It’s quite possible that we’re creating a bigger crisis in the future by demanding that our politicians protect us with the “nuclear option” now.

The first is the prettied up, hopeful version from a major news organization, about what's happening to small, specialized farms and agriculture right now. Here, I'm already seeing some local small businesses throw in the towel in spite of the 2 trillion dollar (so far) bailout / addition to our national debt. Those closures will affect real people. And if there are too many of them, the effects might be catastrophic.

Note they mention in passing that the US has stopped processing worker visas for immigrant labor during the pandemic. This means agriculture will soon be facing a big problem. I’ve also seen where some slaughterhouses had to shut down if a single person gets infected. And I don’t know what state the supply chains are for food in packages, but some businesspeople have been complaining that governors shut everything down without thinking about the interconnectedness of supply chains.

https://www.baltimoresun.com/coronaviru ... story.html


The second is a personal view from a small business owner in Canada who's concerned about the effects of both the virus and the loss of work on her family and employees, and what they're trying to do. It's very much worth reading, especially for those of us who don't have to wrestle with their issues.

https://quillette.com/2020/04/02/i-run- ... -my-world/


I’d also suggest looking up the news from southern Italy, where they’ve had to send the army down because some people are out of work, have run out of money, and are demanding that grocery stores give them food.



And, lastly, an editorial with some interesting questions. Personally, I don’t think enough people are asking them:
https://thehill.com/opinion/civil-right ... g-covid-19
Quote:
The first area of expertise is the epidemiology of COVID-19. It entails questions of the virus’s contagiousness and deadliness. There are questions on which there are very significant disagreements (with important policy implications) and, importantly, very poor data.
A second question is whether cost-benefit analyses favor the draconian measure of coercively shutting down all of civil society, one that is fundamentally unanswerable. This question is unanswerable because we cannot know how much the forcible suppression of civil society will cost and we won't know the benefits.
Quote:
Politics is plagued by a do-something bias, which drives elected officials and bureaucrats to act hastily, scrambling to enact some policy even when faced with a complete lack of evidence about that policy’s long term effects.
Economist Robert Higgs has presented the theory of a “ratchet effect” to explain the growth in the power and scope of government during times of crisis. Higgs shows that crisis situations afford the state the opportunity to stretch its power into areas of life that were before beyond its reach.
The lesson from his work is clear. These layers of government power do not go away when the crisis subsides, but rather remain, becoming the new normal.

And Google is tracking cell phones and giving (selling?) the information to governments. They claim there is no personal information and paint this as a good thing, so governments can see where people are disobeying orders and congregating. I find it disturbing.
Maybe those people I used to think were tin-foil-hat levels of paranoid for putting their cell phones in Faraday pouches were not so crazy after all....





One thing I can say, it’s been interesting watching what people will do out of fear –cheer on draconian measures, turn in their neighbors to the authorities (even sometimes when they’re just technically breaking rules, like walking on a deserted beach or going for a hike in the wilderness), physically attack a little group of congregating teenagers, etc. Anyone who condemns the Germans in the 1930s and thinks Americans would have resisted Hitler should took a good hard look at how most people act when they get scared.

We’re really not that far mentally from the cave and the tribe, when it comes down to it. Only now we’re all compartmentalized in our states and countries, yelling “go away, you might infect me!” to outsiders and grabbing scarce resources from each other in any way possible. Both governments grabbing medical supplies and individuals grabbing food. And sometimes getting upset and angry at anyone who doesn’t follow the herd.

Truthfully, I've lost a lot of respect for certain liberal posters (on a political messageboard) whose political opinions I generally agreed with before. Out of their own personal fear of the unknown, they're cheering on authoritarianism with amazing zeal, and even complaining that Trump isn't as authoritarian as they'd like.* Surprisingly, it's many of the conservatives who've kept their heads and can look at the whole picture analytically and rationally, instead of succumbing to emotional arguments.

In all fairness, I've seen this epidemic bring out the best in some people, too. But how fear negatively affects people and makes them afraid to differ publicly with "the herd," even when they do have private misgivings and doubts, is what has really struck me.


*Trump is actually surprising me with his restraint during the pandemic, given his emergency powers. He's still an ass and a conman and responds to the things he sees on Fox news without thinking things through or consulting experts. And, behind the scenes, he's still systematically firing anyone who might oppose his aims or expose his corruption. But he doesn't seem especially eager to play dictator right now. The state governors and mayors seem far worse. Like Cuomo confiscating ventilators from rural hospitals to give to New York City, or the governor of Maryland putting a $5000 fine and/or jail time on violations of his "stay at home" order, or the mayor of Los Angeles forcing everyone to wear fabric masks in public. And several governors shutting down every single public greenspace where people could get some fresh air and exercise ... Or, for that matter, Quebec and Nova Scotia preventing people from crossing their borders.






Some points in addition to those I've already made. This was written by a physician, signed by 4 other physicians:
https://medium.com/@jbgeach/eight-reaso ... bb0bc94f00
Quote:
Eight Reasons to End the Lockdowns As Soon as Possible
Quote:
... Lockdowns also slow the development of herd immunity, which helps a society move past the virus.

... By the time the lockdowns began, COVID-19 had already been seeded in the US for months, limiting the effectiveness of the lockdowns in the first place as the virus was already widespread.
Quote:
We have not saturated the health care system...
Quote:
... What we really need to know is the infection mortality rate (IFR). Fortunately we have some good clues. Looking at the data from the Diamond Princess cruise ship, the infection fatality rate on the cruise ship was 1%. However, the average age of people on the cruise ship was much higher than the age of the average American. When you adjust for the differences in age between the cruise ship and America, you see that the IFR should be about 0.1%. There was a recent study out of Germany in the city of Gangelt where they tested 80% of the population, the IFR there was about 0.37%. .... Antibody testing is needed to know the true number of people who have been infected. There is a good chance this number is well above 10 million, which drives the IFR down even further.
Quote:
....[meanwhile] countless patients are not receiving the care they need in a timely manner. In medicine, timing is of the essence, so even receiving the same exact in the future comes at a price. Many important services are being delayed: blood donations, organ donations, screening colonoscopies, and many other elective procedures. It is very important to note that elective medical care is not useless medical care; rather, it’s simply meaningful and necessary medical care that is scheduled in advance and not performed on an emergency basis....
Quote:
Those who want to continue the lockdown indefinitely should show clear evidence regarding the benefits of indefinite lockdown. There needs to be a clear reliable model that shows how many additional lives will be saved considering we have already flattened the curve and there is essentially no further risk of overwhelming the health care system. The previous models were wrong. The consequences of indefinite lockdown are quite staggering, to the tune of one million jobs lost per day.
And even they are afraid to openly say that lockdowns (in other words, copying authoritarian China's method of dealing with a disease, which is something I never thought I'd see in the western world) might not have been the right thing to do. They (or the editors of Medium) felt the need to add a disclaimer, even though one of their statements, quoted above, suggests that the lockdowns might not have done much good.

Frankly, no one is ever going to admit it now, especially not the politicians, though it's quite possible it's the truth. The models assumed either all or nothing. It' could be that a plethora of lesser commonsense measures like banning large indoor crowds and too large outdoor gatherings, mandating that openly sick people stay home, encouraging telecommuting as much as practical, figuring out ways to isolate nursing homes, etc. would have done as much good without putting millions of people out of work. And possibly putting them on the road to becoming homeless once this all ends. Many people in the US don't have savings and some continued to live beyond their means after things recovered from 2008. The U.S. economy seems like a fragile one to me, built on people constantly spending money. It doesn't seem like it would take much to knock it to pieces.

_________________

Society can and does execute its own mandates, and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. ― John Stuart Mill


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aninkling
Post subject: Re: Escaping the Echo Chamber
Posted: Wed 15 Apr , 2020 2:33 pm
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I've been quietly scratching my head for some time over the advice coming from WHO in this pandemic. The WHO's director Tedros Adhanom kept saying bizarre stuff like "the US is now the epicenter of the pandemic" and insisting that every country must do more to contain COVID-19 immediately. This was long past the point where it was clear this virus is spreading extensively and "containment" was simply not feasible, with this type of virus and its transmission, plus the preponderance of mild and asymptomatic infections.

First, Italy was supposed to "do more," then Europe, then the U.S., as if that was going to somehow contain the virus. It always struck me as magical thinking, pretending that lockdowns could do anything beyond slow virus spread to make sure hospitals in densely population regions didn't get overwhelmed with too many people at once. (Or maybe delay things until cases diminish with warmer weather and people getting out and about more - if that's going to happen with this virus - though there's an obvious irony here when the authorities tighten the restrictions even more as the weather warms and people try to seek out parks and outdoor spaces)

The epicenter stuff is also head-scratching. Of course we have more cases, in total - we also have more people. In terms of cases/ population, it doesn't look that different from anywhere else (possibly excluding New York, though that's not certain - and things like Cuomo starting to send back ventilators suggests things did not become as overwhelmed as the predictions suggested). And even if the virus was spreading in the U.S., it was everywhere else too - it's not as if the US was going to now seed outbreaks in other countries that had eradicated the virus.


Now it's becoming clearer - it's starting to look like China is pulling the puppet strings on WHO's director. Tedros, incidentally, is the first head of WHO who's not a physician and has done some head-scratching and/or corrupt things in the past. (For one, he was going to appoint Robert Mugabe (!) as a goodwill ambassador until the outcry forced him to back down. He's also been accused of hiding three cholera outbreaks in Ethiopia as health minister.) To be blunt, I also wonder how much experience Tedros has with healthcare systems outside Ethiopia, which is an impoverished country with abysmal healthcare and weak research/ testing capabilities. He may have been a good choice for dealing with persistent healthcare issues in Africa, but this is different.


Anyway, China backed Tedros's election over the candidate from the U.K. and it looks like Tedros might be repaying the favor. At one time, I thought it equally plausible that Tedros was just playing nice with China so they would be more transparent. But this article suggests it's more than that - the WHO accepted too much information uncritically from China.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/04/02/ch ... oft-power/
Quote:
How WHO Became China’s Coronavirus Accomplice
Beijing is pushing to become a public health superpower—and quickly found a willing international partner.
Quote:
While the novel coronavirus is changing the world, China is trying to do the same. Already a serious strategic rival of the United States with considerable international clout, it’s now moving into a new field—health.

After initial denials and cover-ups, China successfully contained the COVID-19 outbreak—but not before it had exported many cases to the rest of the world. Today, despite the falsehoods it initially passed on, which played a critical role in delaying global response, it’s trying to leverage its reputed success story into a stronger position on international health bodies.

Most critically, Beijing succeeded from the start in steering the World Health Organization (WHO), which both receives funding from China and is dependent on the regime of the Communist Party on many levels. Its international experts didn’t get access to the country until Director-General Tedros Adhanom visited President Xi Jinping at the end of January. Before then, WHO was uncritically repeating information from the Chinese authorities, ignoring warnings from Taiwanese doctors—unrepresented in WHO, which is a United Nations body—and reluctant to declare a “public health emergency of international concern,” denying after a meeting Jan. 22 that there was any need to do so....
Quote:
WHO was keen to broadcast Beijing’s message. “In the face of a previously unknown virus, China has rolled out perhaps the most ambitious, agile and aggressive disease containment effort in history,” WHO experts said in their February report on the mission to China. The country had gained “invaluable time for the response” in an “all-of-government and all-of society approach” that has averted or delayed hundreds of thousands of cases, protecting the global community and “creating a stronger first line of defense against international spread.”

China’s “uncompromising and rigorous use of non-pharmaceutical measures” provides vital lessons for the global response, the WHO report said. Beijing’s strategy “demonstrated that containment can be adapted and successfully operationalized in a wide range of settings.” However, while recommending China’s epidemic control policy to the world, WHO neglected the negative externalities—from economic damage to the failure to treat many non-coronavirus patients, psychological woes, and human rights costs.
Quote:
...based on numbers from the South China province of Guangdong, WHO argued that undetected cases are rare. However, a screening program for COVID-19 only included patients seen at fever clinics; most of them probably showed at least a fever. In Germany, most of the people who tested positive did not show a fever. It is easily possible that there has been a substantial number of undetected cases, Neher said, which is the “big unknown” in calculations of the death rate.

WHO also left many questions open about how exactly public engagement was managed in its report. ...

In China, no measures have been implemented that could not also be used elsewhere, Aylward claimed in an interview. Apparently, the WHO mission didn’t have the chance to speak with people with opposing views. Many Chinese people told him that they all have been attacked together and need to react in a united fashion, Aylward said.

The very uniformity of this narrative should have been a wake-up call, said Mareike Ohlberg from the Berlin-based Mercator Institute for China Studies. Indeed, the whole trip of both foreign and national experts seems to have been organized along Potemkin-esque lines for a team where most of its international members lacked linguistic skills and familiarity with China....

Also, from a German source
https://www.dw.com/en/how-chinese-propa ... a-52796337
Quote:
How Chinese propaganda is reframing the coronavirus narrative

As new cases of COVID-19 drop in China, experts say Beijing has started to use different propaganda tools to improve its international image and portray its authoritarian system as better equipped to handle a crisis.
Quote:
..."The CCP is also using the 'beating the virus' narrative as an opportunity to polish China's global image as a responsible power that is capable of withstanding the toughest of disasters, as well as using these experiences to help other countries fight the coronavirus," Repnikova told DW.

....Repnikova said that China has taken harsh criticism from western media and politicians about how it handled the coronavirus outbreak in the early stages.

Now Beijing is seizing the opportunity to reshape that narrative by declaring victory in the battle against the pandemic.

"This is a timely opportunity for the CCP to turn the narrative of a troublemaker into the narrative of a global leader that's fighting against a pandemic," said Repnikova.

"I think China's efforts have in part paid off, as international organizations like the WHO have praised China's response, and much of the Western media's narrative has shifted from criticizing China to describing it as a lesson or an example."...


Call me suspicious, but China half-destroyed its economy before deciding it had succeeded in containing the coronavirus and suddenly and magically had no more cases (color me very, very skeptical). I think they'll be very happy if the rest of the world damages itself by following its model of "containment."



At the moment, there seems to be a huge outcry in much of the media over Trump pausing WHO's funding The liberal narrative claims that he's looking for a scapegoat. Perhaps he is, but some of us can walk and chew gum at the same time, and WHO/ Tedros isn't looking particularly good to me either.





https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/ ... t-of-hand/
Quote:
Coronavirus Authoritarianism Is Getting Out of Hand
Quote:
...Under what imperious conception of governance does Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer believe it is within her power to unilaterally ban garden stores from selling fruit or vegetable plants and seeds? What business is it of Vermont or Howard County, Ind., to dictate that Walmart, Costco, or Target stop selling “non-essential” items, such as electronics or clothing? Vermont has 628 cases of coronavirus as of this writing. Is that the magic number authorizing the governor to ban people from buying seeds for their gardens?

Maybe a family needs new pajamas for their young kids because they’re stuck a new town. Or maybe mom needs a remote hard drive to help her work remotely. Or maybe dad just likes apples. Whatever the case, it’s absolutely none of your mayor’s business.

It makes sense for places like Washington, D.C., Virginia, and Maryland to ban large, avoidable gatherings. But it is an astonishing abuse of power to issue stay-at-home orders, enforced by criminal law, empowering police to harass and fine individuals for nothing more than taking a walk.

The criminalization of movement ends with ten Philly cops dragging a passenger off a bus for not wearing a face mask. It ends with local Brighton, Colo., cops handcuffing a father in front of his family for playing T-ball with his daughter in an empty park. It ends with three Massachusetts men being arrested, and facing the possibility of 90 days in jail, for crossing state lines and golfing — a sport built for social distancing — in Rhode Island....

Two days before Easter, Louisville, Ky., mayor Greg Fischer attempted to unilaterally ban drive-in church services for the most holy day in Christianity. It’s one thing if people are purposely and openly undermining public health. The constitutional right to assemble peacefully and protest or practice your religion, however, is not inoperable in presence of a viral pandemic....
I thought the Louisville incident was egregious myself. They were sitting in a church parking lot, each family in its own car with the windows rolled up, listening to their preacher broadcasting the sermon on AM radio from inside the church. Strikes me as a novel and rather creative way to gather for an important service without endangering anyone's health.

And the mayor called in the police to charge each participant and fine them $500.

Meanwhile, anyone caught not wearing a mask while shopping in some states, including California and Maryland, is now a criminal. I haven't seen California's order but, in Maryland, the order says it's punishable by $5000 or up to a year in jail.
Quote:
ORDER OF THE GOVERNOR OF THE STATE OF MARYLAND
NUMBER 20-04-15-01
REQUIRING USE OF FACE COVERINGS UNDER CERTAIN CIRCUMSTANCES AND
REQUIRING IMPLEMENTATION OF CERTAIN PHYSICAL DISTANCING MEASURES ...


NOW, THEREFORE, I, LAWRENCE J. HOGAN, JR., GOVERNOR OF THE STATE OF
MARYLAND, BY VIRTUE OF THE AUTHORITY VESTED IN ME BY THE
CONSTITUTION AND LAWS OF MARYLAND, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED
TO TITLE 14 OF THE PUBLIC SAFETY ARTICLE, AND IN AN EFFORT TO
CONTROL AND PREVENT THE SPREAD OF COVID-19 WITHIN THE STATE, DO
HEREBY ORDER:

a. Effective as of 7:00 a.m. on April 18, 2020:
i. all riders and operators on any Public Transportation are required to wear
Face Coverings (excluding any operator in a separate compartment that is
off-limits to riders);
ii. all customers over the age of nine are required to wear Face Coverings
while inside the enclosed area of any Retail Establishment or Foodservice
Establishment;
iii. adult customers accompanying children age two through nine shall use
reasonable efforts to cause those children to wear Face Coverings while
inside the enclosed area of any Retail Establishment or Foodservice
Establishment;
iv. all Retail Establishments shall require staff to wear, and those staff shall
wear, Face Coverings while working in areas open to the general public
and areas in which interactions with other staff are likely; and
v. all Foodservice Establishments shall require staff who interact with
customers (including, without limitation, delivery personnel) to wear, and
those staff shall wear, Face Coverings while working.
b. Single-use Face Coverings shall be properly discarded in trash receptacles. It is
recommended that all reusable Face Coverings be cleaned frequently (at least
once per day).
c. Wearing a Medical-Grade Mask satisfies any requirement in paragraph II.a to
wear a Face Covering, but all Marylanders are urged to reserve Medical-Grade
Masks for use by health care workers and first responders.


....b. A person who knowingly and willfully violates this Order is guilty of a
misdemeanor and on conviction is subject to imprisonment not exceeding one
year or a fine not exceeding $5,000 or both.
c. This Order remains effective until after termination of the state of emergency and
the proclamation of the catastrophic health emergency has been rescinded, or until
rescinded, superseded, amended, or revised by additional orders. ...


And while arresting and/or charging these "dangerous" criminals for defying orders of uncertain effectiveness from the authorities, many states have actually released convicted criminals from prison so they won't get infected, or told the police not to prosecute certain crimes....


I'm also seeing people proposing cell phone apps to track people and their contacts, under the justification of preventing disease. Is this really the wonderful communist China system these people want to emulate?
https://thediplomat.com/2020/03/china-f ... d-tyranny/
Quote:
China: Fighting COVID-19 With Automated Tyranny

The government response to the virus hinged on invasive new surveillance methods, like the Health Code app.
Quote:
“I thought the days when humans are ruled by machines and algorithms won’t happen for at least another 50 years. [But] this coronavirus epidemic has suddenly brought it on early,” a blogger on the popular Chinese forum Zhihu wrote. The blogger was complaining about Health Code, an app that local authorities around China rely on to make decisions about quarantining individuals amid the COVID-19 outbreak....

How does Health Code work? People first fill in their personal information, including their ID number, where they live, whether they have been with people carrying the virus, and their symptoms. The app then churns out one of three colors: green means they can go anywhere, yellow and red mean seven and 14 days of quarantine, respectively. The app also surreptitiously collects – and shares with the police – people’s location data.

The app’s color determination has a wide-ranging impact on the lives of its 700 million users, as local authorities throughout China require people to show their app when they hail a ride, go to supermarkets, or enter and exit residential areas and the subway. Their ability to move around, earn a living, and even obtain necessities and medical care are dependent on the app’s tri-color code. The access control systems of some residential areas even use facial recognition technology, allowing only those with green code to enter, indicating that these systems are linked....




btw, Sweden has a very solid and sensible health page on COVID-19, treating this coronavirus in a very reasonable way instead of pretending it's something from the distant moons of Jupiter that will bear no resemblance to other viruses that affect people (For instance, whenever someone tries to tell me that research suggests people don't develop immunity to this novel coronavirus (OMG!), I have to work very hard not to roll my eyes. Really, if the human immune system was that bad, we'd be extinct as a species by now. Or the many other exaggerated claims for this virus.).
I think it's actually better than what the CDC puts out. It's here, in English.
https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/the ... /covid-19/

_________________

Society can and does execute its own mandates, and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. ― John Stuart Mill


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aninkling
Post subject: Re: Escaping the Echo Chamber
Posted: Thu 16 Apr , 2020 8:07 pm
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OK, here we go at last. It looks like many of us may have already been exposed to this virus. This suggests the worst case scenarios of the modelers are very unlikely and also that the fatality rates are much lower than previous reports. It would also be a plausible explanation for some of the odd incidents where one person is infected, with or without symptoms, and their spouse or family never gets infected even after close contact .


https://www.dailywire.com/news/early-an ... eport-says
Quote:
At a hospital in Chicago, a non-randomized sample found that 30-50% of patients tested for COVID-19 have antibodies in their system, suggesting they already had the virus and have potential immunity.

“A phlebotomist working at Roseland Community Hospital said Thursday that 30% to 50% of patients tested for the coronavirus have antibodies while only around 10% to 20% of those tested have the active virus,” Chicago City Wire reported Thursday....

This is a non-randomized sample done at a testing center, so it's already selecting for the sick and the worried, not the healthy and young and asymptomatic.

The Daily Wire has a right bias but I don't see that this matters much here. Certainly their reporting in this story was much straighter and more factual than CNN has been. The other day, I actually saw CNN forecasting doom and dire despair from the findings that so many infected people are asymptomatic in Iceland. CNN's take was that most of these people were inevitably going to fall ill during the next few weeks and in the meantime they were going to be running around as plague carriers and infect everyone. That was an amazing spin of what's good news into something to spread fear. I swear, they're getting as bad as MSNBC and Fox.



Will this stop the politicians, the modelers and the media from dire forecasts and increasing clamp-downs? Call me doubtful. This was published on April 11, at least 5 days before the governors of New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, etc. started publishing their mask mandates. One state - I think it's Massachusetts - is already spending billions on training people to trace contacts of any cases after they release their citizens from lockdown. Meanwhile, many of these states have their hands out to the federal government, asking for bailout funds because they've trashed their state economies by closing businesses down and putting so many people out of work.


Also, a couple of Democrats in Congress have proposed a bill that would give everyone $2000/month until they decide to release us to live our lives again. I really hope it doesn't pass. It could end up another reason to prolong the lockdowns, to save face and claim they saved us from much worse. And the interest on the national debt already took a good chunk of the budget, before they increased the debt from $15 trillion to $17 trillion with the first bailout bill. At this rate, we will be in debt to China forever.

Some people don't seem to realize that "free money for all" isn't really free. There will be consequences, paid by us, not the politicians.

btw, the bailout funds (loans/gifts) for small businesses are already emptied.


This has been the weirdest outbreak. I was alive during the Hong Kong flu pandemic. My father went to work, my mother shopped freely and visited the neighbors, we kids went to school. None of us even remembers it. Yet an estimated one million people died worldwide, with a much smaller world population. And no one, back then, would have dreamed of locking healthy people into their homes, extending these "two week" lockdowns again and again, and demanding that everyone wear masks in public simply because they were susceptible to a virus.


Also, I can't believe the preconditions the WHO/Tedros/China are suggesting before we can be released. If it turns out that up to half of us have had it already, there is no point to running around wasting money for contact tracing of every damn case.
https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/co ... nada-ready
Quote:
Jianhong Wu, a distinguished research professor at York University who has led multiple national projects on SARS, pandemic influenza and immunization evaluation, said there is a close relationship between contact tracing, testing and social distancing.

“If you don’t do well in one component, you need to significantly magnify your effort in other components,” he said.

Sly said provinces are largely trying to contact people exposed to a confirmed case by telephone, which is not sustainable given the soaring number of cases.

He pointed to countries such as South Korea, which have employed cellphone data to track possible contacts. He said that is much more effective, but it would raise privacy issues.

“People are going to be hollering and screaming about that but it does seem to work,” he said.
So can this "expert" describe when countries ran around contact tracing all influenza cases, with the exception of the very early stages of the 2009 swine flu pandemic? (Just because you do research on something doesn't mean you know much about the practicalities and limitations of a public health response.)


Meh. Back to hibernation. Until the media finds some other profitable bone to chase, I expect most people will stay terrified and risk-averse and willing to let the politicians do their thinking for them.




btw, beware of media claims based on total deaths from day to day. It sounds like they're starting to do some data dumps, adding things like probable past COVID deaths to the total. The U.S. is also counting deaths that could have other causes. For instance, if you die of a heart attack and are also infected, it can be called a COVID death. That could be true. Let's say you have heart disease and get bad pneumonia. The pneumonia then puts too much strain on your heart, which can't take it. On the other hand, it could be false. People can die of heart attacks that were not influenced by the fact that they were infected with this coronavirus. There was one 17-year-old in California the media was using as a poster child to scare young people, until the public health department spoke up and said "Whoa - we're not sure COVID was the cause of death. He had other problems." I doubt they would have done that if they thought COVID had any significant part in his death.

And I still can't figure out how the left-leaning media thinks we're ever going to get through this pandemic if people don't get exposed to the virus and develop immunity. Do they seriously think we can stay shut away for a year or more? The lockdowns had a specific purpose (whether or not that was justified is a question for hindsight). But I'm not sure if that purpose has been communicated clearly enough to the average person. No one likes the deaths. But the reality is, this is a pandemic and some people are going to die, whether they meet the virus tomorrow or in 2 months.

And some of the paranoia is getting silly. Yesterday, the cashier at the grocery store "reminded" me to wipe down all my groceries (presumably with disinfectant?) before putting them away. I nearly laughed. I suppose I was also supposed to take a hot bath, wash my hair, set my shoes outside the door and throw all my clothes in the laundry, making sure they touched nothing inside the house? I simply washed my hands, put things away, and went for a long bike ride. This was the bloody grocery store, not a hospital COVID ward.
(The seriously immunocompromised/ highly susceptible may need to take more precautions. But they probably shouldn't be out there shopping in the first place, whether or not we're locked down.)

_________________

Society can and does execute its own mandates, and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. ― John Stuart Mill


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aninkling
Post subject: Re: Escaping the Echo Chamber
Posted: Tue 21 Apr , 2020 6:01 pm
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FYI, a pertinent scientific paper on models. It's not an easy read (though not especially technical) but important takeaways are:
- Modelers speak more confidently to politicians and the public than their models warrant (they don't acknowledge the uncertainties the same way as when they have to talk to other scientists. See, for instance, this arrogant bunch: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... who-advice )
- Models have screwed up (for instance, the foot and mouth disease model they discuss here, where the modelers took credit for the disease peak starting to go down, thanks to the government following their recommendations for culling many uninfected animals, but others point out that the numbers of cases had already peaked before these control measures could have had an impact)
-Models should never be the sole basis for a policy. They can be part of the decision making, but not the whole.

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/artic ... ne.0076277
Quote:
“Wrong, but Useful”: Negotiating Uncertainty in Infectious Disease Modelling
Quote:
King's statement, made to the UK Parliamentary Inquiry into the impact of the 2001 FMD epidemic, illustrates the use of strong program rhetoric (hard sell [16]). Here, modelling science unequivocally indicates the different futures open to decision makers; no accommodation is made for contingency, nor thus for alternative scientific views. This contrasts with the weak program rhetoric (soft sell) adopted in a scientific journal paper read predominantly by microbiologists....

This soft sell presents modelling as an exploratory tool to assess what might be of the impact of alternative choices, implying that modelling provides a starting point for discussion and need not dogmatically warrant a specific action in response.
Quote:
This uncertainty actually encompasses at least four underlying uncertainties (about each species and each process), but could also include uncertainties about potential variation in each process (for example relating to age, breed and other factors that, although poorly described, may influence individual animals' immune systems). Hence, this single listed uncertainty embodies a wide range of independent potential sources of uncertainty, although most are not mentioned or discussed. As is well understood, but may need repeating here, these are not only additive in their potential cumulative error-magnitudes, but may be multiplicative. Hence, authors must decide what to present, what to leave out, what to prioritise and, ultimately, what is to be achieved through the communication processes in which the model becomes an actor. The representation of uncertainties through the production of the model is, therefore, contingent on the actions of the authors, and alternative choices and representations are possible. Importantly, omission of any specific uncertainty in communication of model results may prevent or limit its consideration by consumers/users of the model results. We contend that selective omission, reinforced by an empiricist repertoire, is a recurrent feature of formal modelling discourse, and that this asymmetric accounting results in understatement of the potential implications of uncertainties in what are usually mixed biological and social systems, even when these are recognised by modellers in less formal discourse.
Quote:
Finally, as noted by Haydon et al [36], all models used in the UK 2001 FMD epidemic considered a narrow range of policy options and “it is difficult to make the argument that mathematical models showed that implementation of widespread and intensive culling was the only tenable option.” Therefore, the strong program rhetoric adopted in the comparison of models (and the inferred validation of these and/or their conclusions) masks the weak program test that is used, ignores issues that may bias the models toward developing similar mutually affirming conclusions, and limits the scope of discussion by disregarding alternative potential policies.
Quote:
Many modellers we interviewed expressed awareness of complex issues associated with communication of uncertainty to decision-makers, with modellers being simultaneously aware of the scientific basis of the models and the need to safeguard the influence of modelling as a tool in decision-making.

E20 (Interview – modeller)

It's very dangerous to say you don't believe this model before you start. It's quite a hard trick to pull off to convince the policymaker that the model has value and should be believed and they should base their policy on it and at the same time explain that actually the model, it's not true, is wrong.

E21 (Interview – modeller)

If the modellers believe a model's giving important advice, even though there's a level of uncertainty in that advice, how – it's a real issue – how hard should you – if you feel the advice is good advice and important, how hard should you push it? ‘Cause if you’re – if you take a very open approach, saying, “Well, this may or may not be correct, there are different possibilities,” then you run the risk that what you consider important advice may be ignored.

These modellers express the concern that exposure of their true understanding of the uncertainties of a model would undermine its credibility and prevent its effective contribution to decision-making....

Hence, whilst model-users may have some appreciation of general issues relating to uncertainty in models, they may be poorly placed to judge the depth or impact of these. This difficulty was articulated by one respondent, quoting a colleague who had expressed frustration with a model: “Everyone knew it was crap, but nobody knew why”....

https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/17/inf ... itics-say/
Quote:
A widely followed model for projecting Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. is producing results that have been bouncing up and down like an unpredictable fever, and now epidemiologists are criticizing it as flawed and misleading for both the public and policy makers. In particular, they warn against relying on it as the basis for government decision-making, including on “re-opening America.”

“It’s not a model that most of us in the infectious disease epidemiology field think is well suited” to projecting Covid-19 deaths, epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health told reporters this week, referring to projections by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.

Others experts, including some colleagues of the model-makers, are even harsher. “That the IHME model keeps changing is evidence of its lack of reliability as a predictive tool,” said epidemiologist Ruth Etzioni of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, who has served on a search committee for IHME. “That it is being used for policy decisions and its results interpreted wrongly is a travesty unfolding before our eyes.”...

A fair article that acknowledges the Swedish approach might be right and might be wrong, and gives an insider's perspective on what's actually happening in Sweden. Most of the articles I've seen on Sweden, including the BBC, start from the view that Sweden is wrong and slant the article that way. Even their titles are along the lines of "Experts Fear Swedes Will All Die!" (yeah, that's an exaggeration, but not much).
https://reason.com/2020/04/17/in-sweden ... -long-run/
Quote:
In Sweden, Will Voluntary Self-Isolation Work Better Than State-Enforced Lockdowns in the Long Run?
There’s a lot of debate over the Swedish model of coronavirus response, but there are good reasons to think a Hippocratic approach to policy may pay off.
Quote:
"Sweden's suffering very, very badly" according to President Donald Trump. Nope, says Denmark's former Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen, who suggested April 7 that Denmark should have followed the cautious Swedish way of responding to COVID-19.

Views diverge on Sweden's unique strategy of not closing borders and shutting down schools, workplaces, restaurants, libraries, gyms and shopping centers. ...Some Brits think that we Swedes are crazy, The Spectator's Fraser Nelson told Swedish radio last week, but added that other Brits admire how the Swedish people have largely followed scientific advice—no mandatory lockdown needed.

One reason why some believe Sweden is a disaster zone while others see it as a role model is that currently available data can be interpreted many different ways.

For example, the number of deaths as a share of total cases is a useless statistic,...
Quote:
No matter how we count, though, I assume that Sweden has had more COVID-19 deaths per capita than our Nordic neighbors. But that is an obvious result of those countries' decisions to postpone cases and deaths by locking down whole societies for a period of time. The thing to watch is what happens when they begin to open up again and will face a new wave of COVID-19. No government can keep people locked up until we have a vaccine, and most are now loosening restrictions.

A Harvard model projects that a 60 percent suppression of the disease will result in a higher peak later on and a higher number of total deaths than a mitigation strategy like the one Sweden used... Other models come to other conclusions, of course, depending on what you put into them. We just don't know yet, and only time will tell.



More solid than an interview with a phlebotomist:

https://www.msn.com/en-in/news/other/in ... r-BB12qsbt
Quote:
The survey in Germany was conducted out by a team led by virologist Hendrik Streeck at the University Hospital in Bonn, who stated that they had spoken to around 1,000 residents of Gangelt to give their blood samples, have their throats swabbed, and complete a survey, the report said.

They discovered that 2% of the town’s residents had contracted the virus and a total of 14% possessed antibodies, suggesting earlier infection.
This was a community survey, so presumably it tested those who had not been tested earlier or seen a doctor. In other words, despite the pessimistic slant in the news article, it's good news.


In California:
https://www.latimes.com/california/stor ... ara-county
Quote:
The preliminary study, conducted by researchers at Stanford University, estimates that between 2.5% and 4.2% of Santa Clara County residents had antibodies to the new coronavirus in their blood by early April. Antibodies are an indication that a person’s immune system has responded to a past infection.

Though the county had reported roughly 1,000 cases in early April, the Stanford researchers estimate the actual number was between 48,000 and 81,000, or 50 to 85 times greater.

...Based on their results, the Stanford researchers estimated the mortality rate in Santa Clara County to be between 0.12% and 0.2%. By comparison, the average death rate of the seasonal flu is 0.1%.
Similar to the 0.3% estimate from a town in Germany.


https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/04/20/ ... n-apology/
Quote:
Researchers are engaged in a fierce debate over the startling* estimates in a Stanford study that suggested as many as 81,000 people could already have been infected with coronavirus in Santa Clara County, with some of the world’s top number crunchers calling the study sloppy, biased and an example of “how NOT to do statistics.”

“I think the authors owe us all an apology… not just to us, but to Stanford,” wrote Andrew Gelman, a professor of statistics and political science and director of the Applied Statistics Center at Columbia University.

Yet after a weekend of attacks on the paper, a study announced Monday out of the University of Southern California on a sampling of residents in Los Angeles reached a very similar conclusion: It found hundreds of thousands of adults there may have already been infected. As of Monday, Los Angeles County had recorded fewer than 13,000 cases....

The Santa Clara County study concluded that the virus had infected 2.5% to 4.2% of residents here; in LA, the estimated infection rate ranged from 2.8% to 5.6%.

If true, it suggests that the large majority of people who contract COVID-19 recover without ever knowing they were infected. If undetected infections are that widespread, then the death rate in the county could be less than 0.2%, making the virus far less lethal than authorities have assumed. Los Angeles authorities also peg their death rate at 0.2% based on the USC study.
You know, when at least four serological studies have similar findings (plus a little study in Italy where a single known case in a village revealed something like 3% of the residents had unrecognized mild/ subclinical cases there, based on testing for the virus's RNA in nasal secretions) and it's also consistent with the reports from closed populations (cruise ships, navy ships, see below), perhaps these people getting all outraged about imperfect methodology might consider the possibility they might be wrong themselves? I'm really starting to wonder why so many people seem to be clinging hard to worst case scenarios.

*Don't ask me why this is "startling," except this is the news media. Some of us predicted that mortality estimates would come down significantly with antibody testing, weeks (months?) ago.




Another outbreak in a closed population. Like the Diamond Princess cruise ship but with a younger average age:
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/ne ... reak-study
Quote:
The outbreak on the Roosevelt is the single largest in the military, with 660 members of its crew testing positive for the novel coronavirus, seven in the hospital and one sailor who died Monday.

The virus has sidelined the carrier in Guam for three weeks, where 4,000 sailors have been quarantined off the ship.

About 60 percent of the 660 Roosevelt sailors who have tested positive so far have shown no COVID-19 symptoms,
Another source said the person who died had a preexisting condition that made him more susceptible to the virus.


Published, peer-reviewed study on the Diamond Princess cruise ship (much older population):
Quote:
Euro Surveill. 2020 Mar;25(12). doi: 10.2807/1560-7917.ES.2020.25.12.2000256.
Estimating the infection and case fatality ratio for coronavirus disease (COVID-19) using age-adjusted data from the outbreak on the Diamond Princess cruise ship, February 2020.
Russell TW1, Hellewell J2,1, Jarvis CI2,1, van Zandvoort K2,1, Abbott S1, Ratnayake R3,1, Cmmid Covid-Working Group4, Flasche S1, Eggo RM1, Edmunds WJ1, Kucharski AJ1.
Author information
Abstract

Adjusting for delay from confirmation to death, we estimated case and infection fatality ratios (CFR, IFR) for coronavirus disease (COVID-19) on the Diamond Princess ship as 2.6% (95% confidence interval (CI): 0.89-6.7) and 1.3% (95% CI: 0.38-3.6), respectively. Comparing deaths on board with expected deaths based on naive CFR estimates from China, we estimated CFR and IFR in China to be 1.2% (95% CI: 0.3-2.7) and 0.6% (95% CI: 0.2-1.3), respectively.




https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archi ... er/610213/
Quote:
The Internet’s Titans Make a Power Grab

Facebook and other platforms insisted that they didn’t want to be “arbiters of truth.” The coronavirus changed their mind overnight.
Quote:
The ordinary laws no longer govern. Every day, new rules are being written to deal with the crisis. Freedoms are curtailed. Enforcement is heavy-handed. Usual civil-liberties protections, such as rights of appeal, are suspended. By act, if not by word, a state of emergency has been declared. This is not a description of the United States, or even Hungary. It’s the internet during the coronavirus pandemic. We are living under an emergency constitution invoked by Facebook, Google, and other major tech platforms. In normal times, these companies are loath to pass judgment about what’s true and what’s false. But lately they have been taking unusually bold steps to keep misinformation about COVID-19 from circulating.....
I've noted with cynicism that these platforms still allow misinformation to circulate as long as it promotes the officially sanctioned opinions.

Speaking of cynicism, I've noticed how certain governors (Michigan, Kentucky, Maryland?) and social media users are trying to turn everyone against protesters, claiming they will be responsible for increased cases and longer lockdowns. Excellent use of propaganda, considering that these places have rising numbers right now from virus spread and/or increased testing, so it's hard to disprove. But, given how widespread the virus already is, and the constant mixing already going on at grocery stores and WalMart (the current setup in the strictest states pretty much funnels everyone through a small number of stores), I have my doubts. Also, most of the protesters have either distanced themselves or stayed in cars. Though, as usual, the media makes sure to focus the pictures and stories on the wackos and extremists, not the normal but fed up folk.

I think the news media underestimates the anger among normal people, both among those who are out of work/ in danger of losing their business soon/ retired and worried about their savings in the economic mess, and among those who think their governors/ mayors (and police enforcing lockdowns via drones) have gone too far and are being unreasonable. Right now, the news media is keeping that suppressed by feeding the fear, but that might not last too much longer. If you're stuck in a tiny city apartment with a couple of kids and no job, everyone is getting on everyone else's nerves, and your governor is talking about months more lockdown, your patience may eventually snap. Personally, I'm feeling rather envious of Australia. They seem to be doing all right, and apparently, you can even get a haircut there as long as the salon complies with certain distancing requirements. And some Australians seem puzzled that car washes have been shut down in the U.S., even though you have no contact with a person, except maybe to pay. I guess they've come up with some sane restrictions, unlike some of our loonier governors.


Added:
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/4 ... data-shows
Quote:
Preliminary data shows about 13.9 percent of the population of New York state — about 2.7 million people — have at some point been infected with the coronavirus....

In New York City, 21 percent of residents had antibodies for coronavirus, compared with 3.6 percent in upstate New York, 16.7 percent in Long Island and 11.7 percent in the Westchester and Rockland area.
The 21% figure for New York City suggests the 30-50% figure from the phlebotomist at a hospital might be a plausible estimate. It's in a very poor section of town where exposure could well be high.



https://thehill.com/policy/technology/4 ... ers-coughs
Quote:
Police in Westport, Conn., will test a “pandemic drone” they say is capable of monitoring residents’ temperatures from nearly 200 feet as well as detecting coughing and sneezing.

The police department said they are testing the technology in cooperation with drone manufacturer Draganfly.

The company said the drone will feature sensors that can detect fever temperatures and heart rates as well as sneezing and coughing in crowds, according to a local NBC affiliate.

“One of the major problems for cities and towns like Westport in managing and responding to a pandemic like the COVID-19 virus, is finding out who could be infected and how widespread the disease has spread,” Westport First Selectman Jim Marpe said in a statement....
Many states have bought these Chinese-made surveillance drones. Police in another city in Connecticut have been sending drones into people's backyards to watch them and make sure they're not congregating. Police in Lewes, Delaware are using one to monitor people using trails...

As that Chinese blogger said about the phone-based control of their movements, the pandemic has advanced the government's control over our lives. The scary thing is that I see some people in western countries suggesting this is a good thing.

_________________

Society can and does execute its own mandates, and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. ― John Stuart Mill


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aninkling
Post subject: Re: Escaping the Echo Chamber
Posted: Mon 04 May , 2020 2:18 pm
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As I mentioned before, there is a long-standing debate about how much good surgical masks do against influenza,* but the consensus has been that at least they're helpful if the wearer coughs or sneezes. Turns out that this probably isn't true either. This actually surprised me a bit, though I figured the stuff about stopping asymptomatic people from breathing out viruses was nonsense.

*For instance, they might be beneficial in stopping you from touching your face as often.... but, on the other hand, they're uncomfortable (even people who are used to wearing surgical masks find it a relief to get them off) and many people touch their faces more often to adjust the mask. Also, untrained people don't handle masks correctly. And the masks give people a false sense of security so they're more likely to neglect other precautions. Not to mention that these respiratory viruses can get in through your eyes too...


https://www.newsweek.com/surgical-cotto ... ts-1496476
Quote:
Surgical and Cotton Face Masks Ineffective at Blocking SARS-CoV-2 Particles When COVID-19 Patients Cough, Study Finds
Quote:
...researchers asked four COVID-19 patients in South Korea to enter negative-pressure isolation rooms. The volunteers, aged between 35 and 82, were asked to cough four times each on to five separate Petri dishes positioned 20 cm (7.9 inches) from their mouths. The first time they wore no mask, then a surgical mask, followed by a cotton mask, and again no mask. The disposable surgical masks used in the study measured 180 mm × 90 mm and had three layers, while reusable cotton masks measured 160 mm × 135 mm and were comprised of two layers

After the participants finished coughing, the researchers took swabs from the inner and outer surfaces of the masks.

...Dr. Sung-Han Kim of Asan Medical Center, University of Ulsan College of Medicine, Seoul, and colleagues found SARS-CoV-2 on the outside of every mask, but "most" swabs from inside tested negative.

Finding more virus particles on the outer than inner mask surfaces was "of note," the scientists said. It was unlikely the researchers spread the virus while swabbing the masks, they argued, as they tested the outside before the inner surface.

Instead, SARS-CoV-2 particles may have escaped around the edges of the mask, the researchers said. Alternatively, small SARS-CoV-2 particles created during a hard cough may have penetrated the masks....
In a sensible world, this would end the mandatory masks stuff, especially since the WHO re-examined the same research as the CDC, when the CDC recommended that people wear masks, and the WHO still decided not to recommend them for the general population. If you look at their current guidance documents for COVID-19 in medical settings, they don't even recommend them for patients not showing respiratory symptoms, or for some people associated with healthcare facilities like ambulance drivers (or, if I remember right, clerical staff in hospitals).

In the current panicky climate, I predict it will just lead to more debate, where the proponents of masks will insist that, before changing the mandatory mask laws, there must be large scale studies of mask-wearing and non-mask-wearing populations during the COVID-19 outbreak (and those studies will probably be mostly garbage, since they will be observational studies easily confounded by other factors, not controlled studies).


btw, well-fitted N95 respirators (which protect the wearer, but not others) are uncomfortable to wear. I saw that our local grocery store had given one to the person standing at the entrance monitoring people coming in and leaving. But he had already pulled it off his nose and, by the time I left, he had taken it off altogether. I wasn't surprised.





Speaking of which, another antibody study that shows the same thing has been reported - many of us have already been exposed to this coronavirus and have antibodies, with no serious ill effects. (again, there will be some reason for some researchers to criticize the study and the politicians to say "oh, no, we can't abandon lockdowns." I don't know why everyone's waiting for the perfect study, when those usually take a long, long time to come out, often well after the epidemic has subsided.)
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/04/17/ ... ronavirus/
Quote:
Nearly one third of 200 Chelsea residents who gave a drop of blood to researchers on the street this week tested positive for antibodies linked to COVID-19, a startling indication of how widespread infections have been in the densely populated city.



btw, when the news media goes on about how COVID-19 is so different because it affects the kidneys, can cause neurological signs, etc, and influenza doesn't? Well, here's a small sample from a quickie search of the scientific literature:

Brain Dev. 2018 Oct;40(9):799-806. doi: 10.1016/j.braindev.2018.05.019. Epub 2018 Jun 8.
Influenza-associated neurological complications during 2014-2017 in Taiwan.
Chen LW1, Teng CK1, Tsai YS2, Wang JN1, Tu YF1, Shen CF1, Liu CC3.
Author information
Abstract
INTRODUCTION:
Seasonal influenza-associated neurological complications had high mortality and morbidity rates in recent studies. We reported influenza-associated encephalitis/encephalopathy in children during 2014-2017 in Taiwan, focusing on neurological presentations, neuroimaging correlations, and critical care managements.
MATERIALS/SUBJECTS:
During January 1st 2014 to June 30th 2017, pediatric patients reported to the Taiwan Centers for Disease Control surveillance system for severe complicated influenza infections in the hospital were retrospectively reviewed. Children with influenza-associated encephalitis/encephalopathy were inspected for clinical presentations, laboratory data, neuroimaging studies, treatment modalities, and neurological outcomes.
RESULTS:
Ten children with median age 5.9 years were enrolled for analysis. Influenza-associated encephalitis/encephalopathy appeared in the spring and summer, with a delayed peak comparing with the occurrence of pneumonia and septic shock. The neurological symptoms developed rapidly within median 1 day after the first fever episode. All patients had consciousness disturbance. Seven patients (70%) had seizures at initial presentation, and six of them had status epilepticus. Anti-viral treatments were applied in all patients, with median door-to-drug time 0.9 h for oseltamivir and 6.0 h for peramivir. Multi-modality treatments also included steroid pulse therapy, immunoglobulin treatment, and target temperature management, with 85.2% of the major treatments administered within 12 h after admission. Nine of the ten patients recovered without neurological sequelae. Only one patient had epilepsy requiring long-term anticonvulsants and concomitant cognitive decline.
CONCLUSIONS:
In highly prevalent area, influenza-associated encephalitis/encephalopathy should be considered irrespective of seasons. Our study suggested the effects of timely surveillance and multi-modality treatments in influenza-associated encephalitis/encephalopathy.
Copyright © 2018 The Japanese Society of Child Neurology. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
KEYWORDS:
Encephalitis; Encephalopathy; Influenza; Multi-modality treatments; Status epilepticus
PMID:
29891404
DOI:
10.1016/j.braindev.2018.05.019
[Indexed for MEDLINE]




JAMA Netw Open. 2020 Mar 2;3(3):e201323. doi: 10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2020.1323.
Respiratory and Nonrespiratory Diagnoses Associated With Influenza in Hospitalized Adults.
Chow EJ1,2, Rolfes MA2, O'Halloran A2, Alden NB3, Anderson EJ4,5,6, Bennett NM7, Billing L8, Dufort E9, Kirley PD10, George A11, Irizarry L12, Kim S13, Lynfield R14, Ryan P15, Schaffner W16, Talbot HK16, Thomas A17, Yousey-Hindes K18, Reed C2, Garg S2.
Author information
Abstract
Importance:
Seasonal influenza virus infection is a major cause of morbidity and mortality and may be associated with respiratory and nonrespiratory diagnoses.
Objective:
To examine the respiratory and nonrespiratory diagnoses reported for adults hospitalized with laboratory-confirmed influenza between 2010 and 2018 in the United States.
Design, Setting, and Participants:
This cross-sectional study used data from the US Influenza Hospitalization Surveillance Network (FluSurv-NET) from October 1 through April 30 of the 2010-2011 through 2017-2018 influenza seasons. FluSurv-NET is a population-based, multicenter surveillance network with a catchment area that represents approximately 9% of the US population. Patients are identified by practitioner-ordered influenza testing. Adults (aged ≥18 years) hospitalized with laboratory-confirmed influenza were included in the study.
Exposures:
FluSurv-NET defines laboratory-confirmed influenza as a positive influenza test result by rapid antigen assay, reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction, direct or indirect fluorescent staining, or viral culture.
Main Outcomes and Measures:
Acute respiratory or nonrespiratory diagnoses were defined using International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision, Clinical Modification (ICD-9-CM) and International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, 10th Revision (ICD-10) discharge diagnosis codes. The analysis included calculation of the frequency of acute respiratory and nonrespiratory diagnoses with a descriptive analysis of patient demographic characteristics, underlying medical conditions, and in-hospital outcomes by respiratory and nonrespiratory diagnoses.
Results:
Of 89 999 adult patients hospitalized with laboratory-confirmed influenza, 76 649 (median age, 69 years; interquartile range, 55-82 years; 55% female) had full medical record abstraction and at least 1 ICD code for an acute diagnosis. In this study, 94.9% of patients had a respiratory diagnosis and 46.5% had a nonrespiratory diagnosis, including 5.1% with only nonrespiratory diagnoses. Pneumonia (36.3%), sepsis (23.3%), and acute kidney injury (20.2%) were the most common acute diagnoses. Fewer patients with only nonrespiratory diagnoses received antiviral therapy for influenza compared with those with respiratory diagnoses (81.4% vs 88.9%; P < .001).
Conclusions and Relevance:
Nonrespiratory diagnoses occurred frequently among adults hospitalized with influenza, further contributing to the burden of infection in the United States. The findings suggest that during the influenza season, practitioners should consider influenza in their differential diagnosis for patients who present to the hospital with less frequently recognized manifestations and initiate early antiviral treatment for patients with suspected or confirmed infection.
PMID:
32196103
PMCID:
PMC7084169
DOI:
10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2020.1323
Free PMC Article


Pediatr Nephrol. 2018 Nov;33(11):2009-2025. doi: 10.1007/s00467-017-3783-4. Epub 2017 Sep 7.
Influenza-associated thrombotic microangiopathies.
Bitzan M1, Zieg J2.
Author information
Abstract
Thrombotic microangiopathy (TMA) refers to phenotypically similar disorders, including hemolytic uremic syndromes (HUS) and thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura (TTP). This review explores the role of the influenza virus as trigger of HUS or TTP. We conducted a literature survey in PubMed and Google Scholar using HUS, TTP, TMA, and influenza as keywords, and extracted and analyzed reported epidemiological and clinical data. We identified 25 cases of influenza-associated TMA. Five additional cases were linked to influenza vaccination and analyzed separately. Influenza A was found in 83%, 10 out of 25 during the 2009 A(H1N1) pandemic. Two patients had bona fide TTP with ADAMTS13 activity <10%. Median age was 15 years (range 0.5-68 years), two thirds were male. Oligoanuria was documented in 81% and neurological involvement in 40% of patients. Serum C3 was reduced in 5 out of 14 patients (36%); Coombs test was negative in 7 out of 7 and elevated fibrin/fibrinogen degradation products were documented in 6 out of 8 patients. Pathogenic complement gene mutations were found in 7 out of 8 patients tested (C3, MCP, or MCP combined with CFB or clusterin). Twenty out of 24 patients recovered completely, but 3 died (12%). Ten of the surviving patients underwent plasma exchange (PLEX) therapy, 5 plasma infusions. Influenza-mediated HUS or TTP is rare. A sizable proportion of tested patients demonstrated mutations associated with alternative pathway of complement dysregulation that was uncovered by this infection. Further research is warranted targeting the roles of viral neuraminidase, enhanced virus-induced complement activation and/or ADAMTS13 antibodies, and rational treatment approaches.
KEYWORDS:
ADAMTS13; Complement; Hemolytic uremic syndrome; Influenza vaccine; Neuraminidase; Plasma exchange; Thrombotic-thrombocytopenic purpura
PMID:
28884355
PMCID:
PMC6153504
DOI:
10.1007/s00467-017-3783-4
[Indexed for MEDLINE]
Free PMC Article



The thing is, when you're seeing more people with a particular condition like the current coronavirus pandemic, of course the rare complications are going to be noticed more, just thanks to percentages being applied to a higher number. I expect the same thing happened during the 1968-1969 Hong Kong flu pandemic, though I haven't gone back to see if that stuff was published.

It's like the 2009 swine flu pandemic, when people started noticing that pets could get the influenza virus from people and a few of the cats and dogs got seriously ill or died. Something new? Nope, they saw the same thing during the previous pandemic (Hong Kong flu), people just forgot about it over 40 years. And any cases that showed up in pets during an ordinary flu season were far too rare for anyone to make the connection. When this all started, I was curious if this coronavirus would be found in a few pets too. I wasn't surprised when it was. Also zoo tigers that had an infected caretaker, and I believe some mink.

_________________

Society can and does execute its own mandates, and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. ― John Stuart Mill


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aninkling
Post subject: Re: Escaping the Echo Chamber
Posted: Wed 06 May , 2020 3:00 pm
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I found this amusing:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/0 ... -breaking/
Quote:
The scientist whose advice prompted Boris Johnson to lock down Britain resigned from his Government advisory position on Tuesday night as The Telegraph can reveal he broke social distancing rules to meet his married lover....

The epidemiologist leads the team at Imperial College London that produced the computer-modelled research that led to the national lockdown, which claimed that more than 500,000 Britons would die without the measures.

Prof Ferguson has frequently appeared in the media to support the lockdown and praised the "very intensive social distancing" measures.
Goes right along with Chicago's mayor, who got a haircut herself while telling everyone else they can't (https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/chi ... k-n1181546), Ruth Bader Ginsberg getting to use the Supreme Court gym with a personal trainer when such services are forbidden to everyone else (https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/justice ... d=69966242), Scotland's chief medical officer traveling to her second home and so forth. I actually don't have a problem with Ginsberg choosing to take a limited risk in spite of her age and health, or people traveling between their own homes, or two people in a dedicated relationship meeting each other (though Ferguson and his lover are total jerks for what they're doing to her/their families), but the hypocrisy of these people is annoying. They all know these things won't make much difference to anything in the long run, but if you're going to have extreme rules for some, the rich and powerful shouldn't get to skirt them.

EDIT: Oh jeez, I just heard that Neil Ferguson was also the person behind the crappy and overblown foot-and-mouth disease models that helped make the 2001 epidemic in the UK worse than it had to be. (I thought his name sounded familiar, but Ferguson is one of those common names...) And our governments listened to his worst case scenario predictions again?!





Newly published, relevant to other respiratory viruses (e.g., COVID-19) as well as influenza:
Quote:
Emerg Infect Dis. 2020 May;26(5):967-975. doi: 10.3201/eid2605.190994. Epub 2020 May 17.
Nonpharmaceutical Measures for Pandemic Influenza in Nonhealthcare Settings-Personal Protective and Environmental Measures.
Xiao J, Shiu EYC, Gao H, Wong JY, Fong MW, Ryu S, Cowling BJ.
Abstract

There were 3 influenza pandemics in the 20th century, and there has been 1 so far in the 21st century. Local, national, and international health authorities regularly update their plans for mitigating the next influenza pandemic in light of the latest available evidence on the effectiveness of various control measures in reducing transmission. Here, we review the evidence base on the effectiveness of nonpharmaceutical personal protective measures and environmental hygiene measures in nonhealthcare settings and discuss their potential inclusion in pandemic plans. Although mechanistic studies support the potential effect of hand hygiene or face masks, evidence from 14 randomized controlled trials of these measures did not support a substantial effect on transmission of laboratory-confirmed influenza. We similarly found limited evidence on the effectiveness of improved hygiene and environmental cleaning. We identified several major knowledge gaps requiring further research, most fundamentally an improved characterization of the modes of person-to-person transmission.
KEYWORDS:

environmental measures; influenza; influenza virus; meta-analysis; nonhealthcare settings; nonpharmaceutical measures; pandemic influenza; personal protective measures; public health; respiratory infections; viruses

PMID:
32027586
DOI:
10.3201/eid2605.190994

Free full text
Full text:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7181938/
Quote:
In pooled analysis, we found no significant reduction in influenza transmission with the use of face masks (RR 0.78, 95% CI 0.51–1.20; I2 = 30%, p = 0.25) (Figure 2). One study evaluated the use of masks among pilgrims from Australia during the Hajj pilgrimage and reported no major difference in the risk for laboratory-confirmed influenza virus infection in the control or mask group (33). Two studies in university settings assessed the effectiveness of face masks for primary protection by monitoring the incidence of laboratory-confirmed influenza among student hall residents for 5 months (9,10). The overall reduction in ILI or laboratory-confirmed influenza cases in the face mask group was not significant in either studies (9,10). Study designs in the 7 household studies were slightly different: 1 study provided face masks and P2 respirators for household contacts only (34), another study evaluated face mask use as a source control for infected persons only (35), and the remaining studies provided masks for the infected persons as well as their close contacts (11–13,15,17). None of the household studies reported a significant reduction in secondary laboratory-confirmed influenza virus infections in the face mask group (11–13,15,17,34,35). Most studies were underpowered because of limited sample size, and some studies also reported suboptimal adherence in the face mask group.
Not perfect evidence but certainly suggests that mandatory surgical or cloth facemasks* are not "follow the science," as the media keeps suggesting, but more just a sop to make frightened people feel they're "doing something."

*Again, I don't include N95s, which do work if properly fitted and handled (something the general public is quite unlikely to do).




https://reason.com/2020/05/05/coronavir ... o-outside/
Quote:
Let People Go Outside
Many public health experts say the benefits outweigh the risks.
Quote:
...Policies discouraging nearly every form of public interaction—from widespread restaurant closures to a prohibition on big box retailers selling paint—have popped up across the country in an attempt to curb the coronavirus. Some of those policies still make sense.

Closing outdoor spaces does not. That includes the beaches in Florida, which have slowly begun reopening on a county-by-county basis.

Predictably, the move wasn't without backlash. "The trouble is, Florida's not known for 'good' or 'safe,'" writes Diane Roberts, a professor of English at Florida State University, in a Washington Post op-ed. ...

But Roberts does not cite any infectious disease specialists, who are trained to analyze the risks of such situations using science, not stereotypes. What do those experts have to say?


"It bugs me to see these restrictions on people being outside," said Edward Nardell, a professor in the departments of Environmental Health and Immunology and Infectious Diseases at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Nardell told Slate that he favors opening the beaches, so long as social distancing rules are put in place and enforced....

According to Daniel Kuritzkes, the chief of the infectious disease division at Brigham and Women's Hospital, "I don't think there's a real concern" about catching COVID-19 from walking past someone....

"If you're swimming more than 6 feet away from people, you're probably reasonably safe," Michael Buchmeier, a professor of infectious diseases at the University of California, Irvine, told The Guardian. "The virus is very sensitive to ultraviolet light and very sensitive to heating. It's not likely to survive in heat and sunlight."
This is all absolutely correct. Also worth pointing out that the virus will get diluted quickly in the open air and it's going to take more than a single virus or two to infect a normal person. So why the devil is the Washington Post publishing editorials from sanctimonious English professors on COVID-19 instead?


https://reason.com/2020/05/06/the-coron ... ly-effect/
Quote:
The Coronavirus Butterfly Effect
Global manufacturing is an intricate ecosystem of specialized players, their fates closely intertwined.
Quote:
At this point in the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. is facing two parallel crises—looming public health and economic cataclysms. In navigating them, it confronts what former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld famously called known knowns ("things we know we know"), known unknowns ("we know there are some things we do not know"), and also unknown unknowns ("ones we don't know we don't know").... We also know that these governments are implementing public health measures that try to account for the virus's known unknowns (its mortality rate, infectiousness, and proportion of asymptomatic carriers, among other variables) and that reflect worst-case predictions: millions of cases, hundreds of thousands of deaths. About half of the world's population has been under some degree of lockdown, according to a New York Times estimate. We know that that should slow the virus's spread.

But the deeper we delve into the economic side of the ledger, the more we are forced to confront the unknown unknowns that inevitably lie in wait. American and European economists are already forecasting a major recession; they largely agree that we cannot simply flip the global economy back on once the terror of infection has passed....

Globalized supply chains are a recent development in economic history. Since the 1980s, trade barriers have fallen, shipping technologies have improved, and U.S. manufacturers, lulled by the prospect of lower costs and greater efficiency, have cast their nets far beyond our country's borders. This has engendered a panoply of unforeseen risks, and the pandemic has laid them bare. ...


https://quillette.com/2020/05/04/risk-u ... trategies/
Quote:
Risk, Uncertainty, and COVID-19 Strategies
Quote:
Former World Bank President Jim Yong Kim recently argued that “[n]o one in the field of infectious disease or public health can say they are surprised about a pandemic.” And yet, the COVID-19 outbreak did take most policymakers very much by surprise. ...

In such a situation, the precautionary principle tends to apply. As a prominent member of the Danish parliament told us in mid-March: “This is a natural disaster in slow motion. We basically know nothing. The only rational thing to do is to shut down entirely.” That was six weeks ago. At the time of writing, we are already in a very different situation. Now that many more data points are available, sophisticated cost-benefit analyses are emerging, and the curves depicting those who are hospitalized, in intensive care, or dying are flattening or even dropping in many places. We are moving from a situation of radical uncertainty to one that is in many respects more like a risky situation—one in which we can be fairly confident of what the likely outcomes of our actions and the associated costs and benefits will be....
Quote:
When faced with a situation like the COVID-19 pandemic, political leaders and their advisors must embark on a rapid process of learning and discovery necessary to inform urgent decision-making. However, this process takes place under the impact of threat responses that are likely to disfigure decision-making in various ways. In the weeks after the dramatic pictures from Lombardy circulated the world, many epidemiological experts offered policymakers worst-case scenarios and proposed far-reaching measures to fight the pandemic. This is understandable—these experts were dealing with an unknown virus, and their responsibility at such times squarely lies in preventing a foreseeable medical disaster.

Less understandable is why policymakers relied exclusively on these experts and rarely formed interdisciplinary teams to think through related global health, economic, political, and social dynamics simultaneously. ...
Quote:
...However, the public was not educated in elementary statistics and the dangers of sampling biases (for example, the fatality rates initially communicated in the media and by the WHO generally overestimated the number of infected people dying, because only the sickest patients were being tested). This effectively prevented them from being empowered to make their own risk assessments.

While epidemiological experts did try to educate the public and allocated ample time to this, they did not always manage to communicate the seriousness of the situation without slipping into counterproductive alarmism. ...

btw, Singapore, which many people held up as an example of how to do things, is now facing a large outbreak. Which is not surprising - sure, they temporarily stopped the virus locally, but everyone was still susceptible. Like it or not, there is no good, easy way through a viral pandemic like this. IMO, too many people, especially in the U.S., have become used to thinking that someone should "do something" to protect them from perils of all sorts. But Mother Nature likes to periodically remind us who really calls the shots on planet Earth. And she's not always nice.

_________________

Society can and does execute its own mandates, and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. ― John Stuart Mill


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aninkling
Post subject: Re: Escaping the Echo Chamber
Posted: Wed 13 May , 2020 2:10 pm
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Some practical considerations that don't seem to be making the rounds among the proponents of contact tracing by phone.

https://quillette.com/2020/05/11/covid- ... rveillance
Quote:
In the past few months, governments ranging from Australia to the United Kingdom and corporations as influential as Google and Apple have pushed the idea that cellphone tracking can be used to effectively fight COVID-19. There was even an essay here at Quillette, arguing that a mandatory phone tracking app would save lives while also saving jobs as a policy alternative to economic lockdown. Unfortunately, the idea that phone apps should be popularized or even mandated to fight outbreaks is techno-utopian, based on optimism rather than evidence. The real impact of such an approach on society wouldn’t be better immunity, but rather the acceptance and creeping growth of an even more powerful and omniscient global surveillance state....
Quote:
Academics have provided ammunition for this approach, recently stating in Science that “controlling the epidemic by manual contact tracing is infeasible. The use of a contact tracing app… would be sufficient to stop the epidemic if used by enough people.” Regardless of rationale, the immediate, often unsaid problem is that phone contact tracing is not accurate enough for medical use, and trying to implement this strategy will expose individuals and authorities to false positives and false negatives and bring false confidence....
Quote:
A big problem with this approach is its inaccuracy: Tracking someone by their cellphone location is only accurate within 10 — 50 meters, far outside the accuracy needed to see if you’ve come close enough to a carrier to warrant concern....

A second approach, marketed as more accurate and privacy-preserving, is being promoted most notably by Google and Apple, and relies on Bluetooth Low Energy ...

In theory, a Bluetooth-powered COVID-19 app will broadcast digital “handshakes” on an ongoing basis with any other phones that come close....

In practice, however, Bluetooth exposure tracking is so fundamentally flawed that it amounts to little more than security theater. The virus has hit hardest in densely-populated areas like New York City, Milan, and Wuhan. How will your phone know that the handshake it just received was from someone sitting two meters next to you, and not the person sitting two meters away from you through a wall in a next-door cafe? Or that it was the person on a bus sitting near you on the upper level but not the person sitting underneath you? ... the actual inventors of Bluetooth have voiced concerns that the technology is not actually as accurate as some have claimed, opening the door for additional uncertainty....
Quote:
We must also grapple with the fact that the government with the most intense citizen surveillance system in history—the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)—couldn’t, despite all the Orwellian tech in the world, prevent an outbreak, untold deaths, and economic devastation. ...
And, whatever the means, I'm afraid I still don't understand how contact tracing is going to usefully limit a widespread and highly contagious respiratory virus in the real world, possibly outside limited applications like nursing home personnel or controlling virus spread at a work site. If you do it for every contact, it seems like it would shut down society constantly, from even a handful of infected people going about their lives, with uncertain benefits.




CIDRAP is a highly respected source of information and this is an excellent and detailed review.
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspec ... sound-data
Quote:
COMMENTARY: Masks-for-all for COVID-19 not based on sound data
Filed Under:
COVID-19
Lisa M Brosseau, ScD, and Margaret Sietsema, PhD


Dr. Brosseau is a national expert on respiratory protection and infectious diseases and professor (retired), University of Illinois at Chicago.
Dr. Sietsema is also an expert on respiratory protection and an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

_____________________________________

In response to the stream of misinformation and misunderstanding about the nature and role of masks and respirators as source control or personal protective equipment (PPE), we critically review the topic to inform ongoing COVID-19 decision-making that relies on science-based data and professional expertise....
https://www.infectioncontroltoday.com/m ... t-covid-19
Quote:
Lisa Brosseau, ScD, is a nationally recognized expert on infectious diseases. Brousseau taught for many years at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She may be retired from the university, but she’s not retired from teaching. She recently cowrote an opinion piecethat drew a lot of notice: In it Brousseau argues that cloth masks offer no protection from COVID-19. As one might imagine, it drew a lot of attention and caused a fair amount of controversy. She recently sat down with Infection Control Today®to talk about her strong feelings about cloth masks and that data she used to reach her conclusions...

Nothing I've seen since then invalidates her opinions, which I share. In fact, the South Korean research which showed that the coronavirus all appears outside fabric and surgical masks after a cough, and the recent review article on the effectiveness of fabric and surgical masks against influenza in the real world (both posted above) support them. Honestly, I'm still scratching my head over why the CDC and some others did a 180 degree U-turn over masks for the public against respiratory viruses (COVID-19 is no different than influenza in this respect). Or why some experts who would have told you the same thing about masks and influenza as Dr. Brosseau 2 months ago have now gone silent. The cynic in me wonders if masks are supposed to be a security blanket so people will dare to return to "normal" life, or if it's a way for politicians to back away from lockdowns gradually. Personally, I think it was an unwise move by some governors and mayors to make them mandatory, given the drawbacks of masks among people not used to wearing them.




And, though I'm not usually fond of cutesy derogatory names, I might have to appropriate the term covidiots for people who are so paranoid about this virus that they do dumb and dangerous things. Like walkers who step out into the traffic lanes so they don't get closer than 6 feet from a perfectly healthy-looking person for 2 seconds. Or who dart across the road in front of cyclists to avoid being anywhere near them (it's great fun when there are two cyclists on opposite sides of the road, who have to wonder whether and when the person might suddenly dart back).

_________________

Society can and does execute its own mandates, and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. ― John Stuart Mill


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yovargas
Post subject: Re: Escaping the Echo Chamber
Posted: Wed 13 May , 2020 9:04 pm
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I have heard pretty much no one (experts at least) say that wearing a mask will help prevent you getting an infection. Instead, the consensus seems to be that if you are infected, the mask will make you less likely to infect others. Since we have found that many of the infected are asymptomatic, making it impossible to know who is and is not infected, it would then make sense to encourage the general public to wear masks to lower the spread caused by those people a bit.


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LalaithUrwen
Post subject: Re: Escaping the Echo Chamber
Posted: Mon 25 May , 2020 10:04 pm
The Grey Amaretto as Supermega-awesome Proud Heretic Girl
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What yovi said, honestly.

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aninkling
Post subject: Re: Escaping the Echo Chamber
Posted: Wed 24 Jun , 2020 6:27 pm
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Quote:
I have heard pretty much no one (experts at least) say that wearing a mask will help prevent you getting an infection.
Actually, a N95 mask plus eye protection, gloves, good hygiene, etc. (and knowing how to handle PPE and act around infectious individuals) will do a great deal to protect a trained professional from aerosolized respiratory viruses, and can make the risk very low. How do you guys think healthcare providers keep from getting infected with aerosolized viruses (or when doing procedures that cause aerosolization) in hospitals? Some of them far nastier than this coronavirus.

But masks vary and so do situations.
Quote:
Instead, the consensus seems to be that if you are infected, the mask will make you less likely to infect others. Since we have found that many of the infected are asymptomatic, making it impossible to know who is and is not infected, it would then make sense to encourage the general public to wear masks to lower the spread caused by those people a bit.
This is not an unreasonable view if there are no detriments to wearing a mask. As there are some, as I've mentioned above (including complacency/ feeling less vulnerable, touching your face more, possibility of heat stroke or other adverse effects for some, study that found fabric masks increased influenza-like illnesses in healthcare workers compared to surgical masks or the control group, etc.), that makes this a debatable view.

And I'm afraid your so-called "consensus" is nowhere near as solid as you think. I think some of it might be part of the pandemic plans put in place under the Obama administration - consistent messaging from all sources of information to the public - media, etc. But I happen to disagree with pretending that science is a monolith and everyone agrees. I feel that, if people eventually find out that the "consensus" was wrong, they stop trusting the information put out by medical organizations and their skepticism makes them them think everything they were told is wrong. In other words, they're ripe for disinformation. I think it's better to let people know where there's uncertainty and debate, than to pretend something is more solid than it is.

In more than a decade of following the mask research on influenza, I have yet to see any solid evidence from a real world study that a mask will be helpful for the general public, given the realities of how the average person handles a mask. Given this is the case with surgical masks, I don't anticipate a piece of fabric being any better. And the basics of both respiratory viruses are the same, both the general mechanisms (coughing, etc.) and the fact that many pathogens (microbes) can be spread by people shortly before their symptoms first appear.


Many of the Masks Work!! "studies" you guys are being fed by the media are either models, where they make an assumption that a mask is X% effective and feed that data into the model (garbage in, garbage out is possible in this situation) or observational studies of correlation, which does not necessarily equal causation. (A couple of those studies look like they might be retracted soon, by the look of it, after they were heavily criticized.). There's also a weird study on hamsters infected with a coronavirus, where they covered the cages with surgical mask material and found that cut down on transmission (hey, if you can find a giant tent of such material and want to go walking around under it, go for it. Otherwise, it really doesn't address the issues with surgical or fabric masks in actual humans.)

As the WHO says, there is currently no high quality evidence that wearing a mask does any good if you're not coughing or sneezing.* Researchers in Canada and a couple of other countries are starting controlled, randomized studies for coronavirus in various groups of people, I believe, and that might finally answer the question. My prediction is that they'll be just like the few influenza/ masks studies on the public - no statistically significant benefit, for various reasons (including that most people don't wear or handle masks correctly, and that exhaled air is going to escape around the edges of most masks). I admit I could be wrong, but we'll see.

*WHO recently changed their recommendations to be in line with the CDC's. The timing was interesting. Some conservative news outlets discovered that the WHO's guidance for the public on masks differed from the CDC and said no, you don't need to wear them unless you're sick, other media outlets and pundits piled on to say, in vehement outrage, that either 1) you guys misunderstood the WHO, or 2) the WHO doesn't know what they're talking about. And soon after that the WHO said essentially "we still know there's no high quality evidence for this recommendation but we're now going to suggest that the public all wear masks." The cynic in me wonders if they also changed the technical guidance for people like ambulance drivers (no masks needed). This whole mask thing seems to be turning into another stupid political fight with no nuance.


Look, I don't really care if someone chooses to wear a mask or not. The only thing I've told vulnerable people in my life is not to trust that bit of fabric or whatever in the slightest, and if you're in a high risk group, you should be isolating yourself until the virus is no longer as widespread (or, given that they're adults, taking precautions and taking the risk of exposure with open eyes).

But, honestly, mandatory masks bugs me because IMO if you're going to make something mandatory, you'd better have rock solid evidence of benefits far outweighing any potential harm. There are circumstances where I might decide to wear a mask - like the duration of a conversation facing a single person at a close distance, especially if one of us was a shouty sort of person (It might be helpful in deflecting particles to the side, though I remain skeptical it will make any statistically significant difference in virus transmission, and the drawbacks of very short-term use in this case seem minimal) - vs. others - like a farmer's market on a humid 90-degree day - where I'd choose not to.

And because it's a slippery slope to other arbitrary orders by politicians "to protect other people's health." I don't think anyone has a right not to be exposed to a virus by making someone else do something on the off-chance that they might be infected. Yeah, if you're sick, quarantining that person is absolutely reasonable. But, in my view, if it's "you might be infected and you can probably spread the virus for a few days before you get symptoms and there's a possibility that masks might do some good" that's too many "mights" for anything mandatory. Persuasion or personal choice, sure, go for it. Mandatory, no. Let the person choose. And if they're motivated by personal choice to wear a mask, they're probably more likely to handle it well, change it often, etc.

A technical note:, before they were forced to backtrack by the political outcry, WHO scientists said what is probably the truth - the data they're getting suggest that truly asymptomatic people don't seem to be transmitting the coronavirus much. This is different than people in the late incubation period (which is sometimes called "presymptomatic"), who can spread it. This makes sense if you know something about infectious diseases. A great deal of the symptoms are actually your body's response to the virus, so as the number of replicating viruses rise, your body starts to respond, but there's a bit of a lag and viruses increase before the symptoms fully show up.


And, as I say, I could be wrong. I'm only one person and science/ medicine/infectious disease research is more a debate and argument, not the monolithic "trust the science" stuff the activists like to put out. All I wanted to do here was present information that seemed to be drowned out by the idiot media. And yeah, I'm pretty fed up with the half-understood crap information they're putting out on a lot of things. They don't have the background to put things in context - for instance, virus dose/ concentration and length of exposure matter - and don't bother anyway, because nuance doesn't sell as well as rules to keep you "safe" and scare stories.

Anyway, I think there have been some major screw-ups from politicians of all stripes. For instance, now that many liberal politicians and the media gave their approval to big, close crowds during the BLM protests ("as long as they're wearing masks"), ordinary people will see the hypocrisy and are going to start ignoring what, in my mind, was one of the most useful control measures - no big indoor gatherings of strangers and no closely-packed outdoor groups. When you're pretty much immediately breathing everyone else's exhaled breath, especially when they're shouting, that bit of fabric isn't going to help in the least.
(btw, it's really quite amazing how that there was so much heated media criticism of people who were mostly doing low risk things during lockdown protests, like driving around in cars or standing outside, well-spaced and holding signs, but soon afterward, massive, out-of control crowds of shouting, shoving people was an admirable thing. )





But what I really came here to post was this, in case anyone finds it useful. Graphs of different countries, including Sweden on cumulative deaths and new deaths/ day. Ignore the total deaths graphs - they're pointless - but the cases/million population helps even out the differences in population numbers. I find them interesting and will be curious where they go. (overall deaths still seem to be falling in the U.S., even while infections increase in some areas. Not a surprise, that increase, as people move about more. The deaths could be falling simultaneously if the most vulnerable people tended to get it earlier and now it's a more resistant group of people getting infected.)

Case numbers are partly a function of how many people are being tested, so deaths can be more useful sometimes. (admittedly, they're influenced by who you decide to count as a COVID death. For instance, I thought it rather dishonest that the US is counting deaths of people in hospice. Or that the media doesn't make it clear that, when an infant with a serious heart condition dies as it's apparently starting to recover from COVID in the hospital, that child might have just as easily died from any other respiratory virus it was unlucky enough to contract.)


The graph at the bottom - daily COVID mortality vs "all cause" mortality in Sweden - is also interesting.

https://www.covid19insweden.com/en/deaths.html


EDIT: A Japanese article about the risks of heat and face masks. I just had a personal demonstration of this, on a very hot and humid day when I was moderately active outside for a while, then donned the mandatory mask when I went into an air conditioned shop. I was surprised at how quickly a reddening face, rapid heartbeat and light-headedness can show up, and at how quickly the symptoms are relieved if you adjust your mask to let the hot air escape and not blow back on your face. Worth noting this was not an N95 mask, where I might have expected this.
https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2020 ... ummer.html
Quote:
Medical experts have called for extra vigilance regarding heat-related illnesses this summer, amid growing fears that the wearing of face masks to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus could cause breathing difficulties and dehydration....

Wearing masks during the hot and humid summer months "will be a new experience for many people," said Yasufumi Miyake, head of the advanced emergency medical service center at Teikyo University Hospital.

As wearing masks in hot weather makes it difficult for cool air to reach the lungs, the respiratory muscles are activated resulting in shortness of breath, which in turn makes it easier for heat to build up inside the body.

Miyake... stressed it is important to cool the body down in order to prevent heat exhaustion and heatstroke. He suggested turning on air conditioners, drinking water at regular intervals and increasing rest time....

"As you take more frequent breaths when wearing a mask, you should definitely avoid vigorous exercise (when wearing one)," Koibuchi said.

In China, at least two junior high school students collapsed and died last month while wearing face masks during physical exercise examinations...

https://www.businessinsider.com.au/how- ... ask-2020-6
Quote:
Protestors are at risk of dehydration and heat exhaustion, and their masks make it worse. Here's how to stay safe.
Quote:
Dr. Ernest Brown was biking toward protests in Washington, DC, this week when a woman flagged him town: “One girl over there looks like she’s dehydrated, she’s on the ground,” she said.

So Brown, an independent family medicine physician wearing his signature scrubs, rode over to make sure she was OK. She was – thanks to some water and a group of friends who were fanning her – but she wasn’t the first such case Brown had seen that day.

“It’s very hot,” the young woman said about her mask in a video Brown took. “It says ‘I can’t breathe’ and I really can’t breathe!”...
I'm not sure either story would even show up when searching with Google these days (they didn't seem to; I was only directed to stories promoting mask use) though they came up with a European search engine. Given my experience, I'd say "Get the damn mask off!" might be added to the list of advice, together with cool water to drink and sitting down. Though I suppose sipping on water probably accomplishes that too.



EDITS: typos, clarifications of brain farts, additions of info I shouldn't assume people know

Last edited by aninkling on Sat 11 Jul , 2020 7:57 pm, edited 8 times in total.

_________________

Society can and does execute its own mandates, and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. ― John Stuart Mill


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aninkling
Post subject: Re: Escaping the Echo Chamber
Posted: Wed 24 Jun , 2020 6:51 pm
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I might or might not stop by again, so I might as well post something else that might be inflammatory to some. :D

I found it an interesting argument.

https://quillette.com/2020/06/19/the-pu ... same-time/
Quote:
The Purity Paradox: How Tolerance and Intolerance Increase at the Same Time
Quote:
How can intolerance be increasing when Western democracies are demonstrably more tolerant of historically marginalised identities than at any point in their history? It is, according to Douglas Murray, “a curiosity of the age” that as racial and sexual tolerance “at the very least appears to be better than it ever was, it is presented as though it has never been worse.” This paradox occurs because, as we address and overcome problems of intolerance and discrimination, we also expand the concept of intolerance to stigmatise new attitudes and behaviours. This makes it appear as if we are either making no progress at all or, worse, that we are becoming more intolerant. The upshot is that social problems appear increasingly irresolvable.

It is, of course, counter-intuitive to think of tolerance and intolerance increasing at the same time. Nevertheless, the idea is supported by a Harvard University study of human judgement, led by Professor Daniel Gilbert. In a series of experiments, Gilbert and his team of researchers showed that “people often respond to the decrease in the prevalence of a stimulus by increasing the concept of it.” He termed this phenomenon “prevalence-induced concept change.” In the first experiment, participants were shown 1,000 dots that varied on a continuum from very purple to very blue and then asked to identify the blue dots. After 200 trials, the number of blue dots was decreased for one group of participants but increased for another. In both cases, participants assessed the number of blue dots to be the same—the group with decreasing blue dots expanded their concept of blue to include dots they had previously excluded. This change was not altered by forewarning participants, by sudden decreases in prevalence, or by reversal in the direction of prevalence.

The same effect was noticed when participants were shown 800 human faces on a continuum of threatening to non-threatening...
Quote:
The implications of this research should give us pause for thought across a wide range of social and cultural issues, especially when it comes to assessing the prevalence over time of bias against marginalised groups. There is no doubt that discrimination against people on the basis of race, gender, or sexuality continues, the view that it is increasing is likely to be an effect of prevalence-induced concept change. The concept of what constitutes discrimination has expanded, and as marginalised communities have splintered into mutually antagonistic groups, overall hostility and inter-community tension has been exacerbated....

_________________

Society can and does execute its own mandates, and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. ― John Stuart Mill


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Post subject: Re: Escaping the Echo Chamber
Posted: Thu 25 Jun , 2020 4:22 pm
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That tolerance/intolerance study is very interesting. Thanks for that!

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aninkling
Post subject: Re: Escaping the Echo Chamber
Posted: Wed 01 Jul , 2020 12:21 pm
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This made me angry enough to post it here. Apparently this part editorial/ part book promotion was originally posted on Forbes (supposedly you can still get copies of it via the wayback machine). But it seems someone was so threatened by it that they pressured Forbes into taking it down. They haven't been entirely successful - it's been picked up by other sources, but probably those that many liberals will never read/see.

If someone or some group can't respond honestly with a rebuttal and let readers decide, instead of telling them what to think, then I'm all for thwarting their censorship by all means possible.

I've also quit reading any of the New York Times editorials, and am now viewing their news articles with a degree of skepticism, in protest for their young "woke" staffers forcing the resignation of an editor because publishing the Sen. Cotton editorial made them "feel unsafe." Either the Times restores my confidence by recommitting itself to objectivity and fairness, or they're off my list of news sources.

https://quillette.com/2020/06/30/on-beh ... ate-scare/
Quote:
On Behalf Of Environmentalists, I Apologize For The Climate Scare
written by Michael Shellenberger
Quote:
On behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologize for the climate scare we created over the last 30 years. Climate change is happening. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem. I may seem like a strange person to be saying all of this. I have been a climate activist for 20 years and an environmentalist for 30.

But as an energy expert asked by Congress to provide objective expert testimony, and invited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to serve as expert reviewer of its next assessment report, I feel an obligation to apologize for how badly we environmentalists have misled the public.

Here are some facts few people know:

Humans are not causing a “sixth mass extinction”

The Amazon is not “the lungs of the world”

Climate change is not making natural disasters worse

Fires have declined 25 percent around the world since 2003

The amount of land we use for meat—humankind’s biggest use of land—has declined by an area nearly as large as Alaska

The build-up of wood fuel and more houses near forests, not climate change, explain why there are more, and more dangerous, fires in Australia and California

Carbon emissions are declining in most rich nations and have been declining in Britain, Germany, and France since the mid-1970s

The Netherlands became rich, not poor while adapting to life below sea level

We produce 25 percent more food than we need and food surpluses will continue to rise as the world gets hotter

Habitat loss and the direct killing of wild animals are bigger threats to species than climate change

Wood fuel is far worse for people and wildlife than fossil fuels

Preventing future pandemics requires more not less “industrial” agriculture


I know that the above facts will sound like “climate denialism” to many people. But that just shows the power of climate alarmism.

In reality, the above facts come from the best-available scientific studies, including those conducted by or accepted by the IPCC, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and other leading scientific bodies.....
btw, I do enjoy the comments on Quillette. There is the occasional loon or extremist who's found the site but many commenters are reasonable and articulate. This comment made me laugh:
Quote:
"vast majority of scientists in a well-established field arrive at the same conclusion"

This quip has always made me chuckle a bit having worked in a university setting for 16 years. First of all what, exactly, is the conclusion? If we could define that very narrowly, then the statement may be true. But my observations lead me to believe that if you put two Ph.D’s in a room and ask them if it’s raining outside, you’ll walk away confused and the Ph.D’s will partner up to write a grant proposal.


And this one gets to the gist of the problem with many "hot" topics in science. The media tends to amplify the overconfident people/ self-promoters and ignores the scientists who admit to alternative explanations and uncertainties. I'm seeing a similar problem in some scientific papers, overconfidence in your findings, though that might be partly because space limitations are getting worse and so there's less room to say "our findings agree with those of so-and-so but disagree with this other guy. Here are the factors that might influence this." :
Quote:
The real problem he exposes stays implicit, which is how activism and alarmism are out of touch with real science. You can see why, since his resume shows he spent more time in his youth being a know-it-all activist than learning anything. Reminds me of a certain Swedish girl. This is the real difference between people at a young age - those who think they should learn versus those who think they should act. A lot of the idiocy today is because we’ve forgotten to put the latter in their place.

I have a friend in climate science (glaciology to be precise) and he has commented on how upset scientists feel about being misrepresented by both climate change activists (who make up their own more alarmist pseudoscience and want to enforce a political and economic program of dubious value) and climate change deniers. More precisely he says he thinks the activists are worst because they can do more harm. The word on the street is that a there are lot of scientists out there who really dislike St Greta of Arc for popularising wrong conclusions and claiming they are supported by science, and essentially turning a scientific issue into a religious one.

And an excellent article worth drawing attention to. Too many people have forgotten that there are many perspectives and experiences and equate "the worst" with "everyone." And these same people absolutely adore simplistic solutions. :
https://quillette.com/2020/06/30/polici ... nomie-era/
Quote:
Policing in the Anomie Era
Quote:
We bounced along a pitted dirt road on an Indigenous reserve in Northern Ontario. As I leaned on my horn to convince a bored looking, semi-feral stray dog to move out of our path, I chatted with my passenger. She was a young Indigenous woman who worked at our police detachment as an administration assistant....

... Unfortunately, this potential success story would end in failure. Within a year, Grace’s parents had returned to drinking and she was forced to choose between withdrawing from school and returning to care for her children or losing them to foster care. She chose the former and the intergenerational cycle of defeat continued.

Activists invariably claim “racism” or a “lack of funding” are behind stories like these. But these are simplistic characterizations of complex problems. .... What undermined her were deep-rooted social pathologies that simply cannot be solved through corporate diversity programs, increased government funding, or vituperative Twitter campaigns that seek to defenestrate those who fail to stay current with the malleable tenets of the zeitgeist.

As a now senior Canadian police officer in my third decade of service, I have reflected on this experience quite a bit recently. ....

As calls to “defund police” continue, academics, activists, politicians, and other public figures are re-evaluating the role law enforcement plays in liberal democratic societies. In and of itself, this isn’t a bad thing.

.... Mental health provides one example. Since the 1970s, virtually every jurisdiction in the Western world began the process of deinstitutionalization, which saw those suffering from psychiatric disorders treated within the community rather than warehoused in asylums. While this was a humane evolution, it also resulted in police officers becoming the default option when a person with a psychiatric disorder suffers emotional distress....

Another area in which activists and police leaders would no doubt find common ground relates to police accountability....

...When anti-racism activists cite evidence of systemic racism, they invariably point to statistics that demonstrate marginalized people make up a disproportionate share of those involved adversely with the justice system. In Canada, this is reflected in the oft-cited statistic that Indigenous Canadians make up five percent of the population but now account for 30 percent of the federal inmate population, up significantly since the year 2000. Activists claim this proves that systemic racism not only exists, but is growing, and they identify “over-policing” as the root cause of this disparity. But are Indigenous communities really over-policed?...

A closer examination of the facts would suggest otherwise. The Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, for instance, found that on-reserve Indigenous people in Canada are charged with fewer property offences than non-Indigenous people but more violent ones.1 ... I

In reality, the underlying cause of high rates of Indigenous incarceration results from higher rates of criminality. That’s not a moral judgement. Toxic combinations of poverty, geographic isolation, family breakdown, and substance abuse underpin this pathology. ...




btw, glad you appreciated the previous article, Al.

_________________

Society can and does execute its own mandates, and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. ― John Stuart Mill


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aninkling
Post subject: Re: Escaping the Echo Chamber
Posted: Thu 09 Jul , 2020 3:30 pm
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Couldn't resist posting this. Massey College caught my eye, as a fan of Robertson Davies.
He never struck me as someone who would have caved to the woke mob. I wonder what he would have had to say?
https://quillette.com/2020/07/09/it-was ... it-happen/
Quote:
It doesn’t take much to get cancelled these days. Last month, my turn came around. The experience was unpleasant, but also completely ludicrous. And I learned a lot. I learned how easily an institution will cave to a mob. I learned how quickly the authorities will run for cover, notwithstanding the lip service they may pay to principles of free speech.

After all, they’re terrified. They’re afraid that if they don’t beg forgiveness and promise to do better, they’ll be next at the guillotine.

I was cancelled by one of Canada’s quainter institutions, a University of Toronto graduate residential school called Massey College....

The college has an appendage called the Quadrangle Society, which is basically a jumped-up book club. Its members, of whom there are hundreds, are drawn from the non-academic world. Although membership is by invitation only, it is not terribly exclusive, and nobody is quite sure of its purpose. It is a WASPish take on what once might have been called a “salon”—back in the days when words like that could be used unironically without provoking eye rolls.

Last winter, I was asked to join....

I am a journalist, now mostly retired, who for several decades served as a senior editor, and then an opinion columnist, for The Globe and Mail, the closest thing Canada has to a New York Times. Some of my opinions were controversial—or at least what passes for controversial in this country....



“I thought Massey had just resolved to educate its members about racism and microaggression and do better to create a safe and welcoming environment for marginalised people,” one complainant wrote. “And then we invited Margaret Wente to join us? Seriously? How are my friends and colleagues supposed to feel safe sitting across from her at dinner?”

Dozens of scholars threatened to resign from the college if my appointment were allowed to stand. A few did so pre-emptively, in fact. They included Alissa Trotz, director of the University of Toronto’s Women & Gender Studies Institute. “Margaret Wente is someone who has demonstrated consistent and outright hostility to questions of equity, women and gender studies and anti-racism,” she wrote in her letter of resignation....


The solution?
https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/07/0 ... s-madness/
Quote:
In light of the chaos happening in so many areas of our culture, I am proposing a new strategy: herd sanity.

Herd sanity is an idea, invented by me, whereby enough people remain calm and rational that stupid, insane ideas can no longer spread too far.

Once this level of mass common sense is achieved in a population, any stupid idea like ‘Speech is violence’, or ‘Defund the police’, or ‘Listen to Sadiq Khan’ will only be able to get so far without running into a sane, normal person and immediately dying out....
Yeah, it's humor and exaggerated but probably the only thing that will work .... making fun of the mob. And I'm sure they'll be outraged. One thing I've noticed the "woke" do not have is a sense of humor. In particular, they have about zero ability to laugh at themselves and get a sense of perspective. They do have a lot of anger, though.

Just a letter from some writers and intellectuals saying "let's support free speech" was enough to stir them to new heights of outrage.
https://reason.com/2020/07/08/the-react ... necessary/
Quote:
The Reaction to the Harper's Letter on Cancel Culture Proves Why It Was Necessary
I was one of the 153 signers and am a veteran of the Twitter wars. But even I was taken aback by the swift, virulent response.
Interesting letter, btw - common cause between some very different people.



And I've given up hoping for any sanity regarding the coronavirus epidemic in the U.S. It seems no one understands the concept of balancing competing harms any more. The safety-above-all culture has even grown to the point where we'll destroy kids' educations in the hope of preventing one or two deaths (never mind that the kids will be exposed to this virus anyway at the grocery store or WalMart or.....) .
It looks like a significant number of parents are reluctant to send their kids back to school and the CDC's guidance for school reopening is so extreme many schools will probably shut back down as soon as they reopen. Even at the college level, some professors are already giving up at the multitude of restrictions imposed by the administration and switching to fully online classes, though they know the students don't learn half as well.

Does anyone even realize there were several hundred deaths due to influenza among children some "normal" flu years? Or that COVID-19 is turning out to be less dangerous to kids overall than flu? Or that online education turned out to be a complete mess for most? Or that kids in some other countries are already back in school - or never left it, in the case of Sweden - without major issues? Without masks, incidentally, in Sweden, Denmark and Norway, as far as I know. ;) I don't think any of them went in for the mask thing, in general.

Anyway, it should be interesting, not to mention depressing as hell. US K-12 schools were already turning out many kids who are, to put it charitably, very weak academically compared to students from other countries.

Between this and destroying the economy, it's going to be an interesting old future, especially for the poor. Or the young people just growing up or getting their careers started. I wonder if they'll thank the world (and the media, constantly pursuing their ratings with spin*) for what it's done to them.

Will the young, impressionable children who were frightened into thinking they'll kill someone if they hug them?


*One example:

The spin:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2 ... us/?rand=1
Quote:
Weeks later, the Sunshine State has emerged as a coronavirus epicenter. Nearly 1 out of every 100 residents is infected with the virus, hospital intensive care units are full or filling up and big-name visitors who chose Florida for their first post-isolation events are now mired in questions and controversies about safety.
vs. a local news source:
https://www.clickorlando.com/news/local ... increases/
Quote:
News 6 reached out to AdventHealth and Orlando Health, the regions largest healthcare providers, to verify if the state-run dashboard is an accurate reflection of local hospital capacity.

Orlando Health Director of Public Affairs Kena Lewis said ...

“In mid-March, as patient volumes declined and fewer beds were needed, Orlando Health began consolidating units to reduce the number of beds – including ICU beds – that were staffed and in operation. The current operational bed count is what we report to AHCA and what appears on their website. That number is not Orlando Health’s total bed capacity. Across all of our operations, we have nearly 3,300 beds. Nearly 200 of those are ICU beds and we have the capacity to surge up to 500 ICU beds if it becomes necessary,” Lewis said in an email. “We are carefully monitoring the increases in patient volumes. If the need for additional beds grows, Orlando Health will re-open units and make other necessary adjustments in order to meet the needs of the community.

In response to inquiries, AdventHealth issued this statement:

“AdventHealth’s facilities across Central Florida have sufficient capacity to care for patients, including those with COVID-19. Our hospitals are designed in such a way that spaces are flexible and expandable. We have sufficient supplies of ventilators, monitors and other specialized equipment in order to quickly convert spaces in the hospital to both standard and ICU level rooms. We did a significant amount of planning in March and April...



btw, it does seem that Forbes deleted Schellenberger's editorial without explanation:
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/john-r ... -mea-culpa
Quote:
Sorry. Did I say “in Forbes?” Alas, if you go there now you get a terse “This page is no longer active. We regret any inconvenience.” In the fast-vanishing spirit of fair play, I contacted Forbes to see if it was just a technical glitch. Nyet, tovarisch.

Their initial wary response asked “the angle of your column” and suggested “a brief call for us to connect.” I retorted that “the ‘angle’ of my column has no bearing on the reasons for your decision” and asked bluntly “Was it because you discovered a factual error? Because of protests from subscribers? Because of protests from within the organization? Because something in it struck you as legally problematic? It’s a pretty major decision. I assume someone fairly senior in the organization took it, and that this person knows why. Please ask them, and tell me what they said.

Their reply, which would make a seasoned politician or bureaucrat blush, read, in its entirety, “You can attribute the below statement to a Forbes spokesperson. Forbes requires its contributors to adhere to strict editorial guidelines. This story did not follow those guidelines, and was removed.”

I responded tartly: “Thanks. But obviously this statement raises fresh questions, particularly: 1. Which guidelines did it not follow? 2. In what way did it not follow them? 3. How often do you remove a story for violating those guidelines?”

As you may imagine, that inquiry went down the memory hole...

_________________

Society can and does execute its own mandates, and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. ― John Stuart Mill


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aninkling
Post subject: Re: Escaping the Echo Chamber
Posted: Mon 13 Jul , 2020 6:30 pm
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The full George Floyd transcripts:
https://www.twincities.com/2020/07/09/g ... full-here/

I found it pretty interesting to read them and then read what the Washington Post and New York Times wants you to think about them. It's pretty obvious from the transcripts that Floyd was high on something. Some of them seem to be trying to help Floyd and calm him down earlier. The officers had already called for an ambulance, then upgraded it to code 3. Toward the end, they're trying to resuscitate him when they don't get a pulse.

A sample:
Quote:
J.Alexander Kueng:
I'm going to hold on to that foryou. Stand up .

George Floyd:
Please,man . [inaudible 00:06:01,Mr.Officer, like right now , I'm like,"What'sgoing
J. AlexanderKueng:
Yeah and look it, you're still able to reach your side. You'remakingmenervous.
George Floyd :
All right, look at my wrist , look at it.
J.Alexander Kueng:
Yeah , got you We'll fix allthat. We'll fix allthat , but you got to walk with me.
George Floyd:
Ouchy.
Thomas Lane:

What are, are youon somethingrightnow ?
George Floyd :
No, nothing .
Alexander Kueng
Because you acting real erratic .

George Floyd:
I'm scared,man.
Thomas Lane:
Let's go, lets go
George Floyd :
God,man

J.Alexander Kueng
You got foam around yourmouth, too ?

Axon Body_3_Video_2020-05-25_2008

Transcript byRev.com

Page 12 of 57

27 -CR -20-12951

Filed in DistrictCourt

StateofMinnesota
7/7/2020 11:00 AM

This transcript was exported on Jun 15, 2020 - view latest version here.
George Floyd:
Yes. Yes, I was hoopingearlier .
Thomas Lane:
Okay

GeorgeFloyd :
Man,why the...Allright, let me calm down. I'm feeling better now . Okay, Mr.Officer, willyou do me
one favor,man?
J. Alexander Kueng:
We're going to talk about that oncewe get to the car.
Thomas Lane :
Get to the car,man.
J. Alexander Kueng:
Stopmoving around.

George Floyd :
God dang, man. Oh,man .God, don't leave me,man. Please, man. Don't leave me,man Please ,oh,
please don't leave me,man.
Thomas Lane:
Did we lock that door(crosstalk 00:06:45

Alexander Kueng:
Yeah, just unlock the door forme.
George Floyd:
I didn't do anything.
J. Alexander Kueng:
Stand up. Stop falling down.
George Floyd :
I'm claustrophobic, man .

J. Alexander Kueng:
Stand up
George Floyd :
I'm claustrophobic .
Quote:
Take a seat !
George Floyd :
Please! Please! No, inaudible 00:10:10 .
Kueng:
Take a seat.
George Floyd:
I can't choke, I can't breathe Mr. Officer ! Please! Please !
Kueng:
Fine.
George Floyd
Mywrist,mywristman. Okay, okay. I want to lay on the ground. I want to lay on the ground. I want to
lay on the ground!
Lane:
your getting in the squad.
George Floyd :
want to lay on the ground ! I'm going down,
Kueng:

going down, I'm going down.

Take a squat
George Floyd
I'm going down
Speaker 9
Bro, you about to have a heartattack and shitman, get in the car!
I know I can't breathe. I can't breathe
Lane:

crosstalk 00:10:18 ] .

Get him on the ground .
George Floyd:
Let go ofmeman , I can't breathe. I can't breathe.
Lane:
Take a seat


It doesn't mean that Chauvin didn't screw up by holding Floyd down by the neck. It does mean that the media has, as usual, fed us all a simple story and reality is messier.






While I'm here, I might as well add this since it's nice to see someone else fed up with some of the stuff that's being promoted about COVID-19. Some of the translation is not great (viruses translated as virusi is an obvious one) and I think some subtleties might also have been lost along the way,* but he has some good points:

*To clarify, I don't think he's saying below that most people necessarily have immunity to this particular coronavirus (though it's possible some do), but mostly that the media et al. are treating this virus like no one's ever seen a coronavirus before, when scientists know plenty about coronaviruses and we even have a few already causing colds in people.


https://medium.com/@vernunftundrichtigk ... e6db5ba809
Quote:
The original article was published in the Swiss magazine Weltwoche (World Week) on June 10th. The author, Beda M Stadler is the former director of the Institute for Immunology at the University of Bern, a biologist and professor emeritus. Stadler is an important medical professional in Switzerland, he also likes to use provoking language, which should not deter you from the extremely important points he makes....



Why everyone was wrong
The coronavirus is slowly retreating. What actually happened in the past few weeks? The experts have missed basic connections. The immune response against the virus is much stronger than we thought.

By Beda M Stadler

This is not an accusation, but a ruthless taking stock [of the current situation]. I could slap myself, because I looked at Sars-CoV2- way too long with panic. I am also somewhat annoyed with many of my immunology colleagues who so far have left the discussion about Covid-19 to virologist and epidemiologist. I feel it is time to criticise some of the main and completely wrong public statements about this virus....
Quote:
...Many veterinary doctors were therefore annoyed by this claim of novelty, as they have been vaccinating cats, dogs, pigs, and cows for years against coronaviruses.

2. The fairy tale of no immunity

From the World Health Organisation (WHO) to every Facebook-virologist, everyone claimed this virus was particularly dangerous, because there was no immunity against it, because it was a novel virus. Even Anthony Fauci, the most important advisor to the Trump administration noted at the beginning at every public appearance that the danger of the virus lay in the fact that there was no immunity against it. Tony and I often sat next to each other at immunology seminars at the National Institute of Health in Bethesda in the US, because we worked in related fields back then. So for a while I was pretty uncritical of his statements, since he was a respectable colleague of mine. The penny dropped only when I realised that the first commercially available antibody test [for Sars-CoV-2] was put together from an old antibody test that was meant to detect Sars-1. ....

That’s when I realised that the entire world simply claimed that there was no immunity, but in reality, nobody had a test ready to prove such a statement. That wasn’t science, but pure speculation based on a gut feeling that was then parroted by everyone....
Yep. And there is a reason several companies went straight to developing vaccines and that's because it's quite likely you can make one against a coronavirus that causes an acute respiratory disease. If this was something like malaria, they would have been far more cautious about the prospects.

Not to mention that they already had provisional vaccine against SARS-Cov1, so it was just a matter of switching out part of the vaccine virus.

Another thing no one wants to mention is that immunity from a vaccine is rarely as good or long lasting as the immunity you get from the infection. Though of course they have the great benefit of providing immunity without the hazards of getting sick.

Or that contact with tiny amounts of a microorganism often gives you little boosters once you've become immune. So your immunity will probably last longer when you're walking around in a society where the infection is still around, but vanish faster if you're never exposed to it again. This is probably one of the reasons some of the traditional vaccines (measles et al.) don't seem to last quite as long as they did in the past.



Though there's one point I disagree with him on, probably because he's working off old knowledge. When they were looking at the aftermath of the H1N1 "swine flu" pandemic, people realized that these seasonal respiratory viruses don't actually stop in the summer, as people used to think. The cases usually drop way off, but they don't necessarily end. So it's a bit tough to predict exactly what a new coronavirus will do.




EDIT:
btw, his remarks about the names of SARS-CoV-1 (the cause of SARS, which was a nasty disease) and SARS-CoV2 caused a real penny drop moment for me. I've always wondered about 2 things.

1. Why they picked a name for the virus that's so close to SARV-Cov1. Why not something completely different? For instance, MERS virus wasn't called SARS-Cov-2, and none of the other human coronaviruses are named anything similar. Also, WHO is big on picking virus names that are not alarmist. So it always puzzled me that they allowed SARS-Cov2.

2. Why all the earlier freaking out and closing of borders and calls for containment/ eradication? From the start, outside China this mostly looked like other highly contagious respiratory diseases that move around freely because so many of the infections are mild or asymptomatic. And everyone knows perfectly well that's not the sort of virus that can be contained.

Also, we have other coronaviruses already and they mostly cause serious pneumonia in the elderly and young infants, don't cause much of any illness in kids, etc.

And most of the early evidence suggested this virus was probably going to be similar, with 2 possible exceptions -Italy, which has nasty flu outbreaks too, so could be a special case, and Wuhan - where the Chinese said there was an earlier strain, which was nastier, that seemed to evolve into a milder strain that took off and spread. And also where pollution is dreadful, most of the patients were elderly, and medical care during the outbreak definitely seemed to be substandard - which could all be factors in making the outbreak worse. Though it's worth noting that the case fatality rate was much lower in the rest of China than Wuhan, which was always a bit odd.

Anyway, I explained some of the exaggerated response to myself as "well, the world's different these days; society was different back in the 60s during the last flu pandemic that affected older people." But I'm starting to wonder if there was more reason for the politicians' and WHO's freak-out than that.

Just speculation really, and it makes no real difference to the pandemic now. But it makes me more open to some speculation about the virus that I pretty much dismissed earlier and, put together with various other puzzle pieces, makes me wonder if Luc Montagnier* was onto something with his remarks on SARS-CoV2 and we got rather lucky.

*French scientist whose lab discovered HIV-1, though Robert Gallo's lab did some important work too. There was a huge fight between Fauci/Gallo and Montagnier's group back in the day. As I understand it (didn't follow it closely and it was many years ago), the Americans didn't want to share the honor or the patents with the French, who actually found the virus first. It all seems to have blown over these days and they admit each others' contributions, but it was quite a story back then. Interesting story for anyone who thinks scientists (including Fauci) are some sort of selfless saints and not subject to the usual human failings. Including a big ego in some cases. (I suspect the modeler Neil Ferguson is definitely a big ego kind of guy. :) )

_________________

Society can and does execute its own mandates, and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. ― John Stuart Mill


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aninkling
Post subject: Re: Escaping the Echo Chamber
Posted: Tue 14 Jul , 2020 12:36 pm
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btw, I have to say I didn't think much of Fauci's claim to Congress that he's just a medical adviser and everyone else has to figure out the rest. Nope, sorry. If you're acting as a public health official and giving advice the media hangs on and treats as gospel, that's part of your job, deciding how to balance the different harms.

Or leave it to local public health officials, who understand the situation in their county.




Also, since I don't like letting Google's search results manipulate what we're expected to think about people, here's a fair and, as far as I know, truthful Discover magazine story for non-scientists about Judy Mikovits from 2012:
https://www.discovermagazine.com/health ... e-and-xmrv
Quote:
Chasing the Shadow Virus: Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and XMRV
In one of the most bruising science debacles of the decade, researchers hoped to track down the cause of chronic fatigue syndrome — but ended up studying an artifact created in the lab.
Mikovits now stars in a video about COVID-19 called Plandemic, which was banned by YouTube. I took a look at the transcript and most of Plandemic is pretty nonsensical, with the occasional grain of truth, which is pretty typical of conspiracy theories. Sometimes scientists do get a little weird, as can anyone. And Mikovits has gone through a fair bit and left the scientific world after XMRV. But her earlier research is solid enough, as far as I know, and still published, so claiming she was always a loony or implying that her work on XMRV was the work of a crackpot (as some sites do), is not fair.

Since I believe sunlight is the best disinfectant and banning things just makes people think there's something to them, here's a link to the Plandemic transcript. It contains some snippets of the criticisms of Plandemic, from Science/AAAS:
https://frankreport.com/2020/05/09/tran ... -magazine/

The entire criticism from Science is here:
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/05 ... auci-viral

I generally agree with what Science says but I do think they're trying to whitewash themselves with this:
Quote:
From Plandemic: Interviewer: At the height of her career, Dr. Mikovits published a blockbuster article in the journal Science. The controversial article sent shock waves through the scientific community, as it revealed that the common use of animal and human fetal tissues was unleashing devastating plagues of chronic diseases.
Quote:
[Science: The paper revealed nothing of the sort; it only claimed to show a link between one condition, CFS [Chronic Fatigue Syndrome], and a mouse retrovirus.]
Science is really minimizing the potential impact of this paper, which they published - back when they still published very little, and what they did was only the most significant articles (they've since expanded to a whole family of journals). And I'm pretty sure I remember a major write-up on the discovery in their nontechnical section too.

The article was indeed a blockbuster, as you can read in the Discover article, and I remember at the time. And, yes, the "common use of animal and human fetal tissues was unleashing devastating plagues of chronic diseases." is hyperbolic, and also the findings turned out not to be true. But, if the research had held up, the impact of her paper could have been pretty major.

These things happen sometimes. Science's reviewers took a hard look at Mikovits' research on XMRV and it passed their very high standards, so they published her paper. Mikovits defended her hypothesis for a while but she's an author on a later paper that described why the results turned out not to be true. Whatever Mikovits became later, the retracted XMRV article is just a part of how science works.

I also have a few other quibbles with Science - for instance, that whoever wrote it focuses on a technicality - that Mikovits's PhD thesis wasn't significant in AIDS treatment (which wouldn't surprise me) - but ignores the fact that she did do research on AIDS treatment and publish it (discussed in the Discovery magazine article, or search PubMed). Or they call her a lab tech when, by my reckoning, she would have been a PhD student at the time - "lab tech" seems calculated to minimize her role.


Just FYI: Mikovits's claims about Fauci, if they were true, are not trivial - it would have been a very large breach of ethics on his part, and serious scientific misconduct. You are absolutely not allowed to pass on a paper you've been asked to review to your colleagues working on the same subject. That sort of thing is basically cheating, sort of like industrial espionage. Hence the big deal.








Also, it's very much worth looking at different news media. The virus is indeed spreading (what else would you expect, until there's significant natural or vaccine immunity?) and maybe too fast in some places (thanks, large gatherings, including protesters) but some stories seem to be exaggerated.:
https://www.fox35orlando.com/news/fox-3 ... -19-report
Quote:
The Florida Department of Health released its daily coronavirus testing report showing a statewide positivity rate of 11 percent...

Countless labs have reported a 100 percent positivity rate, which means every single person tested was positive. Other labs had very high positivity rates. FOX 35 found that testing sites like Centra Care reported that 83 people were tested and all tested positive. Then, NCF Diagnostics in Alachua reported 88 percent of tests were positive.

Not likely, as Fox correctly observed.
So:
Quote:
FOX 35 News [contacted] every local location mentioned in the report.

The report showed that Orlando Health had a 98 percent positivity rate. However, when FOX 35 News contacted the hospital, they confirmed errors in the report. Orlando Health's positivity rate is only 9.4 percent, not 98 percent as in the report.

The report also showed that the Orlando Veteran’s Medical Center had a positivity rate of 76 percent. A spokesperson for the VA told FOX 35 News on Tuesday that this does not reflect their numbers and that the positivity rate for the center is actually 6 percent.

_________________

Society can and does execute its own mandates, and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. ― John Stuart Mill


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aninkling
Post subject: Re: Escaping the Echo Chamber
Posted: Thu 16 Jul , 2020 12:53 pm
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Joined: Fri 10 Aug , 2012 4:42 pm
 
Related matters - gain of function studies and should they be funded, also whether it's a good idea to be funding labs in China that have a poor track record for biosecurity.

https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opin ... bate-34502
Quote:
Lab-Made Coronavirus Triggers Debate
The creation of a chimeric SARS-like virus has scientists discussing the risks of gain-of-function research.
Jef Akst
Nov 16, 2015

Update (March 11, 2020): On social media and news outlets, a theory has circulated that the coronavirus at the root of the COVID-19 outbreak originated in a research lab. Scientists say there is no evidence that the SARS-CoV-2 virus escaped from a lab.

Ralph Baric, an infectious-disease researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, last week (November 9) published a study on his team’s efforts to engineer a virus with the surface protein of the SHC014 coronavirus, found in horseshoe bats in China, and the backbone of one that causes human-like severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in mice. The hybrid virus could infect human airway cells and caused disease in mice, according to the team’s results, which were published in Nature Medicine.

The results demonstrate the ability of the SHC014 surface protein to bind and infect human cells, validating concerns that this virus—or other coronaviruses found in bat species—may be capable of making the leap to people without first evolving in an intermediate host, Nature reported. They also reignite a debate about whether that information justifies the risk of such work, known as gain-of-function research. ...


https://www.newsweek.com/controversial- ... ic-1500503
Quote:
Just one day after the U.S. surpassed China to become the country with the highest number of Covid-19 cases, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency updated its assessment of the origin of the novel coronavirus to reflect that it may have been accidentally released from an infectious diseases lab, Newsweek has learned.

The report, dated March 27 and corroborated by two U.S. officials, reveals that U.S. intelligence revised its January assessment in which it "judged that the outbreak probably occurred naturally" to now include the possibility that the new coronavirus emerged "accidentally" due to "unsafe laboratory practices" in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, where the pathogen was first observed late last year. The classified report, titled "China: Origins of COVID-19 Outbreak Remain Unknown," ruled out that the disease was genetically engineered or released intentionally as a biological weapon....


btw, there's some suggestive evidence for SARS-CoV2 adapting to humans the usual way:
Quote:
Curr Biol . 2020 Apr 6;30(7):1346-1351.e2.
Probable Pangolin Origin of SARS-CoV-2 Associated with the COVID-19 Outbreak
Tao Zhang 1 , Qunfu Wu 1 , Zhigang Zhang 2
Affiliations

An outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by the 2019 novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) began in the city of Wuhan in China and has widely spread worldwide. Currently, it is vital to explore potential intermediate hosts of SARS-CoV-2 to control COVID-19 spread. Therefore, we reinvestigated published data from pangolin lung samples from which SARS-CoV-like CoVs were detected by Liu et al. [1]. We found genomic and evolutionary evidence of the occurrence of a SARS-CoV-2-like CoV (named Pangolin-CoV) in dead Malayan pangolins. Pangolin-CoV is 91.02% and 90.55% identical to SARS-CoV-2 and BatCoV RaTG13, respectively, at the whole-genome level. Aside from RaTG13, Pangolin-CoV is the most closely related CoV to SARS-CoV-2. The S1 protein of Pangolin-CoV is much more closely related to SARS-CoV-2 than to RaTG13. Five key amino acid residues involved in the interaction with human ACE2 are completely consistent between Pangolin-CoV and SARS-CoV-2, but four amino acid mutations are present in RaTG13. Both Pangolin-CoV and RaTG13 lost the putative furin recognition sequence motif at S1/S2 cleavage site that can be observed in the SARS-CoV-2. Conclusively, this study suggests that pangolin species are a natural reservoir of SARS-CoV-2-like CoVs.

Keywords: COVID-19; SARS-CoV-2; origin; pangolin.

https://thediplomat.com/2020/05/why-wou ... wuhan-lab/
Quote:
Why Would the US Have Funded the Controversial Wuhan Lab?

Reports about the connection between the U.S. National Institutes of Health and the Wuhan Institute of Virology risk feeding conspiracy theories about the origins of COVID-19.
Quote:
Newsweek recently put out some surprising reports that the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) had funded the controversial Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). The WIV is the level four research facility suspected by some of being a possible source for the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. ...

... funding for the WIV occurred in two phases. The first took place from 2014 to 2019, through a $3.7 million project for collecting and studying bat coronaviruses. This work was largely led by Dr. Zhengli Shi, known to many as “batwoman” for her years investigating caves in search of new bat viruses. The second phase began shortly after, with another $3.7 million. Unlike the first, this project appears to have included work on “gain-of-function”: research that investigates how a virus can gain the ability to infect a new type of animal.

Anyone with a vague sense of current events would, understandably, be concerned that COVID-19 might have been produced through this research. The connections to the NIH would also be unsettling, offering the possibility that the U.S. government may be complicit, having unnecessarily “outsourced” dangerous research. Although strong denials by both Chinese and American officials and several pieces of scientific research have concluded COVID-19 is not man-made, the connection between the NIH and WIV still behooves critical examination. Why would the NIH want to fund the WIV to begin with?...

_________________

Society can and does execute its own mandates, and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. ― John Stuart Mill


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aninkling
Post subject: Re: Escaping the Echo Chamber
Posted: Thu 16 Jul , 2020 1:02 pm
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Joined: Fri 10 Aug , 2012 4:42 pm
 
More directly related to echo chambers.
https://quillette.com/2020/07/14/the-de ... ari-weiss/
Quote:
The Defenestration of Bari Weiss
written by Brian Stewart

In London’s Hyde Park, the famous Speakers’ Corner stands as a tribute to the victory of John Stuart Mill, the most prominent thinker in the liberal tradition. In the occasionally stultifying intellectual climate of Victorian England, Mill led a successful campaign for the right to protest in London’s public parks. His main concern was not government censorship but the chilling effect of social conformity. In his famous essay On Liberty, Mill advocated for a culture that offered a rich diversity of viewpoints that would enable the pursuit of truth...
Quote:
Mill recognized that the tyranny of groupthink posed lethal dangers to individual behavior in an ostensibly free society. “Our merely social intolerance kills no one, roots out no opinions, but induces men to disguise them, or to abstain from any effort at their diffusion.” The indirect force of orthodoxy and peer pressure fashions “the mind-forg’d manacles” (in William Blake’s phrase) that render society mute on questions of vital public importance just as surely as official censorship. The ultimate objective of cancel culture seems less to cancel the actual target of abuse than it is pour encourager les autres. Mill believed fiercely in the virtues of free inquiry and open debate, and he wanted to uphold the kind of society that gave a podium to those virtues...

The principle of free speech is not quite at issue here. Rather, it is the dignity and necessity of intellectual engagement. ...
Quote:
Nowadays the institutions of American life—the durable forms of society, as Yuval Levin has defined the concept—that have traditionally instilled respect and a degree of reverence for Mill’s virtues are being hollowed out by forces across the political spectrum. More and more, the prevailing forces on the Left and Right have jettisoned any attachment to the social structures responsible for fashioning individuals into citizens. This crisis of dissolution can be seen across the range of society, from schools and churches to political parties and business enterprises....
Comments are also worth reading, and those that are dodgy are fairly criticized by other commenters.






Stumbled across an example of a fair mask article below:

https://www.livescience.com/are-face-ma ... pread.html
Quote:
Do face masks really reduce coronavirus spread? Experts have mixed answers.
The research on whether masks mechanically stop influenza viruses, rhinoviruses, and seasonal coronaviruses from people with symptoms is especially interesting if it holds up, though it doesn't address the million dollar question of whether they do anything at all for asymptomatic people.

A few notes, though:
1) They don't discuss possible harms from masks in some circumstances (see, for instance the Japanese news article quoting an emergency physician I posted earlier, or the potential for increased risk to the mask wearer from touching their faces to adjust the mask in the real world. Or the fact that people with certain medical conditions shouldn't be wearing some types of masks, and very young children/ infants * shouldn't be wearing them at all), 2) They don't make it clear that some results can be due to chance, or mention whether any of their studies reached statistical significance, 3) They don't discuss issues from wearing masks all day and not changing them, like a build-up of moisture and bacteria from breathing, 4) They don't consider other effects, like what happens when scaled-up orders mandate masks for millions of people, some of them buy surgical masks, and there's not enough for hospitals, where they're more likely to provide a benefit. And what about all the discarded masks in parking lots and along roadways? Great infection control there, put a mask across your face for a while then toss it out for someone else to encounter. Worth noting that, if you mask everyone, there are going to be plenty of other things people may be infected with and breathing out, sometimes without knowing it.

*https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/ ... ronavirus/


What most people probably don't realize is that people have been doing studies, writing reviews, and arguing about the usefulness of masks for infection control for decades. There are some who can even make a good argument for how surgical masks in hospitals are mostly just tradition and do little good - except for protecting the surgical team from splashes of blood and bodily fluids, obviously.
EDIT: I can't find the articles and arguments right now, with search engines redirecting people to officially approved information on masks, even if you put in umpteen keywords that should take you to the right place - but here's a not terribly old scientific review article that claims there's not enough evidence to be sure masks are helpful in surgery.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4480558/
Quote:
Intuition would suggest that facemasks offer a physical barrier preventing the emanation of droplets from the oral or nasal passages and therefore satisfy the efficacy requirement of the evidence ladder. However, there are a number of different hypotheses as to why this may not be the case. ‘Venting’ is a phenomenon whereby air leaks at the interface between mask and face which can act to disperse potential contaminants originating from the pharynx.5 The accumulation of moisture, during prolonged usage, may exacerbate this problem by increasing resistance to air flow through the filter itself. Moisture accumulation is also thought to facilitate the movement of contaminants through the material of the mask itself by capillary action. These bacteria can subsequently be dislodged by movement. Friction at the face/mask interface has also been demonstrated to disperse skin scales which can further contribute towards wound contamination.6

In the modern era, there has also been a scarcity of experimental evidence to support the effectiveness of facemasks in the prevention of surgical site infections. The earliest retrospective studies7 failed to demonstrate any statistically significant improvement in surgical site infection rates following the use of masks. Indeed, the latest National Institute for Health and Care Excellence guidelines on the matter do not require operating staff to wear a mask in theatre.8 This decision was based primarily upon the findings of a Cochrane systematic review.9...

btw, beware of anyone who tries to reason that, because they found aerosolized viruses in hospitals full of very sick people in China, aerosols of SARS-Cov2 are being put out by asymptomatic people. It's not unusual for a virus to be mostly spread in droplets by healthy people with symptoms, but to become an aerosol issue in critically ill patients when it's basically running rampant in the body.





Also, I'm noticing a disturbing trend for retracting COVID studies that are not perfect. Even the studies that I considered crap, where they cherry-pick certain societies where they wore masks and claim masks work - let them stay published, just point out their flaws.
Quote:
Editor's Note (June 2 at 11:30 a.m.): A paper discussed below has been retracted by the journal the Annals of Internal Medicine. The authors wrote that their statistical methods could not determine whether the findings were reliable, making the results of the small study "uninterpretable." The study had found that surgical and cotton masks do not effectively contain viral droplets containing SARS-CoV-2. Subsequent research has suggested [emphasis mine] that face masks are an effective method for containing the spread of the virus, used along with staying six feet apart from other people.
This is bullshit. Every scientist knew you can't do meaningful statistics on a study like this one but that doesn't mean you retract it and say it isn't real. It just means you do more research and you put more weight on a study like the one mentioned in the article. You retract a paper because you find that either 1) something is a big issue, like the authors completely blew it with their methods or found something else was confounding the results or 2) there's good evidence that someone faked a result. Otherwise, the study just goes in the pile of "well, other research shows this doesn't hold up." If I had a penny for every statistically weak (and still published) study I've read....

Incidentally, the editor of this site is also being disingenuous with the "suggested" (it doesn't mean an issue is settled_ - even the 6 ft rule is being questioned. See the UK, for instance, where they're doing a somewhat better job about letting people know what's solid and what isn't. And no one really knows whether 30 asymptomatic children in a classroom, day after day, would end up being significantly more dangerous than 15 children sitting 6 feet apart. Sometimes you've just got to make a choice between theoretical harms, like the value of hydrid vs traditional classrooms on the one hand, and classroom density for children, while considering their relative susceptibility to getting seriously sick and importance (or not) in passing on the virus to others.

Last edited by aninkling on Sat 25 Jul , 2020 4:53 pm, edited 1 time in total.

_________________

Society can and does execute its own mandates, and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. ― John Stuart Mill


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aninkling
Post subject: Re: Escaping the Echo Chamber
Posted: Sun 19 Jul , 2020 6:31 pm
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Well, here's a major screw-up. In case you haven't heard:
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/4 ... sting-data
Quote:
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) acknowledged Thursday that it is combining the results from viral and antibody COVID-19 tests when reporting the country's testing totals, despite marked differences between the tests.

First reported by NPR's WLRN station in Miaimi, the practice has drawn ire from U.S. health experts who say combining the tests inhibits the agency's ability to discern the country's actual testing capacity.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, told The Atlantic. “How could the CDC make that mistake? This is a mess.”..


According to reports, several states, including Pennsylvania, Georgia, Texas and Florida, have also been combining the results of the two tests.

It's worse than inhibiting "the agency's ability to discern the country's actual testing capacity." The quote below is an absolutely accurate assessment of what the CDC did.
Quote:
“The viral testing is to understand how many people are getting infected, while antibody testing is like looking in the rearview mirror.* The two tests are totally different signals,” Jha told The Atlantic.
It's like saying we're going to add infections that might have happened in May to infections that happened a week ago and report them on today's totals.

This is just mind-boggling when people, especially the media, are using the changes in data on "cases" (i.e., known infections, either symptomatic or asymptomatic) to see where things are going with the virus right now.

And people with few or no symptoms are being tested all over the place, sometimes repeatedly - monitoring from their employer, if they want to visit a nursing home, if they're spooked and just want to know (some places allow or even encourage this, in other places people lie to get a test), even some states demanding a negative test before you enter their state. It's no longer just the people who are sick.



*This is why you really can't definitively say John Smith has disease X by testing for antibodies, unless you do one of 2 things - 1) do a test specifically for an early antibody called IgM (later it switches to IgG), or 2) test your patient twice, once early and once later, often when they're convalescing, and find that the antibody levels are going up (or the occasional special case, like a ratio of CSF/serum antibodies you can do when it's a brain infection). Otherwise, it's possible that John Smith was exposed to disease X sometime in the past but now he's actually sick with disease Y.

Plus the CDC noted earlier that antibody tests can cross-react with seasonal coronaviruses. Don't try to tell me that their antibody test is now so perfect that never happens. Maybe it's better than the earlier tests but, if it's 100% perfect, then I'm a green leprechaun. In other words, antibody tests are great for seeing where you roughly are in terms of immunity or exposure in the population but you don't want to rely on them for accurate case numbers.


It's not that antibody tests are bad tests but there's no such thing as a perfect test. All tests have strengths and weaknesses. The particular disadvantage to antibody (serologic) tests is that antibodies are made in response to shapes/ patterns on the microorganism. Those shapes can be shared, more or less, by other organisms. This is what causes a cross-reaction - you think you're measuring antibodies to organism X but the person was actually exposed to organism Y instead. A good test is designed so the percentage of reactions to organism Y is low, but even good antibody tests can have cross-reactivity to some extent. It's one thing you've got to keep in back of your mind when you're using them to diagnose something.







FYI:
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspec ... sound-data
I probably posted the link to this article before but the new comments added in July might be eye-opening for some people:
Quote:
Editor’s Note: The authors added the following statement on Jul 16.

The authors and CIDRAP have received requests in recent weeks to remove this article from the CIDRAP website. Reasons have included: (1) we don’t truly know that cloth masks (face coverings) are not effective, since the data are so limited, (2) wearing a cloth mask or face covering is better than doing nothing, (3) the article is being used by individuals and groups to support non-mask wearing where mandated and (4) there are now many modeling studies suggesting that cloth masks or face coverings could be effective at flattening the curve and preventing many cases of infection.
If the data are limited, how can we say face coverings are likely not effective?

We agree that the data supporting the effectiveness of a cloth mask or face covering are very limited. We do, however, have data from laboratory studies that indicate cloth masks or face coverings offer very low filter collection efficiency for the smaller inhalable particles we believe are largely responsible for transmission, particularly from pre- or asymptomatic individuals who are not coughing or sneezing. At the time we wrote this article, we were unable to locate any well-performed studies of cloth mask leakage when worn on the face—either inward or outward leakage. As far as we know, these data are still lacking.

The guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for face coverings initially did not have any citations for studies of cloth material efficiency or fit, but some references have been added since the guidelines were first posted. We reviewed these and found that many employ very crude, non-standardized methods (Anfinrud 2020, Davies 2013, Konda 2020, Aydin 2020, Ma 2020) or are not relevant to cloth face coverings because they evaluate respirators or surgical masks (Leung 2020, Johnson 2009, Green 2012).

The CDC failed to reference the National Academies of Sciences Rapid Expert Consultation on the Effectiveness of Fabric Masks for the COVID-19 Pandemic (NAS 2020), which concludes, “The evidence from…laboratory filtration studies suggests that such fabric masks may reduce the transmission of larger respiratory droplets. There is little evidence regarding the transmission of small aerosolized particulates of the size potentially exhaled by asymptomatic or presymptomatic individuals with COVID-19.” As well, the CDC neglected to mention a well-done study of cloth material filter performance by Rengasamy et al (2014), which we reviewed in our article.

Is wearing a face covering better than nothing?

Wearing a cloth mask or face covering could be better than doing nothing, but we simply don’t know at this point. We have observed an evolution in the messaging around cloth masks, from an initial understanding that they should not be seen as a replacement for physical distancing to more recent messaging that suggests cloth masks are equivalent to physical distancing. ...

We know of workplaces in which employees are told they cannot wear respirators for the hazardous environments they work in, but instead need to wear a cloth mask or face covering. These are dangerous and inappropriate applications that greatly exceed the initial purpose of a cloth mask. ...

Despite the current limited scientific data detailing their effectiveness, we support the wearing of face coverings by the public when mandated and when in close contact with people whose infection status they don't know. However, we also encourage everyone to continue to limit their time spent indoors near potentially infectious people and to not count on or expect a cloth mask or face covering to protect them or the people around them. ...

We have reviewed the many modeling studies that purport to demonstrate that cloth masks or face coverings have the potential for flattening the curve or significantly decrease the number of cases. These studies fail to recognize several important facts...


... We are very concerned about messaging that suggests cloth masks or face coverings can replace physical distancing. We also worry that the public doesn't understand the limitations of cloth masks and face coverings ...

I tend to fall on the other side of the fence for various reasons including that I weight the negatives more heavily. Especially that mask wearing makes people overconfident, even more so because of the strong way mask wearing is being pushed by some politicians, the media, and social media. I think it helped encourage people to protest in large, close groups since they thought it was now "safe." I also think it makes medical professionals afraid to point out negatives like "beware of the heat if you're wearing a mask" because that might be seen as counter to the official narrative.

But CIDRAP's position is a fair one too. And I respect them for not bowing to the political pressures.

And of course I agree that refusing to wear a mask in a store and making the employees' lives harder is rude and idiotic. (based on what I've heard, many of them hate the masks, too, and would gladly ditch them if allowed.) It's equally rude and idiotic for a random person who's not a store employee to self-righteously confront someone not wearing a mask and berate them because the media has them convinced a non mask-wearer is going to kill grandma. I swear, mask wearing has become the new religion.
Just like the 6 foot rule. Yeah, farther is safer. But there's nothing magical about 6 feet, as opposed to 5 or 7. It's just a parameter someone plugged into a model and a distance that's reasonably practical in most situations. I generally give elderly people an even wider berth where possible. I used to do that to mask wearers, too, because there was a decent chance they were either especially susceptible, caring for someone especially susceptible, or symptomatic. But that's no longer possible now that everyone has to wear a mask.


Worth mentioning that "Will face coverings 'flatten the curve' and stop the pandemic?" in the article could be misleading. Stopping the pandemic is not equivalent to stopping the virus. Only immunity can do that. At one point not long ago, it sounded like the rate of new infections/ hospitalizations was hovering right around the CDC's official definition of an epidemic and might have been poised to dip below it, though they've gone up a bit since then.



Also a reasonable assessment of masks, though I wish the author didn't accept the CDC's assessment of the importance of asymptomatic transmission so uncritically. The last I saw, the jury's still out on that. :
https://www.forbes.com/sites/tarahaelle ... mplicated/

And I was amused that Fauci took off his face mask inside, the minute he thought the cameras stopped rolling. I guess he's liable for the fines or jail time now? ;)
To be serious, I'm not surprised. I'm sure all those lights during an interview (or congressional testimony?) are hot. And now he will have to wear masks outside too, at least if he's compliant with the rules. DC's mayor, like some other mayors and city councils, has decided to mandate them outdoors. During a heat wave where the National Weather Service is issuing excessive heat warnings. Interesting way to conserve hospital resources.




From a retired Supreme Court justice in the U.K.:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/202 ... -children/
Quote:
We are in the process of committing an act of gratuitous vandalism against a generation of schoolchildren. Children are less vulnerable to Covid-19 than any other sector of the population. Look at the facts. Out of 46,000 deaths in England to date, only five were aged under 15. That compares with 104 child deaths from ordinary flu in the epidemic of 2014/15. Very few children have suffered more than mild symptoms. Yet we are depriving the great majority of them of school for at least six months.

NHS care workers have risked their health to treat the sick, while some teachers, encouraged by their unions, will not go back to their schools to teach the healthy. They will take the risk of going to supermarkets, but not the risk of educating the young. We are opening non-essential shops and pubs for them, while their schools remain firmly closed. Something has gone badly wrong with our decision-making processes....
Quote:
...to avoid having to make judgments, politicians alter the question. They ask the scientists whether some policy option is risk-free, or almost risk-free. To this, the answer is naturally that in the absence of knowledge, nothing is risk-free.

This is the famous precautionary principle. It means that decisions heavy with social consequences are made not on the basis of evidence, but on the basis of the absence of evidence....
Also known as decisions made "out of an abundance of caution."
Quote:
...the Government, anticipating more resistance to the lockdown than they actually encountered, tried to terrify the public into compliance with an exaggerated picture of the disease's horrors. "Terrorised" was the term used in an interview by Prof Robert Dingwall, one of the Government's own advisers. They played down the fact that the symptoms have been mild for those under 65, unless they had serious underlying conditions. They milked every young death for all the emotion that it was worth. Now they are paying the price.

"Project Fear" was so successful that when ministers want to reopen schools, they meet resistance from teachers and parents. These groups were told that Covid-19 was a horrific and indiscriminate predator. They naturally want to know what has changed. The honest answer is that nothing much has changed, it just wasn't a very sensible policy to begin with. But that admission would require too much honesty....
I'm sure politicians of all stripes hope the populace stays fearful at least until the elections are over. I expect they're also hoping the full economic effects of their decisions don't become obvious until then either. From what I've read, several big name retail chains are poised for file for bankruptcy or at least to close a number of stores. They're just waiting until lockdowns are over so they can liquidate their stock.
https://moneywise.com/a/chains-closing- ... es-in-2020

This doesn't account for all the mom-and-pop stores going under, either from the lockdowns or because rioters destroyed their stores and they don't have insurance, or they simply don't want to take the risk and start over again. And, yes, i think lockdowns contributed to both the protests and the riots - they provided a huge number of frustrated, bored people without jobs or school. Perfect tinder for any any group that wants to throw a match into it.

_________________

Society can and does execute its own mandates, and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. ― John Stuart Mill


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aninkling
Post subject: Re: Escaping the Echo Chamber
Posted: Sat 25 Jul , 2020 2:40 pm
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I hope one of the biggest issues society looks at, in the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic, is the effect of propaganda and censorship on figuring out the best public policies in the face of scientific uncertainty. And of this propaganda and censorship influencing the analysis of where governments may have gone wrong.

It's been amazingly pervasive. I've even noticed the rise of the old-fashioned cautionary tale in the media - little Johnny denies God and goes to skate on the pond on a Sunday, falls through the ice, and his last words are of repentance and "I was wrong." Some of these stories deny both common sense about how people behave, and any knowledge of medical practice. For instance, no one's last words are likely to be "I thought it was a hoax." when you're critically ill and in ICU on a ventilator. At that point, you're sedated to keep you from fighting the ventilator and in a semi-conscious state.


The widespread propaganda is one reason I've been reading spiked, lately - they have interviews with ministers and experts who are censored or ignored by much of the media, not to mention Google, YouTube, etc. I can read the scientific research but, like everyone else, I rely on journalists and interviews to find out what's going on with the decision-makers.

Some examples:
https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/06/0 ... s-forever/
Quote:
We cannot sit in our own little bubbles forever’

The lockdown is loosening, but life is nowhere near back to normal. As schools and businesses reopen, they are being asked to follow social-distancing rules, keeping everyone two metres apart. But is all of this disruption worth it, particularly as the pandemic recedes from view? Many are also still afraid to go back to work, to send their children to school, and to rejoin social life. Is this fear justified?

spiked spoke to Professor Robert Dingwall to find out more. Dingwall sits on NERVTAG, the government’s New and Emerging Virus Threats Advisory Group, which feeds into SAGE (Scientific Advice for Emergencies). He spoke here in a personal capacity....
https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/05/2 ... na-debate/
Quote:
Big Tech censorship is out of control during this pandemic. Social-media platforms’ determination to censor supposed ‘misinformation’ has morphed into policing the debate about the pandemic itself. While many platforms have been guilty of this, YouTube is in a league of its own. Recently, it deleted a video of two medics discussing their own testing data and arguing that California’s lockdown should be lifted. Then it deleted an interview with Knut Wittkowski, an epidemiologist who is fiercely critical of lockdowns. Now it has taken down an interview that Professor Karol Sikora, a professor of medicine and former adviser to the World Health Organisation, gave to UnHerd

....what’s particularly concerning here is that Professor Sikora is hardly a huge dissenter. He supported the UK’s lockdown; he just thinks it should now be eased. ...

https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/07/1 ... e-science/
Quote:
At every stage of the Covid-19 crisis, ministers have insisted that they are following ‘The Science’. And yet the result has been a catastrophe. Tim Knox is the former director of the Centre for Policy Studies. He recently co-authored a report for Civitas on the UK’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, which highlights the dangerous role played by ‘the blob’ – a narrow coterie of scientific advisers. spiked caught up with him to find out more.

... ...The crucial strand of thinking which inquires will have to investigate is why the UK performed so poorly compared to other countries. The two most obvious countries to compare the UK to would be Sweden and Germany. They each had very different responses. But Sweden has done substantially better than us in economic terms – their economy seems to be contracting at a rate of around 5 to 6 per cent, less than expected, rather than the 20 per cent we are experiencing. And Germany had a rapid, extreme lockdown, but came out of it pretty quickly....

spiked: What is the ‘blob’, and how is it responsible in part for the failings we have seen?

Knox: ‘The blob’ refers to a group of scientific advisers who, for historic reasons, have had a disproportionate impact on government policy, including during the pandemic. SAGE and Public Health England are right at the centre of that. SAGE was set up in the immediate aftermath of the Foot and Mouth crisis, and always wants to fight the last war, so to speak. Foot and Mouth is a relatively simple disease and people knew what it was at the time. But in many ways our response to it may have been hugely overreactive. There are plenty of academic papers suggesting this, and Neil Ferguson appears to have been at the heart of that overestimation of the problem. That was the issue then.

What is a more complicated problem now, with our response to coronavirus, is the question of whether this scientific blob did its job, and whether ministers challenged its recommendations empirically enough. The position of SAGE changes from crisis to crisis but it has been dominated by one particular group of epidemiologists. I am not imputing any bad motives there – it is just how it is. ...


... This was where the awful mantra of ‘following the science’ came from. That phrase is the most aggravating in the world. Any scientist will tell you there is no such thing as ‘The Science’. The whole point of science is that you are constantly challenging, questioning and examining the existing consensus. Therefore, science always changes – especially when confronted with something as complicated as Covid-19.

The government was, in fact, following the advice of one particular branch of the scientific community. There are many scientific groups and interpretations they could have drawn upon. In Germany, the equivalent of SAGE took a much broader approach. Not only did it have a greater range of types of scientists on it, but it also included historians, psychologists and crowd-behaviour experts. They brought in everyone who could make a contribution. But in the UK, the view given was from one particular faction of one particular subset of scientists who had actually already been at the heart of government for 20 years. This ran against the advice of some public-health officials who felt no one group should stay in place for so long. But because they were there for long enough, the problem started to perpetuate itself. ...
And the U.K. has, at least, been decent in the past about admitting its failures. The government's foot and mouth disease report after 2001 pretty much skewered its own failings. (though why the hell a new government didn't treat Neil Ferguson's predictions with a big grain of salt after that, I'll never know.) It's very unlikely the U.S. state governments will analyze their responses and admit mistakes.

And maybe if the U.S. had a few behavioral folks around, like Germany, they might have warned the idiot politicians and media that telling people massive BLM protests were necessary and admirable and safe ("as long as you put a piece of fabric across your face while yelling slogans") in the middle of a pandemic would lead to everyone else saying "OK, then it's fine for me to have a big block party." Which is, of course, entirely logical.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/06/2 ... ny-deaths/
Quote:
Dr Malcolm Kendrick is a GP and author of Doctoring Data: How to Sort Out Medical Advice from Medical Nonsense. spiked caught up with him to get his take from the frontline.

spiked: Do you think the Covid statistics are accurate?

Malcolm Kendrick: It is very difficult to tell. It is clear that different countries are recording deaths differently. Death certification is not a precise science. Normally, when someone dies, you have got a reasonably good idea what they died from. But if a person who is 85 drops dead, what do you put on the certificate? I do this, so I know it is not very accurate. GPs were advised to put Covid-19 on the certificate if they suspected somebody had it, even if there was no test done. We are in a strange situation where we are probably both over-recording Covid-19 and simultaneously under-recording it...

The really concerning thing is that if all the deaths taking place during lockdown are put down as Covid-19 deaths, we are going to miss the fact that the lockdown policies have caused an increase in deaths from many other things. ...If we muddle the Covid-19 statistics in with the other statistics, we might think the lockdown has prevented a certain number of deaths, when it has actually caused a large number of deaths.

spiked: Was there any danger of hospitals becoming overwhelmed from Covid?

Kendrick: The clarion call was to clear the hospitals of patients. There was a point when my local hospital was a quarter full. Staff were wandering around with nothing to do. You hear this idea that all NHS staff have been working 20 times as hard as they have ever done. This is complete nonsense. An awful lot of people have been standing around wondering what the hell to do with themselves. A&E has never been so quiet.

This initial response was understandable, but it quite rapidly became clear that it was an overreaction....

The average age of death from Covid-19 in the UK is around 82, and most of those people have comorbidities. I said to our managers that we had to test people and could not just be throwing them into nursing homes. But that is what they did. Homes were virtually ordered to take elderly patients. We had one nursing home that ended up with 12 deaths in a week....

The other curious thing has been how the media goes to anyone who will parrot the official party line. If you can't find an infectious disease expert to spread your doom and gloom, interview a physicist or a chemist.

It's even filtering into some sources that should know better. There was a fairly weak "masks work" news article in Science, the other day. I read it because I thought they might have finally published some decent randomized, controlled, "mask vs no mask" real world studies on COVID-19 transmission from asymptomatic people. But it was just the same old stuff, like cherry picking observations from a few societies that wear masks. And some other flaws, like assuming virus transmission by a healthy, asymptomatic person is the same as transmission by someone who is terminally ill (or, weirdly, that smelling cigarette smoke works just like aerosolized viruses. I don't know how volatile chemicals are spread in air currents, but I have my doubts it works like aerosolized viruses or has a similar dose effect). So I looked at who wrote it and found the first author was at an oceanography institute, the second was a chemist, the third a scientist from China (no idea what dept. he works for), the fourth at least at a public policy institute. Were there no virologists and immunologists available to write up a scientifically rigorous analysis?


Also, a very astute observation from another spiked article. https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/04/0 ... e-disease/
I spent time in the former Soviet Union and his comment is accurate IMO.
Quote:
In the Soviet Union, where I spent a lot of time, it was clear that there was only one official point of view and that people were being pushed around. I don’t recall ever being compelled to stay at home, and there was at least a pretence made of having a legislative body as well. But the point that strikes me here is that – particularly in the Eastern European countries, but also largely in Russia – most people regarded the Soviets’ rule with a certain amount of contempt and made jokes about it and realised they were being mocked and fooled. In this case, the population accepts what they are being told, without any question. It’s extraordinary. The old USSR would have loved to have had a population like that in the Western world and in the United Kingdom, which genuinely believes the propaganda and does what it is told. You could say, ‘The chocolate ration has gone up’, when in fact it has gone down and people will believe it.
I think this is a side effect of fear. Though I'm not entirely sure everyone is being fooled. Some are staying quiet and conforming because it's not worth the bother of drawing wrath down on themselves. People did the same in the Soviet Union - use caution outside a small circle of people you trust. Cancel culture is pushing people to that sort of caution too.
Quote:
... of course it seems to me, the crucial test of any policy, and indeed almost any human action, is not absolute right or absolute wrong – which very rarely arises in practical life – it is proportionality. Is the action in proportion to the problem?

If you look at the past and the problems which this country and its medical system have almost every winter, for instance with influenza, the complications of it are considerable. ...It is doubtless tragic for all those involved, but you can’t use emotionalism to justify policy.

I have a quote here from Jonathan Sumption’s interview on The World At One on Monday because it simply hasn’t been stressed enough in the coverage of what he said. They have gone on about what he said about the police, which was a marginal part of what he said. His key point was this:

‘The real question is, is this serious enough to warrant putting most of our population into house imprisonment, wrecking our economy for an indefinite period, destroying businesses that honest and hardworking people have taken years to build up, saddling future generations with debt, depression, stress, heart attacks, suicides and unbelievable distress inflicted on millions of people who are not especially vulnerable, and will suffer only mild symptoms or none at all?’...

It's fascinating to watch the differences between countries sometimes. In the U.S., the press supports mask wearing unconditionally. Then there's this in the U.K.:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/0 ... al-action/
Quote:
Schools which force pupils to wear face masks could face legal action for acting “irrationally” and in an “absurd” manner....

At least 10 schools have decided to break with Government guidance and make coverings mandatory for pupils.

Meanwhile, unions have urged ministers to update their guidance on schools to include the wearing of face masks.

They argue that the requirement to wear masks on public transport and in shops has "highlighted the need for similar protections to be in place in schools and colleges".

Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, said last week that masks are not recommended in schools because “if you're in a classroom with kids all day then a mask doesn't give you protection”.

George McLellan, an expert in public law at DLA Piper told The Telegraph that schools which press ahead with imposing face masks would be acting in a “manifestly absurd” manner.

“The primary ground for judicial review would be unreasonableness or irrationality,” he said. “The concern with masks is that there is no rational basis for them to be required. We would say there is a lack of proportionality of requiring children in schools to wear masks....
Speaking of irrationality, Delta airlines in the US turned a flight around and inconvenienced everyone, probably making many miss their connections, because a couple of people on the flight refused to wear a mask. Doesn't seem to be any particular disease control purpose at that point, even if cloth masks do anything to mitigate virus transmission from the people you're sitting crammed shoulder-to-shoulder with. And, of course, taking the mask off to sip drinks.

I have no idea why these two people took off their masks - political convictions or real issues -
but on a plane you're at the mercy of the airline's decisions. But I'm not letting Delta off scot-free for making this choice when they could have made others, like continuing the flight and refusing future business from these people. There's a very good chance they weren't even infected.

That's the reason I'm not flying right now, the mask mandates. Unlike a store, where I can leave if I need to take the mask off, the airline calls all the shots once you get on a plane. And they're not always reasonable (e.g., making people remove "unacceptable" T-shirts, catering to scaredy-cat patrons for various reasons, refusing to let people off the planes during "quick" repairs that turn out not to be quick at all....)

_________________

Society can and does execute its own mandates, and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. ― John Stuart Mill


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