Questioning Conventional Wisdom - The virus

[dneal]

Did you read them?

Yes. I wouldn't have commented if I hadn't. They were in plain sight when I clicked on "Comments" near the top. I don't have a subscription.

You seem to have taken something from my post that I didn’t intend.

I got a blank screen essentially, although maybe the page wouldn’t completely load; with “ This feature is available only to Registered Users” and nothing after.

Anyway, I thought the comments were just a bit more academic than the routine internet bickering of the general interwebz. The point about dismissing malaria medications because they aren’t proven, but we use “unproven” ventilators (and I’m not sure that’s a fair analogy) was relevant. We are very familiar with the benefits and side effects of malarial meds. If doctors are not violating the “do no harm” rule, why not use them; particularly when there is a life at stake?

[Jon Szanto]

You see, dneal, you are comfortable using the term "we". I'm not. You make it appear or sound as if these things are universally accepted, that "we" are all in agreement. If that were the case, there wouldn't be any debate at all. That means to me that "we" is actually "a number of people" or something.

I've read enough on the general topic to know that I won't be able to, on my own, judge the efficacy or veracity of the use of these alternative interventional avenues. I see a lot of people in the media and elsewhere speaking as if they are certain of much of this. I find that troubling at best.

Everything I have said here I've tried to be measured and contained.

[dneal]

Everything I have said here I've tried to be measured and contained.

I suspect that you have, and I have given you the benefit of the doubt when I read unnecessary remarks like White House Clown Show. Perhaps you could do the same for my lack of the requisite precision of language.

To paraphrase an earlier poster, we can have nice things... or not.

[Jon Szanto]

Everything I have said here I've tried to be measured and contained.

I suspect that you have, and I have given you the benefit of the doubt when I read unnecessary remarks like White House Clown Show. Perhaps you could do the same for my lack of the requisite precision of language.

Fair enough - I said I was trying. Also, you misquoted me, which was not intentional, I'm certain, but not accurate, either.

What would be fascinating is if any single one person around here actually had expertise in the area. This is all just... occupying our time, I suppose.

[TSherbs]

Wait.

I want to be clear about my point of view: a clown does presently masquerade as the POTUS. His mishandling of improving our readiness for this virus once he was warned is another reason I look forward to voting him out in November of this year.

Jon is being magnanimous in retracting any part of his screed against Trump. I applaud it.

/Opinion

Sent from my Moto E (4) using Tapatalk

[Jon Szanto]

Jon is being magnanimous in retracting any part of his screed against Trump. I applaud it.

Ha! Well, look, I still believe it to my core, it's just that it didn't have a direct relevance to the topic at hand, so I agree that it would have been better left out. I could easily screed on for pages!

Honestly, I think - though I probably said it before - that I've contributed enough at this point. I wish everyone well.

[dneal]

Everything I have said here I've tried to be measured and contained.

I suspect that you have, and I have given you the benefit of the doubt when I read unnecessary remarks like White House Clown Show. Perhaps you could do the same for my lack of the requisite precision of language.

Fair enough - I said I was trying. Also, you misquoted me, which was not intentional, I'm certain, but not accurate, either.

What would be fascinating is if any single one person around here actually had expertise in the area. This is all just... occupying our time, I suppose.

Well if we’re going to be pedantic, I didn’t quote you since I didn’t use quotation marks...

I’ve found that there are a lot of people with expertise you wouldn’t expect to find on forums. I’m on a guitar forum where people argue about strings (among a great many other things). Composition, harmonic frequencies, sympathetic resonances, whether or not they should be stretched or if they even do stretch, etc... Turns out there are friggin’ Ph.D. physicists and lifelong metallurgists that play guitar. Even the professional luthiers learn something on occasion.

I don’t know the background of most folks here, but this isn’t just you’re either a doctor or you’re not issue; and they don’t even agree. Dr. Fauci isn’t an economist. John Taylor isn’t a medical doctor. Either’s opinion is enhanced in light of the other’s, and that’s why discussion is key. I’m neither a doctor or economist, but I am a professional logistician and strategic planner. I’m well versed in emergency management and interagency operations. Of course I’m not thinking we’re going to solve the world’s problems on a pen forum, but as Seneca the Younger said: “No man became wise by chance”.

If anything, I enjoy the mental exercise. Some don’t. I don’t understand why they don’t have the self-control to just move on without feeling like they have to take a shit in every thread they come across.

[Jon Szanto]

I don’t understand why they don’t have the self-control to just move on without feeling like they have to take a shit in every thread they come across.

Is that directed at me? If not, why put it in a response to me?

I mean, fuck, dneal. I deserve a bit better than that.

[dneal]

I don’t understand why they don’t have the self-control to just move on without feeling like they have to take a shit in every thread they come across.

Is that directed at me? If not, why put it in a response to me?

I mean, fuck, dneal. I deserve a bit better than that.

You know, I almost added “of course I’m not talking about you”. If I did, do you really think I’d be so subtle? Of course it isn’t directed at you. It’s in the post because I would have said it if we were sitting in person, because it’s a comment germane to the preceding paragraph and my thoughts on the the current state of the forum. There’s a lot of thread-shitting going on lately.

[dneal]

Back on topic, and particularly for mhosea...

Have you seen the reporting on the correlation that the Tuberculosis vaccine (Bacillus Calmette-Guerin vaccinations) and lower rates of coronavirus (specifically in S. Korea and Japan)? The studies themselves are showing as pre-printed and not yet peer reviewed.

[rocl]

I'm not sure what place an economist has in working out how to respond to a pandemic and neither is the PM down here in NZ. What she said on the topic sounds really simple so it probably can't be right. She said -
Ultimately, though the best protection for the economy is containing the virus, a widespread outbreak will hurt our economy far more in the long run than short-term measures to present prevent a mess outbreak occurring.

[dneal]

I'm not sure what place an economist has in working out how to respond to a pandemic and neither is the PM down here in NZ. What she said on the topic sounds really simple so it probably can't be right. She said -
Ultimately, though the best protection for the economy is containing the virus, a widespread outbreak will hurt our economy far more in the long run than short-term measures to present prevent a mess outbreak occurring.

I think there is some truth to her statement, but I’m not convinced the current strategy (here in the U.S. anyway) is the most effective way to minimize risk to both the economy and the public health. I don’t think it’s economic suicide, as some pundits argue; but I think the repercussions are going to be very serious. Most western nations carry enormous debt, and printing money to monetize it is dangerous. The EU concerns me, particularly those countries that are essentially bankrupt but tied to the Euro. The world’s economies are so closely linked that one drags down all.

[Dave]

Back on topic, and particularly for mhosea...

Have you seen the reporting on the correlation that the Tuberculosis vaccine (Bacillus Calmette-Guerin vaccinations) and lower rates of coronavirus (specifically in S. Korea and Japan)? The studies themselves are showing as pre-printed and not yet peer reviewed.

Interesting potential correlation between BCG vaccination and incidence of SARS-CoV-2. That's not to say that BCG vaccine is effective as a vaccine for SARS-CoV-2, but may offer some insights into possible components. Will add this to the candidate watch list.

[dneal]

Back on topic, and particularly for mhosea...

Have you seen the reporting on the correlation that the Tuberculosis vaccine (Bacillus Calmette-Guerin vaccinations) and lower rates of coronavirus (specifically in S. Korea and Japan)? The studies themselves are showing as pre-printed and not yet peer reviewed.

Interesting potential correlation between BCG vaccination and incidence of SARS-CoV-2. That's not to say that BCG vaccine is effective as a vaccine for SARS-CoV-2, but may offer some insights into possible components. Will add this to the candidate watch list.

Not potentially, but of course how strongly and whether it’s causal are a different story. I was looking through medical articles, and apparently they’ve studied using it for prevention of acute respiratory illness in seniors.

[Dave]

Do you have a link to the articles on this correlation? Haven't been able to read them yet, so was making a general statement.

[mhosea]

Have you seen the reporting on the correlation that the Tuberculosis vaccine (Bacillus Calmette-Guerin vaccinations) and lower rates of coronavirus (specifically in S. Korea and Japan)? The studies themselves are showing as pre-printed and not yet peer reviewed.

I had not. It certainly would be a welcome development if there turns out to be some causality there. The more plausible potential treatments the better. Avigan/Favipiravir made the news recently. Then we have possible artificial antibody drugs which could enter trials by early fall. We don't need to keep people from getting sick to get out of this pickle. We just need to figure out how to keep people from developing ARDS when they do get sick.

[dneal]

Do you have a link to the articles on this correlation? Haven't been able to read them yet, so was making a general statement.

I was being a little pedantic about “possible”, because correlations are just that - possibilities - based on a perceived association between two things.

Anyway, here are the links (there are news articles as well, but I didn’t post them). It’s early, and the articles haven’t been published. Not sure where they’re at for peer review. It seems we’re all over the place with the mechanics of the virus and treatment. I was just reading that it’s not necessarily pneumonia, but the ability of the blood to transport oxygen that’s the issue.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1....24.20042937v1

https://www.researchgate.net/publica...ological_study

[Dave]

Thanks for the link - both to the same article, for some reason I had the impression there were two articles. My mistake.

Idle musings ahead!

As this is not peer reviewed as yet it would be premature (of me) to read too much into it. One thing that did jump out on a first pass was that the UK doesn't seem to get a mention (I may have overlooked it). This would be a bit strange as the UK has had BCG vaccination since 1953, which should make that country a useful comparator. I would want to look at the differences between the Japan and the UK, as the UK has 104.54 deaths per million (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/t...hs-per-million) and Japan has 0.64 deaths per million (same source). Both have implanted national BCG vaccination policies just 6 years apart on incept. Of course this likely overlooks many factors of difference between the two countries/cultures, such as volume of movement of people in and out of the country, modes of living/working, among many others, that may affect the incidence of the disease in the respective populations. Hard to know what to control for I would think.


As before, I haven't really read it in detail so I may have missed something, like an exclusion criterion.

[Dave]

Just going back to the video on denominators. There are two numbers that are kind of known. One is the fatality rate among known cases, and one is the best case scenario if the entire US population is infected and nobody else dies. These are, as of this post being written, 14797/435160 or 3.4%, and 14797/327200000 (figure from 2018) or 0.005% respectively.

3.4% and 0.005%. That's a big range. It doesn't mean a great deal, other than to say the MCFR cannot get any better than 0.005% in the US, which is pretty low anyway; and it will definitely be worse than this because there will be more deaths. However, there is also the possibility that it could get worse than 3.4%.

For those who are not inclined to crunch numbers, 3.4% of the total population is a shade over 11 million. Now that is a truly scary number for a single country, so let's hope it doesn't go there.


Anyway, a simple way of getting one's head around the figures. Nothing really sciencey about it.

[dneal]

If this site is accurate, globally we're at around a 5% case fatality rate and about 3.5% for the U.S.

The denominator still has issues, and will as long as we don't expand testing. The CDC plays a role in this, still saying "Not everyone needs to be tested for COVID-19". Context is important, and I think they mean that if you aren't experiencing symptoms then you don't need to be tested. From a treatment standpoint, not to mention one of resources; that makes perfect sense. From the standpoint of an organization that is supposed to be controlling disease, you would think they would want more testing - representative samples of the population at a minimum; to better understand what we're facing.