Post your Contentious Virus Posts Here

[dneal]

Back on topic, there are two more antibody tests finding that roughly 25% (France) and 30% (Massachusetts) of the tested population has antibodies (i.e.: has been infected). Of course these are initial, small sample studies and they also require peer review; but there seems to be a trend...


French study

MA study

[ilikenails]

Back on topic, there are two more antibody tests finding that roughly 25% (France) and 30% (Massachusetts) of the tested population has antibodies (i.e.: has been infected). Of course these are initial, small sample studies and they also require peer review; but there seems to be a trend...


French study

MA study

Apparently you can't read. No, the French study does NOT claim that there is evidence that 30% of the French population have had C19. As you link says, the study was conducted entirely in one small region (Oise) where C19 hit "heavily." You can't deduce a national infection rate for the USA from NY or for China from Wuhan. It's as stupid as deducing a national rate for hypothermia deaths from Alaska or drowning deaths from Hawaii...

Even more pathetically, you failed to understand what this means:

we conducted a retrospective closed cohort study among pupils, their parents and siblings, as well as teachers and non-teaching staff of a high-school located in Oise


...This isn't even an attempt at obtaining representative data for Oise! It isn't a random sample of the local population - it's the freaking OPPOSITE of that! It's an examination of what happens when a large % of group is infected. Saying "this is a small sample" misses the point - you're apparently too ignorant to understand what it's a sample of. It's like deducing the number of Americans who are convicted criminals by sampling people held by the police... This isn't the researchers' fault: they're not making the idiotic claim that they've deduced an infection rate for the whole of France - they were doing something else and dneal isn't smart enough to understand what that is and is arrogant enough to make claims based on a level of comprehension that he doesn't possess.

(Again: you're the guy who claimed to be a "scientist", yes? As in Christian Scientist perhaps?)

[ilikenails]

...Honestly, it's no wonder people like this elect presidents who suggest injecting bleach as a medical treatment...

[dneal]

Sad little troll, mhosea is right. Your reading comprehension is pitiful. The post clearly says that the French found 25%, not 30%. Massachussets was 30%. How is anyone supposed to respond when you can't grasp the simplest bits of information? I already told you in a response to another of your silly posts that I'm not a scientist, and never claimed to be. You're clearly confused about many things.

Here's what's really pitiful though: your "arguments". Normally I enjoy playing with you kool-aid drinkers, but you've proven yourself an exception. At least you're novel in one aspect! Aside from the fact that you can't follow along (maybe because you're so busy trying to formulate those lame attempts at insult) your posts are so full of strawmen and tortured logic that it's not even worthwhile to rebut them.

So run along, the grown-ups are having a conversation.

Clearly you're still

tgd fatty.gif

[dneal]

Some notes (not a pure transcript):

Does this make sense? Are we following the science?

Our volumes have dropped significantly. We're shutting down floors and furloughing doctors.

People with heart disease, cancer, hypertension, and other critical issues are choosing not to "come in" based on fear. There are lots of secondary effects of COVID that aren't being talked about.

Typically you quarantine the sick. We've never seen where we've quarantined the healthy. This doesn't mesh with what we've known.

6.5% of the population indicates that there's a wide spread of viral infection, similar to the flu. We think it's ubiquitous in California. We'll go over some of the numbers, it's prevalence, and how we should be dealing with it.

The initial models were woefully inaccurate. They predicted millions of deaths. That is not materializing.

What is materializing in California is 12% positives. Simple math indicates there are about 4.7 million cases throughout California. It's widespread.

We've seen 1,227 deaths. With a possible prevalence of 4.7M, you have a 0.03% chance of dying of COVID in California. Does that necessitate sheltering in place? Does that necessitate shutting down medical systems. Does that necessitate people being out of work?

96% of people who contract COVID recover. [I think this needs clarification. 96% of people who seek treatment? 96% of people who are hospitalized?]

The more you test, the more positives you get; which means the prevalence goes up but the number of deaths stays the same.

39% of over 640k people tested in New York, tested positive. They've had 19,410 out of 19M residents, which is a 0.1% chance of dying of COVID.

So is this significantly different than Influenza, and if not why has our response been what it is?

802,590 cases, and we've tested over 4M. That's a 19% positive rate for COVID, which extrapolated to the entire population is about 64M. That's a similar infection rate as the flu. The deaths are also corresponding to the flu. Every year we have between 37k-60k deaths from the flu. No pandemic talk, no shutting down business, no sheltering in place.

We have a vaccine for the flu, and many people don't even get it.

Span has 22% positive rate for COVID, a 47M population, which is about 10M cases. 21k deaths is a 0.05% chance of dying from COVID and a 90% chance of recovering without being on a vent and without being in a hospital [again, he needs to clarify the criteria for recovery because this one is different]

That's the first 15 minutes or so. He's goes on to talk about other effects of isolation like child molestation, domestic violence, alcohol and drug abuse, anxiety, depression, etc...; what we should be doing, what we should expect, and so forth.

There are some "gotcha" questions from journalists, "are you saying Dr. Fauci and other world experts are wrong..." and so forth; and clear responses.

Worth a watch.

[Dreck]

dneal, its clear that ilikenails is a bored teenager who doesn't know how to behave with unrestricted internet access and is using the current lockdown to cause trouble on the internet because school closures mean that he can't bully middle schoolers and the neighbors are onto him torturing animals. Chances are he'll get a virus on his mum & dad's computer from surfing porn sites and soon be gone from here. If you stop feeding the troll and put him on your ignore list, we can just carry on with a rational, reasonable discussion without interruptions.

[Dreck]

So is this significantly different than Influenza, and if not why has our response been what it is?

This one, at least, I think I can answer based on what I've heard from our state director of health: It's novel coronavirus. There's been nothing like it. The information coming out of China was (and is) not at all reliable *cough* *cough* much like the overpriced PPE they're selling *cough* *cough* and fear filled in the gaps where we would prefer to have knowledge.

[grainweevil]

The WHO, as of 24th April, sez:

There is currently no evidence that people who have recovered from COVID-19 and have antibodies are protected from a second infection.

Link.

To me, this seems rather an important thing.

[dneal]

dneal, its clear that ilikenails is a bored teenager who doesn't know how to behave with unrestricted internet access and is using the current lockdown to cause trouble on the internet because school closures mean that he can't bully middle schoolers and the neighbors are onto him torturing animals. Chances are he'll get a virus on his mum & dad's computer from surfing porn sites and soon be gone from here. If you stop feeding the troll and put him on your ignore list, we can just carry on with a rational, reasonable discussion without interruptions.

I see it differently. I see an attention whore who will continue to interrupt depending on how emotionally volatile they are at a given period of time; so I'll just do what I always do: comment or ignore at my leisure. I don't need buttons to ignore things that don't bother me in the first place. ilikenails is amusing to me, not bothersome. Sometimes I like to pull the string and see the monkey dance... It's a character flaw I readily admit.

Often these kind of comments tend to cause as much disruption, because they create yet another "sidebar" topic.

[dneal]

So is this significantly different than Influenza, and if not why has our response been what it is?

This one, at least, I think I can answer based on what I've heard from our state director of health: It's novel coronavirus. There's been nothing like it. The information coming out of China was (and is) not at all reliable *cough* *cough* much like the overpriced PPE they're selling *cough* *cough* and fear filled in the gaps where we would prefer to have knowledge.

He was posing a rhetorical question, to later argue that it's really no different (in terms of prevalence and mortality) than the flu.

[dneal]

The WHO, as of 24th April, sez:

There is currently no evidence that people who have recovered from COVID-19 and have antibodies are protected from a second infection.

Link.

To me, this seems rather an important thing.

Yes, but the same is true for influenza, rotaviruses and noroviruses.

[mhosea]

The WHO, as of 24th April, sez:

There is currently no evidence that people who have recovered from COVID-19 and have antibodies are protected from a second infection.

Link.

To me, this seems rather an important thing.

It is rather important in the context of trying to contain the virus if you still believe that is possible. There's hardly much evidence that isolation is working, either. You might think the way the model predictions have changed is evidence, but no. Models are useful for understanding and making predictions. They do not confer evidence. That's not what mathematical models do.

Despite our best efforts, we're getting some indications that the virus has penetrated a much larger percentage of the population than the current mathematical models assume. If the models are tracking deaths and hospitalizations now, and I can tell you that in Massachusetts it is doing reasonably well, it can only be because they are tuned with incorrectly pessimistic parameters, i.e. predicting much worse outcomes than would be realistic from a much more limited range of infection.

If we do widespread randomized antibody testing and find that a significantly larger percentage of the population has been infected than the models assume, we would be forced to conclude that the models have no predictive value for what would happen if isolation were lifted. The conservative way out of this is to wait for widespread antibody testing and, with that data in hand, re-tune the models to correctly describe what has actually happened with the correct penetration data. Then perhaps the models will have some predictive value. While that might make some people happy, others might complain that it was a mistake to let mathematical models dictate extraordinary policy measures in the first place, and maybe we ought to stop doing that here.

[Dreck]

Nevermind...

[dneal]

Nobody has yet cited the Santa Clara or Los Angeles studies. Please don't. I've just scanned their "white papers." I've led and conducted research studies before, and these 2 are (sadly) worthless. Not only are they fundamentally unsound, the statistical extrapolations are extremely suspect. Researchers like the ones who conducted these sloppy studies give the rest of us a bad name

Which studies? The one done by USC and L.A. County?

--edit--

I assume you are talking about the same study. Jay Bhattacharya (who is an M.D. and has a Ph.D. in Economics) was part of the study, and talks about it in this interview. I have seen a lot of statisticians pontificating on their blogs on how the study is flawed, although they're just speculating since they don't have the data and arguing about numbers is just what statisticians do.

There seem to be some demands for certainty that I think are unreasonable given the amount of time that has been spent on this. Most of these studies are small (which is it's own target for the statisticians), but there seems to be a similar trend in the results.

[Dave]

Read the report - HERE - and the pre-print abstract - HERE.

At this time I would be hesitant to criticize as there is insufficient information to do so.


Edited because the video above was posted before I could hit send, and it explains well the reasons why I believe there is not enough information in the reports/abstract for anyone to criticise at this stage.

[mhosea]

I doubt small-scale studies will resolve the question to everyone's reasonable satisfaction. I wonder what the CDC's timeline is ( https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019...y-testing.html ) .

[ethernautrix]

Whoa. Scanning the posts since my last peek and wanting to quickly post this video (which I see not-Dave has already posted it, or something from the same press conference):

https://m.facebook.com/bayanwang23abc/.

Except mine is from a public Facebook post, cos I didn't easily see another share option.

What with the news of face-recognition software's being legislated in Washington state and the push to force free citizens to download a health-assessment app so that everyone will be monitored... I can't believe that people will accept this. I question my imagination (cos of the messes I've gotten myself into for lack of foresight and pathological compassion), but... this trend appears obvious to me.

Controlling the herd.

...


Why do people to an alarming degree not realize that, for the most part, no matter how free-thinking and tolerant we believe ourselves to be, we are the herd. We are the ones that restrictions are imposed upon. (See: Polish leaders laying a wreath on a memorial recently, after strick lockdown measures were instituted on the herd, practicing none of the measures the hoi polloi would be subjected to fines up to 30,000 zł for breaking: more than five persons, no distancing, no masks, no special precautions taken.)

Is taking precautions necessary or not (public officials)?




COVID-19 doesn't scare me so much as the measures being taken to turn the U.S. into a Chinese-type surveillance state....


Meanwhile, as Randy Newman sings, you gotta roll with the punches....

[dneal]

I doubt small-scale studies will resolve the question to everyone's reasonable satisfaction. I wonder what the CDC's timeline is ( https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019...y-testing.html ) .

Good question.

I suspect it’s an issue of test availability initially, and as production increases testing will also increase. There’s the point made in the video on whether or not the Federal government is funding studies (and if so, how much). I would also suspect that the CDC will collect and correlate data, like they do for other diseases (i.e.: data and/or actual samples will be sent to the CDC).

[dneal]

COVID-19 doesn't scare me so much as the measures being taken to turn the U.S. into a Chinese-type surveillance state....

I think it’s a big leap to get to a Chinese type surveillance apparatus, and it’s a matter of time before facial recognition being employed by a/the government faces legal challenges from civil libertarians on 4th amendment grounds. The appointments of Gorsuch and Kavanaugh in particular have pushed the court to a Scalia-esque constitutionalist/originalist view.

I also think the intelligence community and NSA in particular, in the wake of 9/11, have already done more to create a “surveillance state” than this outbreak will - we’re just not that aware of it or don’t really care. Facebook, Google, etc... already know more about “you” than the government could ever hope to.

[dneal]

From Scott Atlas M.D., published in The Hill

Here are some snippets from the piece.

The data is in — stop the panic and end the total isolation.

The tragedy of the COVID-19 pandemic appears to be entering the containment phase. Tens of thousands of Americans have died, and Americans are now desperate for sensible policymakers who have the courage to ignore the panic and rely on facts. Leaders must examine accumulated data to see what has actually happened, rather than keep emphasizing hypothetical projections; combine that empirical evidence with fundamental principles of biology established for decades; and then thoughtfully restore the country to function.

Fact 1: The overwhelming majority of people do not have any significant risk of dying from COVID-19.

Fact 2: Protecting older, at-risk people eliminates hospital overcrowding.

Fact 3: Vital population immunity is prevented by total isolation policies, prolonging the problem.

Fact 4: People are dying because other medical care is not getting done due to hypothetical projections.

Fact 5: We have a clearly defined population at risk who can be protected with targeted measures.