America is giving up on the pandemic? • Hacker News Board

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#841

Post by hrktb » Mon, Jun 08, 2020, 9:18 AM UTC

scarmig wrote: post #543

noad wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe there are just bigger problems than the virus right now.

Your comment is a case in point: the takeaway the general public will have from this letter is that the virus doesn't really matter, and you should feel free to disregard it if you can come up with a vaguely plausible reason why your particular circumstances mean you should be exempt from caring about it. Which we kind of were at anyway, but now public health figures have given their signoff on that interpretation.

The virus doesn’t seem to matter for police forces either, spraying tear gas as salutation and forcing anyone at reach to burst out as much body fluid as they possibly can.

TBH from the outside it seems that whatever the death count is it never really mattered to a majority of people in the US.

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#842

Post by mrb » Mon, Jun 08, 2020, 9:25 AM UTC

humaniania wrote: post #553

smsm42 wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, as public health advocates, we do not condemn these gatherings as risky for COVID-19 transmission That's a shining example of weasel speak. They don't explicitly say it's not risky - because that would be plain lying, it is obviously risky - but they are saying they are not condemning it as risky. Which most people would take as implying it's not actually risky - even though they are not saying that. They…

The CDC revised their risk estimates towards the end of last month. "The fifth scenario is the CDC's "current best estimate about viral transmission and disease severity in the United States." In that scenario, the agency described its estimate that 0.4% of people who feel sick with Covid-19 will die. For people age 65 and older, the CDC puts that number at 1.3%. For people 49 and under, the agency estimated that 0.0…

The CDC estimate (IFR 0.26%, S-IFR 0.4%) is heavily criticized because it ignores, thus predates, the 3 largest and most reliable serosurveys which all indicate an IFR of ~1% (S-IFR ~1.54%, assuming 35% of cases are asymptomatic):

1.0% in Brazil based on 25,025 samples https://twitter.com/GidMK/status/1267670267624476672

1.14% in Spain based on 60,897 samples https://twitter.com/zorinaq/status/1265405628853305345

0.92% in NYC and 0.84% in New York State based on 15,101 samples https://twitter.com/GidMK/status/1267669314657611777

Also YYG, the guy who runs https://covid19-projections.com/ (a model that has consistently produced the most accurate forecasts) reported his model found that a ~1% IFR gave the best fit: https://mobile.twitter.com/youyanggu/status/1256051255253757...

Note: S-IFR is the fatality of symptomatic cases only. IFR is the fatality of all cases (asymptomatic and symptomatic)

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#843

Post by cm2187 » Mon, Jun 08, 2020, 9:31 AM UTC

zingar wrote: post #815

rayiner wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t forget public health officials outright lied and said masks don’t help reduce the spread of the disease, putatively to help conserve masks for medical personnel: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/opinion/coronavirus-face-... > When news of a mysterious viral pneumonia linked to a market in Wuhan, China, reached the outside world in early January, one of my first reactions was to order a modest supply of masks.…

There seems a fairly trivial explanation: they were talking about the effectiveness of a mask in protecting you from what you breathe in, not the communal action of everyone wearing a mask to protect other people from what you breathe out.

It doesn’t matter, the advice was for the whole population not to go buy masks.

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#844

Post by hef19898 » Mon, Jun 08, 2020, 9:31 AM UTC

blub wrote: post #816

apatters wrote: post #807

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hopefully this doesn't come across as pedantic but airborne transmission of COVID-19 is rare. Not ruled out completely but not the main way it is spread. In the initial Chinese study of 75K they said there was zero airborne transmission, I think they've found some exceptions since but it's not a common thing. The WHO actually has a definition for this, when the droplets carrying the disease are It's still good to wea…

If your source that airborne transmission is rare is the WHO, then all you have is a worthless source. Recently I've read an interview with Drosten (the German virologist which came up with one of the Coronavirus tests) say that they're starting to see airborne transmission as an important transmission factor, maybe not a strong as droplets but comparable. This is especially the case in poorly ventilated spaces.

Key words: starting to see. Using that now is 20/20 hindsight.

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#845

Post by hef19898 » Mon, Jun 08, 2020, 9:36 AM UTC

blub wrote: post #827

GiorgioG wrote: post #642

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem for me is we don't have any way at this time of knowing at an individual level what the consequences are likely to be. I might have no symptoms if I get sick but I may transmit it my son (type 1 diabetic) who might die. Or maybe he'd be fine and I might die, etc. There's just no way to gauge what one's reaction might be to getting the coronavirus. A local, healthy 8 year old girl started having symptoms l…

That's really unfortunate with that young girl. So far it looks like these are the absolute exception, but it does sadly happen that young healthy people and kids too get seriously sick and sometimes even die. The German pediatric association publishes some (incomplete) stats about the disease in children ( https://dgpi.de/covid-19-survey-update-kw22/ ) and there were so far 159 hospitalizations, with 21 of those in…

Key word: Incomplete. As was Drostens study about the virus concentration in children. The German Fox News wannabe BILD tried to kill him for it. Incomplete studies and data is the norm right now. I am happy to not have to make decissions about life and death based on this. Someone has, so. And erring on the side of caution isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#846

Post by buboard » Mon, Jun 08, 2020, 9:41 AM UTC

metrokoi wrote: post #90

Quoted from a letter from 1,000 health professionals on the virus and protests [0] >However, as public health advocates, we do not condemn these gatherings as risky for COVID-19 transmission. We support them as vital to the national public health and to the threatened health specifically of Black people in the United States. We can show that support by facilitating safest protesting practices without detracting from…

In my country, the church protested that holy gatherings won't spread COVID because it is graced by god. What these scientists are doing is on an equivalent level of medieval stupidity. It's really sad to read this , and even more sad to see the media reproducing it without criticism.

Outbreaks in mass gatherings are responsible for entire epidemics in italy, spain and germany. I can only imagine what will happen in a month, when racial minorities start accusing each other for the scale of the second epidemic.

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#847

Post by hef19898 » Mon, Jun 08, 2020, 9:41 AM UTC

alkibiades wrote: post #737

sjg007 wrote: post #719

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The prevalence is too low for the antibody tests to be reliable. Every public health expert has reported that but people refuse to listen. Sweden has admitted their strategy is not working.

i don’t think we’ll know what worked or didn’t for years from now. regardless of what even they say. it could be we just delayed deaths that will happen eventually anyway while commuting economic seppuku

One ting everybod gnores right now regardign experts is, that this a novel virus. We don't have any prior exerience or knowledge about it. Wich means incomplete data and potentially wrong data from day one. Making decissions in such cirumstances is incredibly difficult, and I expect every expert to change his mind when the data changes.

Does that potential confuse people? Yes. Are experts always right? No. Are they still the best resource we have? Yes.

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#848

Post by disgruntledphd2 » Mon, Jun 08, 2020, 9:41 AM UTC

raverbashing wrote: post #788

javagram wrote: post #664

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, I don’t think the majority of the officials intended to lie about this. It wasn’t anything that started this year or anything - they’ve had the same message about masks since as far back as the 2009 H1N1 pandemic. https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/23/face-masks-much-more-t... > But the CDC has recommended against mask use. I hypothesized that the CDC was intentionally lying to us, trying to trick us into not b…

The recommendation against masks was probably a knee-jerk reaction. Or maybe a bureaucratic "we know better than you" reaction At the same time the amount of people that think that have the mask below the nose or just at the chin or mishandling it because it feels "uncomfortable" to them is astounding. I'm not sure but I believe an intubation is more uncomfortable (and yes these are predominantly people at risk ages)

This is so very, very annoying. I saw my parents-in-law yesterday, and both of them were wearing masks incorrectly.

It's just so pointless to go to the bother of getting a mask and then wear it in such a way that you get no benefits from it.

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#849

Post by sfj » Mon, Jun 08, 2020, 9:45 AM UTC

thisiszilff wrote: post #569

jpxw wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I see these calculations please?

Their letter has a paragraph addressing some of their concerns: > White supremacy is a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to COVID-19. Black people are twice as likely to be killed by police compared to white people, but the effects of racism are far more pervasive. Black people suffer from dramatic health disparities in life expectancy, maternal and infant mortality, chronic medical conditions,…

I realize you are just quoting the text, but this does not describe "black people". It describes poor people.

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#850

Post by cm2187 » Mon, Jun 08, 2020, 9:48 AM UTC

mrb wrote: post #842

humaniania wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The CDC revised their risk estimates towards the end of last month. "The fifth scenario is the CDC's "current best estimate about viral transmission and disease severity in the United States." In that scenario, the agency described its estimate that 0.4% of people who feel sick with Covid-19 will die. For people age 65 and older, the CDC puts that number at 1.3%. For people 49 and under, the agency estimated that 0.0…

The CDC estimate (IFR 0.26%, S-IFR 0.4%) is heavily criticized because it ignores, thus predates, the 3 largest and most reliable serosurveys which all indicate an IFR of ~1% (S-IFR ~1.54%, assuming 35% of cases are asymptomatic): 1.0% in Brazil based on 25,025 samples https://twitter.com/GidMK/status/1267670267624476672 1.14% in Spain based on 60,897 samples https://twitter.com/zorinaq/status/1265405628853305345 0.9…

The wider NY state has an IFR of 0.5%. The IFR should also be very sensitive to the demographics of the infection. Both the UK and NY State had a policy of sending recovering (but potentially contagious) older covid patients back to nursing homes and it would have exacerbated the mortality rate vs regions that did a better job at protecting the elderly.

I am also starting to hear some noise that there might be cross immunity between this virus and previous coronavirus. In a recent video Prof Raoult was suggesting it might explain the low infection rate of people under 20 [1]. I am not qualified to tell whether the theory has any leg but it may be that we underestimate the spread of the virus when looking at a specific antibody.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=734&v=zUbiYhknaK... (in french)