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Tribalism comes for pandemic science

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Re: Tribalism comes for pandemic science

#141

Post by m0zg »

growlist wrote: post #95
m0zg wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. But it takes decades for it to do so, and in the initial stages it can appear to be quite effective. And as any communist will tell you, "it's not really communism" if it collapses on itself, killing tens of millions of people in the process.

We need a Russian to comment with some examples of the exceedingly black humour that developed under communism.

Soviet-born Russian-American here. How may I be of service? Some of that humor, BTW, could land you in a labor camp if a secret KGB agent (секретный сотрудник) heard it. So it was only shared with very trusted audiences.

Re: Tribalism comes for pandemic science

#142

Post by dekhn »

Avicebron wrote: post #120
dekhn wrote: post #40

There are times I'm glad I left health science/biology/medicine as a field and it's interesting to watch people slowly realize just how badly structured the entire human health field is organized (from academic research to research hospitals to profit hospitals to world health organizations) and how all the incentives are messed up. The closer you get in biology to human health, the more ego, tribalism, and assholery…

I will second this as I am currently working in the biotech field. The amount of short sighted thinking and opportunism from small start ups to the most massive CMO's in the world is staggering. My take is that the whole field is extremely underfunded and that breeds levels of competition and short term profit seeking, but that's probably a biased opinion. I'm sure if the field had the level of VC support that tradit…

I don't know if the field is underfunded. What I'd say is that the area is very risky (few ideas really pan out), there are lots of powerful incumbents who want to retain the many-billion-$ revenue streams, and it's very costly to test. But I also see people wasting huge amount of money chasing ideas that really would be better handled with shotgunning (the tech VCs I used work with said "why would I want to invest $20M in a biotech that fails after 20 years, when i can invest $1M in 20 tech startups and one of them will make $1B in 2-3 years?").

It's not clear to me that investing more money helps, either. For example, the NIH doubled its budget during the Clinton era, leading to far higher numbers of grad students being trained than there were positions (prof, etc) in their fields. So there was a glut, super-high competition for a limited number of spaces, and many people dropped out of the race to be a prof and instead went to be ML/data science people at ads firms.

Re: Tribalism comes for pandemic science

#143

Post by salmon30salmon »

DanBC wrote: post #47
rayiner wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was pro lockdown at the beginning. Now, I’m convinced that we could have gotten most of the benefits with a substantially less invasive approach, especially outside the mega cities.

Or a shorter harder lockdown earlier on, combined with rigorous test and trace programme.

Testing/tracing is very, very hard in the United States. In my own community, we have immigrants who are afraid to talk to the government at any level due to fears of deportation. You have the libertarians who refuse all but the most basic interactions with anything government. You have some other specific immigrant communities who are here legally, but have a deep, deep distrust of government due to abuses back in their original countries. Add in a language divide and a population strewn across many different jurisdictions (several major cities cross state/county lines) and it is just a mess.

Re: Tribalism comes for pandemic science

#144

Post by PeterisP »

salmon30salmon wrote: post #16
albybisy wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i would like to know how to "isolate the vulnerable"...?! We send to an island? we weld inside home? We should talk only if we have a realizable plan and not a "dream/idealistinc" plan.

Well we were able to somewhat effectively isolate the entire country, so I would say have modified stay-home orders that target those who are most vulnerable. That, in addition to common sense acts like hand washing, isolating the sick etc. would go a long way to flatten the curve enough to not overwhelm the hospitals, which after-all was the original goal.

The problem is that you can't isolate the most vulnerable fully. The current lockdown works because it reduces the spread through the wider society, including all the people who are in contact with the most vulnerable. If you don't do that, then we have the Sweden scenario where inevitably there's someone young and fit and infected who brings the disease into the institutions that should be protected, because these young and fit and infected people work there or go there to deliver things.

Alternatively, you need a total quarantine isolation - e.g. anyone working in a care home should live there and can't touch their kids if they go to a school where will be spread because everyone else's parents are not on lockdown. Or the most vulnerable will die.

Re: Tribalism comes for pandemic science

#145

Post by jtbayly »

mdemare wrote: post #58
pjc50 wrote: post #17

The people who said that lockdown needed to be limited in length because people couldn't take it for long were right. Unfortunately, due to not understanding exponentials, many advocated for starting the lockdown later : hence the UK's delayed lockdown and therefore highest death toll in Europe. The people advocating for "herd immunity" never addressed the death rate; a death rate of even 0.5% in the UK would be thre…

If you trust the death rate, and the number of deaths reported are both accurate, the UK is at 40k/300k = 13%. A very long way from immunity, but not 0.5%.

300k confirmed cases / 59M population = .5% of the country having had the virus.

Of course, this is inaccurate, since many more have had it and not gotten confirmed positive tests.

Re: Tribalism comes for pandemic science

#146

Post by mthoms »

salmon30salmon wrote: post #125
mthoms wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The data is indeed old but China began its lockdown on January 24th and South Korea a month later. Those countries seem to be the central focus of the study with regards to evaluating the effectiveness of the shutdown(s). I'm only a layperson but it doesn't seem too far-fetched that they could extrapolate from how those countries "flattened the curve" to come up with a ballpark estimate of global fatalities averted.…

IMO, it is pretty easy to see why an extrapolation is faulty. Let us look at two different reasons: 1. Density. China and South Korea are far more dense than most of the western world. Seoul has a density of 42,000 per square mile. New York City, the densest city in the US, has a density of 23,000 per square mile. The next top 10 most populous cities in the USA have an average density of 5,000 per square mile. Over h…

What you're saying makes sense, thank you.

I'm wondering though, are you saying it because the study did indeed fail to account for all those factors or are you basing it my (probably poor) interpretation/description of it? :-) If you're going off my comments, I may have done a disservice as my laypersons understanding of the topic is pretty rudimentary.

FWIW, the study does indeed model other countries like the US and Italy so I'd be surprised if much of what you speak of was not taken into account.

I certainly don't think they modeled one nation and simply extrapolated that out into the world without other considerations. I apologise if my words gave that impression... Even I can see how stupid that would be.

Here's the link if anyone is interested https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2404-8_reference....

Re: Tribalism comes for pandemic science

#147

Post by PeterisP »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #133
cma wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No country has successfully done isolation of vulnerable, while there are many countries that have successfully eradicated or at least brought it to extremely low levels. With cheaper testing, pooled testing protocols, etc. we could potentially test every household in the US every couple of weeks for less than we spend on auto insurance.

This requires a citation. It's intuitively far easier to quarantine 1% of the population than 90+%.

To protect 1%, you need to isolate them absolutely from everyone else who will be infected.

To protect 90%, it's sufficient if you reduce the rate of spread below 1, which means that it's sufficient to have a (realistically achievable) "quarantine" that reduces the number of contacts 3-4 times. It's possible to have much less contact with people, it's very limiting to have no contact at all.

There's a huge world of difference between the contact limitations required for a true quarantine (essentially, zero contact) and what "lockdown" has meant in most places, with most people continuing to work with other people just with much less contact.

Re: Tribalism comes for pandemic science

#148

Post by jtbayly »

pfkurtz wrote: post #117

There's almost certainly a lot of safe opening up we could do. What would make it dramatically safer would be pro-social behavior from people on the right. The protesters are all wearing masks and doing their best to maintain social distance outside of the actions. They calculate that it is worth the risk. Time will tell, but the calculus isn't merely do the protests increase the spread? but also will they achieve po…

> The protesters are all wearing masks

Really? I keep seeing people saying this. It’s laughably false. Here is the governor of MI at a protest that breaks her own rules about social distancing and protests, directly between two men without masks. (Just one high profile example.)

https://mobile.twitter.com/TPCarney/status/12689028204108431...

Re: Tribalism comes for pandemic science

#149

Post by PeterisP »

growlist wrote: post #95
m0zg wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. But it takes decades for it to do so, and in the initial stages it can appear to be quite effective. And as any communist will tell you, "it's not really communism" if it collapses on itself, killing tens of millions of people in the process.

We need a Russian to comment with some examples of the exceedingly black humour that developed under communism.

For whatever reason, this comes to mind -

A judge meets a colleague in the corridor who's chuckling and wiping tears from his eyes, saying "Ah, I just heard the best joke of my life!" - "So tell me?" - "I can't, I just assigned 20 years of hard labor for it.."

But the Soviet economic sytem was one where you could go to a shop and ask "You don't have sausage, I suppose?" and they would answer "No! Here we don't have milk, the shop on the other side of the road doesn't have sausage!"

Re: Tribalism comes for pandemic science

#150

Post by NotSammyHagar »

salmon30salmon wrote: post #2

This is so very disheartening. I will speak only for the United States, as I am not familiar enough with other countries to comment. Not only is this impacting nearly every single person in the country, it is ruining the financial situation of over 40m people, primarily concentrated within the most financially vulnerable. This is because leaders on the left and right have refused to respond to new data, and are worki…

By your words, let's allow vastly heightened danger to those over 40.

How about, we have national regulations for safe interactions, rules requiring ppe when appropriate, and available ppe. Your company has to provide it if you work together. It turns out its very very hard to provide ppe that protects people when they work closely together (see the meat packing plants, see hospitals). My families economic safety is also impacted if I'm dead or in the hospital with covid, even if they are all in your 'safe' category. Only a few 100 kids will die unnecessarily so we can open the economy?

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