Attributes and predictors of long Covid • Hacker News Board

Re: Attributes and predictors of long Covid

#41

Post by klmadfejno » Mon, Mar 22, 2021, 2:38 PM UTC

vanderZwan wrote: post #12

greenwich26 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't neglect the prior. In most European countries, somewhere around 5% of the population might have been infected with covid. Up to around 10% in the US. Therefore, to have comparable posterior probabilities for long-term side effects, you would need the side effects argument not to merely "apply equally", but to favour the vaccine over the disease by a factor of about 10.

You're not wrong, but my priority is to ensure that my friends who rely on emotion-based arguments (fear of the unknown regarding the vaccines, dismissing the risks of covid and taking too few precautions as a result) to be safe and to not contribute to keeping the pandemic going. Going this deep into statistics would just lose them, because I'd come across as trying to intimidate them into taking my viewpoint on how…

If your friends accuse you of being an ivory tower jerk for adding nuance to a conversation, you should probably get better friends.

Re: Attributes and predictors of long Covid

#42

Post by entropicdrifter » Mon, Mar 22, 2021, 2:44 PM UTC

wvh wrote: post #3

lofi_lory wrote: post #2

> Long COVID was characterized by symptoms of fatigue, headache, dyspnea and anosmia and was more likely with increasing age and body mass index and female sex. Experiencing more than five symptoms during the first week of illness was associated with long COVID. A bit disappointing information. So, first week severity indicates risk for long covid? Or is it multiorgan involvement independent from severity?

It's surprising how long it takes to draw solid conclusions, considering the amount of "live" cases to draw from.

Ironically, an excessively large amount of raw data can make study harder, at least at first, since it can be difficult to scientifically discern what is a real case of long covid and what is the result of other external factors.

Raw data abundance may seem like a good thing for study, but when people have time to build their own lore and superstitions, it can make scientific inquiry that much more difficult.

Re: Attributes and predictors of long Covid

#43

Post by s1artibartfast » Mon, Mar 22, 2021, 2:49 PM UTC

cortic wrote: post #19

vanderZwan wrote: post #7

Something I've noticed: when people in my surroundings bring up worries of long-term effects of the fast-tracked vaccines, they somehow tend to not consider the unknown long-term effects of covid. Even though the argument that we cannot know the long term effects yet should apply equally. When I bring this up they do seem receptive to this argument though, provided I'm not dismissive of their own skepticism. I'm not…

That the vaccine is better than the disease seems a ridiculously low bar to me. I'd be much more reassured if they listed the side effects with their likelihoods (1 in ??) subdivided this with age groups if appropriate, I've seen this in NHS prescriptions in the past and its always been very reassuring.

Every medication publishes this information and must include it in every box shipped. It has been available since approval if you Google “vaccine name” + prescribing information.

The fact that I have yet to see it discussed in 1000s of news articles shows how ineffective news is as an information source.

Re: Attributes and predictors of long Covid

#44

Post by Retric » Mon, Mar 22, 2021, 2:50 PM UTC

sdenton4 wrote: post #30

Retric wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. A lot of modern physics for example still seems objectively wrong when hearing about it as a student. Physical experiments and math has converted a lot of skeptics into believing some very “strange” things about how our universe works.

Acceptance of some of those strange observations relied on the older generation - with strong emotional attachment to the old way of looking at things - dying off.

That’s extremely overstated.

Einstein for example complained about spooky action at a distance, but didn’t disagree with the results. “Quantum mechanics is very worthy of respect. But an inner voice tells me this is not the genuine article after all. The theory delivers much but it hardly brings us closer to the Old One's secret. In any event, I am convinced that He is not playing dice.”

So, he was completely on board with the results of the single photon double slit experiment and other observable results which are very odd. But, he may have favored non local hidden variable theories which are indispensable from QM and all it’s observable oddities.

Re: Attributes and predictors of long Covid

#45

Post by peter422 » Mon, Mar 22, 2021, 2:55 PM UTC

greenwich26 wrote: post #9

vanderZwan wrote: post #7

Something I've noticed: when people in my surroundings bring up worries of long-term effects of the fast-tracked vaccines, they somehow tend to not consider the unknown long-term effects of covid. Even though the argument that we cannot know the long term effects yet should apply equally. When I bring this up they do seem receptive to this argument though, provided I'm not dismissive of their own skepticism. I'm not…

You can't neglect the prior. In most European countries, somewhere around 5% of the population might have been infected with covid. Up to around 10% in the US. Therefore, to have comparable posterior probabilities for long-term side effects, you would need the side effects argument not to merely "apply equally", but to favour the vaccine over the disease by a factor of about 10.

Well one pretty big side effect of the disease is death, which is very long term and we know the vaccines prevent way above 10x. So that should probably count for more.

Re: Attributes and predictors of long Covid

#46

Post by JamesBarney » Mon, Mar 22, 2021, 3:01 PM UTC

jdjdn827js wrote: post #38

m0llusk wrote: post #35

One of the biggest risk factors for COVID and especially for poor outcomes is Vitamin D deficiency, but this study apparently didn't even check Vitamin D levels. That seems like a serious oversight.

> One of the biggest risk factors for COVID and especially for poor outcomes is Vitamin D deficiency. Is it? How exactly is vitamin D deficiency measured and diagnosed? How much variance / tolerance is there between people. Most importantly does COVID impact Vitamin D levels? This may be a serious oversight. Or it may be that the Vitamin D thing is pseudoscience.

> Is it?

Yes

> How exactly is vitamin D deficiency measured and diagnosed?

Usually with a blood test. It's diagnosed because the blood test comes back out of range which is usually below 30 ng/ml for insufficiency, and below 20 for a deficiency.

> How much variance / tolerance is there between people?

The std. deviation is 16.6 ng/ml

> Most importantly does COVID impact Vitamin D levels?

I don't think we know, it's hard to track this. You'd need to follow a huge cohort of people who you test for vitamin d often enough so that while they're getting the infection we see their vitamin d in real time.

Re: Attributes and predictors of long Covid

#47

Post by Closi » Mon, Mar 22, 2021, 3:04 PM UTC

m0llusk wrote: post #35

One of the biggest risk factors for COVID and especially for poor outcomes is Vitamin D deficiency, but this study apparently didn't even check Vitamin D levels. That seems like a serious oversight.

It's not an oversight, it's a limitation of how the study was conducted - you can't check for Vitamin D levels through an app.

But what you can do in this study, is have a dataset with a good size (4m people from the UK!) which allows for much broader analysis than would be possible through other means.

Blood testing 4m people during a pandemic is impractical, and widescale self-reporting will provide insights not otherwise available (as this paper shows).

Re: Attributes and predictors of long Covid

#48

Post by nharada » Mon, Mar 22, 2021, 3:15 PM UTC

learnstats2 wrote: post #13

greenwich26 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not an epidemiologist so don't weigh my opinion too highly, but as a data analyst, my first impression of this "model" is overfitted nonsense.

I checked the paper to try and defend it, but I was unable to find a table with significance testing or standard errors for this regression - it is just stated without justification. This seems an unusual style of reporting results, to me. (Happy to be corrected)

I don't see a table but Fig 3 presents 95% confidence intervals for the odds ratios in the logistic model.

Re: Attributes and predictors of long Covid

#49

Post by adolph » Mon, Mar 22, 2021, 3:19 PM UTC

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #31

adolph wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>my friends who rely on emotion-based arguments Isn’t every argument based in emotion? Do unpalatable facts have a strong track record of success in arguments?

Depends on the setting. Among educated professionals - it's how science gets done. So even though the process is flawed, it's still more consistently fact-based than emotion-based. But some people's arguments are based exclusively on emotion. And they tend to be very bad at estimating risk, because they literally can't tell the difference between one specific tragedy which triggers their emotions because it's reporte…

Is your claim that people whose “arguments are based exclusively on emotion” are “very bad at estimating risk?”

Do you use the term “argument” as meaning a decision making process or an advocacy method?

Is there a significant population of people who base a decision making process “exclusively” on emotion or is that a straw person? (And how do you know that?)

If there were a significant population of people whose decision making process was based on emotion, how would one falsify the premise that they are “bad at estimating risk?”

Given the causality claim that emotion based decision making poorly estimates risk due to availability cognitive bias, could the same causality claim be made that “educated professionals” are often bad at estimating wholistic risk because tunnel vision is also a product of their specialization?

Re: Attributes and predictors of long Covid

#50

Post by Izkata » Mon, Mar 22, 2021, 3:19 PM UTC

DrBazza wrote: post #21

vanderZwan wrote: post #7

Something I've noticed: when people in my surroundings bring up worries of long-term effects of the fast-tracked vaccines, they somehow tend to not consider the unknown long-term effects of covid. Even though the argument that we cannot know the long term effects yet should apply equally. When I bring this up they do seem receptive to this argument though, provided I'm not dismissive of their own skepticism. I'm not…

> fast-tracked vaccines It would be accurate to say that these vaccines have been developed in the optimal time, and vaccines are usually 'slow-tracked'. Nothing has been rushed here in the sense of cutting clinical corners. The development of these vaccines has gone through the same phases of testing that every other vaccine has. Things that slow down all vaccine development: funding, finding volunteers for testing…

> Nothing has been rushed here in the sense of cutting clinical corners. The development of these vaccines has gone through the same phases of testing that every other vaccine has.

They were approved for emergency use, which means skipping tests for long-term side-effects, because those usually take around two years. Every other vaccine has been around for a while and gone through this.