291–300 of 465 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
ONS sampling disputes this.
For anyone else not from the UK, ONS seems to be some official body doing some sort of, well, sampling. Do you have a link to their current stats? I found this page[1] but it's not very accessible, not sure this is what you mean. [1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...
Most news articles I see focus solely on the number of vaccinated people when estimating how far away countries are from herd immunity, which seems odd to me. Left out in the discussion seem to be the unvaccinated but already infected. As far as I know, prior infection confers at least some degree of immunity. It may also be the case that those inclined to be skeptical of vaccines were also the ones who exposed thems…
I anecdotally am finding this to be the case
Most models predict initially exponential growth of rate of infection per day, before a flattening off to a steady number of cases per day,and eventually a declining number of cases per day.
Yet in the case of the UK. there is exponential growth, followed by very sudden exponential decay, with no gradual flattening off phase.
It appears that the sudden "switch" is likely caused by a large unmodelled effect.
Possible causes I see:
* Schools stopped on that day, and >half the transmission was occurring in school age children mixing with their peers. That would cause the graph we see.
* Schools stopped that day, and lots of people were only testing themselves as a requirement for attending school. Now that school is over, they have stopped testing. That would also cause the graph we see, but real infection rates would now be higher than suggested by test results. this hypothesis is backed up by the daily number of tests done seeing a big shift (previously few tests were done on friday and saturday, now it's more even).
* The weather changed and now people are spending more time outdoors, reducing transmission.
* It's summertime and a lot of people are taking summer breaks rather than working.
* Another variant, or maybe a totally different virus, is spreading which isn't picked up by current tests (and displacing the current one by causing cross-immunity).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Death is not the only bad outcome to be avoided. And this is yet another illustration of the point I was making about fear, uncertainty and doubt: the Nature article didn't say that there is proof that children will have "long Covid"...it says that these particular studies didn't address the question . By this standard, anyone can make up any speculation of something that might happen to children someday, and we'll…
I agree there is a lot of hysterical speculation, around everything from the initial high death rates to the supposed benefits of HCQ. And slowly we have need to attempt to re-evaluate the data, when it is possible. I really wonder how we could get that data more accurately in the future, without all of the inherent privacy implications and dangers from collecting it. The article also mentions that most of those myoc…
This depends so heavily on personal circumstance that all I can say is "consult with your doctor". There are kids for whom the tradeoff is obviously in favor of getting the vaccine, and others for whom it isn't.
From a high-level perspective, I tend to agree with the logic outlined here (same link as in previous comment):
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know what the point of such conjecture is. Of course we don't know how much immunity comes from infection, and it is quite clear from the spread of delta that we are nowhere near herd immunity in the developed world, even in places like Israel. I had a coronavirus called a cold last year; does that mean I'm immune this year? Unlikely in the long term with COVID. The entire concept of herd immunity may be a mi…
> Usually viruses become more transmissible and less lethal in response to rational behavior in their hosts--but humans are proving we're not rational. I was under the impression viruses became less lethal because if they became more, they'd kill off their hosts and be less likely to spread. There's a chance you get some super virus that becomes both more transmissible and lethal, but that is very rare (from what I c…
Only if the lethality is negatively impacting their fitness. If it can spread to another host quickly, who cares if the previous host dies. There's no selective pressure against it.
Which is why Delta is scary. Not just because of the higher viral load, but new strains could be more lethal and still not be selected against.
I don't see why we should care about number of cases in countries with freely available vaccines. Disease (as reflected by hospital admissions) and death are what we care about. And those numbers are continuing to trend in the right direction. The US media is just addicted to fear at this point. With a more boring/traditional president in the office and the covid panic waning, there is a news vacuum. And the media is…
"Patients with Long COVID report prolonged, multisystem involvement and significant disability. By seven months, many patients have not yet recovered (mainly from systemic and neurological/cognitive symptoms), have not returned to previous levels of work, and continue to experience significant symptom burden."
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5...
Frankly we don't really know how bad the long term effects will be for even those with "mild" illness.
UK citizen here. I just don't think this "collapse" is the case. My gut feel is that everyone has stopped doing lateral flow tests and reporting those tests: noone wants to be isolating now the summer holidays have started, and many people are now ignoring track and trace because they're scared of the possible "pingdemic". I know many people who have stopped scanning in to venues. I reckon many suspect they may have…
> My gut feel is that everyone has stopped doing lateral flow tests and reporting those tests: noone wants to be isolating Okay that's easy to check: data should show a reduction in positive tests roughly on par with the reduction in number of tests. Recent peak value of tests per day was 16.42 per 1000 citizens on Jul 17th. At that time there were 630.57 positive test results per million citizens. On July 28th (late…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Without time for a study, wouldn’t it make sense to assume the most common thing, that a natural infection provides more immunity than the vaccine? No, actually; the actual infection sometimes misfires, leaving dud spike proteins outside the cells. If the immune system finds those first, it'll attack the dud spike proteins instead of the still-functional spike proteins, attacking all the viruses that failed to get…
> Assuming the worst-case scenario until proven otherwise doesn't work like that. You have to look at the entire range of uncertainty, and choose the worst-case scenario for each question. It seems to me the worst case scenario is always applied when looking at things like natural immunity from prior infection, long covid, etc If you model Sars-Cov-2 after Sars-Cov-1 or MERS then you would be lead to believe natural…
What's the worst case scenario here?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> we clearly have evidence that on a short timeframe a version with _wildly_ enhanced transmissibility has evolved. So speculating that changes will continue is reasonable. So let's be clear: the claim is that the virus can mutate, therefore, any particular outcome is equally likely? If I speculate that the virus will mutate into a hemorrhagic fever, like marburg or ebola, is that reasonable? If I speculate that the…
> the claim is that the virus can mutate, therefore, any particular outcome is equally likely? No. Did you actually read the study I linked? Outcomes that enhance transmissibility are always being selected for. Things like higher viral load in the vaccinated. That which spreads, spreads. All things being equal, pathogenicity is neutral and gets down-selected when the pathogenicity conflicts with the ability to spread…
Yes. It makes the general argument (not specific to Covid) that is known to any evolutionary biologist: partial selective pressure causes an organism to evolve away from that pressure. It's why we tell people to take their entire course of antibiotics.
It in no way implies that the organism will evolve to do anything else. You wrote this:
> Additionally, we know that leaky vaccines and continued spread may cause greater pathogenicity.
This is NOT supported by evidence, except in the completely silly sense that the virus "may" do anything, if it is allowed to continue existing.
If we partially vaccinate, SARS-CoV2 "may" evolve legs and do a little dance...but it probably won't (...and for that matter, it probably will hit an upper limit on transmissibility as well. But now I am speculating, if only in an evidence-based manner.)
I don't see why we should care about number of cases in countries with freely available vaccines. Disease (as reflected by hospital admissions) and death are what we care about. And those numbers are continuing to trend in the right direction. The US media is just addicted to fear at this point. With a more boring/traditional president in the office and the covid panic waning, there is a news vacuum. And the media is…
Long Covid. It's not just death and hospitalisations. From The Lancet: "Patients with Long COVID report prolonged, multisystem involvement and significant disability. By seven months, many patients have not yet recovered (mainly from systemic and neurological/cognitive symptoms), have not returned to previous levels of work, and continue to experience significant symptom burden." https://www.thelancet.com/journals/ec…