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Leaked documents: Ugandan government expects explosion in Ebola cases

telegraph.co.uk

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Re: Leaked documents: Ugandan government expects explosion in Ebola cases

#131

Post by johndfsgdgdfg »

Bukhmanizer wrote: post #91
pvarangot wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's really not mainstream amongst virologists I mean if you seriously believe that theory you are probably going to either end, start thinking about how to end, or significantly change how you develop, your career as a virologist. Of course it's not mainstream.

It’s not common for virologists to work on GOF research or to do anything close to as dangerous. It’s pure tin hat thinking to say that “my idea is correct and everyone who has any expertise is compromised”. I don’t know what is right or not, but I know a lot of virologists (through work) without any personal interest in the case who don’t put much stock in the lab leak hypothesis.

Thank you for saying this. We know xenophobic racist right wingers are saying that COVID came from China. But WHO-China investigation definitely proved that COVID came outside of China. Even western virologists have been supporting Chinese scientists. [1]

[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

Re: Leaked documents: Ugandan government expects explosion in Ebola cases

#132

Post by hammock »

beebmam wrote: post #87
hammock wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How far out did the Covid forecasts look, to justify global lockdowns?

Are you claiming that the lockdowns that happened in the first half of 2020 had zero effect on SARS-CoV-2 infections?

I'm literally asking a question, since it is news to me that "no professional infectious disease modeler will forecast out more than a few weeks."

Do I sense attitude? If so, why?

Re: Leaked documents: Ugandan government expects explosion in Ebola cases

#133

Post by johndfsgdgdfg »

benreesman wrote: post #110
mikeyouse wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can be as infuriated as you'd like, but I consider HN to be one of the more responsible and educated forums for casual discussion and the level of straight up conspiracy-driven misinformation on everything related to Covid is astonishing. From origins to vaccines to treatments (remember all of the threads extolling HCQ and IVM?), it's as sophisticated as you'd expect from people "doing their own research" in fiel…

Neither the GP nor myself said that SARS-COV-2 escaped from the Wuhan lab, let alone that it was the result of GoF research. I called it a theory , as in, neither conclusively proven nor conclusively disproven. It’s a theory about which there has been significant controversy. I didn’t even say there was significant evidence for it. Acknowledging the existence of a controversy is not the same thing as promoting a cons…

Thank you for saying this. We know xenophobic racist right wingers are saying that COVID came from China. But WHO-China investigation definitely proved that COVID came outside of China. Even western virologists have been supporting Chinese scientists. [1]

[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

Re: Leaked documents: Ugandan government expects explosion in Ebola cases

#134

Post by [deleted] »

spywaregorilla wrote: post #119
mwint wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If “useful to compel” is a criteria, we can jump straight to flat-out lying and dispose with the statistics part.

So you're in charge of making decisions. Hypothetically. Your epidemiologists believe that if no action is taken, 10 people will die in the next two weeks, 100 people will die in the next 4 weeks, and 1,000,000 will die in the next 6 months. Which forecasts would you prefer they keep to themselves?

[deleted]

Re: Leaked documents: Ugandan government expects explosion in Ebola cases

#135

Post by LatteLazy »

postalrat wrote: post #124
LatteLazy wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

6% of Americans (10% of millennial Americans) supposedly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_landing_conspiracy_theori... Despite actual pictures taken recently...

You are claiming 6% is mainstream?

I will say that the evidence is the same for either.

What percentage you think makes an idea mainstream I will leave up to you...

Re: Leaked documents: Ugandan government expects explosion in Ebola cases

#136

Post by Closi »

The quality of forecasting here looks questionable IMO... Let's take the only visible leaked slide below:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/global-health/2022/1...

1) The forecast appears to be "200 new cases per month" (i.e. Month 1 is 200 cases, Month 3 is 600 cases (3200) and Month 4 is 1200 cases (6200)). This is far too simplistic, and should probably follow an exponential/logistic curve if r>1.

2) The graph has simple stats failures like plotting a line between a bar chart.

Doesn't give me too much hope for the other 15 slides...

(The above isn't to say that it isn't a scary situation - clearly this is an awful situation which needs a huge amount of support. But the apparent quality of analysis does worry me that decision makers might not be working on great information)

Re: Leaked documents: Ugandan government expects explosion in Ebola cases

#137

Post by apetersonBFI »

joshuamorton wrote: post #118
VancouverMan wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As with other actions, it's the relationship between the benefits that something brings versus the costs associated with doing it that determine whether or not it's "working". The costs associated with widespread everyday masking are severe. You even quoted the ones that I'd mentioned earlier. Just to overcome those severe costs, masking would have had to consistently bring astounding benefits. At a bare minimum, tha…

> The costs associated with widespread everyday masking are severe. You even quoted the ones that I'd mentioned earlier. Yes, and stated that they are, for the most part, not actually costs. Masks don't cause accessibility problems, they don't cause child development issues, they don't cause social strife when consistently warn and enforced, and they don't cause abusive policing (police don't enforce mask mandates an…

What about people who have difficulty breathing, and have to have their breathing hindered for hours by the mask?

I was in the hospital for 2 days when my wife gave birth, and I was supposed to wear the mask 24/7. Luckily they didn't enforce it strictly so I was able to sleep without the mask.

Re: Leaked documents: Ugandan government expects explosion in Ebola cases

#138

Post by benreesman »

mikeyouse wrote: post #130
Melting_Harps wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've got a busy day so don't want to get into it again -- but I cannot express how incapable the average (even educated!) person is to "do their own research" on something as complex and nuanced as molecular engineering and the probabilities of covid genetic engineering. I don't think you can claim to have consensus on this matter since Dr. Li-Meng Yan who worked at the lab and got the CCP scrub when she went publi…

Me: "Doing your own research on this is very difficult due to people with credentials selling their reputations to service political goals." You: "What about this Chinese scientist who lied about their experience and had no actual evidence of anything but who was working with Steve Bannon and Guo Wengui and repeatedly platformed on Tucker Carlson?![1] Oh and a Senate Republicans minority committee just released a rep…

Why are you so insistent that there shouldn’t be a discussion on this?

For you to say, e.g. “My bona fides are such and such, I find this theory highly implausible for $REASONS” would be eminently useful and helpful and very much in the spirit of the site.

In case the multiple people saying this aren’t saying it clearly enough: you sound more like “Serious people all agree about this, only cranks disagree with us, and you plebs wouldn’t understand even if I explained it”.

Love #1. Fuck #2 in fucking particular.

Re: Leaked documents: Ugandan government expects explosion in Ebola cases

#139

Post by justapassenger »

MichaelCollins wrote: post #58
justapassenger wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gain function is only way to research pathogens.

No it isn't.

To study how they evolve and their potential to become a problem? Yeah, that’s the only way to go.

And given how fast viruses evolve, there’s no real alternative.

Re: Leaked documents: Ugandan government expects explosion in Ebola cases

#140

Post by justapassenger »

benreesman wrote: post #43
mikeyouse wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really not mainstream amongst virologists.. as has been demonstrated by repeatedly debunking the latest gish gallop papers, there's literally zero evidence for lab manipulation of the sars cov2 virus. It's vaguely plausible that the virus could have been captured in the wild and then leaked, but even that seems extremely unlikely given the two separate market lineages and timeline of the earliest cases. Stricter…

I think there is a lot more controversy than you’re implying, even among serious scientists, but an HN comment thread is probably not the right place to litigate a complex issue that is also a partisan political football. I’ll leave it at this: I would encourage everyone to do their own research on this and try to look past the elephant in the room of the politics angle.

Most of controversy comes from scientists, often biologists and doctors, yeah. But not virologists. You know, people who actually know what they’re talking about.

Biology is such an enormously wide and diverse field that opinions of someone who’s not a virologist is often as relevant as an opinion of the software engineer.

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