Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

thetimes.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

981–990 of 1001 posts

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#981

Post by falseprofit »

ricksunny wrote: post #294
randomperson01 wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its a good compilation that I saw in mid 2020 that was one of the sources of data leading me to question the zoonotic spillover hypothesis that I had read in Zhou et al (RaTG13 paper) and Anderson et al. That the WIV was conducting exactly the type of research that could have led to a highly human infectious novel SARS-CoV was poo-pood and cast as a conspiracy theory. As Ian Lipkin stated following the Fauci teleconf…

And helpful that it's hosted on GitHub. PRC can't block Github on a strategic level. So content can be hosted there that gets through the GFW that PRC netizens can see.

Can't they block the subdomain?

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#982

Post by revelio »

boston_clone wrote: post #972
gmarx wrote: post #846

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a medical background and when the pandemic started I did a literature to see if masks had helped with other respiratory virus epidemics (as masking had been common for years in many Asian countries ). the results were decidedly unimpressive and I concluded masks might to something but it was not a big effect at a societal level. The mistake that many smart people without medical backgrounds make is assuming th…

Please share your background so we can more accurately asses your credibility; saying that masks are ineffective is, at this point, painfully ignorant. The nurses who thought so are either fired, dead, or updated their thinking.

No, saying masks work is the ignorant position here. There is no robust evidence that community masking has any effect, and people have looked hard for it. You can easily confirm this yourself because mask mandates had no impact whatsoever on case growth as can be seen by literally anyone who looks at the public test results data.

But if you don't trust your own eyes, maybe the Cochrane Collaboration is enough for you? They published a meta-review of mask studies.

https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD...

Remember, you don't get to claim you're right because you fired everyone who pointed out you're wrong. It's painful to accept this, but masking was a lie from start to finish which is why the position of all the medical staff at the start was that masks don't seem to do anything and there's no evidence community masking would help. That position was correct. They changed it later for ideological reasons and the politician's fallacy.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#983

Post by sampo »

gmarx wrote: post #965
sampo wrote: post #865

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Due to large numbers of immigration, Sweden has younger population than comparable nearby countries. Too many excess death analyses just take the average of 5 previous years (2015-2019) as the baseline, to compare yearly or weekly deaths to. But in countries with ageing population, number of yearly deaths have been on a slowly increasing linear trend already for a long time. If you ignore the trend, and only compare…

All valid things to check but would also need to be checked for other OECD countries. I would not assume the OECD methodology does not take account of the aging. Also I would not assume this had much of an effect. The way it might would be if a lot of younger people moved to Sweden during the pandemic . In general cross border movement slowed during that time

> I would not assume the OECD methodology does not take account of the aging.

And here you would assume very wrong.

OECD does indeed estimate excess mortality simply by comparing to the 2015-2019 averages:

"The expected number of deaths is based on the average number of deaths for the same week over recent years (in this case the previous five years, 2015-19). This baseline could be considered a lower estimate of the expected number of deaths since both population growth and an ageing population would be expected to push up the number of deaths observed each year."

"Importantly, given the impact of COVID-19 to the overall number of weekly deaths in 2020, the average deaths for the period 2015-2019 continues to be used to calculate excess deaths in 2021, and still applies as the base for 2022 and 2023 excess deaths."

From their: Methodology_All-cause-Excess-and-COVID-19-deaths_OECD.pdf

Which you can find from https://stats.oecd.org/index.aspx?queryid=104676 when you try to find their notes for methodology.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#984

Post by wizofaus »

snowwrestler wrote: post #964
wizofaus wrote: post #825

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did GP imply if a virus was leaked it must be man-made? Obviously the fact that the exact virus hadn't been seen before is suggestive of that but it's not inconceivable the lab happened to have samples of a never-before-seen naturally occurring virus that they were planning to do research on. That wasn't the same lab that released the first genome sequencing of the virus though (I gather it was in Shanghai). Not sure…

> Did GP imply if a virus was leaked it must be man-made? This is what the “lab leak” theory is. It’s why every conversation of lab leak is tied up with comments about gain of function, etc. The interesting thing about SARS-COV-2 is that it can infect humans and cause illness (unlike the vast majority of known viruses). When people talk about the origin of the pandemic, it is the origin of this property specifically…

The paper I linked to above has as one hypothesis that it was a naturally occurring virus, cultures of which had been stored or worked on at the lab, and "leaked" by way of infection of workers there. Seems just as plausible as some source virus having been manipulated to increase its infectiousness to humans.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#985

Post by defrost »

revelio wrote: post #982
boston_clone wrote: post #972

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please share your background so we can more accurately asses your credibility; saying that masks are ineffective is, at this point, painfully ignorant. The nurses who thought so are either fired, dead, or updated their thinking.

No, saying masks work is the ignorant position here. There is no robust evidence that community masking has any effect, and people have looked hard for it. You can easily confirm this yourself because mask mandates had no impact whatsoever on case growth as can be seen by literally anyone who looks at the public test results data. But if you don't trust your own eyes, maybe the Cochrane Collaboration is enough for yo…

> There is no robust evidence that community masking has any effect, and people have looked hard for it.

This is simply factually incorrect.

The situation in the US provided a textbook ANOVA scenario with various individual counties adopting a hodge podge of approaches.

For example, one of many such studies

https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/jom-2021-0214...

concludes:

These data showed statistically significant lower averages of SARS-CoV-2 daily infection in counties that passed mask mandates when compared with counties that did not.

The difference-in-difference analysis revealed a 16.9% reduction in predicted COVID-19 cases at the end of 30 days.

You might want to look into why meta reviews, particularly those plucked from popular COVID forums, aren't the bees knees you seem to think they are.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#986

Post by sampo »

gmarx wrote: post #965
sampo wrote: post #865

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Due to large numbers of immigration, Sweden has younger population than comparable nearby countries. Too many excess death analyses just take the average of 5 previous years (2015-2019) as the baseline, to compare yearly or weekly deaths to. But in countries with ageing population, number of yearly deaths have been on a slowly increasing linear trend already for a long time. If you ignore the trend, and only compare…

All valid things to check but would also need to be checked for other OECD countries. I would not assume the OECD methodology does not take account of the aging. Also I would not assume this had much of an effect. The way it might would be if a lot of younger people moved to Sweden during the pandemic . In general cross border movement slowed during that time

> Also I would not assume this had much of an effect.

Also here you are assuming somewhat wrong.

For Finland, the 2015–2019 average annual deaths is 53723. 2022 deaths were 63219. Thus the simple, OECD-style, estimate for excess mortality is 9496.

Whereas an age-structured model from Statistics Finland estimated 56158 deaths for 2022 from pre-covid trends. So the age-structure-aware excess mortality estimate is 7061 for 2022 for Finland.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#987

Post by smeagull »

distortionfield wrote: post #373
smeagull wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

No, it doesnt. All the “indirect evidence” of the lab leak hypothesis could be interpreted multiple other totally reasonable and likely ways, and it would be irresponsible to motivate foreign policy on that “indirect evidence”.

I didn't suggest anyone should. Merely that when a state acts in bad faith, their claims should be ignored, and the worst can be assumed.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#988

Post by GivinStatic »

LatteLazy wrote: post #700

It honestly terrifies me that people in this very thread are still pushing conspiracy theorys. Not just the technically possible ones ("the CCP did it all on purpose") but the just plain factually wrong ("vaccines are more deadly than covid"). Such comments remain popular. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36276268&p=2#36290411

Lab origin is a conspiracy theory too.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#989

Post by revelio »

defrost wrote: post #985
revelio wrote: post #982

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, saying masks work is the ignorant position here. There is no robust evidence that community masking has any effect, and people have looked hard for it. You can easily confirm this yourself because mask mandates had no impact whatsoever on case growth as can be seen by literally anyone who looks at the public test results data. But if you don't trust your own eyes, maybe the Cochrane Collaboration is enough for yo…

> There is no robust evidence that community masking has any effect, and people have looked hard for it. This is simply factually incorrect. The situation in the US provided a textbook ANOVA scenario with various individual counties adopting a hodge podge of approaches. For example, one of many such studies https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/jom-2021-0214... concludes: These data showed statistically sign…

That paper isn't robust evidence, it's the kind of joke quality that typifies masks-work papers actually. RCTs are how you try to decide whether a medical intervention works, they're considered the gold standard for a reason.

Problems with this paper:

1. It's just a study of public data so should be trivially replicable, but they picked data points "via Microsoft Excel’s random number generator function" so it's non-replicable by design. Right up front this makes it incompetent work because there'd be no way to detect P-hacking.

2. Because it's not an RCT they can only show a correlation, not a causation, yet their claims are causal. An obvious confounder is that going out with a mask is no fun so you'd expect people to socialize more in places without a mandate, yet this isn't mentioned.

3. The effect size is tiny: ~4 cases a day! In counties with tens of thousands of people! This is NOT how mask mandates were advertised to the population.

4. "We did not record compliance with mask mandates". Yes I'm sure the residents of places like Anderson County Tennessee followed public health orders meticulously.

5. They ignore all the contradictory evidence.

Again, I cannot stress this enough, we know mask mandates don't work because of the times they were introduced with no change in case trends. Here's a single example:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FPHy4ZoUYAIsYbt.jpg:large

Because the claim is "mask mandates always reduce transmission", it only takes one counter-example to disprove the claim. There are hundreds of charts like that one, but only one is required. That's the nature of falsifiability.

To conclude that mask mandates work you have to be able to explain the times when they didn't. Crap studies like this one (cited 3 times, well done for finding it) are produced by academia all the time, but they get ignored because they can't explain that, and the authors are invariably biased. These guys even cite a claimed 0.5% reduction in cases and call this "effective"! Imagine if governments had stated up front when imposing mask mandates for the first time, "we think this will be effective because it might reduce case counts by half a percent". What would people have thought of the sanity of this cost/benefit tradeoff, exactly?

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#990

Post by stcroixx »

stef25 wrote: post #979
stcroixx wrote: post #936

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody should be trusting news reports anymore. I worked in pharma for a few years on clinical trial systems. What I learned of the dishonesty in the industry made me decide to only take anything they produce if it’s an extreme emergency and I have no other choice. The FDA is a revolving door of pharma execs with financial incentives so they can’t be trusted either.

> I worked in pharma for a few years on clinical trial systems Same here. What did you see that didn't make you lose trust? What I saw if anything was the rigorous work required to get a drug on the market. FDA inspections were feared because if you've made mistakes in your trial everything risks going to the trash. > to only take anything they produce if it’s an extreme emergency How high would you toddler's fever o…

Lying was absolutely commonplace about anything, software validation testing included. Our company 'managed' their relationships with the FDA so we didn't have to fear them, so bribery basically. When I worked there, it was less than a decade since all the rules regarding bribing doctors had changed, so there was still a lot of that going on. All expenses paid trip to Hawaii for doctors and PI's for a week to optionally attend your 2 hour talk on a new drug, that kind of thing. Golf was a big carrot that was used. This was in an area that was a pharma co. hub geographically, so most people had worked at the other companies and all knew each other as well the the FDA people and this helped to grease the wheels. Our company did most of their trials in India, where it's apparently legal to do things to humans with drugs and therapies you can't get away with in the states, so we really leaned into that. Might not have been legal, but it's what was happening anyway.

I don't force my own preferences on my family. I'd not go to a doctor complaining of pain again - they're in over-correction mode over killing so many people with opiates that you can't get help with that for the time being. I'd never personally take any of the medication peddled for anxiety - too many of those meds don't have long term studies or the AE's were swept under the rug for approval.

Post reply on HN