The great Covid and smoking cover-up? • Hacker News Board

Re: The great Covid and smoking cover-up?

#111

Post by acdha » Mon, Dec 05, 2022, 7:50 PM UTC

rhino369 wrote: post #107

graeme wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was apparent very early that there were spread patterns only explainable by aerosols. The Diamond Princess was the earliest publicized example, with cases occurring onboard despite isolation in cabins. Japanese experts understood the lesson immediately and implemented a "three C's" approach to counter airborne spread: avoid close contact, closed spaces, and crowds. Western governments and experts and the WHO inste…

While it took way way way too long for the scientific community to recognize airborne spread, it's hard to say that stuff like Diamond Princess could ONLY be explained by airborne spread. It was early in the pandemic, the disease was poorly understood. It's hard to know if the quarantine was effective--passengers could have continued socializing, sick workers distributing food may have been spreading it, etc. It's a…

> While it took way way way too long for the scientific community to recognize airborne spread

I would make that more specifically as referring to the Western public health establishment, especially the CDC and WHO. Actual scientists were comfortable saying recognition was overdue fairly early on, reaching the point in July 2020 where a large group published an open letter:

https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/71/9/2311/5867798

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00925-7

Re: The great Covid and smoking cover-up?

#112

Post by ghostbrainalpha » Mon, Dec 05, 2022, 7:53 PM UTC

noelsusman wrote: post #99

This thread will surely devolve into a general repository for COVID contrarian angst, but the broader point in this article is an interesting one. I would summarize it by saying there's an asymmetry in evidence demanded for a claim based on whether or not it agrees with the conclusion obtained by reasoning from first principles. The author seems to be saying that rigorous, peer-reviewed, observational studies should…

The data is the data.

If the data that agrees with you is "good data", and the data that disagrees with you "needs to reach a higher standard", that is how inaccurate beliefs get entrenched.

Re: The great Covid and smoking cover-up?

#113

Post by benjaminwootton » Mon, Dec 05, 2022, 7:53 PM UTC

throwaway22032 wrote: post #105

Does anyone else find this baffling as an avenue of exploration to begin with? The health impacts of a 30 year old healthy male smoking tobacco massively outweigh what coronavirus would do to them in 99.9 percent of cases, likely higher. It feels a bit like saying you could reduce your chance of toe cancer by amputating your toe. Theoretically sure, if you're already in a wheelchair, why not, no toes required. But th…

Though you are right, this doesn’t mean that it’s not an interesting avenue of investigation by which we could learn something important about the disease.

Re: The great Covid and smoking cover-up?

#114

Post by saalweachter » Mon, Dec 05, 2022, 8:00 PM UTC

throwaway22032 wrote: post #105

Does anyone else find this baffling as an avenue of exploration to begin with? The health impacts of a 30 year old healthy male smoking tobacco massively outweigh what coronavirus would do to them in 99.9 percent of cases, likely higher. It feels a bit like saying you could reduce your chance of toe cancer by amputating your toe. Theoretically sure, if you're already in a wheelchair, why not, no toes required. But th…

> It feels a bit like saying you could reduce your chance of toe cancer by amputating your toe.

Not disagreeing with your actual point, but we do actually sometimes opt to remove body parts if the cancer risk is high enough, because cancer metastasizes.

So in the hypothetical toe-cancer case, you might go from a X0% chance of developing toe cancer with a Y0% chance of it metastasizing to a 0% chance, which might be worth losing a toe over.

Re: The great Covid and smoking cover-up?

#115

Post by ltbarcly3 » Mon, Dec 05, 2022, 8:02 PM UTC

axiolite wrote: post #40

ltbarcly3 wrote: post #4

As this article points out, there was a lot of correct information being posted that was flagged as misinformation because the officially correct information was incorrect, even though much of it was extremely obviously true (such as n95 masks reducing the chance of infection). In fact it was simultaneously a crisis that n95 masks were in short supply for medical workers and disputed that n95 masks could be useful to…

Please point out anywhere that "officially correct information" stated that n95 masks did not reduce the chance of infection. Very early on, I recall statements discouraging mask use because of concerns the public would incorrectly wear them and increase their risk. At that time there was very limited information about how COVID-19 spread, with the NY Subway steam cleaning their cars on a nightly basis, and people wa…

I can find tons of examples very easily. The last link is a video of Fauci saying masks won't help and aren't worth it. At the time, if you said people should wear masks, you were 'spreading misinformation'.

https://www.cnn.com/factsfirst/politics/factcheck_e58c20c6-8...

"While Fauci, along with several other US health leaders, initially advised people not to wear masks, Fauci later said that he was concerned that there wouldn’t be enough protective equipment for health care workers. This was also early in the pandemic before public health experts fully knew how contagious the disease was and how it spread."

https://www.newsweek.com/fauci-said-masks-not-really-effecti...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackbrewster/2020/10/20/is-trum...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JddXPeeNGoo&t=10s

Re: The great Covid and smoking cover-up?

#116

Post by notahacker » Mon, Dec 05, 2022, 8:09 PM UTC

josefresco wrote: post #8

I immediately check out whenever someone says "Google it and see what comes up" as "evidence" proving some conspiracy. Also, this is weird hill to die on. This dude has amassed a mega-blog post with a ton of aggregated studies - it's not a small amount of work. Anecdotally my only family member who regularly smokes just got COVID.

The author has spent his entire career attacking anti-smoking campaigns both as an author and the reason why the Institute for Economic Affairs was Big Tobacco's favourite think tank, so assembling this sort of list of "evidence" is par for the course for him.

Back in the day when "long COVID" was an unknown phenomenon and vaccines a dim and distant dream, the medical profession had already spotted the interesting correlation and started nicotine supplement trials (anecdotally, my very non-scientific experiment with nicotine patches for lagging symptoms showed no evident effect). It's possible there's been a massive coverup, but it's also possible the health professionals reasoning just wasn't as highly motivated to see success in these trials and an absence of confounding data as Christopher Snowdon...

Re: The great Covid and smoking cover-up?

#117

Post by JustSomeNobody » Mon, Dec 05, 2022, 8:13 PM UTC

Based on the smokers I know, I wonder if it is because smokers, by and large, have been banished to the outdoors. They're much more likely to sit outside at restaurants, they frequently go outside for smoke breaks, they tend not to go places that are overly restrictive of smokers and thus less likely to be around larger groups of people.

Re: The great Covid and smoking cover-up?

#118

Post by janalsncm » Mon, Dec 05, 2022, 8:13 PM UTC

kelnos wrote: post #80

i_am_proteus wrote: post #14

Author compiled a lot of studies on his web log: https://velvetgloveironfist.blogspot.com/2021/08/smoking-and... The studies do appear to show that smoking cigarettes is correlated with a lower probability of getting the Covid, for a lot of different definitions of "getting the Covid." They also appear to be, by eyeball aggregate, inconclusive as to whether the risk of dying from the Covid is higher or lower for smok…

After being given this information, a reasonable person would conclude that while smoking might decrease their risk of getting COVID, starting a smoking habit (possibly leading to addiction) would mean likely worse health outcomes than just accepting the risk of getting COVID (which can be lowered significantly through much safer means). Unfortunately, there are lot of unreasonable people out there. I would not be su…

I think the most likely outcome is for a certain subset of the population to think “I don’t need to get vaccinated, I smoke cigarettes.”

Re: The great Covid and smoking cover-up?

#119

Post by jiggawatts » Mon, Dec 05, 2022, 8:16 PM UTC

NoPie wrote: post #56

i_am_proteus wrote: post #14

Author compiled a lot of studies on his web log: https://velvetgloveironfist.blogspot.com/2021/08/smoking-and... The studies do appear to show that smoking cigarettes is correlated with a lower probability of getting the Covid, for a lot of different definitions of "getting the Covid." They also appear to be, by eyeball aggregate, inconclusive as to whether the risk of dying from the Covid is higher or lower for smok…

Equally we have many studies showing that vitamin D helps to reduce risk from covid (hint: it doesn't). More studies show that ivermectin has a positive effect in covid patients. In fact, ivermectin has no effect or has only a very weak effect in certain patients. In medicine observational studies suffer from certain problems that are hard to overcome. The biggest is that the groups are not equal. For example, smoker…

It’s easy to be confidently wrong with statistics.

Ivermectin improves outcomes in a hospital setting… but only in developing nations.

There’s two confounding effects there! One, you have to be sick enough to be treated in hospital and two, living in a place with high levels of endemic parasite infections.

Ivermectin treats parasites. Parasites are helped by the steroids given for severe infections. Treating the parasite infections does -- demonstrably -- help outcomes, but not uniformly. It's not a prophylactic and it won't do much of anything in developed nations where less than 1% of the population has parasites.

I noticed just how bad these studies were when I took Tamiflu for the worst flu I had ever had. I went from crying in pain to "this feels like a mild sniffle" in less than 12 hours, the fastest I had ever experienced flu symptoms subsiding.

My doctor recommended against taking Tamiful because it was expensive (not really) and that studies showed that its effects were marginal, something like reducing the duration of symptoms by a mere 1/2 a day out of 2-3 weeks.

Reducing the duration... reducing the duration. You see, there's no objective method for measuring symptom severity, so during studies of new medications, they don't. They measure duration. But duration is very difficult to reduce, because of the way the learning process of the immune system works. There's a bunch of sequential processes that occur sequentially.

Tamiflu reduces symptom severity but not duration. So apparently it's "worthless", because it improves only outcomes that aren't measured.

Whether you're crying in pain or not is apparently not objective enough...

Re: The great Covid and smoking cover-up?

#120

Post by iepathos » Mon, Dec 05, 2022, 8:17 PM UTC

Reminds me of the silly graphs you can find proving correlation is not causation like the correlation between Nicolas Cage movies coming out and increase in people drowning by falling into pools. If a Nicolas cage movie comes out this year then people are 50% more likely to drown by falling into a pool and it's a cover up if fact checkers hide this fact from gullible people /s