I for one love it when mouthy oncologists get picked to talk about epedemiology in the Journal. Next week, tune in for a sculptor's hot take on the Mars lander.
This is textbook ad hominem, and I think is against HN guidelines.
Opinion: We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April
141–150 of 381 posts
Re: Opinion: We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April
#142I'm not sure how much stock I would put into this type of claim in an opinion article, but anecdotally, I've been tracking the daily new cases and percent positive in my area very closely for a while. Especially in the last couple of weeks the percent positive & new cases has fallen dramatically. Seemingly for no good reason. In my state, we are now consistently seeing percent positive less than 10%. After the holida…
It's important to remember that the positivity rate is a measure of how much testing you're doing, not a measure of how much virus is around. Unless you're reading articles about the politics of rapid tests or the like, you should mostly just ignore the pos rate, it doesn't tell you anything useful otherwise.
Re: Opinion: We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
When you say "the vaccine was done in May" do you include building the manufacturing system that would create it and put it into a supply chain? This is a physical thing, not a website, scaling a website to cope with 100m requests is helluva job - scaling a physical product to 100m items is much, much, much harder. Especially when it is a medical product. I think you have forgotten this small detail. Another detail :…
The vaccine could have been rolled out to the most vulnerable groups much sooner than it was. If you vaccinate only those groups (and the vaccine works), you prevent the vast majority deaths. > When we talk about this as a natural process in a population and allowing it to happen the people it happens to in the summer rather than the winter live 6 months less. They may have written a book or a play or helped their gr…
> The vaccine could have been rolled out to the most vulnerable groups much sooner than it was. If you vaccinate only those groups (and the vaccine works), you prevent the vast majority deaths.
Challenge trial don't include the vulnerable groups, so how would you know if a vaccine works for them without doing the normal non-challenge trials?
Vulnerable groups are also usually much more affected by side effects. A vaccine that has no serious side effects in the small, young, healthy people that challenge trials are done on might have severe side effects in vulnerable groups.
Re: Opinion: We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is China an isolated island? How about Vietnam? And no, land borders don't matter that much. They aren't a strong infection vector. You can just close the borders. The vast majority of infections come from air travel, not land travel that is essentially zero. Were also not taking about the EU here, the Article is American, and there aren't a billion people neither in Europe nor in North America. Incidentally, the mod…
I presume you have never been in Europe. There barely any borders to close and a lot of people live in one country and work in another. You can’t block that for a year. In Baarle Nassau in the Netherlands there is a store, and half of it is in the Netherlands and half of it is in Belgium. By the way, air travel has been ~0 for a year now. Unfortunately it has not in fact stopped the pandemic. Must be the no true lock…
Canada closed some of the internal borders between its provinces; something that has never happened before. Some road blocks, some of its based simply on the honour system. Here in Ontario, I cannot legally visit anywhere east of Quebec right now without quarantining on arrival for 2 weeks. And some remote communities are literally barricaded from entry.
Re: Opinion: We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
It should be noted that WSJ’s opinion section is extremely politicized. Their regular news desk is separately edited and maintains decently high journalistic standards.
It's pretty weird actually. The news desk for the WSJ is among the best out there. Their news stories tend to be really dry in a good way - full of facts and figures, with very little in the way of click bait hyperbole. Their subscriber model is all about business people who want the details and not opinion... Which then makes the opinion desk at the WSJ a real oddball. It's consistently right-leaning, sometimes to t…
Isn't that the point of Op-Ed sections, at the end of the day? It's always been a way for newspapers to host what's effectively a glorified collection of Medium posts. Even the New York Times' Opinion page is consistently partisan.
Re: Opinion: We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
The economic damage is being done by the pandemic: people aren’t going to congregate when it’s risky and many businesses can’t survive without high in-person volume. Having lockdowns can get you back to the point where businesses can safely operate with community spread control measures (see e.g. Australia or Taiwan). What won’t work is attacking medical precautions or dissembling about vaccine effectiveness — and on…
Ah. The ‘it works on an isolated island with 5 million people’ fantasy. Except it doesn’t work on continents with billions of people with multiple governments. And then the magical mask fairytale. If only people had worn masks this would all be over. Except now it turns out people have to wear three masks on top of each other. How could that be if masks had solved all the problems? The answer is clear: they don’t. Th…
Last time I checked, Australia is a continent with 26 million people, mostly urban, and strong travel ties throughout the world. Taiwan isn’t big but they’d be at the top of the list of countries you’d expect to get hit by an outbreak in China given travel patterns.
Nobody is saying masks are 100% effective but the scientific consensus has been clear since last spring that they sharply reduce transmission rates. Epidemics are all about cutting those rates, and a minor inconvenience is about as cheap as you can buy a reduction. Certainly better than getting advice from someone who’s going to claim South Korea is a sparsely-populated island to avoid having to admit credulously repeating untrustworthy sources.
Re: Opinion: We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
The upward curve started well before Thanksgiving -- really around October 1 we started seeing the summer flatness yield to an upward curve, it was steepest in November, peaking around mid-January. If the holidays were end of November through December, wouldn't the spike have started around December 1?
That is not evidence that holidays do not lead to increased transmission. It is evidence that other things can also lead to increased transmission. If my hypothesis were "ONLY holidays can lead to increase transmission", then that evidence would falsify it. But my hypothesis is that "holidays can lead to increased transmission", so that evidence doesn't falsify it.
It's hard to prove a negative, for sure. I just don't really see the data that shows the holidays had much effect. There was already a hard bend upwards well before the holidays started. It's certainly possible that the holidays made it worse and the peak ended higher than it needed to, but they certainly didn't create the winter spike.
Re: Opinion: We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April
#148So by April we'll have a new crisis in order to keep the lock-downs rolling.
I have no idea why big business, who supposedly controls the world, would want lockdowns. But in any case, we clearly won't have herd immunity by April, so don't embrace conspiracy theories when lockdowns continue.
There are plenty of ideas that would support those narratives, but I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that you've (disclaimer: correctly or incorrectly I make no judgement) dismissed them as conspiracy theories.
Re: Opinion: We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April
#149I'm not sure how much stock I would put into this type of claim in an opinion article, but anecdotally, I've been tracking the daily new cases and percent positive in my area very closely for a while. Especially in the last couple of weeks the percent positive & new cases has fallen dramatically. Seemingly for no good reason. In my state, we are now consistently seeing percent positive less than 10%. After the holida…
There are many countries exhibiting a similar downward trend, there must be some more global phenomenon at play - https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToS...
Re: Opinion: We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April
#150I'm not sure how much stock I would put into this type of claim in an opinion article, but anecdotally, I've been tracking the daily new cases and percent positive in my area very closely for a while. Especially in the last couple of weeks the percent positive & new cases has fallen dramatically. Seemingly for no good reason. In my state, we are now consistently seeing percent positive less than 10%. After the holida…
It's important to remember that the positivity rate is a measure of how much testing you're doing, not a measure of how much virus is around. Unless you're reading articles about the politics of rapid tests or the like, you should mostly just ignore the pos rate, it doesn't tell you anything useful otherwise.
If one was coming to this conclusion from a single data point, you might be right, but the OP is referring to the period-over-period change. This is a significant trend.