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New Concerning Variant: B.1.1.529

yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com

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Re: New Concerning Variant: B.1.1.529

#201

Post by makomk »

ehsankia wrote: post #167
flunhat wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree 100% -- that whole paragraph has some flimsy logic. The only bit of evidence they provide for travel bans not working is: > For example, we had a travel ban with China in March 2020, only to be infiltrated with a European strain. Isn't this a good sign that the travel ban actually worked -- i.e. created enough of a delay in the spread of covid to result in a meaningfully different pandemic than we would have ot…

The issue with the 2020 travel ban was indeed that it was for a single country only (later added Iran too), and AFAIK only included direct flights, which kinda defeats the point. You have to go all in or nothing.

Italy only banned direct flights from China which was indeed worse than useless, but the US travel ban was based on whether someone had been in China in I think the last 14 days and most subsequent travel restrictions have been modelled on that one.

Re: New Concerning Variant: B.1.1.529

#203

Post by timr »

vishho wrote: post #199
timr wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's too much uncertainty and I don't know how to quantify and otherwise address risk from stranger You know what would help with this? A randomized controlled trial. This isn't tricky at all, except that we can't do the science because it has become political , because people insist that they know the answer already! And if the study shows what they don't want to see, then they censor it, bury it, downvote it i…

We cannot do the science, because such a randomized test would be deeply unethical. Compare to having pregnant women smoke cigarettes to study effect on the fetus. You do this only afterwards with observational data. Next to politization there is also public health, which is more of a management science than an emperical science. And economic concerns. From all the data worldwide, you only reduce risk of hospitalizat…

> We cannot do the science, because such a randomized test would be deeply unethical.

Thank you for perfectly illustrating the problem. I was actually sort of worried that people wouldn't take me seriously when I said that science has become so political that we actually can't do any. It sounds conspiratorial, doesn't it? But, alas:

1) I post results of RCTs showing that masks do little, if anything.

2) Someone replies that the evidence is insufficient for reasons X, Y, Z.

3) I say "great, let's gather more evidence to resolve those uncertainties".

4) Someone replies "we can't, it's unethical".

Quite a fine castle you've built on that cloud, good sir. Very safe indeed.

Re: New Concerning Variant: B.1.1.529

#204

Post by bavell »

kcplate wrote: post #159
oliv__ wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So Sweden had proportionately 5 times more deaths for not locking down with a death / population ratio of 0.00145? I don't think it's ridiculous to consider not locking down with those stats. Locking down has tremendous costs whether mental or economic, you just can't compute and make a nice graph of it.

> Locking down has tremendous costs whether mental or economic, you just can't compute and make a nice graph of it The gorilla in the room that no one’s wants to acknowledge…we locked down to allow people who were likely to die within the next 3-5 years to maybe survive a couple of those years. The price of the lockdowns economically, physical health, mental health, and in education will be paid by folks who were pro…

Harm the young to help the old... why are we doing this to ourselves?

Re: New Concerning Variant: B.1.1.529

#205

Post by flunhat »

timr wrote: post #197
flunhat wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is everyone you're referencing -- and for that matter, you too -- so damn hysterical? Vinay Prasad, case in point: > When democratically elected systems transform into totalitarian regimes, the transition is subtle, stepwise, and involves a combination of pre-planned as well as serendipitous events. Indeed, this was the case with Germany in the years 1929-1939, where Hitler was given a chance at governing, the pr…

> Why is everyone you're referencing -- and for that matter, you too -- so damn hysterical? I am calling for scientific studies. More data to justify our actions and guide our decisions. You are...calling me hysterical.

> you can barely say the results out loud lest you get silenced by the angry mob

Please -- you're not being silenced, you are not some martyr, people are just disagreeing with you.

Re: New Concerning Variant: B.1.1.529

#206

Post by XorNot »

actually_a_dog wrote: post #14
gfodor wrote: post #3

> Travel bans are not evidence-based: It may seem like travel bans for individual countries are a necessary step, but I cannot stress enough that they do not work. This one point compromised the article for me. The standard for “working”, like all measures, is to slow down the spread. We all know travel bans got a bad name because you-know-who proposed them. But all countries imposed travel bans and we ought to be co…

I agree with about 95% of this, but, I don't think "travel bans got a bad name because you-know-who proposed them." I think they got a bad name because you-know-who proposed them previously, targeting countries with you-know-what religion, for a political reason. Had it been just "we're going to reduce air traffic into the country to slow the spread of the virus," I don't think that would have been terribly controver…

The China travel ban wasn't opposed, it was ineffective because it was both late, and then they wasted all the useful time you could've gotten by not stopping indirect travel or travel from Europe where it was already spreading at the time.

By the time a European travel ban was created, it was basically pointless because spread within the US was at wildfire levels compared to any possible contribution from international travel (the question of the morality of forcing flight crews to expose themselves to a deadly novel virus is of course quite a different one).

The story of the Trump pandemic response is taking weak action months too late.

Re: New Concerning Variant: B.1.1.529

#207

Post by timr »

flunhat wrote: post #205
timr wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why is everyone you're referencing -- and for that matter, you too -- so damn hysterical? I am calling for scientific studies. More data to justify our actions and guide our decisions. You are...calling me hysterical.

> you can barely say the results out loud lest you get silenced by the angry mob Please -- you're not being silenced, you are not some martyr, people are just disagreeing with you.

For the record: I wasn't talking about me. There has been actual censorship throughout 2020. A lot of it, across all social-media platforms.

I'm sure the downvoting here has nothing to do with the fact that comments get sorted to the bottom and grayed out.

Re: New Concerning Variant: B.1.1.529

#208

Post by lamontcg »

graeme wrote: post #136
dragontamer wrote: post #10

Look, I'm about as pro-vaccine, pro-lockdown, pro-mask as they come. But the hyperbolic reporting on this variant is not helpful. News articles in mainstream press are already wrong: WHO has named this Omicron (while many publications came out with Nu). This is a virus that takes weeks to months before a variant becomes dominant. You can afford to wait a day or two to get information correct before publishing. Edit:…

This variant is moving much faster to dominance in South Africa than Delta. About 6x faster. You can make some quibbles (small case numbers etc) but this is quick. https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.ft.com/content/d42bcd3d-e70...

Small case numbers are not a "quibble". You need high case numbers to establish that a variant outcompetes another variant or else all you potentially have is luck and founder effects.

Re: New Concerning Variant: B.1.1.529

#209

Post by makomk »

mellavora wrote: post #30
miohtama wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does anybody think these variants will ever stop? We have managed to clear out measles, so we should be able to stop COVID as well with high enough vaccination rates. Although this is not apples-to-apples comparison. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measles_vaccine

We were close to clearing out measles in western countries until the anti-vax movement came along. These days, not so much.

Peak anti-vax for measles was like two decades ago, at least over here in the UK - we were at pretty much an all-time record high for MMR vaccinations of kids before Covid came along and disrupted all the vaccination programs. (I know the BBC ran a very misleading article making it sound like Facebook was causing a vaccination crisis and putting us at risk of a measles outbreak, but in reality the actual danger is from all the people who weren't vaccinated years ago due in part to their own bad reporting.)

Re: New Concerning Variant: B.1.1.529

#210

Post by Klinky »

timr wrote: post #194
Klinky wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His review is targeting the weakest mask type while cherry picking and downplaying even from studies showing benefits of masking, such as the Bangladesh study others have cited, to paint the picture he wants to paint.

Read past the title. It covers all masks, not just cloth facemasks.

I have. I've skimmed through the PDF, and it seems he wants to highlight the "ineffectiveness" of cloth masks, and downplay benefit from other types. It is also odd to put "cloth masks" in the title, if that is not the main focus of the review.
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