COVID-19

Discussions about serious topics, for serious people
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jimbob
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Re: COVID-19

Post by jimbob » Fri Sep 11, 2020 7:56 am

Little waster wrote:
Fri Sep 11, 2020 7:25 am
sTeamTraen wrote:
Thu Sep 10, 2020 1:28 pm
#KBF types.
The urban dictionary definition of that is... unfortunate.

:shock:
To be fair - the urban dictionary definition of almost any word is unfortunate.
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Re: COVID-19

Post by Little waster » Fri Sep 11, 2020 10:56 am

jimbob wrote:
Fri Sep 11, 2020 7:56 am
Little waster wrote:
Fri Sep 11, 2020 7:25 am
sTeamTraen wrote:
Thu Sep 10, 2020 1:28 pm
#KBF types.
The urban dictionary definition of that is... unfortunate.

:shock:
To be fair - the urban dictionary definition of almost any word is unfortunate.

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Re: COVID-19

Post by Woodchopper » Fri Sep 11, 2020 11:17 am

The emergence of SARS-CoV-2 in Europe and North America
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/ ... c8169.full

Article uses DNA analysis to recreate the spread of the infection. Shows that several outbreaks died out in the US and Germany during February. Argues that the most important aspect of containment measures was speed.

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Re: COVID-19

Post by discovolante » Fri Sep 11, 2020 11:41 am

Scotland now has a contact tracing app...

https://www.gov.scot/news/protect-scotl ... -launches/

Any thoughts?
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Re: COVID-19

Post by lpm » Fri Sep 11, 2020 11:58 am

It's not described as world beating.

So it's not as good as England's world beating app that was deployed to great acclaim in the Isle of Wight.
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Re: COVID-19

Post by discovolante » Fri Sep 11, 2020 12:27 pm

So far about 11% of the population have downloaded it, but how many keep their bluetooth and location on?
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Re: COVID-19

Post by Grumble » Fri Sep 11, 2020 12:43 pm

My phone updated itself last night to enable contact tracing. Which I thought it had already done a couple of months ago, but never mind.
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Re: COVID-19

Post by Woodchopper » Fri Sep 11, 2020 2:01 pm


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Re: COVID-19

Post by sTeamTraen » Sat Sep 12, 2020 9:47 am

It's being pointed out that the Moonshot testing could do more harm than good.

With 0.01% population prevalence and 99% specificity of the test, you're going to have ~100 false positives for every true case you find. Those 100 will have to majorly isolate (quarantine), and all their contacts will get alerts on their world-beating app. This could cause precisely the disruption to the economy that the uncertainty over the virus is meant to avoid. Of course, the virus might be more prevalent by the time the moonshot lands, and the specificity might be better than 99% (although after a certain number of decimal places you hit limits, including simple human error; "the test" is not just about scraping a sample and assaying it, it's also things like getting the participant's phone number right), but there will still be lots of false positives under such a regime. If it becomes known that most people who are diagnosed don't actually have the disease (to the extent that that can be separated from "They said I was positive but nothing happened, so I must have been an asymptomatic case"), it would seriously affect public confidence in the process.
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Re: COVID-19

Post by headshot » Sat Sep 12, 2020 10:07 am

It's almost like Boris Johnson announced it without thinking it through fully, or consulting any experts about it.

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Re: COVID-19

Post by jimbob » Sat Sep 12, 2020 2:39 pm

jimbob wrote:
Tue Sep 08, 2020 5:42 pm
jimbob wrote:
Sun Sep 06, 2020 5:16 pm
jimbob wrote:
Mon Aug 31, 2020 6:57 am


New map
Image
More in the Central Belt, the Severn Estuary area and the North East with a quick eyeballing
Image

And the North Somerset cluster from that has made it into the UK official data now:

https://www.travellingtabby.com/uk-coronavirus-tracker/

Image
new data

Looking not too good in the South Coast now as well as the places we know.
Screenshot 2020-09-12 152021.png
Screenshot 2020-09-12 152021.png (59.8 KiB) Viewed 3335 times
https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/C3SKs/10/ (zoomed map from https://www.travellingtabby.com/uk-coronavirus-tracker/)
Screenshot 2020-09-12 154107.png
Screenshot 2020-09-12 154107.png (275.63 KiB) Viewed 3334 times
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Re: COVID-19

Post by TAFKAsoveda » Sat Sep 12, 2020 7:15 pm

This video:

https://youtu.be/8UvFhIFzaac

Is being shared all over my Facebook as proof that Covid etc is over.
Can you lot help me Fisk it?
I get all sorts of red flags from it.

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Re: COVID-19

Post by jimbob » Sat Sep 12, 2020 8:18 pm

TAFKAsoveda wrote:
Sat Sep 12, 2020 7:15 pm
This video:

https://youtu.be/8UvFhIFzaac

Is being shared all over my Facebook as proof that Covid etc is over.
Can you lot help me Fisk it?
I get all sorts of red flags from it.
Oh God "Gompetz Curve" and "Professor Michael Levitt*". Those alone are red flags that the person knows less than me - and I'm fairly happy with my competence in semiconductor engineering and device physics. Epidemiology - less so.

Levitt is someone who on the 22nd May was predicting fewer than 5000 deaths in Sweden at a time when there had already been 4200.
Spoiler - he was wrong.
Screenshot 2020-09-12 203846.png
Screenshot 2020-09-12 203846.png (43.65 KiB) Viewed 3282 times


The "rapidly hits about 20% of the population".

The best guess is that by mid August it had "hit about 6% of the UK population" (source - https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/201893/ ... y-testing/ )

We have also seen a single choral rehearsal with 53% to 80% infected. A Korean church with 80% infected. A school overnight camp with 76% of the 58% tested testing postitive and those are off the top of my head, but sufficient to say that the 20% infection rate hasn't been reached in the UK, nor is there any reason to suppose it is anywhere near the herd immunity limit.

"Around 80% are already depfacto immune" Ha. To be honest. If he's misunderstanding or misrepresenting the data this badly this early into the video, it's going to boil down to "he has no credibility - so why should we even address his claims"?

I am unsure even about the shape of his graph for the UK.

This is my version of the 7 day rolling average (=/- 3 days from stated date) UK deaths from the ECDC website https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/publicati ... -worldwide
Screenshot 2020-09-12 205833.png
Screenshot 2020-09-12 205833.png (47.64 KiB) Viewed 3282 times
And this is from my download of the ONS weekly death statistics for England and Wales 2020
Screenshot 2020-09-12 210241.png
Screenshot 2020-09-12 210241.png (45.89 KiB) Viewed 3282 times
Neither *quite* look like his from a quick youtube check - the ONS data is more accurate.

As an aside "sadly have passed" - f.ck YOU AND YOUR INSINCERE SYMPATHY (Although you could probably have a drinking game with that phrase).
4:05
"some hospitals were overflowing in the UK" - various NHS staff have stated that April 2020 was completely different. And indeed it was especially in London - here it is note how utterly invisible this 2017-2018 winter flu is in the overall deaths compared to the April peak, and the lack of cumulative impact on the running total of deaths for the years
Image
(this from the ONS all deaths statistics for Deaths by region of usual residence "E12000007 London" from the ONS weekly deaths data for 2015-2020)

I have so far got 4 minutes out of 37 and got these
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Re: COVID-19

Post by jimbob » Sat Sep 12, 2020 8:28 pm

4:18 Lockdowns and masks have been shown to have very little impact. Evidence?
It's not what what epidemiologists have been saying.

And Israel is an example. Presumably from his previous statements about 20% of the Israeli population were infected by early April, then it declined in a "classic Gompetz curve" before a new population of Israelis arose in the end of May, coincidentally after the restrictions were relaxed:
EeBYG48U0AQ7_I7.png
EeBYG48U0AQ7_I7.png (26.27 KiB) Viewed 3275 times
(oldish graph from my analysis of the ECDC data for Israel)
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Re: COVID-19

Post by jimbob » Sat Sep 12, 2020 8:31 pm

I'm losing the will to live at this rate it would take about a week to get through the video. I always point out that if someone is making that many poor analyses in the first five minutes - why should I have to watch to the end to dispute the rest?
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Re: COVID-19

Post by jimbob » Sat Sep 12, 2020 9:17 pm

Have you considered stupidity as an explanation

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Re: COVID-19

Post by TAFKAsoveda » Sat Sep 12, 2020 10:41 pm

Ta, that”s pretty much what I thought.
When he quoted an opinion piece by libertarian economists as if it was data I really loled out loud.

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Re: COVID-19

Post by jimbob » Sun Sep 13, 2020 8:22 am

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41577-020-00451-5
Clearly, no sterilizing immunity through cross-protection was evident during the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak on the Charles de Gaulle aircraft carrier, where 70% of the young adult sailors became infected before the epidemic came to a halt9.

But he's still talking about 20% threshold for herd immunity, which is 3x higher than we have reached, and with lots of evidence that it is far too low
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Re: COVID-19

Post by badger » Sun Sep 13, 2020 8:35 am

The Times breaking a story (behind paywall) on testing capacity: apparently UK have only been managing 62k a day:

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/leak ... -xjxprnm0v

Also covered here:
https://twitter.com/Gabriel_Pogrund/sta ... 3983225858

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Re: COVID-19

Post by Sciolus » Sun Sep 13, 2020 8:46 am

You wouldn't expect herd immunity to happen for an acute outbreak in a vulnerable population, because it would spread faster than immunity is acquired. So that 70% isn't evidence that the threshold for herd immunity is higher than that. (Although it's surely higher than 20%.)

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Re: COVID-19

Post by lpm » Sun Sep 13, 2020 9:13 am

badger wrote:
Sun Sep 13, 2020 8:35 am
The Times breaking a story (behind paywall) on testing capacity: apparently UK have only been managing 62k a day:

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/leak ... -xjxprnm0v

Also covered here:
https://twitter.com/Gabriel_Pogrund/sta ... 3983225858
I love this powerpoint slide.

Somebody obviously just got their phone out and snapped a photo of their screen while on a conference call. That's what I like to do. How can you stop leaks like that?

And it has all those little powerpoint errors and crammed-in-iness.

Image

I said 3 weeks ago, 22 August, that quantity was going up but quality was going down. It was pretty obvious even from a quick look at published stats. Incompetetence isn't having things go wrong on your watch - it happens to all of us and things going wrong is why we have a watch. Incompetetence is not responding when things start going wrong. Lying and blustering through it makes it worse, the cold hard facts of reality always push through.

The UK abandoned proper testing at the start of the 1st wave. And now here we are at the possible start of a 2nd wave, still without a functioning system.
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Re: COVID-19

Post by Bird on a Fire » Sun Sep 13, 2020 10:37 am

My favourite little detail on that slide is that they apparently have a target of ≤2% results issued positive.
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Re: COVID-19

Post by jimbob » Sun Sep 13, 2020 10:49 am

Sciolus wrote:
Sun Sep 13, 2020 8:46 am
You wouldn't expect herd immunity to happen for an acute outbreak in a vulnerable population, because it would spread faster than immunity is acquired. So that 70% isn't evidence that the threshold for herd immunity is higher than that. (Although it's surely higher than 20%.)
His claim is that 80% is immune due to exposure to other coronaviruses.

Just got this tweet in reply:
https://twitter.com/MackayIM/status/130 ... 47236?s=20
Replying to
@ParkinJim
and
@FatEmperor
You got that far? 3:48 here
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Re: COVID-19

Post by jdc » Mon Sep 14, 2020 12:43 am

jimbob wrote:
Sun Sep 13, 2020 10:49 am
Sciolus wrote:
Sun Sep 13, 2020 8:46 am
You wouldn't expect herd immunity to happen for an acute outbreak in a vulnerable population, because it would spread faster than immunity is acquired. So that 70% isn't evidence that the threshold for herd immunity is higher than that. (Although it's surely higher than 20%.)
His claim is that 80% is immune due to exposure to other coronaviruses.
Seen it via another forum. My pet covid skeptic shared this tweet: https://twitter.com/BenMarten/status/12 ... 6893082624
New German study confirms that 81% of pre-Covid blood donors show T-cell reaction against SARS-CoV-2.
This Confirms that ~19% of people are only expected to be infected with Covid19!
The tweet linked to this: https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-35331/v1 which has a slab of red text at the top saying "This is a preprint. Preprints are preliminary reports that have not undergone peer review. They should not be considered conclusive, used to inform clinical practice, or referenced by the media as validated information." The authors also say in the discussion that:
Notably, we detected SARS-CoV-2 cross-reactive T cells in 81% of unexposed individuals. To determine if these T-cells indeed mediate heterologous immunity and whether this explains the relatively small proportion of severely ill or, even in general, infected patients during this pandemic32,33, a dedicated study using e.g. a matched case control, or retrospective cohort design applying our cross-reactive SARS-CoV-2 T-cell epitopes would be required.
There's also this earlier paper https://www.nature.com/articles/s41577-020-0389-z which refers to a number of similar studies and points out that:
It is frequently assumed that pre-existing T cell memory against SARS-CoV-2 might be either beneficial or irrelevant. However, there is also the possibility that pre-existing immunity might actually be detrimental, through mechanisms such as ‘original antigenic sin’ (the propensity to elicit potentially inferior immune responses owing to pre-existing immune memory to a related pathogen), or through antibody-mediated disease enhancement. While there is no direct evidence to support these outcomes, they must be considered.

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Re: COVID-19

Post by jimbob » Mon Sep 14, 2020 8:11 am

jdc wrote:
Mon Sep 14, 2020 12:43 am
jimbob wrote:
Sun Sep 13, 2020 10:49 am
Sciolus wrote:
Sun Sep 13, 2020 8:46 am
You wouldn't expect herd immunity to happen for an acute outbreak in a vulnerable population, because it would spread faster than immunity is acquired. So that 70% isn't evidence that the threshold for herd immunity is higher than that. (Although it's surely higher than 20%.)
His claim is that 80% is immune due to exposure to other coronaviruses.
Seen it via another forum. My pet covid skeptic shared this tweet: https://twitter.com/BenMarten/status/12 ... 6893082624
New German study confirms that 81% of pre-Covid blood donors show T-cell reaction against SARS-CoV-2.
This Confirms that ~19% of people are only expected to be infected with Covid19!
The tweet linked to this: https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-35331/v1 which has a slab of red text at the top saying "This is a preprint. Preprints are preliminary reports that have not undergone peer review. They should not be considered conclusive, used to inform clinical practice, or referenced by the media as validated information." The authors also say in the discussion that:
Notably, we detected SARS-CoV-2 cross-reactive T cells in 81% of unexposed individuals. To determine if these T-cells indeed mediate heterologous immunity and whether this explains the relatively small proportion of severely ill or, even in general, infected patients during this pandemic32,33, a dedicated study using e.g. a matched case control, or retrospective cohort design applying our cross-reactive SARS-CoV-2 T-cell epitopes would be required.
There's also this earlier paper https://www.nature.com/articles/s41577-020-0389-z which refers to a number of similar studies and points out that:
It is frequently assumed that pre-existing T cell memory against SARS-CoV-2 might be either beneficial or irrelevant. However, there is also the possibility that pre-existing immunity might actually be detrimental, through mechanisms such as ‘original antigenic sin’ (the propensity to elicit potentially inferior immune responses owing to pre-existing immune memory to a related pathogen), or through antibody-mediated disease enhancement. While there is no direct evidence to support these outcomes, they must be considered.
Thanks. You have a pet denier who hasn't blocked you? I have one, but she doesn't seem to say much. Those who make lots of assertions tend to be block-happy like Alistair Haimes
Have you considered stupidity as an explanation

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