Jump to content

sokolow

Members
  • Posts

    594
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by sokolow

  1. I don’t think we should approach population risks for negative covid-19 outcomes as a live action mashup of Logan’s Run and Roosh Rates Fatties
  2. Well. There’s limited preprint data from German research that shows a low level of limited background immune cross-reactivity in ~1/3 of the population, possibly due to previous exposure to other human coronavirus. But I don’t think they know how much of that is artifact let alone whether those findings are in turn associated with meaningful immune protection
  3. I think healthcare professionals in Italy would be ‘surprised’ by the suggestion that 150 physician deaths in three months from a novel infectious disease is comparable to the flu. I don’t know, maybe given the much higher all-cause mortality and significantly lower lifespans for police and firefighters as an occupation generally, perhaps it is normal for thirty new york cops to die from flu in eight weeks.
  4. It’s pretty safe and its cheap and you can make it real fast!
  5. We could do like Konstantin Chumakov suggests and see if we can induce broad spectrum, nonspecific partial immune protection by exposing the entire population to live attenuated poliovirus through the good old Sabin vaccine. It worked in the USSR, apparently. I’d be for it but I reckon that a fair whack of the aforementioned immunology cognoscenti that are advocates of strengthening one’s immune system would sh!t bricks
  6. On the other hand, the first group of people to begin public discussion of the emerging C-19 epidemic in English is probably the community of beautiful nerds at FluTrackers.com who heard about it from Weibo and WeChat, and I think got onto it before ProMed-Mail, on 30 December. I’m reading their original thread now, its incredible, like reading the Hurricane Sandy thread in the archives
  7. As a result at least one influential epidemiology and public health figure in the USA says he was given a heads up to start paying attention to the atypical pneumonia in Wuhan, on December 15. Because a colleague in China sent him an email.
  8. I’m not sure what you’re saying. You endorsed the concept of international collaboration, and then seemed to retract the endorsement based on some sort of lack of transparency / failure of good faith in data exchange on the part of the CPC rationale. I was saying a benefit of international collaboration is that instead of having to rely on carefully vetted official statements you instead have many hundreds of people in different countries who are now professional colleagues and sometimes friends and they can just send each other an email.
  9. For instance this article about C19 taking hold in Somalia: https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2020/04/somalia-struggles-coronavirus-infections-undetected-200428193056599.html Low number of test kits available, few labs properly equipped to process the tests, technicians and clinical workers already strained to meet need in normal times; testing directed to the very sick; ~2/3 of the ~750 tests run return positive result
  10. @RyanDe680 On the other hand do you think decisionmaking in the USA about how to interpret unofficial, semiofficial, and official public health data & information from China is aided or hindered by the fact that thousands of health and biological scientists in the USA have by now had decades of close academic / professional relationships and personal friendships with their counterparts from China; how many relatively candid and direct channels of communication exist?
  11. i would be unsurprised if it were 10-20x as many persons infected and twice or three times as many dead as the official number but i’m more inclined to believe that if thats the case its because scientists in China themselves might not know yet or be sure of their data & surveillance than a deliberate & overt CPC policy of suppression. i personally am willing to believe the broad strokes of the narrative about the pandemic’s course in China because none of my friends in Shanghai have messaged me yet complaining that they had to call the cops because the semi-trailer full of decomposing plague victims parked across the street from their apartment was starting to smell
  12. Check out his comment on USA from the presser before and you can see how Mike Ryan works his messaging: acknowledging local challenges & sociopolitical context, praise, pointing towards need for science based leadership, praise, countries need to fashion a solution thats long term, praise, emphasis that there needs to be a plan driven by case data and healthcare capability, optimistic finish
  13. Finding the transcript I saw from the papers and blogs that this is featured in that it is going to be a very popular partisan item but for our purposes I would point out that notwithstanding the Nordic countries’ relative movement towards liberal (their liberal not ours, ie to the right) economic & government policy since the 80s Sweden starts this experiment in voluntary community compliance from a very different place than the USA in terms of institutions & policies that enable material conditions that would allow people to make this possibly succeed. Like doing whats best for you and everyone else: stay home from work when you’re sick. In normal times Norway and Sweden still have a problem with illness presenteeism, though its way less than in the USA and usually the reason is people feel bad for making their colleagues rearrange their days. instead of fear. Meanwhile in the USA we’ve been fighting a vicious battle with each other over the very concept of medical PTO and even without PTO its not uncommon for employers to take the attitude that people are malingering when they call in sick and to demand what is basically a punitive physician’s note
  14. reading the transcript i would suggest that mike ryan is being extremely diplomatic while emphasizing & executing positive reinforcement before finishing with a warning to swedes, their leadership and all of us that basically sweden is running a natural & social experiment on whether people as individuals and as a community as well as as a polity will take the initiative to arrest the epidemic & mitigate its effects. praising a relationship of trust between swedes, their governance, their social norms & institutions, telling us its a model we will need but then saying that its going to be put to the test from the presser:
  15. People are very interested in portraying sars-cov2 as a lab release allowed by irresponsible and reckless Chinese scientists. Which is plausible in the “not impossible” sense but the claims to evidence for that are shall we say, circumstantial. And there’s supposed videos and secondhand reports of lax procedure in these labs. So of course we’re supposed to believe scientists in China must be uniquely reckless and incompetent. But like. I was just listening to an interview with Christian Drosten, who is widely recognized as the German national expert on the spicy ‘rona. At one point he was talking about how during sars-1 (sars classic?) he was involved in the first characterization of the virus in Europe. And he had somewhere to be. So when the lab wrapped the work he chucked a briefcase filled with vials of active virus isolate into the trunk of his car and tootled down the autobahn to Frankfurt. He was telling us this, he said, because he was pretty sure enough time had passed he could no longer be charged criminally. Meanwhile in 2014, science staff cleaning out an old NIH lab which was basically being used as a storage closet / junk drawer. In an old wooden box just sitting on a shelf, they found a dozen sealed glass tubes labeled VARIOLA. if that was me I would have run screaming from the building. In 2005, CDC researchers reconstructed the 1918 H1N1 virus in an uparmored BSL3 lab. then they published the genome.
  16. I mean. The USA should be supporting international collaborative research on potential emerging viruses. Financially and with technology and staff exchanges. It makes perfect sense for us a nation to be supporting virology labs in China, India, Indonesia, all throughout South America, etc. I think debunking is a matter of realizing there’s an ethical debate that’s been ongoing among researchers over gain-of-function, some measure of which is basically necessary for therapy and vaccine research, some of which is dangerous. Put it like this: the world in general and the economically marginalized regions of the world in particular has a persistent problem with polio eradication which is that the killed version of the vaccine is relatively expensive. prohibitively so for the so called developing world. it requires injection, hence at least a trained paraprofessional to do it safely, plus its ineffective at outbreak control. meanwhile the live attenuated vaccine costs pennies and you take it orally. however, the attenuated virus can and does mutate such that its descendants can cause disease in unvaccinated humans. so the polio eradication campaign for years has been running around trying to put out brush fires by back-burning, with the inevitable outcome that occasionally the campaign itself starts a local epidemic. meanwhile, in a sinister & secretive lab in the united states the billionaire/oligarch bill gates and his arm candy bride melinda are employing hundreds of scientists and technicians to bioengineer a “designer” poliovirus by tinkering with its genome. the clueless public believe his PR lackeys, which claim that the gates foundation scientists are exploiting a bottleneck in the pathway by which the attenuated virus is able to revert to virulence, with the ultimate aim of creating a live attenuated oral poliovirus vaccine which does not carry the risk of epidemic reemergence. those in the know, however, understand that in reality gates and his minions are engaged in reckless, dangerous gain-of-function experiments ... playing god at best ... perhaps creating the Dollar Flu at worst ...
  17. great news for good food, America! we wanted insight into what percentage of people around the world are currently wanting the rich buttery taste of a hot n fresh Hardee’s® Made from Scratch Biscuit™ so one saturday morning our team randomly sampled the opinions of 3300 potential cravers we encountered in parking lots of just a few of the more than 5000 Hardee’s® locations nationwide. it would be a surprise, folks, if we didn’t know just how good those Made from Scratch Biscuits™ are — our analysis of the data collected in this study shows the answer is 100%!
  18. they got condemned by the professional societies
  19. speaking of excess mortality https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch of the FT has lots of new graphs; he comments that its worth particular attention to look at the hardest-hit regions the by-country example when you look at epidemic centers: lastly this small research triumph about finally tracking down Ecuador’s data would be heartwarming if the topic were not so grim:
  20. what was the recent milestone? seasonal flu is now the hard lower bound of how severe it is? because now by BoE if every person in NYS who is going to get it has already caught it and every one of those who is going to die from it already has, then it would be like the flu
  21. trevor bedford argues based on relatively low genetic diversity and relationships among lineages identified through sampling, and observed patterns of spread that evidence points to emergence in wuhan ca. nov 2019. probably from bats or bats + a another reservoir with lots of human contact or affinity. its always the freakin bats. https://twitter.com/trvrb/status/1253038551869960192?s=20 idk that’d i’d heard there was a candidate endemic human virus people were saying possibly did a big ol reassortment, that’d be interesting
  22. my reckon tho is i suspect that to make that category more useful even provisionally than “persistently high returns of percent positive is bad, you want that number to go down” we’d actually need to get some epidemiologists & statisticians drunk and trick them into dropping their candid gut takes
  23. % positive per test over time is a huge mess number or so i’m told because in communities that are in crisis use of available tests will reflect urgent clinical priorities, hence NYC at one point hitting 50% positive per test because healthcare teams were trying to confirm what they suspected in the already sick patients they were getting so they could pursue appropriate care and precautions. vs. when tests are deployed for epidemic surveillance and its low, like south korea finding 2% positive per test
×
×
  • Create New...