Quite sure they had a Zika virus vaccine completed within a few months after the outbreak. Obviously getting regulatory approval takes much, much longer but people would probably be surprised how quickly such things can be developed.
In China they could probably do the regulatory bit quickly but it still takes a while to test if vaccines are safe and work. I don't any of the stuff being tested in the article are vaccines.
You give the control arm the current best standard of care until and unless it becomes statistically obvious that your test arm is better and then ethically you're supposed to switch everyone to the drug at that point. It's not like the control group is denied the best care we know how to provide, just to accommodate experimentation.
This is an objection that could be raised against literally any clinical trial.
If we knew that a treatment was effective and safe, it would indeed be immoral to withhold it from people. But we don't know that. Finding that out is the whole point of having trials!
The alternative is to treat everyone as the null hypothesis population, or administer the treatment to everyone and then be unable to determine if it's effective.
Both of these are strictly worse, since neither of them can result in the discovery of an effective treatment.
I would have expected the rolling out of various countermeasures as the epidemic spreads to have a visible effects on the figures. It's weird that it fits a predictable progression so smoothly.
This is a breathtakingly stupid abuse of data analysis. Which of course means it's at the top of Reddit's r/bestof, with thousands of upvotes.
Let's take a look at that paper you linked. The supposedly damning point is that you can fit the data extremely well with a quadratic, in the sense that R^2 is high. However, the data points are rapidly increasing, and because of the way R^2 works, that means only the last ~4 data points have any impact on R^2 at all. The statement of the paper boils down to the claim that you can fit 4 data points on a smooth curve accurately using a 3-parameter fit whose form you got to choose. This is obviously true, for any 4 data points.
It's too bad that reason goes out the window whenever China is involved.
I'm sorry, but I don't quite understand your point. There are far more than 4 data points fitting the curve smoothly. Shouldn't the data have a lot more variation for something like this?
I'm responding to the paper you linked, where you assert "this has happened before".
The story with the Reddit link is similar: at the time of the posting, only ~6 data points actually mattered for R^2, so you would expect R^2 to be very high. (The fit is extremely poor for the first ~6 data points, but that doesn't affect R^2 at all.) After the last date on the chart shown, the R^2 begins to plummet. This is also exactly what you would generically expect.
Amusingly, both of these totally ordinary results are taken as evidence for a conspiracy: the 6 points that fit are taken to be fabricated, and the subsequent points are taken to be fabricated with the sole purpose of throwing off people on Reddit. But if you can claim evidence for a conspiracy no matter what the numbers are, has something gone wrong in your reasoning process? You be the judge!
I would say the numbers deviating from the model after it has been publicized and discussed online are still evidence against the data being fabricated, but weaker than it could have been because there were definitely Chinese people watching those discussion on social media, and so the idea that they might have corrected the mistake and started adding more variation isn't that unlikely.
wow you make it sound like someone is sitting in front of a computer, watching reaction of foreigners on reddit, and tweaking the numbers on an excel sheet. Really? You know, Chinese ppl online really hoped it wasnt a quadratic curve. If the government was just making up the numbers and trying to hide the problem, why not make it linear, or square root? why pick quadratic, such terrifying curve...why say its cornavirus at all? just say its flu, its pneumonia, its a terrible flu season. If all the government cares about is money and economy, why shut down the cities at all and destroy the economy in the processes. When economy is down, business will go bankrupt, people will be pissed, and maybe they will revolt. Why go through all this trouble and not deflect the issue or take no responsibility at all. Isn't all about protecting people and keep people from getting sick? oh btw, now that model doesnt fit anymore, the reported number is higher than the predicted model
I have no doubt there are Chinese propagandists sitting in front of computers watching and interacting with foreigners. I don't know why you think that idea is so ridiculous. The west does it, why wouldn't China?
You're asking a bunch of unrelated questions. It's pretty obvious the epidemic in China is very serious. That's why they are taking all those measures.
I mean it makes sense. We already know Forsythia is safe-ish to eat, has antiviral properties, and it's probably growing within a couple blocks of wherever you live. If it works for COVID-19 then that's kind of the ideal scenario. ~80% of people recover on their own, so a treatment doesn't even need to work that well if it's something that's safe enough for people to just start taking as soon as they get symptoms but before they're sick enough to warrant seeing a doctor, if at that point it can actually make a difference in clinical outcomes.
Something that slows down viral growth by 10% isn't going to do anything if you start taking it a week after you get sick, but if you start taking it at t=0 it could make an enormous difference.
> ~80% of people recover on their own, so a treatment doesn't even need to work that well...
20% of people needing hospitalization and 5-10% needing mechanical ventilation in an ICU does NOT mean treatments don't need to be very effective. ...unless you assume your in the 80% and you don't care about anyone else.
> Another study — a 300-person controlled trial — will test serum from COVID-19 survivors. The bare-bones strategy, based on the idea that the antibodies one person steadily builds up to fight a virus can rapidly help someone freshly infected to fight it off, has had modest success when used to treat other viruses in decades past
I’m surprised we don’t see this type of treatment more often. It might be worth it to set up infrastructure to do this type of treatment at scale everywhere, since it presumably works in most recoverable viral infections.
It has many of the same risks as cannibalism - there are lots of unknown viruses and proteins that normally don't get transferred from person to person, but could cause harm, and if you start distributing them widely, you're gonna have problems.
>China National Biotec Group has been using this plasma, which contains highly potent antibodies, to treat more than 10 seriously ill patients since Feb 8,
> It claimed that those receiving the treatment improved within 24 hours, with reduced inflammation and viral loads along with better oxygen levels in the blood.
32 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 69.0 ms ] threadOf course the biggest problem is that the administration overhead needs to be significantly smaller, which means taking shortcuts.
If we knew that a treatment was effective and safe, it would indeed be immoral to withhold it from people. But we don't know that. Finding that out is the whole point of having trials!
Both of these are strictly worse, since neither of them can result in the discovery of an effective treatment.
None of the various measures taken to contain the outbreak have affected those numbers.
This apparently has happened before with organ donation data: https://bmcmedethics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s129...
Let's take a look at that paper you linked. The supposedly damning point is that you can fit the data extremely well with a quadratic, in the sense that R^2 is high. However, the data points are rapidly increasing, and because of the way R^2 works, that means only the last ~4 data points have any impact on R^2 at all. The statement of the paper boils down to the claim that you can fit 4 data points on a smooth curve accurately using a 3-parameter fit whose form you got to choose. This is obviously true, for any 4 data points.
It's too bad that reason goes out the window whenever China is involved.
The story with the Reddit link is similar: at the time of the posting, only ~6 data points actually mattered for R^2, so you would expect R^2 to be very high. (The fit is extremely poor for the first ~6 data points, but that doesn't affect R^2 at all.) After the last date on the chart shown, the R^2 begins to plummet. This is also exactly what you would generically expect.
Amusingly, both of these totally ordinary results are taken as evidence for a conspiracy: the 6 points that fit are taken to be fabricated, and the subsequent points are taken to be fabricated with the sole purpose of throwing off people on Reddit. But if you can claim evidence for a conspiracy no matter what the numbers are, has something gone wrong in your reasoning process? You be the judge!
You're asking a bunch of unrelated questions. It's pretty obvious the epidemic in China is very serious. That's why they are taking all those measures.
If I recall this was the snakeoil peddled as a miracle cure in the plotline to the movie Contagion.
Something that slows down viral growth by 10% isn't going to do anything if you start taking it a week after you get sick, but if you start taking it at t=0 it could make an enormous difference.
20% of people needing hospitalization and 5-10% needing mechanical ventilation in an ICU does NOT mean treatments don't need to be very effective. ...unless you assume your in the 80% and you don't care about anyone else.
I’m surprised we don’t see this type of treatment more often. It might be worth it to set up infrastructure to do this type of treatment at scale everywhere, since it presumably works in most recoverable viral infections.
Sure you can remove most, but you'll never get all of them.
>China National Biotec Group has been using this plasma, which contains highly potent antibodies, to treat more than 10 seriously ill patients since Feb 8,
> It claimed that those receiving the treatment improved within 24 hours, with reduced inflammation and viral loads along with better oxygen levels in the blood.
https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/china-seeks-plas...