This is a good example of the kind of news that a) should be reported on since it's an important development relating to an ongoing global crisis but b) will be ruthlessly abused by the media to generate clicks, adding to the ever-increasing confusion among the general public about the pandemic.
I'd almost rather it not be reported on since it will only diminish, not enhance, most people's understanding of the virus.
I'd rather the BBC responsibly report that there was "nothing to suggest" it caused worse disease or that vaccines would no longer work, to any alternative.
Facts will get out. You say "the media" as if each outlet is the same, but that's not the case - both responsible sources and conspiracy theorists (among other types of reporters) are represented among "the media". If you want people to have a better understanding of this, it's better that responsible sources get ahead of misinformation.
Maybe we should start calling it the "clickbait media". I do see the BBC as a different type of news outlet that generally plays it straight, and the wording of this particular article sounds very responsible to me.
But much of the rest of the media will have a field day with this.
The pandemic has really made me second guess my blind trust in the "trusted" sources. When the WHO released a statement saying that it hadn't been proven that antibodies prevent covid, the media ran with the sensationalist "antibodies are ineffective" slant. I simply can't believe that the news organizations that ran with that version didn't do it on purpose.
The same can be said for reinfections and perhaps even long-term effects. The narrative surrounding these concepts is so common that I hear it from friends as if it were common knowledge. I don't know about the long-term effects but I am pretty certain that reinfections are very rare. But the prevalence of either seems to be omitted from the story.
Of course we don't know because the news often reports anecdotes when there is no data or even when there is data. The news isn't held to the standard of giving a whole picture, just a glimpse of the current moment. In that they find a lot of wiggle room to publish things that are in the "public interest" while also benefiting from sensationalism.
I have the same reaction. We have listened to falsehoods after falsehoods. A few other examples from the top of my mind:
- Masks protect you / masks don't protect you (I don't know which is true but it is one or the other)
- Infection fatality rates > 5%.
- Virus also dangerous for young people
- Drawing any conclusion from comparing daily cases from the first wave to the second wave (when orders of magnitude more tests were done during the second wave)
- Virus as dangerous as Ebola (read on the front page of the Times in the UK!)
- Hydroxychloroquine is a dangerous drug
- You must stay locked-down until there is a vaccine, even if you had it, as we may not develop immunity (it is either one or the other, if we don't develop immunity there will be no vaccine).
- The virus is not a concern if you go protest BLM
- The virus doesn't respect borders (of course it does because it is carried by humans)
I am sure I could think of more. But my point is the media did everything they could to terrorize the population. And the outcome is x% of the public terrorised, and (1-x%) of the public not believing a word from the media anymore.
The simple fact that you are framing it as "a camp" shows the problem. So there is my camp vs your camp. And one camp is right and the other is wrong? Is that how we deal with infectious diseases?
If GP had used the word "mindset" instead of "camp", would you feel better? Their point is still valid, you're the one framing things here.
You're right that there's a lot of dubious claims out there, and yes there are plenty of examples of overreactions, but it's easy to overcorrect no matter which "side" you lean.
Now explain to me though, if this isn't a "camp" thing, why is it nearly always the case with americans that one political side is claiming the virus isn't dangerous, and one is claiming that it is?
I don't know that there is that much polarisation. There is a very high degree of polarisation and conformity in the media and among public figures. I don't know that the population is actually that polarised. The media would like us to think so, so every Trump voter is presented as a caricature of a Trump supporter, and every Biden voter is a caricature of a SJW activist. But that's not actually how people voted. People rather voted to the centre at this election. There is some correlation but I don't think you can call it a camp.
That's the problem - who has credibility?
Professor pants-down?
Sweden? Germany?
The high profile person on that side, or the high profile person on the other side?
Epistemology is hard. Listen to the best evidence you can, make your own judgements, and realize you won’t be 100% correct in all things. That’s really the best any of us can do.
The WHO very blatantly lied about masks in the beginning to preserve protective equipment for frontline medical personnel. They then changed their tune afterwards. Do you think the science on mask wearing suddenly changed - or do you think they were lying to people because they thought it the lesser evil?
Framing this as a right or left thing is not constructive. Deal with each thing point by point with citations if you want to have a real engagement about the issues.
> - The virus is not a concern if you go protest BLM
That’s right. It doesn’t care whether you do things for fun or for politics. It cares if you do them inside or outside, and that one’s outside. Feel free to go to the beach too.
That wasn't the argument (and the said 1000 health professionals weren't professing any other outdoor activity). Assuming that shouting in close proximity of people is even covid-safe.
I think the point was partly the media didn't seem to care much about BLM protesters not wearing masks. There may have been some lip-service footnotes is all.
Compared to - say - how much they cared when it was Trump supporters rallying etc.
Then all of a sudden it's a big concern.
To be fair, that's probably as much of an issue about media bias as it is about scientifically responsible reporting - but the mixed/contradictory messaging all adds in to the armoury of those who would challenge the mainstream medical view.
The other thing is that protesters actually mostly wore masks. It's kind of something to slam the media for not reporting something that didn't happen.
The thing protesters didn't do was social distancing.
That's fair, though my comment was more about the double standards generally on that issue - masks/distancing whatever (I just used the example given); the point remains that there was a definite light touch from the media wrt covid safety for the "good" guys vs the "bad" guys.
Watching the media say one thing about Hydroxychloroquine and the medical community saying the opposite - at the same time - was really eye-opening for me. As was watching how many people blindly accepted the media's take on it. Every time I brought it up on HN I got down-voted, even when providing citations. It's made me wonder what other things I'm unaware of where the biases in the media lead to large numbers of people believing falsehoods.
I think you can count yourself among the fooled. Have a look at what medical professionals say about HCQ. It's not possible to say that was only the position of a few discredited doctors.
There's quite a lot of evidence to show that if given early it can reduce the severity of the disease.
I went digging for citations to prove my point. However, since I last looked at it back in May there have been a lot of studies that have since completed and they seem to overwhelmingly point to it having no benefit.
Unfortunately many of the studies don't test it correctly in my opinion, as they often test HCQ alone or with Azithromycin. There were some early indications it works as a zinc ionophore to transport zinc into the cells and it's the zinc that has the effect. I personally supplement with zinc and quercetin for this precise reason - I will continue to do so.
I'm not entirely convinced that's wrong, but I will certainly concede that the data now supports that HCQ by itself doesn't seem to have a clinically significant effect on mortality or severity of illness with Covid-19.
I won't exonerate the media though, because they were quick with their early claims that it doesn't work at a time when the evidence was stronger in the other direction (in my opinion) or ambiguous at best. One need look no further for support of that than the sheer amount of studies that were triggered into HCQ for Coivd-19 treatment (over 150 registered clinical trials!) That would have been silly if there was no good reason at the time to think it might be effective.
You must have missed my reply above. But when everyone was starting these studies back in March, it was not because it was a "hoax" it was because it showed initial promise - first in China and then outside of China. So let's not be revisionist with history either. There's a reason it sparked so many studies and it had nothing to do with Trump's antics.
> was because it showed initial promise - first in China and then outside of China
This is incorrect. The idea of using HCQ didn't come from China but from a French doctor, nor did China ever promote using HCQ as a treatment. See the timeline for HCQ in connection with Covid [1].
You're going to need a better source than wikipedia if you want to convince me of that.
Does hydroxychloroquine combat COVID-19? A timeline of evidence [1]:
On February 17, 2020, the State Council of China held a news conference indicating that chloroquine (CQ) had demonstrated efficacy in treating COVID-19 associated pneumonia in multicenter, non-randomized, clinical trials.2,3 This prompted multiple clinical trials in China.
Dude you are trying to discredit cited wiki and you brought a non-statement single page that aggregates Chinese sources from beginning of a year.
here is a quote from that pdf:
>To date, despite enough rationale to justify investigation into the efficacy and safety of HCQ inCOVID-19 (Table II),14,15the evidence regarding itseffect remains limited. HCQ has not yet received United States Food and Drug Administration approval for use against COVID-19, and further trials are needed to establish guidelines. If emerging data from ongoing trials establishes the efficacy of HCQ for prophylaxis and treatment of COVID-19, triage will be important to ensure that existing supplies are used appropriately
The conclusion of your 'evidence' is a call to do trials.
> I don't really care nothing that anyone will say is going to change your mind anyhow
I already changed my mind, you just have reading comprehension issues apparently.
> Dude you are trying to discredit cited wiki and you brought a non-statement single page that aggregates Chinese sources from beginning of a year.
I'm arguing that China was the first country to propose that treatment using HCQ might be effective. I'm NOT arguing that it is effective. I'm merely supporting my statement about the timeline which someone challenged with a wikipedia link. Someone called that false, and it's not - it's history.
> The conclusion of your 'evidence' is a call to do trials.
Work on that reading comprehension, I never called it evidence of efficacy.
HCQ is not effective and that's the conclusve statement. Who cares that back in jan some kooks tried to be famous based on non blinded study on 10 patients?
Also "20 000 new cases" - out of how many tests? 20 000? 100 000? There are claims of some companies returning only positive results, others only negative.
Also the data collection has been so erroneous that analyses are therefore meaningless, and response action therefore just theatre.
> Masks protect you / masks don't protect you (I don't know which is true but it is one or the other)
Or maybe it's not a binary thing at all?
Early discussions centered around "masks are imperfect when worn by non-medical professionals and may lead to more risky behaviour".
In light of this people argued that it was best to not recommend them.
The science of covid does not map cleanly only public health advice. The latter is the art of the possible and the former is - like all science - incomplete and continually evolving.
Let's face it (no pun intended). It was a calculated lie designed to induce desired behavior and 'save masks for healthcare professionals'. It's a pity thousands of Chinese did not fall for the lie and bought yearly supplies of masks, N95 respirators, gloves and whatnot, and shipped them back to the mainland.
You shouldn't be downvoted. These are valid questions that have been poorly handled by media and political leaders. Pretending they're right-wing talking points and ignoring them is a big part of why so many people distrust the mainstream narrative and recommendations regarding COVID.
I am not actually sure some of your things follow; for example, while the virus clearly has a lower fatality rate than Ebola, it also spreads much more effectively than Ebola -- COVID-19 has already killed way more people than Ebola throughout history. I am not aware of the specific article, which could have compared them in many wasys, but I expect this is an example where the claim you're debunking is literally true, but maybe not especially useful because Ebola belongs to a very small class of diseases that are extremely fatal but not very dangerous all told because of the speed with which it kills. The same is true of any seasonal strain of influenza. I am sure the Times is a rag, but most of the comparisons I've seen with other diseases have correctly emphasized that respiratory infections spread so well that even if deaths exist only in the tail of the distribution they have a much higher capacity for carnage than most other infections. This has been a pretty consistent refrain since the beginning.
Likewise, it is not true that you can't develop a vaccine for diseases for which natural immunity from exposure is weak or absent. Some vaccines rely on stimulating a similar kind of natural immunity, others teach your immune system to target the pathogen in a different fashion than the natural immunity if any. For COVID-19 specifically there are vaccines on many different delivery platforms.
Likewise, the BLM point: the media coverage of the protests was definitely not crystal clear, but one consistent refrain was that the virus spreads fairly poorly outdoors (or, in fact, in areas with high air circulation) when wearing masks. The initial "reopen" "protests" were mostly people not wearing masks. The later BLM protests were mostly people wearing masks. Compliance was not 100% and obviously some degree of risk is involved in any protest, but as a whole I think the tone of the reporting was fairly reasonable. You may be conflating the tone of public health officials -- who largely engaged in (politically motivated) cost-benefit analysis about the protests by saying things like "whatever risk of COVID there is, the risk of violence in these communities is higher, so the protests are a public health good." I agree that these statements were not especially helpful or informed.
IFR reporting has been consistently <1%. I think you may be conflating early CFR reporting, which sometimes made claims about 2-5% CFR. That was based on the best available reporting and was not irresponsible at the time. What we've learned since this is that a large number of cases are asymptomatic, and so with a large testing apparatus we catch a number of infections that never would have become cases. This is still important in terms of managing public health resources and spread. Both the CFR and the IFR are important numbers to understand the dynamics. It is possible some source reported a high IFR rate, but I think even by April we had a fairly good indication that seroprevalence was substantially higher than known cases, and so the IFR would be correspondingly lower than the CFR.
Likewise the reporting on hydroxychloroquine. The narrative of reporting seemed pretty consistent: first, some doctors considered hydroxychloroquine as a sort of emergency treatment measure in the early days of the pandemic because it was believed something about the mechanism of action that's beyond me might be fruitful. In parallel to this kind of "battlefield medicine", a small number of trials and studies proceeded. These found mixed but generally negative results with the administration of hydroxychloroquine. At the same time, a collection of right-populist leaders around the world (especially Bolsonaro and Trump) advocated aggressively for hydroxychloroquine on the basis of either attempting to provide hope or else delusion, rather than evidence. This was followed by scary sounding reporting of isolated cases of idiots prophylactically taking either hydroxychloroquine or something that ...
I distinctly remember estimates of the CFR being as high as 5% in several independent (as in non-MSM although I hate that term) reviews of available data.
I never got a sense that the media over-reported CFR or IFR.
They did a terrible job of contextualising all the figures which was infuriating - but the net result of that wasn't especially exaggerating the threat. More that it didn't educate people to understand what they were hearing.
Poking my head in as a physician that is also frustrated with some of the reporting on this topic, it's worth noting that a lot of the reporting seems earnest, but loses context when the person translating 'expert talk' into 'layman talk' isn't qualified to do that translating, and loses some nuance. For instance, referring to your list of "lies":
1. Early on in the pandemic it was highly questionable what the value of masking was. We had mixed experiences to go on: on the one hand, even N95 filtration seemed to not be overwhelmingly effective in stopping viral passage in the laboratory, on the other hand we'd had previous SARS breakouts where universal cloth masking had stopped outbreaks. Neither of these things is "false", they're different facts that needed to be incorporated into a single world-view. What has emerged over time is "masking works, both by reducing the rate of transmission and by reducing viral load - the latter mechanism enough to decreased morbidity, mortality, and symptomaticity rates. It doesn't work by outright stopping viral transmission." "Evolving worldview" isn't the same as "lying."
2. Infection fatality rates were >5%. Important note: there are open and closed case rates. Open Case rates are cases that haven't "ended" yet, either by recovery or death. Closed cases are for those that have. When your population under study is accumulating new cases at an exponential rate, at any given time the majority of "open" cases are early in the disease (and thus haven't died or recovered yet), biasing the IFR downward. At the same time, it means the bulk of cases not destined to end in death are delayed into the future compared to those that end in rapid death - so the closed case IFR is biased upward. For a while we had open case IFR <1% and in a number of places closed case IFR >30%. Early in the course of the outbreak in the US, during the first wave before things skyrocketed and our hospitals went to capacity, our open case rate was ~3% and closed case was around 12%. The more we juggled stats, the more it looked like the 'true' rate was going to be around 4-6%. Again, how these rates evolve over time as we improve detection, management, and treatment doesn't change that this was true at the time.
- Immunity via vaccination and immunity via infection are not the same thing. You can develop an immune response that isn't super effective (e.g., targets a highly non-conserved region of RBD, or was adequate at producing antibodies that provoked macrophage activity but not effective at viral neutralization.) Or you can develop an immune response that isn't long-lasting. The vaccine, on the other hand, is designed to target a highly-conserved region (so it's cross-reactive across many sub-strains, which it is); it's tested for the production of neutralizing antibodies (which it does); and it's given in two doses to ensure a better lasting response by intentionally provoking the development of additional memory cells. These things are different. You falsely equated them, and thus determined one of them must be a lie.
I don't know about, for instance, the ebola thing. Not a paper I read. If I were to be generous, I'd say "reporters fail to convey the nuance and context that helps people make sense of apparently contradictory information." Because that's most of what I'm seeing in your post: attempts at making sense of the world, but without enough information to succeed at doing so, and identifying the gaps in your knowledge as 'lies' rather than ignorance.
>I don't know about the long-term effects but I am pretty certain that reinfections are very rare.
There are 4 endemic coronavirus strains that circulate through out the community. Immunity to those is hypothesized to be a 1 year time frame. Covid19 is probably going to be similar. The game changer is the vaccine which may cause a more durable and longer term immune response.
Mechanistically reinfection is possible even with a vaccine but you may be asymptomatic or the disease course may be innocuous and the infectious period reduced. This is what reduces the Ro value below 1.
Based on what are you so certain when you say: "I am pretty certain that reinfections are very rare"? I read the AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine study, which was as serious as it can be (even the errors in the procedures were discovered and honestly reported):
From all people who were tested in the study (a lot, order of 40000) around 2 percent were infected during the study. Remember that as the base infection rate during the study.
At the same time, around 370 were PCR positive at the start of the study. But during the study, of these 370, 3 were reinfected. It's not far from 1% of those. Now, as the infection rate of those not positive at the start (which we can consider "control") was around 2%, it seems that the chance to be reinfected could be as high as 50% during just the months the study was ongoing!
Please don't consider the estimated numbers as too exact, I don't believe there are much significant digits for conclusion, but I believe they represent the right order of magnitude when based on that many subjects and the randomness of the process, and the only conclusion that could follow is: naturally infected could be only weakly protected from the reinfection only months later. The quote from the study:
"A small proportion of participants were seropositive at baseline (138 [1·3%] of 10 673 in the UK and 235 [2·3%] of 10 002 in Brazil). Three participants seropositive at baseline had subsequent NAAT-positive swabs. One participant had an asymptomatic infection 3 weeks after a first dose of ChAdOx1 nCoV-19. Two other participants in the control group had symptomatic infections 8 weeks and 21 weeks after their baseline sample was taken."
That's for me a kind-of proof that the reinfections aren't rare at all. Even more interesting, 2 of 3 were symptomatic, and the reinfections happened quite soon.
The reason it's not more known is only because most of reinfections just aren't tracked in careful studies like this one. Initially, the cases of reinfections weren't dismissed for lacking the "definitive" proof. An sure, most of the tests are just PCR, but there were a few studies where the sequencing was performed (much rarer and more expensive and time consuming procedure) and where it was possible to prove that the detected virus in the reinfection didn't have the same genetic fingerprint as the initial one.
Then you quoted from the paper: ... small proportion of participants were seropositive ...
Which is in direct conflict. The latter is saying they had positive antibody tests. Not PCR tests. In fact a lot of those were most likely just false positives, from a antibody test that "only" had a 99% specificity. Which is most of them.
No conflict: The infection rate is 2% from those starting not infected. The infection rate is 1% for those who started as infected and later tested positive again, after more weeks. That's only twice less common than normal infection, which is a lot.
The quote you requoted only partially lacked the end: "at baseline": "A small proportion of participants were seropositive at baseline" which doesn't say anything about the reinfection.
It's also surely not antibody test, NAAT mentioned is "nucleic acid amplification test" a test that tests for the presence of virus' RNA, not antibodies. Also: false positive while symptomatic is significantly less probable than just the probability of false positive.
If your point is that you don't believe they were seropositive at all at baseline, fine, that's can be said, it would be possible, and that is surely not 100% sure.
The point is still, there's no proof that the reinfections are "rare." And from what is known about another human coronaviruses reinfections do occur each year.
Edit, answer to below: yes, I tried to understand what you say, the last two paragraphs I wrote after I wrote the start. The NAAT is the only test procedure mentioned in the same quote where you took only the first few words. I do admit wrongly remembering the nature of the test at the baseline. It has sense as it would be less probable to have somebody participating in the study at the time when he should be in isolation.
I don't think you understand. You claimed 370 people were PCR positive at the start of the test. Then you quoted from the paper results for seropositivity. That quote is clearly the source for your claim, since the numbers add up to 371. But seropositivity is not the same thing as PCR positivity.
And I don't understand why you're pulling in the NAAT test from that quote. It is how the three people tested positive later, after being infected. It is not about the 370 people who were seropositive at the baseline.
This is why we need experts that are truthful everyone reading all of these reports just gets their little heads confused. Only problem is everyone's got an ax to grind and everyone's biased. I'd rather talk about facts on the ground. I go to the hospital multiple times a week the whole place is shut down with lights turned off most of the nurses are laid off that I used to know that worked there. They keep saying that the hospital is full because of covid patients it's not true the covid wing is full 30 beds and a hospital designed for an entire city.
Problem is, you could report the most well-sourced, well-worded article and some portion of the readership would only glean a few details, wrapped up in the context of their own understanding or existing outlook, and then repeated through their own interpretation.
There's really nothing to be done to prevent this except to note how important it is to consider all of the associated information, and present its context.
You'll never control how the information is processed by each receiving party, and nor should you.
It's good to have this information—it's good to let people know that there is always the potential for something similar, or worse, to arise.
Similar to knowing your entire house might be wiped out [by a major storm] someday if you move to Florida—which wouldn't surprise anyone anymore. Repeated dispersal of the information will help prevent rampant hysteria... once a semblance of understanding and context is normalized.
Are there any news sources that aren't quite so breathless? I'm not talking about left/right biases, there's a general tendency for all news outlets to report stories that highlight negative aspects and generally choose words that induce anger in one group or another (think of the over-use of words like "slam").
My impression of the current U.K. government is that the only thing it can do well is utter “clickbait”-style soundbites. This is suboptimal, and I hope my impression is inaccurate.
What does "clickbait" mean in this context? Traditional clickbait is "you won't believe what just happened, click to read!".
I have no love for the UK government, but clickbait is not the word that comes to mind. Here's the quote:
“Over the last few days, thanks to our world-class genomic capability in the UK, we have identified a new variant of coronavirus which may be associated with the fastest spread of the virus in the south-east of England.
“Initial analysis suggests that this variant is growing faster than the existing variance [sic, should be 'variants'?]. We’ve currently identified over 1,000 cases with this variant, predominantly in the south of England, although cases have been identified in nearly 60 different local authority areas and numbers are increasing rapidly.”
Having just watched him say it in Parliament. That quote is exactly what he said. He did however also add further details that focused research is now ongoing to establish exactly if this variant is a problem or not in regards to the vaccine efficacy.
The main problem with the mass-Media is that they are so keen to a) publish a click-bait headline, and b) keep the word count to a minimum so as not to scare off their illiterate readers, that the actual truth of news gets lost or diluted... to the extent that the articles no longer form any function other than to generate clicks.
I wasn't calling out the BBC per-se. My points are true of all news media sites.
As a literate person with an higher than average reading comprehension, who do I talk to in the BBC to get news articles on their website that contain proper in-depth content and words beyond Key Stage 2? As a licence fee paying UK citizen, I'd really like to know.
> Mr Hancock said there was "nothing to suggest" it caused worse disease or that vaccines would no longer work.
I was paying more attention to the vaccines would no longer work part. People need a worldview in order to function. Mine has been shattered a few times, including with this pandemic. Still, I have a lot of expectations. I don't think there will be anything worse than COVID-19 that comes from a highly communicable respiratory transmitted illness, just like when I lived in the Bay Area I didn't think there would be a huge earthquake anytime soon...
The possibility of the current crop of vaccines not being overwhelmingly effective, or not being distributed widely, or not being taken widely, thereby extending the quarantine past this summer, is something I'm braced for (although not really prepared for).
The only reason people are tolerating more lockdowns and more quarantines and masks are because the vaccine which is being deployed now is going to end all of that. First it was 14 days to slow the spread and flatten the curve and somehow they stretched that for a year into wait for the vaccine. Unlike Charlie Brown, if they pull this football away I won't be obeying any more orders. Gates said it might be into 2022 until masks will end. Who the put Gates in charge?
Your experience sounds extremely localized (I'd guess California). The pandemic has been handled very differently state-to-state and city-to-city (not to mention internationally). I could see being frustrated if you live in one of the stricter regions, but you should also remember that in many parts of the US and the world, people have been having parties and going to bars, etc for most of this year.
Why would 14 days be enough to stop an exponential curve from overwhelming all medical facilities?
> Who the put Gates in charge?
He isn’t, what you wrote sounds like his option. My option would be ~9 months from now, but it’s still just an opinion, and I’ve been wrong about COVID before.
> First it was 14 days to slow the spread and flatten the curve and somehow they stretched that for a year into wait for the vaccine.
In the US, where it was cited, the 14-day thing referred to strict lockdowns, was always projected to be cycled on and off as needed to maintain caseload and to involve other controls (masks, social distancing, lighter commerce/gathering restrictions) outside of the strict lockdowns period, and strict lockdowns mostly didn't get extended much beyond that length until some of the new ones recently (though some did get restored, perhaps in slightly different form, months later, hence the new onrs), and in many cases were less effective than planned because they saw very poor compliance and inconsistent enforcement, and because travel with different areas that did not enforce similar controls was not curtailed. (And sometimes, those “different areas” were the next county over, with lots of crossover for shopping, work, and personal services.)
I find it awkward that people don’t understand this: experts, researchers, doctors, WHO, CDC, they are not “in charge of” viruses.
They don’t represent the virus. They have no direct control over the virus. They are not, like, negotiating a talk or anything. The thing don’t even qualify as life by our definitions.
Those experts just happens to know how best to handle it. Whether that handling instruction is ideal or compatible with the society up to 2019/11, that’s entirely beyond their control and out of their normal scope of interest.
> The only reason people are tolerating more lockdowns and more quarantines and masks are because the vaccine which is being deployed now is going to end all of that.
FYI - there's no concrete data out yet that suggests the vaccine will stop transmission of the virus. The vaccine is only to reduce symptoms from turning severe. They hope it can reduce transmission, but those studies aren't complete. Also kids and young teens are not going to be vaccinated until probably summer.
> First it was 14 days to slow the spread and flatten the curve and somehow they stretched that for a year into wait for the vaccine
14 days was the optimistic scenario in which people actually follow rules. Many people did not and do not follow the rules.
I feel pretty certain it will be different from what it is today, sure, but how much would be kept? Wearing masks? Some sort of vaccine proof so you don't have to wear them? Still no indoor events with more than, say, 500 people?
Even with vaccines it seems to me quite likely that this will go on past the summer, no? By then only a fragment of the population will have been vaccinated, and it seems likely much of the social restrictions we have today will need to stick around. The pessimist gut feeling in me says it's more likely to be 18 months to 2 years until things have a semblance of normal again. I have nothing to back that up, but thats what I'm preparing for.
Since we have known the virus has been acquiring mutations since basically the beginning [0]. What makes this variant significant enough for the Health Secretary to bring up in Parliament?
They updated the article. Originally they said it was significant because of its potential to spread faster.
> “We have identified a new variant of coronavirus, which may be associated with the faster spread in the southeast of England,” Hancock said in a statement to parliament.
What is unstated here is that the Health Minister is unlikely to mention this in parliament if it is not suspected that there may be a more contagious or harmful strain.
If there is a strain that is more fatal or more virulent, it will be the UK's own fault.
I did not see this reasonably obvious possibility being taken into account in any UK government modelling that was done. It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone in December 2020, and yet it is apparently a surprise to the UK government.
Planning to take the minimum action to prevent spread (keep R at or just below 1) is equal to doing the maximum amount to enable mutations and new strains.
Again: this wasn't considered by the UK's scientific modelling.
>South Australia was plunged into a strict six-day lockdown on the back of a declaration that a “dangerous” new strain of coronavirus had swept the state’s capital.
>It was a claim that raised eyebrows among epidemiologists around the country, some of whom labelled it “rubbish”.
>Today, it was essentially revealed that an alleged lie led health authorities and the government to conclude a new strain must have merged.
>[Health Secretary Matt Hancock] said there was "nothing to suggest" it caused worse disease or that vaccines would no longer work.
I do wonder in general about the "herd immunity" strategy and the likelihood that a worse strain or one that's resistant to the current vaccines comes along.
I assume that the probability of mutation is basically proportional to the number of people who are infected by SARS-CoV-2. So, in addition to all the usual reasons why letting the virus spread freely until most of the population develops immunity (for some unknown length of time) is a bad idea, it seems like the spread of the virus is also setting up optimal conditions for the virus to evolve into something different or worse.
I'm not an expert though, and I imagine there are probably other factors I'm not aware of besides number and severity of infections in determining whether a virus evolves or not.
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[ 0.26 ms ] story [ 161 ms ] threadI'd almost rather it not be reported on since it will only diminish, not enhance, most people's understanding of the virus.
Facts will get out. You say "the media" as if each outlet is the same, but that's not the case - both responsible sources and conspiracy theorists (among other types of reporters) are represented among "the media". If you want people to have a better understanding of this, it's better that responsible sources get ahead of misinformation.
But much of the rest of the media will have a field day with this.
Until that happens, isn't blanket-labelling them a guilty party a little premature?
The same can be said for reinfections and perhaps even long-term effects. The narrative surrounding these concepts is so common that I hear it from friends as if it were common knowledge. I don't know about the long-term effects but I am pretty certain that reinfections are very rare. But the prevalence of either seems to be omitted from the story.
Of course we don't know because the news often reports anecdotes when there is no data or even when there is data. The news isn't held to the standard of giving a whole picture, just a glimpse of the current moment. In that they find a lot of wiggle room to publish things that are in the "public interest" while also benefiting from sensationalism.
- Masks protect you / masks don't protect you (I don't know which is true but it is one or the other)
- Infection fatality rates > 5%.
- Virus also dangerous for young people
- Drawing any conclusion from comparing daily cases from the first wave to the second wave (when orders of magnitude more tests were done during the second wave)
- Virus as dangerous as Ebola (read on the front page of the Times in the UK!)
- Hydroxychloroquine is a dangerous drug
- You must stay locked-down until there is a vaccine, even if you had it, as we may not develop immunity (it is either one or the other, if we don't develop immunity there will be no vaccine).
- The virus is not a concern if you go protest BLM
- The virus doesn't respect borders (of course it does because it is carried by humans)
I am sure I could think of more. But my point is the media did everything they could to terrorize the population. And the outcome is x% of the public terrorised, and (1-x%) of the public not believing a word from the media anymore.
Masks primarily protect others, so whether they protect you is a secondary question.
And no-one (with any credibility) is really stating any of the other positions you've listed.
You're right that there's a lot of dubious claims out there, and yes there are plenty of examples of overreactions, but it's easy to overcorrect no matter which "side" you lean.
Now explain to me though, if this isn't a "camp" thing, why is it nearly always the case with americans that one political side is claiming the virus isn't dangerous, and one is claiming that it is?
Framing this as a right or left thing is not constructive. Deal with each thing point by point with citations if you want to have a real engagement about the issues.
That’s right. It doesn’t care whether you do things for fun or for politics. It cares if you do them inside or outside, and that one’s outside. Feel free to go to the beach too.
https://www.nber.org/papers/w27408
Compared to - say - how much they cared when it was Trump supporters rallying etc.
Then all of a sudden it's a big concern.
To be fair, that's probably as much of an issue about media bias as it is about scientifically responsible reporting - but the mixed/contradictory messaging all adds in to the armoury of those who would challenge the mainstream medical view.
The thing protesters didn't do was social distancing.
Or are you going in the direction of a few discredited doctors presenting evidence that it works?
There's quite a lot of evidence to show that if given early it can reduce the severity of the disease.
One of us is fooled though!
Unfortunately many of the studies don't test it correctly in my opinion, as they often test HCQ alone or with Azithromycin. There were some early indications it works as a zinc ionophore to transport zinc into the cells and it's the zinc that has the effect. I personally supplement with zinc and quercetin for this precise reason - I will continue to do so.
I'm not entirely convinced that's wrong, but I will certainly concede that the data now supports that HCQ by itself doesn't seem to have a clinically significant effect on mortality or severity of illness with Covid-19.
I won't exonerate the media though, because they were quick with their early claims that it doesn't work at a time when the evidence was stronger in the other direction (in my opinion) or ambiguous at best. One need look no further for support of that than the sheer amount of studies that were triggered into HCQ for Coivd-19 treatment (over 150 registered clinical trials!) That would have been silly if there was no good reason at the time to think it might be effective.
Blind studies disproved every claim of HCQ being useful in any way in treating covid patients.
HCQ was a hoax that wasted valuable time to disprove it.
Its a fact now. Stop making shit up. Move on.
This is incorrect. The idea of using HCQ didn't come from China but from a French doctor, nor did China ever promote using HCQ as a treatment. See the timeline for HCQ in connection with Covid [1].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroxychloroquine#Timeline
Does hydroxychloroquine combat COVID-19? A timeline of evidence [1]:
[1] https://www.jaad.org/article/S0190-9622(20)30607-1/pdfI don't really care nothing that anyone will say is going to change your mind anyhow.
An actual study and not a political statements from CPP breadcrumbs (that are used control its population amidst highest rates in their pandemic):
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2016638
Dude you are trying to discredit cited wiki and you brought a non-statement single page that aggregates Chinese sources from beginning of a year.
here is a quote from that pdf:
>To date, despite enough rationale to justify investigation into the efficacy and safety of HCQ inCOVID-19 (Table II),14,15the evidence regarding itseffect remains limited. HCQ has not yet received United States Food and Drug Administration approval for use against COVID-19, and further trials are needed to establish guidelines. If emerging data from ongoing trials establishes the efficacy of HCQ for prophylaxis and treatment of COVID-19, triage will be important to ensure that existing supplies are used appropriately
The conclusion of your 'evidence' is a call to do trials.
I already changed my mind, you just have reading comprehension issues apparently.
> Dude you are trying to discredit cited wiki and you brought a non-statement single page that aggregates Chinese sources from beginning of a year.
I'm arguing that China was the first country to propose that treatment using HCQ might be effective. I'm NOT arguing that it is effective. I'm merely supporting my statement about the timeline which someone challenged with a wikipedia link. Someone called that false, and it's not - it's history.
> The conclusion of your 'evidence' is a call to do trials.
Work on that reading comprehension, I never called it evidence of efficacy.
HCQ is not effective and that's the conclusve statement. Who cares that back in jan some kooks tried to be famous based on non blinded study on 10 patients?
Or maybe it's not a binary thing at all?
Early discussions centered around "masks are imperfect when worn by non-medical professionals and may lead to more risky behaviour".
In light of this people argued that it was best to not recommend them.
The science of covid does not map cleanly only public health advice. The latter is the art of the possible and the former is - like all science - incomplete and continually evolving.
Except that's not what they actually said:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/covid-19-death-rates-are-...
Likewise, it is not true that you can't develop a vaccine for diseases for which natural immunity from exposure is weak or absent. Some vaccines rely on stimulating a similar kind of natural immunity, others teach your immune system to target the pathogen in a different fashion than the natural immunity if any. For COVID-19 specifically there are vaccines on many different delivery platforms.
Likewise, the BLM point: the media coverage of the protests was definitely not crystal clear, but one consistent refrain was that the virus spreads fairly poorly outdoors (or, in fact, in areas with high air circulation) when wearing masks. The initial "reopen" "protests" were mostly people not wearing masks. The later BLM protests were mostly people wearing masks. Compliance was not 100% and obviously some degree of risk is involved in any protest, but as a whole I think the tone of the reporting was fairly reasonable. You may be conflating the tone of public health officials -- who largely engaged in (politically motivated) cost-benefit analysis about the protests by saying things like "whatever risk of COVID there is, the risk of violence in these communities is higher, so the protests are a public health good." I agree that these statements were not especially helpful or informed.
IFR reporting has been consistently <1%. I think you may be conflating early CFR reporting, which sometimes made claims about 2-5% CFR. That was based on the best available reporting and was not irresponsible at the time. What we've learned since this is that a large number of cases are asymptomatic, and so with a large testing apparatus we catch a number of infections that never would have become cases. This is still important in terms of managing public health resources and spread. Both the CFR and the IFR are important numbers to understand the dynamics. It is possible some source reported a high IFR rate, but I think even by April we had a fairly good indication that seroprevalence was substantially higher than known cases, and so the IFR would be correspondingly lower than the CFR.
Likewise the reporting on hydroxychloroquine. The narrative of reporting seemed pretty consistent: first, some doctors considered hydroxychloroquine as a sort of emergency treatment measure in the early days of the pandemic because it was believed something about the mechanism of action that's beyond me might be fruitful. In parallel to this kind of "battlefield medicine", a small number of trials and studies proceeded. These found mixed but generally negative results with the administration of hydroxychloroquine. At the same time, a collection of right-populist leaders around the world (especially Bolsonaro and Trump) advocated aggressively for hydroxychloroquine on the basis of either attempting to provide hope or else delusion, rather than evidence. This was followed by scary sounding reporting of isolated cases of idiots prophylactically taking either hydroxychloroquine or something that ...
I never got a sense that the media over-reported CFR or IFR.
They did a terrible job of contextualising all the figures which was infuriating - but the net result of that wasn't especially exaggerating the threat. More that it didn't educate people to understand what they were hearing.
1. Early on in the pandemic it was highly questionable what the value of masking was. We had mixed experiences to go on: on the one hand, even N95 filtration seemed to not be overwhelmingly effective in stopping viral passage in the laboratory, on the other hand we'd had previous SARS breakouts where universal cloth masking had stopped outbreaks. Neither of these things is "false", they're different facts that needed to be incorporated into a single world-view. What has emerged over time is "masking works, both by reducing the rate of transmission and by reducing viral load - the latter mechanism enough to decreased morbidity, mortality, and symptomaticity rates. It doesn't work by outright stopping viral transmission." "Evolving worldview" isn't the same as "lying."
2. Infection fatality rates were >5%. Important note: there are open and closed case rates. Open Case rates are cases that haven't "ended" yet, either by recovery or death. Closed cases are for those that have. When your population under study is accumulating new cases at an exponential rate, at any given time the majority of "open" cases are early in the disease (and thus haven't died or recovered yet), biasing the IFR downward. At the same time, it means the bulk of cases not destined to end in death are delayed into the future compared to those that end in rapid death - so the closed case IFR is biased upward. For a while we had open case IFR <1% and in a number of places closed case IFR >30%. Early in the course of the outbreak in the US, during the first wave before things skyrocketed and our hospitals went to capacity, our open case rate was ~3% and closed case was around 12%. The more we juggled stats, the more it looked like the 'true' rate was going to be around 4-6%. Again, how these rates evolve over time as we improve detection, management, and treatment doesn't change that this was true at the time.
- Immunity via vaccination and immunity via infection are not the same thing. You can develop an immune response that isn't super effective (e.g., targets a highly non-conserved region of RBD, or was adequate at producing antibodies that provoked macrophage activity but not effective at viral neutralization.) Or you can develop an immune response that isn't long-lasting. The vaccine, on the other hand, is designed to target a highly-conserved region (so it's cross-reactive across many sub-strains, which it is); it's tested for the production of neutralizing antibodies (which it does); and it's given in two doses to ensure a better lasting response by intentionally provoking the development of additional memory cells. These things are different. You falsely equated them, and thus determined one of them must be a lie.
I don't know about, for instance, the ebola thing. Not a paper I read. If I were to be generous, I'd say "reporters fail to convey the nuance and context that helps people make sense of apparently contradictory information." Because that's most of what I'm seeing in your post: attempts at making sense of the world, but without enough information to succeed at doing so, and identifying the gaps in your knowledge as 'lies' rather than ignorance.
There are 4 endemic coronavirus strains that circulate through out the community. Immunity to those is hypothesized to be a 1 year time frame. Covid19 is probably going to be similar. The game changer is the vaccine which may cause a more durable and longer term immune response.
Mechanistically reinfection is possible even with a vaccine but you may be asymptomatic or the disease course may be innocuous and the infectious period reduced. This is what reduces the Ro value below 1.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
From all people who were tested in the study (a lot, order of 40000) around 2 percent were infected during the study. Remember that as the base infection rate during the study.
At the same time, around 370 were PCR positive at the start of the study. But during the study, of these 370, 3 were reinfected. It's not far from 1% of those. Now, as the infection rate of those not positive at the start (which we can consider "control") was around 2%, it seems that the chance to be reinfected could be as high as 50% during just the months the study was ongoing!
Please don't consider the estimated numbers as too exact, I don't believe there are much significant digits for conclusion, but I believe they represent the right order of magnitude when based on that many subjects and the randomness of the process, and the only conclusion that could follow is: naturally infected could be only weakly protected from the reinfection only months later. The quote from the study:
"A small proportion of participants were seropositive at baseline (138 [1·3%] of 10 673 in the UK and 235 [2·3%] of 10 002 in Brazil). Three participants seropositive at baseline had subsequent NAAT-positive swabs. One participant had an asymptomatic infection 3 weeks after a first dose of ChAdOx1 nCoV-19. Two other participants in the control group had symptomatic infections 8 weeks and 21 weeks after their baseline sample was taken."
That's for me a kind-of proof that the reinfections aren't rare at all. Even more interesting, 2 of 3 were symptomatic, and the reinfections happened quite soon.
The reason it's not more known is only because most of reinfections just aren't tracked in careful studies like this one. Initially, the cases of reinfections weren't dismissed for lacking the "definitive" proof. An sure, most of the tests are just PCR, but there were a few studies where the sequencing was performed (much rarer and more expensive and time consuming procedure) and where it was possible to prove that the detected virus in the reinfection didn't have the same genetic fingerprint as the initial one.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
Then you quoted from the paper: ... small proportion of participants were seropositive ...
Which is in direct conflict. The latter is saying they had positive antibody tests. Not PCR tests. In fact a lot of those were most likely just false positives, from a antibody test that "only" had a 99% specificity. Which is most of them.
The quote you requoted only partially lacked the end: "at baseline": "A small proportion of participants were seropositive at baseline" which doesn't say anything about the reinfection.
It's also surely not antibody test, NAAT mentioned is "nucleic acid amplification test" a test that tests for the presence of virus' RNA, not antibodies. Also: false positive while symptomatic is significantly less probable than just the probability of false positive.
If your point is that you don't believe they were seropositive at all at baseline, fine, that's can be said, it would be possible, and that is surely not 100% sure.
The point is still, there's no proof that the reinfections are "rare." And from what is known about another human coronaviruses reinfections do occur each year.
Edit, answer to below: yes, I tried to understand what you say, the last two paragraphs I wrote after I wrote the start. The NAAT is the only test procedure mentioned in the same quote where you took only the first few words. I do admit wrongly remembering the nature of the test at the baseline. It has sense as it would be less probable to have somebody participating in the study at the time when he should be in isolation.
And I don't understand why you're pulling in the NAAT test from that quote. It is how the three people tested positive later, after being infected. It is not about the 370 people who were seropositive at the baseline.
There's really nothing to be done to prevent this except to note how important it is to consider all of the associated information, and present its context.
You'll never control how the information is processed by each receiving party, and nor should you.
It's good to have this information—it's good to let people know that there is always the potential for something similar, or worse, to arise.
Similar to knowing your entire house might be wiped out [by a major storm] someday if you move to Florida—which wouldn't surprise anyone anymore. Repeated dispersal of the information will help prevent rampant hysteria... once a semblance of understanding and context is normalized.
I have no love for the UK government, but clickbait is not the word that comes to mind. Here's the quote:
“Over the last few days, thanks to our world-class genomic capability in the UK, we have identified a new variant of coronavirus which may be associated with the fastest spread of the virus in the south-east of England.
“Initial analysis suggests that this variant is growing faster than the existing variance [sic, should be 'variants'?]. We’ve currently identified over 1,000 cases with this variant, predominantly in the south of England, although cases have been identified in nearly 60 different local authority areas and numbers are increasing rapidly.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/14/new-strain-of-...
The main problem with the mass-Media is that they are so keen to a) publish a click-bait headline, and b) keep the word count to a minimum so as not to scare off their illiterate readers, that the actual truth of news gets lost or diluted... to the extent that the articles no longer form any function other than to generate clicks.
As a literate person with an higher than average reading comprehension, who do I talk to in the BBC to get news articles on their website that contain proper in-depth content and words beyond Key Stage 2? As a licence fee paying UK citizen, I'd really like to know.
I was paying more attention to the vaccines would no longer work part. People need a worldview in order to function. Mine has been shattered a few times, including with this pandemic. Still, I have a lot of expectations. I don't think there will be anything worse than COVID-19 that comes from a highly communicable respiratory transmitted illness, just like when I lived in the Bay Area I didn't think there would be a huge earthquake anytime soon...
The possibility of the current crop of vaccines not being overwhelmingly effective, or not being distributed widely, or not being taken widely, thereby extending the quarantine past this summer, is something I'm braced for (although not really prepared for).
> Who the put Gates in charge?
He isn’t, what you wrote sounds like his option. My option would be ~9 months from now, but it’s still just an opinion, and I’ve been wrong about COVID before.
In the US, where it was cited, the 14-day thing referred to strict lockdowns, was always projected to be cycled on and off as needed to maintain caseload and to involve other controls (masks, social distancing, lighter commerce/gathering restrictions) outside of the strict lockdowns period, and strict lockdowns mostly didn't get extended much beyond that length until some of the new ones recently (though some did get restored, perhaps in slightly different form, months later, hence the new onrs), and in many cases were less effective than planned because they saw very poor compliance and inconsistent enforcement, and because travel with different areas that did not enforce similar controls was not curtailed. (And sometimes, those “different areas” were the next county over, with lots of crossover for shopping, work, and personal services.)
Q: Since when did someone citing their opinion turn into claiming they are in charge?
A: It happens commonly in strawman arguments
They don’t represent the virus. They have no direct control over the virus. They are not, like, negotiating a talk or anything. The thing don’t even qualify as life by our definitions.
Those experts just happens to know how best to handle it. Whether that handling instruction is ideal or compatible with the society up to 2019/11, that’s entirely beyond their control and out of their normal scope of interest.
Is this that hard to comprehend?
FYI - there's no concrete data out yet that suggests the vaccine will stop transmission of the virus. The vaccine is only to reduce symptoms from turning severe. They hope it can reduce transmission, but those studies aren't complete. Also kids and young teens are not going to be vaccinated until probably summer.
> First it was 14 days to slow the spread and flatten the curve and somehow they stretched that for a year into wait for the vaccine
14 days was the optimistic scenario in which people actually follow rules. Many people did not and do not follow the rules.
Heads would roll. And I meant that in the literal sense.
[0] https://nextstrain.org/ncov/global
> “We have identified a new variant of coronavirus, which may be associated with the faster spread in the southeast of England,” Hancock said in a statement to parliament.
If there is a strain that is more fatal or more virulent, it will be the UK's own fault.
I did not see this reasonably obvious possibility being taken into account in any UK government modelling that was done. It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone in December 2020, and yet it is apparently a surprise to the UK government.
Why's that then?
Again: this wasn't considered by the UK's scientific modelling.
https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/health/health-problems/cor...
>South Australia was plunged into a strict six-day lockdown on the back of a declaration that a “dangerous” new strain of coronavirus had swept the state’s capital.
>It was a claim that raised eyebrows among epidemiologists around the country, some of whom labelled it “rubbish”.
>Today, it was essentially revealed that an alleged lie led health authorities and the government to conclude a new strain must have merged.
>[Health Secretary Matt Hancock] said there was "nothing to suggest" it caused worse disease or that vaccines would no longer work.
I do wonder in general about the "herd immunity" strategy and the likelihood that a worse strain or one that's resistant to the current vaccines comes along.
I assume that the probability of mutation is basically proportional to the number of people who are infected by SARS-CoV-2. So, in addition to all the usual reasons why letting the virus spread freely until most of the population develops immunity (for some unknown length of time) is a bad idea, it seems like the spread of the virus is also setting up optimal conditions for the virus to evolve into something different or worse.
I'm not an expert though, and I imagine there are probably other factors I'm not aware of besides number and severity of infections in determining whether a virus evolves or not.