COVID-19 - On the Ground

[Deleted User 863]

Remember the time period where people wanted unvaxxed banned from certain places because they felt it was more socially acceptable to spread covid if you had been vaccinated regardless of whether or not you'd ever been infected?

I do.

Looking back, that looks a little silly.

[japhy]

Ouch. Reality is setting in on the covid cultists

Just so I make sure I have this straight, Randy.

Dr. Kristian Andersen’s opinions are suspect because of the possible influence of the money his research received from the NIH. Money which does not go to his bank account, it went to Scripps.

Dr. Marty Makarty’s opinions are not suspect in spite of his receiving money from Fox News directly into his bank account for those opinions. This being the Fox “news” organization that just admitted it has knowingly pushed conspiracy theories it knows to be false, because it’s viewers like that shit and it generates revenue for Fox.

Did I get that correct?

[Sparko]

Japhy: it is not a lie if you act like you believe it.

[jfish26]

Japhy: it is not a lie if you act like you believe it.

And it's not acting once you've convinced yourself it's true.

[japhy]

Japhy: it is not a lie if you act like you believe it.

It's not a matter of who is lying. I am curious about how liars and truth tellers are determined. Does a criteria for skepticism hold weight regardless of the opinion posited, or does it only apply to one side of an argument?

[KUTradition]

to date:

650 million infections

6.7 million deaths

serious/acute side effects other than death: renal failure, respiratory discomfort syndrome (SDRA), and coagulopathy such as thrombosis

not to mention additional morbidities from long-covid that are still being studied

[jfish26]

Japhy: it is not a lie if you act like you believe it.

It's not a matter of who is lying. I am curious about how liars and truth tellers are determined. Does a criteria for skepticism hold weight regardless of the opinion posited, or does it only apply to one side of an argument?

The phrase "heads I win, tails you lose" comes to mind.

[Deleted User 863]

Japhy: it is not a lie if you act like you believe it.

It's not a matter of who is lying. I am curious about how liars and truth tellers are determined. Does a criteria for skepticism hold weight regardless of the opinion posited, or does it only apply to one side of an argument?

I am curious about that too.

I see a lot of inconsistencies when it comes to these types of polarizing topics.

[jfish26]

to date:

650 million infections

6.7 million deaths

serious/acute side effects other than death: renal failure, respiratory discomfort syndrome (SDRA), and coagulopathy such as thrombosis

not to mention additional morbidities from long-covid that are still being studied

Now now, the True Math requires you to subtract from that 6.7 million whatever number of those would have died anyway within one year. Or ten. Or something.

[KUTradition]

https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters ... on/673263/

The elites got everything perfectly backwards; the lab-leak conspiracy theory was true, and the mask mandates were a fraud!

except…

… Although the Department of Energy and the FBI say the virus likely emerged from a lab rather than a wet market, four other agencies and the National Intelligence Council have come to the other conclusion: that COVID likely started with natural exposure to an infected animal. By this count, the lab-leak theory is still an underdog, trailing 5–2 among government institutions. Adding to the confusion is the fact that none of the agencies reached their conclusion with much conviction, even with access to untold stacks of top-secret information...

and, about those masks…

…Jason Abaluck is a Yale professor who ran a massive, multimillion-dollar study on community masking in Bangladesh. Possibly the most comprehensive masking study ever undertaken, it found that community-wide mask wearing provided excellent protection, especially for older Bangladeshis. “The press coverage” of the Cochrane review “has drawn completely the wrong conclusions,” he told me. Jose-Luis Jimenez, a professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder who studies the transmission of airborne diseases like COVID, is one of the country’s most cited researchers on the nature of aerosols. “I think it’s scientific garbage,” he said of the review.

Abaluck, Jimenez, and other like-minded researchers have an extensive list of grievances with the Cochrane paper. One criticism is that some of the most convincing evidence for masks from laboratory and real-world studies was left out of the review. The best reasons to believe that masks “make a difference” as a product, Jimenez said, are that (1) COVID is an airborne disease that spreads through aerosolized droplets, and (2) lab experiments find that high-quality face masks block more than 90 percent of aerosolized spray. Meanwhile, observational studies during the pandemic did find that masking had a positive effect. For example, a 2020 study comparing the timing of new mask mandates across Germany found that face masks reduced the spread of infection by about half.

But most important, the researchers identify a mismatch between what Cochrane set out to discover and what the studies in its meta-analysis actually examined. Cochrane looked at randomized control trials, where, in many cases, researchers split a population in two, gave one half a bunch of masks and information about proper masking, then came back a few months later to see if the intervention group was any healthier. For the most part, Abaluck and Jimenez said, these studies don’t really ask the question Do masks work? Instead, they ask: When you hand out masks and information to an intervention group without much enforcement, does it make them healthier? That’s a subtle but important difference, because the frustrating truth is that, without encouragement and social norms, people tend not to wear face coverings properly.

In one famous Danish study, which concluded that urging people to wear surgical masks failed to reduce infections, fewer than half of the people in the masking group said they fully “wore the mask as recommended.” In a 2022 study that distributed masks in Uganda, more than 97 percent of participants reached by phone said they “always or sometimes” wore masks. But at the end of the study, researchers concluded that just 1.1 percent of people they observed “were seen wearing masks correctly”—88 times less than the phone survey. Another study from Kenya found that participants were roughly eight times more likely to report mask usage than to actually wear them.

See how complicated this is? Many people who claim to wear masks actually don’t. Many people who do wear masks wear them improperly. The questions Do masks work? and Does merely asking people to wear masks do much? are not interchangeable…


edit to add (for the randys)

…The lab-leak and mask debates touch on a broader theme, which is the relationship between science and modern media. In a fragmented and contentious media environment, scientific communication is a mess. An abundance of crappy or confusing research gives audiences access to an armory of factoids, from which they can construct and defend any narrative they choose. For every position, there is an ostensible expert, an apparent paper, and an alleged smoking gun. Thus, the internet tends to serve as an infinity store for pop-up conspiracy theorists.

My advice in navigating this mess is: Do not trust people who, in their handling of complex questions with imperfect data, manufacture simplistic answers with perfect confidence. Instead, trust people who allow for complexity and uncertainty. Trust people who change their mind when the evidence changes. Trust people who, when they say “Believe the science!” put their trust in science, with a small-s, which is the dynamic reevaluation of complicated truths, rather than SCIENCE, in weird caps-lock font, which has come to mean the faith that for every random political position, there exists an official-looking study to permanently justify it...

[Shirley]

...They pushed a J&J vaccine to predominantly minority/low income communities because it only required 1 shot because there was an assumption (right or wrong) that this demographic of people were more unlikely to show up for 2 shots. And then that vaccine had to be pulled for a time because of concerns about side effects. That was a bad look, both the "why" it was pushed to that demographic, and also due to loss of credibility within that demographic.


Our handling of the pandemic was mostly piss poor. Across the board.

"there was an assumption right or wrong..."

Exactly! And we all know what making "assumptions" can do, right?

NIH 6/7/22 ...the likelihood of COVID‐19 vaccine uptake for beneficiaries who earn less than $25,000 per year was more than 50% lower than that for those whose annual income was $25,000 or more...

Public health officials did exactly the right thing because anyone remotely familiar with primary care medicine or public health, unlike all the internet "experts", already knew that. How? How could they not be forced to make an "assumption"? Maybe based on decade upon decade upon decade of administering vaccines to hundreds of millions of people regularly will eventually, maybe, perhaps, reveal a clue, or two?

(Huge assumption on my part, I know...)

[Deleted User 863]

...They pushed a J&J vaccine to predominantly minority/low income communities because it only required 1 shot because there was an assumption (right or wrong) that this demographic of people were more unlikely to show up for 2 shots. And then that vaccine had to be pulled for a time because of concerns about side effects. That was a bad look, both the "why" it was pushed to that demographic, and also due to loss of credibility within that demographic.


Our handling of the pandemic was mostly piss poor. Across the board.

"there was an assumption right or wrong..."

Exactly! And we all know what making "assumptions" can do, right?

NIH 6/7/22 ...the likelihood of COVID‐19 vaccine uptake for beneficiaries who earn less than $25,000 per year was more than 50% lower than that for those whose annual income was $25,000 or more...

Public health officials did exactly the right thing because anyone remotely familiar with primary care medicine or public health, unlike all the internet "experts", already knew that. How? How could they not be forced to make an "assumption"? Maybe based on decade upon decade upon decade of administering vaccines to hundreds of millions of people regularly will eventually, maybe, perhaps, reveal a clue, or two?

(Huge assumption on my part, I know...)

I am not disagreeing with you. I think we largely have the same views of covid and what happened/how it was handled.

But you can understand how the J&J vaccine rollout (and rollback) played out that there could have been some loss of confidence by those minority and low income communities, right?

[Deleted User 863]

https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters ... on/673263/

The elites got everything perfectly backwards; the lab-leak conspiracy theory was true, and the mask mandates were a fraud!

except…

… Although the Department of Energy and the FBI say the virus likely emerged from a lab rather than a wet market, four other agencies and the National Intelligence Council have come to the other conclusion: that COVID likely started with natural exposure to an infected animal. By this count, the lab-leak theory is still an underdog, trailing 5–2 among government institutions. Adding to the confusion is the fact that none of the agencies reached their conclusion with much conviction, even with access to untold stacks of top-secret information...

and, about those masks…

…Jason Abaluck is a Yale professor who ran a massive, multimillion-dollar study on community masking in Bangladesh. Possibly the most comprehensive masking study ever undertaken, it found that community-wide mask wearing provided excellent protection, especially for older Bangladeshis. “The press coverage” of the Cochrane review “has drawn completely the wrong conclusions,” he told me. Jose-Luis Jimenez, a professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder who studies the transmission of airborne diseases like COVID, is one of the country’s most cited researchers on the nature of aerosols. “I think it’s scientific garbage,” he said of the review.

Abaluck, Jimenez, and other like-minded researchers have an extensive list of grievances with the Cochrane paper. One criticism is that some of the most convincing evidence for masks from laboratory and real-world studies was left out of the review. The best reasons to believe that masks “make a difference” as a product, Jimenez said, are that (1) COVID is an airborne disease that spreads through aerosolized droplets, and (2) lab experiments find that high-quality face masks block more than 90 percent of aerosolized spray. Meanwhile, observational studies during the pandemic did find that masking had a positive effect. For example, a 2020 study comparing the timing of new mask mandates across Germany found that face masks reduced the spread of infection by about half.

But most important, the researchers identify a mismatch between what Cochrane set out to discover and what the studies in its meta-analysis actually examined. Cochrane looked at randomized control trials, where, in many cases, researchers split a population in two, gave one half a bunch of masks and information about proper masking, then came back a few months later to see if the intervention group was any healthier. For the most part, Abaluck and Jimenez said, these studies don’t really ask the question Do masks work? Instead, they ask: When you hand out masks and information to an intervention group without much enforcement, does it make them healthier? That’s a subtle but important difference, because the frustrating truth is that, without encouragement and social norms, people tend not to wear face coverings properly.

In one famous Danish study, which concluded that urging people to wear surgical masks failed to reduce infections, fewer than half of the people in the masking group said they fully “wore the mask as recommended.” In a 2022 study that distributed masks in Uganda, more than 97 percent of participants reached by phone said they “always or sometimes” wore masks. But at the end of the study, researchers concluded that just 1.1 percent of people they observed “were seen wearing masks correctly”—88 times less than the phone survey. Another study from Kenya found that participants were roughly eight times more likely to report mask usage than to actually wear them.

See how complicated this is? Many people who claim to wear masks actually don’t. Many people who do wear masks wear them improperly. The questions Do masks work? and Does merely asking people to wear masks do much? are not interchangeable…


edit to add (for the randys)

…The lab-leak and mask debates touch on a broader theme, which is the relationship between science and modern media. In a fragmented and contentious media environment, scientific communication is a mess. An abundance of crappy or confusing research gives audiences access to an armory of factoids, from which they can construct and defend any narrative they choose. For every position, there is an ostensible expert, an apparent paper, and an alleged smoking gun. Thus, the internet tends to serve as an infinity store for pop-up conspiracy theorists.

My advice in navigating this mess is: Do not trust people who, in their handling of complex questions with imperfect data, manufacture simplistic answers with perfect confidence. Instead, trust people who allow for complexity and uncertainty. Trust people who change their mind when the evidence changes. Trust people who, when they say “Believe the science!” put their trust in science, with a small-s, which is the dynamic reevaluation of complicated truths, rather than SCIENCE, in weird caps-lock font, which has come to mean the faith that for every random political position, there exists an official-looking study to permanently justify it...

I think at this point one thing is pretty clear:

The extreme right has latched onto the lab leak theory as a "told you so" moment (which it isn't), and now the left must take the other side. Because that's how the game is played.


The time some of you are spending worrying about whether the "right" guessed correctly about the lab leak is astonishing. It's highly unlikely it can ever be proven beyond a reasonable doubt either way.

Everything must be adversarial.

[Deleted User 863]

I do like the part of Trads article that mentions that scientific communication in this media environment is nearly impossible due to the media and their biases/agendas having caused a loss of confidence of their trustworthiness by the viewers.

That is so true.


We have major media outlets that completely control some of their viewers thinking.

[PhDhawk]

We also have a huge problem with scientific and mathematical illiteracy in this country. But we live in a culture that increasingly wants to accept assumptions based on nothing as valid.

Most of the people who are angry about mRNA vaccines, don't actually know much at all about mRNA.

And we have people simultaneously saying that a 1 in 100 death rate is rare, while a 3 in 1,000,000 vaccine side effect is common enough to ignore the life saving benefits.

We also pick and choose which things are true and which are lies, even if from the same source. The department of energy says with low confidence that this was a lab leak, but it wasn't a lab manufactured bioweapon. And people accept the first half, and not only ignore the second half, but use the first half as evidence that the second part happened.

[jfish26]

We also have a huge problem with scientific and mathematical illiteracy in this country. But we live in a culture that increasingly wants to accept assumptions based on nothing as valid.

Most of the people who are angry about mRNA vaccines, don't actually know much at all about mRNA.

And we have people simultaneously saying that a 1 in 100 death rate is rare, while a 3 in 1,000,000 vaccine side effect is common enough to ignore the life saving benefits.

We also pick and choose which things are true and which are lies, even if from the same source. The department of energy says with low confidence that this was a lab leak, but it wasn't a lab manufactured bioweapon. And people accept the first half, and not only ignore the second half, but use the first half as evidence that the second part happened.

Not to mention the problem we have with big numbers generally; we're talking 2,100+ 9/11s (9/11 every single day for as long as prisonmitch@ku.edu), but because most of the people that died are old/poor/etc., and are not suitable icons for jingoism and militarism, it's out-of-sight-out-of-mind.

[TDub]

We also have a huge problem with scientific and mathematical illiteracy in this country. But we live in a culture that increasingly wants to accept assumptions based on nothing as valid.

Most of the people who are angry about mRNA vaccines, don't actually know much at all about mRNA.

And we have people simultaneously saying that a 1 in 100 death rate is rare, while a 3 in 1,000,000 vaccine side effect is common enough to ignore the life saving benefits.

We also pick and choose which things are true and which are lies, even if from the same source. The department of energy says with low confidence that this was a lab leak, but it wasn't a lab manufactured bioweapon. And people accept the first half, and not only ignore the second half, but use the first half as evidence that the second part happened.

we live in an era that considers tik tok, instagram, facebook and memes as reliable news sources.

[Deleted User 863]

We also have a huge problem with scientific and mathematical illiteracy in this country. But we live in a culture that increasingly wants to accept assumptions based on nothing as valid.

Most of the people who are angry about mRNA vaccines, don't actually know much at all about mRNA.

And we have people simultaneously saying that a 1 in 100 death rate is rare, while a 3 in 1,000,000 vaccine side effect is common enough to ignore the life saving benefits.

We also pick and choose which things are true and which are lies, even if from the same source. The department of energy says with low confidence that this was a lab leak, but it wasn't a lab manufactured bioweapon. And people accept the first half, and not only ignore the second half, but use the first half as evidence that the second part happened.

I like this post.

[randylahey]

The 1 in 100 death rate is just silly tho. If it was 1 in 100 hundred young healthy people that would be one thing. But its not. The 1 is often Jimmy's uncle who's 400 pounds and had triple bypass surgery last month. Or Suzys 94 year old grandma who has terminal cancer

This country was unhealthy as fuck before covid

[jfish26]

The 1 in 100 death rate is just silly tho. If it was 1 in 100 hundred young healthy people that would be one thing. But its not. The 1 is often Jimmy's uncle who's 400 pounds and had triple bypass surgery last month. Or Suzys 94 year old grandma who has terminal cancer

This country was unhealthy as fuck before covid

Did I stutter?

We also have a huge problem with scientific and mathematical illiteracy in this country. But we live in a culture that increasingly wants to accept assumptions based on nothing as valid.

Most of the people who are angry about mRNA vaccines, don't actually know much at all about mRNA.

And we have people simultaneously saying that a 1 in 100 death rate is rare, while a 3 in 1,000,000 vaccine side effect is common enough to ignore the life saving benefits.

We also pick and choose which things are true and which are lies, even if from the same source. The department of energy says with low confidence that this was a lab leak, but it wasn't a lab manufactured bioweapon. And people accept the first half, and not only ignore the second half, but use the first half as evidence that the second part happened.

Not to mention the problem we have with big numbers generally; we're talking 2,100+ 9/11s (9/11 every single day for as long as prisonmitch@ku.edu), but because most of the people that died are old/poor/etc., and are not suitable icons for jingoism and militarism, it's out-of-sight-out-of-mind.