Machu Peach

When searching for that Spanish Flu/Army base study that I mentioned earlier (I sadly am unable to find it), I came across this interesting paper published about a month ago. It's a very methodical look at viral spread among US Marine recruits under a reportedly strict quarantine. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2029717

The plural of an antidote is not data and the plural of data is not knowledge. Also, declaring something beyond debate without being willing to provide a citation is about as anti-science as it gets. Now on the specific logical fallacy here... You mention that the "death graph" in reference to the timing of the lockdown in NY. Here is the mortality by date graph in GA with the date their mandatory lockdown was ended (indicated by the "Shelter in Place extended for at risk"). See how the mortality rate starts to drop dramatically when the lockdowns ended? Thus we can conclude that ending mandatory lockdowns decreases COVID mortality, right? ...of course that line of thinking is ridiculous. I'm just using it as an example of how the mortality rate vs time of mandatory lockdowns (or end of mandatory lockdown) is an extremely poor measure of the efficacy of mandatory lockdowns. I don't even necessarily disagree with your point, but these sorts of observations do not support it.

Citation(s) please. Not that I necessarily disagree, but if one is going to call something "100% absolutely factual" one should cite some pretty definitive study(s). Edit: I'm terrible with grammar

You can't compare military personnel to the general public when it comes to following orders. You can make all the quarantine, social distance, whatever rules you want but John Q Public (and apparently a whole lot of the same people that are making the rules) is still going to do whatever they want.

For what is worth, I remember attending a plenary talk maybe 10 years ago about an analysis of a couple dozen US Army bases during the Spanish Flu showed that the 3 bases with the strictest quarantine measures greatly limited spread. The bases that chose intermediate quarantine measures showed no difference that those that had no quarantine. I wish I could find the study, but I don't even remember the speaker's name.

I see, you're attempting to use duration of immunity via infection to predict duration of immune via vaccination. That would not work in this situation. The type of immunity generated by the candidate vaccines (either mRNA or rAd) is going to be very different than the type generated by an infection. One can certainly learn things from comparing immunity via infection to immunity via mRNA or rAd vaccination, but duration of protection (particularly when the correlates of protection are poorly understood) is not one of those things.

Here's a study I posted last week screening almost 10 million people from Wuhan that looks at that. 107 asymptomatic cases out of the 34,424 previously infected people. They also note that they did not see a single case of asymptotic spread to close contacts in either the previously infected or the no known previous infection groups. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19802-w

1/3 seems high vs. some of the other estimates I've seen, which suggested closer to 1/5. Are there updated estimates/assumptions out there to suggest that higher number? Serology sampling data has shown up to 20% seroprevalence with a large degree of geographic variability. However most of those types of studies don't become publicly available for months after sample collection ends. For what it's worth, I've seen that the April/May estimates put the true infection rate roughly tenfold higher than the confirmed infection rate. The October estimates were roughly twofold the confirmed infection rate. Here's a link to a CDC seroprevalence tracker. It's pretty underpowered compared with the more region-specific studies, but it looks like it includes the entire US. https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#national-lab

Where are you getting this info? I have never heard of any vaccine working this way.

RotaShield, a rotavirus vaccine, was associated with intussusception in something like 1 of out 10,0000 children under the age of 12 months. It was used for 9ish months in the late 90s before being withdrawn from the market, though there's some level of debate about if the increased intussusception was real or a statistical blip. The oral poliovirus vaccine is no longer used in the US in favor of inactivated poliovirus vaccine in part due to safety reasons ...but that's more of a risk/reward and route-of-transmission thing than a this-vaccine-is-unsafe thing. Oral poliovirus vaccine is still used by many counties because it makes more sense for their specific situation. The most famous vaccine with issues was a swine flu vaccine in 1976 that lead to an increase in Guillain-Barre Syndrome in something like 1 out of 100,000 people. I think about 400 people ended up with GBS. It's still not particularly well understood why it occurred. There also have been issues with specific lots of vaccines, most famously the Cutter Lab Incident in 1955.

Where are you getting this number? Seems like wishcasting. This is absolutely false. Your employer has no access to your medical records or insurance claims without your written permission (outside of specific legal situations). Also, the record keeping requirements of HIPPA are very serious. This means you're mandating a Dr visit and mandating a specific weight. Obesity in high income countries is negatively correlated with socioeconomic status. This will impact more low income people than high income people, that makes it regressive.https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3298576/ Smoking does negatively correlate with income but I believe you are wrong that minorities smoke more. I believe that whites are slightly more likely to be smokers. Either way, I'm generally against policies that have a disparate impact, particularly when things outside a person's control, such as genetics, clearly play a role.

There are a number of issues with this. 1) It functions like a regressive tax, a tax on poverty. Obesity strongly correlates with economic level. 2) The burden of such of policy would be disproportionally felt by minority communities. 3) It disincentives people from seeing health care providers. Gain 10lbs over the last year? Maybe you skip this year's Dr appointment so you don't have to weigh in. 4) It gives your employer access to your health information (assuming you're talking about employee health insurance). There are a ton of reasons why your employer should not have your health info which I don't think I need to detail, but one additional problem is that it forces all employers to maintain HIPPA complaint record keeping, which is no small task. 5) It seems unlikely to actually work to me. I'm no expert in obesity, but anecdotally the few obese people I've chatted with about their weight badly wanted to lose weight. Their issue was not solely motivation.

I see you meant. Yes I agree, it would be a terrific message, even if it weren't a pandemic. We as a society have mostly shunned things like fat shaming, which is certainly a good thing, but we've still need to find effective, positive ways to encourage a more healthy lifestyle. People are generally aware of the health problems and most obese people badly want to lose weight, but it's still very difficult for them. I wish someone had a good answer.

I'm quite tired of strawman arguments intended to insult others and derail an otherwise useful discussion. No one here is evil. No one here wants others to die. No one here is indifferent to people dying (even if they have comorbidities) or the strain on health care works. Just because someone thinks differently than you do does not make them evil and it is inappropriate to state or imply otherwise. I never said anyone was evil. I never said anyone wants people to die. What a ridiculous accusation. Anyone that would think "obese people ha[ve] it coming" would be evil. It's not at all a stretch to say that you're using a strawman to insult and disrail.

Yep, other vaccine trials against far more difficult things to vaccinate against, such as HIV. They don't work well against HIV for various reasons specific to HIV, but the safety profile, like that of most vaccines, has been excellent. They're actually extremely simple compared to more traditional vaccine approaches, from an immune system point-of-view. ...and yes, the smallpox vaccine program is the gold standard. Hopefully we view this one the same way 10 years from now.

I'm quite tired of strawman arguments intended to insult others and derail an otherwise useful discussion. No one here is evil. No one here wants others to die. No one here is indifferent to people dying (even if they have comorbidities) or the strain on health care works. Just because someone thinks differently than you do does not make them evil and it is inappropriate to state or imply otherwise.

Thanks. Seems a positive sign as well. Especially along with some people's posts about how even after vaccine some people will get it but just not get sick. Quick question though. I hope I didn't miss it if it was mentioned in there but this wouldn't be showing people who are 'presymptomatic' as not being able to spread? I struggled with the phrasing there so hopefully what I'm asking makes sense. Basically, getting at the issue of folks who don't know they have it for 4-5 days being spreaders before realizing it taking proper precautions, etc. I would read this study as being a separate issue than that? This study doesn't really address the idea of 'presymptomatic.' The whole language of asymptotic vs symptomatic difficult to quantify; I'm sure 'presymptomatic' is even harder. Personal pet peeve: The word 'subclinical' is usually used instead of 'asymptotic' because it's much more precise. For whatever reason 'asymptotic' and 'subclinical' seem to be used interchangeably by everyone with COVID.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19802-w A new study indicates that asymptotic spread is quite rare. This makes a lot of sense to me.

They've been tested extensively in humans, though I don't believe any have been licensed. Mechanistically they're much simpler than traditional vaccines. All vaccines, including these, are, by definition, inoculations. I guess I don't see how scientists and doctors aren't talking about the obesity epidemic. Is there anyone that doesn't know that the US has an extreme problem with obesity? Something like 300,000 deaths per year are due to obesity, independent of COVID. AZ's vaccine is a rAdenovirus platform. I don't think they've ever been licensed, but they have been tested for decades. My PhD thesis was on rAds.

There are so many unaddressed confounding variables that the study is useless.

Do you have a link or quote for this? In general this is not how vaccines work. There is one major exception that I can think of, but even that would reduce transmission. There are still major, mainstream political leaders spouting antivax and anti-FDA nonsense. It's infuriating.

1) There just a ton of factually incorrect things being stated here. 2) Try to understand other points of view, particularly those of people you disagree with. They're very likely not terrible people so don't take the easy path and simply write them off as such. 3) While vaccine timelines were all over the map throughout the summer, y'all had an inkling of a feasible development timeline fairly early on.

Does anyone have a link to the actual study or where it was published. The Reuters article mentions a press release, but nothing else. Without the actual study data in hand any interpretation of the results is just a Rorschach test of the beliefs of the reader.

Don't be naive. This study has been completed. Do you really believe if the study showed masks are effective it wouldn't already be leaked and front page headline on NYT? If you really believe that, cool. We all know why report hasn't been released, formally or otherwise. Over the last 5 years or so the use of preprint servers has become quite common for scientific studies. These servers allow scientists to share their work without any sort of peer or editorial oversight (other than the most basic of quality check). This is a very positive development as it allows authors to share important findings that were getting held up in peer review (often for years, sometimes over extremely minor details that didn't impact the overall message). This is very negative development because science journalists or laypeople will often read these studies and (not having the technical knowledge) will uncritically report the findings as accepted fact within their scientific field, which they very much are not (some of the 'studies' presented here are very poor quality pre-prints). The reason I mention this is because the study in question is not available via a pre-print. If the authors were concerned that their study was being suppressed by major journals due to political concerns they could very easily make the study available via a pre-print and let their work stand for itself. This is very very common (I believe every paper where I've been an author in the past five years was first available as a pre-print before being eventually published in a reputable journal). That fact that they are unwilling to offer their study on a pre-print makes, in my opinion, their claims extremely suspect.