outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

Yes, a vaca from CRITICAL THINKING!

question: if a vaccine is "90% effective" does that mean it is 100% effective for 90% of people or that it's 90% effective for each individual case of exposure?

― Four Seasons Total Manscaping (forksclovetofu), Monday, November 16, 2020 12:26 AM (sixteen hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Also yeah neither of your options is correct and I don’t think there’s a way you could know either of those things.

― The Bosom Manor Michaelmas Special (silby), Monday, November 16, 2020 1:28 AM (fifteen hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

silby is right unfortunately. what a vaccine trial like this can tell you is: if 100 people has been vaccinated and 100 people have not, and they all do exactly the same things in the same populations for the same amount of time, the vaccinated group will have 90% fewer cases of covid.

the trial on its own doesn't allow you to distinguish between these two possible reasons for that observation:

- 90% of the vaccinated group are perfectly immune but 10% have no additional immunity
- 100% of the vaccinated group have immunity that reduces their risk on each encounter by 90%

and those aren't the only possible reasons.

the upshot of this for individual behaviour is: if you are lucky enough to get the vaccine early, don't go around licking doorknobs. wait until lots of people have had it.

doorknob futures down on advance word of of no-licking recommendation

everyone read "on immunity" btw. it's good (and its not all bayesian stats nonsense). i love the last sentence:

Immunity is a shared space. A garden we tend together.

the fact that we are extremely bad at this is why 90%+ effective is such a big deal. the more effective the vaccine is, the fewer people need to get it in order to get to herd immunity.

actually starting to feel hopeful for the first time in about 8 months, I think by June 2021 I may finally get to meet my nephew

if the vaccine is 50% effective and you are the only person who gets the vaccine (which is how most people think, because they don't understand herd immunity) then it's not insane to think "this might not help and i'm skeptical about trump/vaccines/whatever" so i won't get it.

so you might only get 50% of people getting a 50% effective vaccine, so 25% of people resistant to infection (plus the 5-10% of people who got it naturally).

this is kind of the base case i've been assuming/expecting for the past 6 months. it's a huge bummer because it would mean years more of this.

but if it's 90% then lots more people overcome that skepticism and you might get get 70% adherance, i.e. 63% resistant via the vaccine. and at that point you're likely at herd immunity. tbh you might even get herd immunity if only 50% of people get a vaccine that effective.which is great because 1) selfish assholes don't actually make things worse 2) people who _can't_ get the vaccine for whatever reason still get the benefits.

one of the other big deals about moderna relative to pfizer (other than the temperature thing) is that they ran the trial on kids as young as 12. being able to immunize schoolchildren is a huge deal for obvious reasons.

we were planning to send our kid back to daycare in january, but we're now wondering if we just stick it out for a couple more months. that's partly because january is probably going to be ... not good! but also because if you have a concrete exit strategy it becomes much easier to put up with lockdown. so i wonder if we'll see some people being a weirdly better about the lockdown compromises as vaccine rollout starts?

probably no chance in Hell of saving the Orlando Fringe Festival next year but praying they can move it until later in the year. two years of not running will kill it

trying to figure out how much money to put in the childcare FSA for next year, this is kind of changing the calculus

In California, Gov. Newsom just "pulled an emergency break(sic)" and most of the state has rolled back from Yellow/Orange tiers to Red/Purple. Not sure if this means we are back to shelter-in-place or not. Also thought I heard "curfew" at some point in his presser.

In Oregon we have new restrictions statewide as of Wednesday. It's obvious the governor is trying to walk a line that communicates the seriousness of the situation, while not pushing people to the point of rebellion .A good leader can't close their eyes and pretend the current trend won't fill every hospital bed in the state in another two or three weeks. But there's no enforcement mechanism out there strong enough to force 4 million Oregonians to follow new restrictions on social gatherings if they don't want to comply.

This is why Trump's constant undercutting of the messaging for eight months mattered. In this kind of situation, his lying and dismissiveness was incredibly damaging and it can't be undone now.

yup, it really is almost entirely his fault. it's amazing and infuriating.

And he will never face a single fucking consequence for it either, which might just be the most maddening part of it all.

I mean, one could argue that losing the election was a consequence, but I don't think that is nearly sufficient for the deaths he's caused.

yup, it really is almost entirely his fault. it's amazing and infuriating.

― howls of non-specificity (sleeve), Monday, November 16, 2020 5:38 PM (ten minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

challop: it's not almost entirely his fault, a lot of blame can be shared by our federal system (i.e. every state makes its own rules) and the craziness of our current streak of right wing quasi-libertarianism. Counterpoint: if Trump had had full control of the entire country, things actually would have been worse.

TBC, no question his messaging was damaging. But I could imagine a counterfactual where Obama is president and people in places like Texas and South Dakota rebel against his rational guidance.

silby is right unfortunately. what a vaccine trial like this can tell you is: if 100 people has been vaccinated and 100 people have not, and they all do exactly the same things in the same populations for the same amount of time, the vaccinated group will have 90% fewer cases of covid.

the trial on its own doesn't allow you to distinguish between these two possible reasons for that observation:

- 90% of the vaccinated group are perfectly immune but 10% have no additional immunity
- 100% of the vaccinated group have immunity that reduces their risk on each encounter by 90%

and those aren't the only possible reasons.

the upshot of this for individual behaviour is: if you are lucky enough to get the vaccine early, don't go around licking doorknobs. wait until lots of people have had it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_d7xzbGgWA

I don't think there's any way in which the USA wouldn't have gotten hit particularly hard by this but Trump withholding information, lying constantly about it, and turning this into a culture war made it so much worse than it had to be. Not to mention the fucking rallies!! The only largescale events to be held in an indoor space in the last 8 months!!!! I'm sure someone like Cruz or Rubio would've been horrible in their own way but it wouldn't have turned into this.

^^^

This probably killed 100K people:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67SnwhJQO_o

thanks caek for dn

On the ABC radio news this morning, and I'd love for someone to confirm also explain what this means - the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines produce an immune response that doesn't stop you from getting infected with the SARS-COV-2 virus, or from becoming contagious, but it does mean you are less sick from COVID-19

About 3 minutes in.

https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/breakfast/moderna-joins-pfizer-vaccine/12890220

The body counts really rise when conservatives are in power, it's just that this time, they're doing what they've always wanted: killing their own constituents.

Ed, as I understood it, in the Moderna study 100ish people got infected. 95 were in the control (placebo) group, 5 in the vaccine group.

Eleven of the infected individuals were classified as "severe." All were in the placebo group and none were in the vaccine group.

So that suggests that not only did the vaccine tend to prevent infection, it also made it so that the infections that DID occur were less likely to be severe.

Does that make sense?

That does make sense. Although it also sounds like once vaccinated one should still refrain from high risk activities (eg. hugging a South Dakotan)

BTW, I'm still trying to find the thing I read about vaccination programmes being more effective where there isn't a raging pandemic going on, but I can't find it.

I don't think there's any way in which the USA wouldn't have gotten hit particularly hard by this but Trump withholding information, lying constantly about it, and turning this into a culture war made it so much worse than it had to be. Not to mention the fucking rallies!! The only largescale events to be held in an indoor space in the last 8 months!!!! I'm sure someone like Cruz or Rubio would've been horrible in their own way but it wouldn't have turned into this.

― frogbs, Monday, November 16, 2020 5:58 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

Yeah, this seems fair. It occurs to me that we have a robust anti-vax movement in this country, but that movement would still probably be a lot stronger if we had an anti-vax president.

I sincerely hope and believe we will not have an anti-vaccine president, ever. Trump has done enough to encourage them

me otm 4 months ago

obviously i think the current national administration has done about the worst job imaginable, and certainly any plausible democratic president would have done better...

but i do think the US is set up in a way that pretty much guaranteed this outcome. fractal federation, harmful incentives in the healthcare industry, extreme inequality, and a self-fulfilling culture in which people assume governments of all levels are incompetent. these are all bad!

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Friday, June 19, 2020 1:36 PM (four months ago) bookmarkflaglink

TBC, no question his messaging was damaging. But I could imagine a counterfactual where Obama is president and people in places like Texas and South Dakota rebel against his rational guidance.

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Monday, November 16, 2020 5:54 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

This is true as far as it goes but is nuts in that it disregards national PPE and testing shortages that were major issues in Spring 2020.

And solely, 100% at the feet of Trump.

TBC, no question his messaging was damaging. But I could imagine a counterfactual where Obama is president and people in places like Texas and South Dakota rebel against his rational guidance.

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Monday, November 16, 2020

sounds like an excuse for Trump's covid inaction. If this happened under Obama we would have had funding for on the ground support and clear coordinated rational advice from the CDC and medical experts

If Hillary had been President, we probably would have still had Speaker of the House Paul Ryan.

You gotta work that into the equation somehow. In an election year are they giving her even the stimulus we did get?

don't know what you're talking about, but Obama (or Hillary) wouldn't have politicized it like this

It's an inherently political situation, but what I'm talking about is that the Democrats wouldn't have retaken the House in the midterms and now the Democratic President would have had to deal with Ryan and McConnell in an election year to get the funding that allowed our quarter-assed shutdown to start with. Note that now, without an election for two years, McConnell has zero interest in a stimulus that would benefit the incoming Democratic President. The anti-mask freaks would have been emboldened as much in opposition to Clinton as in support of Trump.

Any Democrat would have been better than Trump - but they would have been concerned with keeping the economy open as well, and they would have been hamstrung by a Republican Congress and Republican state governments as well.

it's not an inherently political situation, it's public health

Who lives and who dies is always subject to politics tho

Which is as political as it gets - Medicare For All, Obamacare, vaccines, abortion, Planned Parenthood, birth control, sanitation of urban areas, clean drinking water, elder care, ad infinitum.

Even in terms of their own internal response, Democratic centrists' first move wasn't (and, uh, still isn't) "pay everyone to stay home," it was tax credits.

I'm out of my depth with these political arguments but we've never just decided to let such a huge number of people die of disease like this without addressing it

Well I’m not gonna argue the numbers but uh

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV/AIDS_in_the_United_States

But we do, every single day. Not from a pandemic but from poverty, lack of healthcare, deaths of despair, pollution.

(https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/c-change/subtopics/coronavirus-and-pollution/)

silby you are right, it has been the thing that has had the most impact on my life

the Democrats wouldn't have retaken the House in the midterms and now the Democratic President would have had to deal with Ryan and McConnell in an election year to get the funding that allowed our quarter-assed shutdown to start with.

Maybe your alternate version with HRC winning would have played out as you state. There is no way to know. Nut HRC did not win and it was Trump who in 2020 was situated as the head of state, was leader of his party, and held most visible and powerful position in the nation. He chose his irresponsible words and actions. If Ryan and McConnell had been the ones who abused their power as Trump did, then in that alternate universe they would have deserved the revulsion now aimed at Trump.

I blame Trump for the simple reason that he deliberately screwed the entire country for totally selfish reasons. He was given ample good advise by experts that he simply kicked to the curb and ignored.

we've done nothing about this except to provide some minor economic relief from the fallout. there has been no coordinated effort to help with the pandemic, but instead active disinformation which has been broadcasted by the administration for partisan political reasons, and which has been really damaging

silby and milo arguing that hypothetical dem responses would have been as bad as Trump is so on brand it's funny. Keep up the fight!

Did I say that? I don’t think I said that.