outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

I guess my take on it sort of depends on if that's a real study endpoint and the results they have are sufficiently powered to make that finding, or if that's just press release material, like a fun fact about who had severe illness.

I dunno, if you have group A consisting of 95 people and group B consisting of 5 people, mix them well, and draw eleven people at random from the 100, the probability of all eleven belonging to group A is over 50% (actually approx 55%) according to my calculation? Seems a very weak suggestion, unless I've done something incorrect.

the lack of clarity on all this is disturbing but, i trust, also completely unavoidable. bring on the hypos.

“in the wild”, you take 10 random people with COVID, severe cases are still very much the minority, yes? when we’re looking at numbers like 8, 10 people i don’t see how that tells you anything.

right, i mean the fact that just one of those is a severe case wouldn’t seem to prove much one way or the other about whether a vaccine reduces the likelihood of getting a severe case because the sample size is so small

but this is maybe a minor point

If 10% of covid cases are severe among unvaccinated and 0 of 8 people in the treatment group get a severe case then that is extreeeeeeemely weak evidence that the vaccine reduces severe cases. Like so weak you cannot claim it, and I hope this is just statistically illiterate journalism and not something moderna put in the press release.

It’s not zero severe cases among the vaccinated group in the other vaccine. Conditional on getting covid, I think the fraction of severe cases among people who get covid is actually higher in the vaccinated group.

All this is meaningless because the number of vaccinated people who get covid in the first place is too low to draw conclusions about the relative frequency of severe cases. So I don’t understand where this claim is coming from!

“Plant manager Tom Hart organized a cash-buy-in, winner-take-all, betting pool for supervisors and managers to wager how many plant employees would test positive for COVID-19.” https://t.co/Nyra56dNJ5

— Taylor Lorenz (@TaylorLorenz) November 19, 2020

jfc

Interested in the report that tge vaccine is 90-95% effective. What happens to the 5-10% of people where this vaccine doesn't work? I know it's not in most people's minds rn..

It’s definitely in mine, plus people who won’t be able to have the vaccine - people with certain autoimmune conditions, for example (potentially my sister in law). If everyone who can have the vaccine gets it, and if you get the levels of virus in the population down, then the 5% plus those who can’t get vaccinated are safe because the virus stops circulating in the population.

That’s a big fucking ‘if’

My understanding is that the makers don’t actually expect the vaccines to be 90% effective across the board once rolled out at large scale, but that an effectiveness of ~50% would push the R rate down and slow/stop the spread. Presumably some people will still die from it, which is why there is talk of some of the current safety measures still being in place after vaccination occurs...

There really needs to be a push to educate people about how vaccines work and how everyone who can get it should in order not to fuck over the person with say an allergy that prevents them getting it. Easier said than done esp if you are a government that has spent years undermining the very principles of the common good, public health &c

90+ is much more effective than a flu vaccine. It's enough to push a high level of herd protection for those who can't get the vaccine and those for whom it isn't effective. It should drive r and therefore cases below endemic flu levels meaning it eventually becomes "just" another potentially deadly disease we can manage.
Treatment is also improving plus there is limited (disputed) evidence that the vaccines may reduce severity of symptoms in positive cases so overall there's lots to be hopeful about.

Apart from mRNA vaccines causing mutations that bring on a zombie apocalypse.

An mRNA vaccine shouldn’t cause mutations. They aren’t gene therapy being delivered with a retroviral vector, it’s just imported into the cell and translated. I know it’s a joke but let’s not even jokingly accidentally fearmonger about implausible things happening I guess.

Or do do that it doesn’t really matter

Great, thanks all - I just saw coverage of its effectiveness, and of the logistics in getting a vaccination program working. It makes sense that this would great herd immunity.

*create

There really needs to be a push to educate people about how vaccines work and how everyone who can get it should in order not to fuck over the person with say an allergy that prevents them getting it. Easier said than done esp if you are a government that has spent years undermining the very principles of the common good, public health &c

Sadly a fair chunk of those who do understand absolutely do not give a fuck.

https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/201021150507-01-anti-vaxxers-today-using-old-arguments-wellness-partner-large-169.jpg

Actual footage of me and user caek pushing eula biss onto ilxors

Fist bump

Today was a very, very odd day

I testified before @senatehomeland

They held a hearing on hydroxychloroquine.

Yup, HCQ

In the middle of the worst surge of pandemic

HCQ

It was clear how our information architecture shapes questions of science and medicine of COVID

A thread

— Ashish K. Jha (@ashishkjha) November 20, 2020

God damn, the despair I felt reading that thread

Plenty of despair to be found today. If the footage from a packed O'Hare this morning is any indication, we are absolutely doomed. Americans are irredeemably, fundamentally selfish to the core and they don't give a fuck how many people die so they can eat turkey around a table.

Actual footage of me and user caek pushing eula biss onto ilxors

― Gab B. Nebsit (wins), Thursday, November 19, 2020 12:52 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

book is really good, everyone should check it out. among its many benefits, it inspired me to read stoker's dracula for the first time.

I've always said we were one or two big events away from eating each other.

Really, it was just one all along.

7-day test positivity for Wyoming is the highest I've seen in any place globally during this pandemic: 81.1%.

Other states doing especially badly: South Dakota 52.5%, Iowa 48.6%, Idaho 40.7%, Kansas 40.6%, Pennsylvania 24.6%, Missouri 23.5%, Montana 23.2%, Alabama 20.3%.

When the pos % is that high it's very hard to tease out how much it's prevalence and how much it's people avoiding testing to avoid isolation/quarantine. I mean even the biggest herd immunity pessimist doesn't think it's realistic for 80% of a large population to be infected at the same time.

Testing availability plays a huge role. Very similar outbreaks in North and South Dakota, but North Dakota is doing 12.2 tests per 1,000 daily for 14.5% positivity, while South Dakota is doing 2.8 tests/1k for its 52.5%. Wyoming dropped to 1.7 tests/1k last week. It's really more of a metric of how well public health is doing on surveilance, and how useful testing is for individual decisions.

Public health messaging from this admin has been dismal. Too many people think the purpose of tests is to initiate quarantine with a positive test, when the message should be everyone should isolate (and be encouraged in this by paid leave/subsidy etc.) upon suspected exposure, with negative tests allowing us to resume more normal lives. NIH should have run informational PSAs daily on Fox, Limbaugh's show etc, all those hard to reach crevasses of willful ignorance.

210 new cases in San Francisco (I think that's a record).

Not sure where you're getting your data but I show the current (previous?) high of 168 new cases on 11/12.

https://data.sfgov.org/stories/s/dak2-gvuj

I use this thing: https://coronavirus.1point3acres.com/en

From their FAQ:

Why your [sic] numbers are frequently thousands of cases higher than the other sources?

Yeah no, I think I am okay with with the sfgov's #s in this instance...

Fucking apparently Ron fucking Johnson is still spending his time in Senate hearings saying COVID wouldn't be killing people if the Big Pharma elites weren't blocking universal hydroxychloroquine dosing so they can keep the sweet COVID $$$$$ flowing into their coffers

Yup! Scroll up for the Ashish Jha twitter thread Josh linked upthread, very depressing read.

We have one of those fucked up nutcases in the Australian parliament, Craig Kelly.

This is the grassroots campaign to unseat him, buy a tote bag:

https://www.wearehughes.org/

TBF, more than one be he’s the hydroxychloroquine truther. (And momenta denier of science in in general)

I misread that as "by" and was like "... fair"

^ In high school Dr. Jha was my doubles partner in tennis. He later dated an ex-girlfriend who had pictures of The Police all over her bedroom.

wait really? (the tennis partner part)

Really! We were...ok.

Anyway about these Police posters.

I should have known I was up against it with all those posters. Let’s just say I was no Captain Tantra at 16.

How about now

When you don’t see me posting for seven hours....

Or do you mean with another person?

I glanced at this column - https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/20/opinion/covid-bubble-thanksgiving-family.html

And I thought it was a smart and accessible way to demonstrate the dangers of being complacent about your bubble, and was useful evidence of why you shouldn’t travel or gather in big groups for thanksgiving. And it wasn’t until I saw people pissed off on Twitter that I realized that I’d missed the twist ending where the author says he’s not actually going to change his big family thanksgiving plans at all!

Thanksgiving is a time for family and sharing.