outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

Nisreen Alwan's piece: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/373/6554/491.full

damn that really really sucks bg

Sorry bg, I can't imagine how awful that must be.

So sorry bg. and Jon not Jon, I'm sorry to hear about the cognitive stuff you're dealing with, that's so rough.

I think there's some legitimate frustration that it's still not well understood or nailed down (though people like Dr Nisreen Alwan have started to really do a good job of publishing studies on it), combined with people who simply don't want to believe it's a thing because then it makes their recklessness even more assholish? idk

That tracks. People are like, "You're young/healthy/vaccinated! You statistically probably won't get it/get it badly/have lasting symptoms" and then dismiss the need for people to be cautious, use NPIs, etc, as extra levels of precaution to PROTECT THEMSELVES AND OTHERS.

anti-NPI people scare me. I wore a fucking black balaclava in hot-assed Florida before cloth/surgical/KN95s were readily available. yeah, it sucked...but now the mask options are a lot better and you get used to it after a while. like for all the things for "man up" alpha folk to whine about. but it's not the mask-wearing, obv, it's the 'symbolism' of it, and the attached tribal reaction to it.

there is also a feeling of 'information overload', which I'm suffering from, but others as well. those who don't know science think that understanding never changes, so changing guidelines = "were you lying the first time?" (no - we went with what we knew!).

but even those laypeople who do know how science works are overwhelmed by the overwhelming number of studies and which ones are legit and which might be 'noise', and the divide that keeps growing on major things like "should we get boosters".

but most problematic is the sheer number of people with MD in their name using their profession to spread anti-vax, anti-mask COVID-hoax nonsense. it's outright scary how many I find daily just on Twitter.

It's not really a 'fuzzy' thing when it happens, either - after my mother's death in January, my sister's whole family caught Covid, and they all recovered except my brother-in-law, who was fucked for 3-4 months until he got vaccinated - it cleared up a few weeks afterwards, and he's back to work now, nearly* entirely recovered.

I don't mean to suggest the vaccine as a cure for it, by the way, the reports I've seen suggest that he was lucky - which is good!

* The last time I was talking to my sister, a few weeks ago, he was about to go back in to work, I should check with them now.

there is tons of "good data" on it from NIH, etc.

― criminally negligible (harbl), Tuesday, August 24, 2021 9:52 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

Is there? All I can find is that it's being studied.

The question is not whether anyone ever experiences acute symptoms for a prolonged period after testing positive for COVID. The question is how common that is, and also how common it is compared to a control group of people who didn't test positive for COVID during the same period. And you also need to measure how long the symptoms last. Sorry if that's aggravating, but that's how science works. Without hard numbers and a control group, you don't have a very clear picture of how likely COVID is to cause prolonged acute symptoms. Post-viral fatigue and other prolonged post-viral symptoms have happened before with other viruses and I'm certainly not doubting that they can happen with COVID or that anyone's symptoms are real or terrible.

It's just that we have to make actual decisions about how cautious to be and how to live our lives, for example, there's a difference for me between sending kids to a school if there's a 10% chance they'll have lifelong severe impairments if they catch COVID (which I doubt) vs if there's a 1% chance they'll have moderate symptoms such as fatigue for up to three months but they'll most likely resolve after. If it was the former, I don't know that I'd send them to school at all, masked or not. And everything I read about Long COVID is extremely vague - again, not saying it isn't real, but it's not clear how common it is, how common the more severe symptoms are, and how common the more prolonged symptoms are, especially when compared to an identical population for the same time period who didn't have COVID.

what the fuck is the matter with you, FP'd

yeah, I am just about done with this shit.

Take this shit to the irrational covid confidence thread.

oh ok, that's how science works. thanks for the lesson. i didn't know anything about science but now i am educated.

just be honest and say that you think people with long covid are faking it, stop dancing around it with all this ‘hmmm my science brain needs data’ like an antivaxxer pretending he’s scrutinising every published vaccine paper

I think there's room for middle ground between saying there is no long Covid and questioning how much we currently know about it. Those studies are being done but I think it's too early to say very much conclusively. I believe that currently long Covid is a "diagnosis of exclusion", meaning if you present to a doctor with any of the symptoms listed above and they can't find anything else wrong with you, you can be diagnosed as having long Covid. So most likely that's a big net that catches things which may not actually trace back to Covid in any direct biological sense, which of course doesn't mean that many cases aren't real.

did anyone say we know all there is to know? it didn't exist two years ago! and no one in "science" (as far as i know, i just learned science this morning) says very much "conclusively" and every paper talks about limitations!

Science is the process of doing the same thing, over and over, until something changes, and of talking with peers, reviewing findings, researching

no that's posting

in case anybody seems the alarmist DELTA IS PRIMED TO BECOME THE MEGA SUPER VARIANT THAT EVADES ALL IMMUNE PROTECTION pre-print study going around, here are some reassuring responses from virologists, who....are pretty angry about the study:

A couple problems with this preprint that do not support the alarmist take is pushes… 🧵 https://t.co/QNJGCCNtxB

— Jeremy Kamil (@macroliter) August 24, 2021

well *this* is a deeply irresponsible shit paper.

shows escape from NTD nAbs which also put RBDs in the "up" position which might improve infectivity. somehow goes on to claim that loss of serum neutralization is the same as vaccine resistance (it's not).

in short, crap. https://t.co/GwsYzDPRnP

— Jasnah Kholin - 8964 - ACAB - 💉💉 (@wanderer_jasnah) August 24, 2021

seems like these pre-print jokers don't know how science works

It took me 3 seconds to find this article and about 5 minutes to read the entire thing
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8056514/

And I’m a dumbass

maaaaaaan alive that is a bad post

(not you, el tomboto.)

If you don't want to engage with what I actually said because you're convinced I'm personally accusing your loved ones of faking fevers, fine. I think it's best I retire from this thread.

good thread:

There is a lot of concern/confusion about vaccine effectiveness against the delta variant. How effective are the vaccines against Delta & how to interpret real-world observational data? So much misinformation is being circulated, so this thread brings key data together. 🧵(1/n)

— Muge Cevik (@mugecevik) August 24, 2021

man alive no no please, who will now gaslight us about long covid?? this is a crisis

look i think it’s important that, despite scientific evidence that long covid can be a very serious condition and the existence hundreds of thousands of documented cases around the world, that we still find time to properly engage with posters whose thoughts on the topic include the phrase ‘everything I read about Long COVID is extremely vague - again, not saying it isn't real, but’

Most people are happy with saying it's a real risk and leaving it at that, but I can sympathize with the urge to put some kind of hard numbers on the risk, and I think that's where things start to get fuzzy. Is the risk analogous to the risk of lingering effects that can occur after any serious illness? How common are long-term debilitating effects after even a mild initial case? I wish we had more certainty about questions like that.

if only there were scientists working around the clock to get those answers

hundreds, maybe even thousands of them, all over the world

If you don't want to engage with what I actually said because you're convinced I'm personally accusing your loved ones of faking fevers, fine. I think it's best I retire from this thread.

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Tuesday, August 24, 2021 2:08 PM (fifty-eight minutes ago)

Ok, here's a question: why have a control group of Covid-negative subjects from the same time period in your study unless the point is to test the hypothesis that long covid is psychosomatic? That strikes me as prejudicial, but I'm not a scientist so maybe it's normal to do this?

TBH I don't get the anger at man alive's post -- I too am sending my unvaxxed kid to in-person school (all teachers vaccinated, all indoor time masked.)

I don't think the chance is tiny that my kid will contract COVID. If I thought my kid had a non-tiny chance of developing debilitating illness that would last years, I wouldn't be letting her go to school. If you know people whose kids under 12 are going to school in person right now, you know people whose estimation of the risk of long COVID are similar to man alive's, I would assume.

cmon, people are mad bc he wrote "Sorry if that's aggravating, but that's how science works"

Ok, here's a question: why have a control group of Covid-negative subjects from the same time period in your study unless the point is to test the hypothesis that long covid is psychosomatic?

This is a great question! The answer is that it's normal for people to develop long-term debilitating symptoms for which there's no discernible explanation, and that does not in any way mean they're psychosomatic, just that the cause is unknown. And that's why it's important to understand whether that's happening to COVID sufferers more frequently than the ambient rate. (Which is a very reasonable hypothesis to test, since LOTS of viruses have weird long-lasting aftereffects, that's why it's being tested!)

It's exactly the same as the reason that we don't just ask "how many people had a stroke / had a blood clot / had a seizure a few weeks after getting vaccinated," we ask "how many people XXXXX a few weeks after getting vaccinated compared to the number of people who XXXXXX out of a similar size/demographic population who didn't get vaccinated" -- because sometimes people just have a stroke! And you don't want to classify that as a vaccine aftereffect just because it happened shortly after vaccination.

eephus! why, in August fucking 2021, do you think what people are getting angry about is the risk to the kids?

yeah i think it's reasonable to have a control of non-covid havers but i'm not an experiment designer

as i said, before the extremely patronizing post that followed later, i was mad about "the impulse toward skepticism or minimizing it as just fatigue or anxiety like everyone has." this could be a justification for the decision to send a child to school but in my opinion it's fine to just say "i don't know what the risk is, i'm just making a decision based on what information is available now" instead of baselessly downplaying it.

AF: As for myself I think the danger from kids is a lot bigger than the danger to kids, but I gotta say, I know a TON of people who frame the issue of in-person schooling as "we are being asked to put our kids in danger," do you not?

Yes, "i don't know what the risk is, i'm just making a decision based on what information is available now" is a solid description of where I am re school and for that matter most things

thanks for the response eephus, I appreciate it

A follow up q: if during this study you observed the same frequency of symptoms in both groups, that would disprove or at least cast a lot of doubt on COVID as the root cause, y/n?

In case my tone is off here: I am genuinely asking as I too am not an experiment designer! Though harbl is right that man alive's preceding post about the effects of isolation etc. did incline me to read his study design post as a way to backdoor psychosomatic suspicions in

A follow up q: if during this study you observed the same frequency of symptoms in both groups, that would disprove or at least cast a lot of doubt on COVID as the root cause, y/n?

It wouldn't disprove, that's not what studies like that are designed to do and it's not even clear you could design a study to do that. You would just walk away saying "In this study we didn't see evidence that long-lasting symptoms like fatigue and anosmia were associated with previous COVID infection." Which would kind of surprise me. But that's what you would say.

got it, thanks!

In the meantime, it seems like discouraging news coming out of Israel about the long-term efficacy of the vaccine. Even the risk of serious illness and hospitalization increases again among the most vulnerable cohorts at some point after vaccination, though perhaps Delta is confounding some of these numbers. We may be looking at a world where vaccine boosters must be given every 6 months or so. In that scenario I guess vaccine mandates would require proof a recent shot? Meanwhile this will only reduce the availability of vaccines to the less-rich countries of the world. Perhaps we're heading towards an outcome where most of the non-rich world develops herd immunity through exposure, and the rich countries are in a pattern of never-ending boosters?

xpost

Yeah the dimensions and effects of long COVID are essential to understand, with good science, because we are going to have a shit-ton of people COVID. I have a sister who dealt with chronic Lyme for about a decade and I watched her go through all the skepticism and limited treatment options, which got a bit better over time but not much. So I'm very sensitive to any downplaying of anybody's symptoms. We just need to have a much clearer sense of what the triggers and risk factors for long COVID are, what systems they impact, and what they mean over time. For diagnosis and treatment purposes, we have to understand it, which means controlled studies.

people with COVID

o. nate, read the last Twitter thread posted by Neanderthal.

Fauci said this morning on MSNBC that (I paraphrase) a booster after the two Pfizer/Moderna jabs strengthens the T cell's institutional memory against variants.

Count me among the people who are primarily fucking furious right now about in person schooling and the risk to kids. I do think the risk is pretty small that my kid will get covid *and* suffer long term effects- but it’s a non-zero risk for sure, and I am pissed off that I was forced to make that calculation. Meanwhile, Florida school districts are not allowed to have mask mandates, they stopped the remote learning option, and basically- despite assurances to the contrary- they have essentially gone back to business as usual, with the exception that some students, my kid included, are masked. It’s eating my guts out from the inside that every day I have to wonder if she’s getting exposed and is going to get sick and possibly die because I chose to take the risk of sending her to school in this fucking cesspit of a state instead of just keeping her home and trying to figure out a way to homeschool her for the year.

well and she could also give it to you. is the thing.

epistantophus, do you live in a county with a mask mandate?

I'm angry that no one is willing to devote the resources to do this the right way. Okay, kids need in person schooling. I'm on board with that, I can't imagine making my kindergartener miss first grade as well. So throw some money at the problem so that kids can be spaced more than 3' apart. Social distancing with kids is totally out the window, the schools don't try and they don't have the resources. None of this is a surprise! We've been going through this long enough now and we're still bumbling through. It is infuriating.

I'm so glad our school (houston) is requiring masks. Greg Abbott and Desantis can choke, die, and burn in hell.

remember when everyone was like, the best thing we can do is improve ventilation

nobody is improving ventilation and nobody is going to improve ventilation