jhpriestley's comments

If it is past exposures and disease resistence, how do you explain early spread in Wuhan? Why does Aus/NZ enjoy natural immunity but not Indonesia? Quarantines are effective against all infectious diseases and have been for centuries, why do you assume they were not effective in places like China and Vietnam? Where is the evidence that disease resistance plays any role?

If the goal is to prevent traffic fatalities then funding self-driving research must be one of the least effective methods. Tens of billions of dollars have been spent and no lives have been saved.

If we could achieve cycling usage at the level of the Netherlands, mass transit usage on the level of Japan, and road safety on the level of Norway then we would cut road deaths by 90%. These are ambitious goals but can actually happen and are not an open-ended research project.

90% of PCR-positive subjects in the ENE-COVID test, for example, did also have a positive antibody test. So actual infection numbers might be ~10% higher than the raw numbers from the antibody tests (and I believe that this is factored into the results reported by such studies). It doesn't change our big-picture understanding of the disease.

I don't quite know what to make of the WHO estimate. I can't find further details about it. I don't think it makes sense to take this estimate and try to extract an IFR from it. They could be suggesting that the IFR of the virus is much lower than expected, but they could also be suggesting that deaths have been badly undercounted (e.g. in areas with poor health infrastructure), or that it has spread more widely among younger populations in places like Africa, where IFR would be expected to be much lower.

Bhattacharya's estimate is being criticized because, even though he was taking a contrarian view on the virus and getting results that were out of wack with other lines of evidence, he rushed out a highly flawed study (the Santa Clara seroprevalence study). This came out when we had little data about antibody prevalence, his study was one of the first ones, and it had the big name of Stanford behind it, so it was reported very widely and misled an awful lot of people about how dangerous this virus is. In his position he should have been bending over backwards to make sure he was on sure footing and not misleading the public, and instead he let this paper full of basic mistakes go to press.

If you look at the responses to that editorial, they note that the 11% positivity of igA tests, cited as suggestive of a high level of undetected infection, is actually the false positive rate of the test, among other embarrassing errors.

The first citation on your linked editorial is Ioannidis, which is the same Stanford researcher in the OP article here, and the same group responsible for the utterly flawed Santa Clara study. It seems like it's literally this one group, and a few other weirdos and contrarians, singlehandedly raising spurious doubts about the science, and then being amplified beyond all reason.

The cited Ioannidis study also sucks, he takes a number of seroprevalence studies, including some very flawed or underpowered ones, and then takes the unweighted median for some reason? More details here, including an illustration of how the high-quality, randomly-selected samples do not vary so much https://twitter.com/GidMK/status/1283232023402868737

The CDC estimate was from before we had any good studies using antibody prevalence. It was too low.

The WHO estimates a fatality rate of 0.6%. If you are simply dividing deaths by (an estimate of) current cases then you will get an inaccurate number because many of the current cases will eventually die of the disease.

1) I'm not a researcher and I can't claim to have a comprehensive view of the evidence, but I think there have been enough high-quality studies based on seroprevalence to give a good estimate. This one https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.08.06.20169722v... found an IFR of 0.83% in spain, or 1.07% if counting excess deaths. This one https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.27.20141689v... found an estimate of 1.39% in NYC. The WHO has estimated 0.6%. These studies are based on representative antibody surveys with good statistical power, they should be accurate. There are factors like demographics and comorbidities that can push the number much higher or lower in a given community, but the range does not seem that wide to me.

2) I haven't been tracking hospitalization data very closely, you may be right that this has changed ... I've seen little discussion of it.

I agree that mask use in particular was controversial for a rather long time, with bodies like the CDC seemingly dragging their feet on recommending the use of masks. Still, I think that it's been a pretty settled question since April (CDC recommended masks from April 3 https://www.livescience.com/cdc-recommends-face-masks-corona...).

I've been reading about this virus daily since February and my impression has been the opposite. It's a very boring virus which has offered very few surprises. We knew since February that it is a flu-like respiratory disease with high rates of hospitalization and death, especially among the old. The initial estimates for fatality rate were about 4% and that has now been narrowed to 1% based on better testing and treatment. Social distancing and masks are effective at controlling the spread. All of this has been known since February/March, most of it is spelled out here: https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/who-chi...

At the same time, there has been an endless parade of contrarians trying to make the whole thing into a big mystery and muddy the waters for some reason. There was the theory that the virus was spreading much earlier than expected. There was the theory that most cases were asymptomatic and that immunity had already been reached. The theory that lockdowns are not effective. The theory that there were different strains with highly different behavior. Some vague theory about t-cell immunity.

None of these contrarian theories have been supported by any real evidence, but there is a large appetite for them and people will seize on any puzzling number to try to rethink the whole picture of the virus.

Damn, these are the same people who came up with that ridiculous antibody study which fueled the crackpot "widespread immunity" theory? They must have no shame to keep pushing their contrarian covid takes.

Clinton was in fact a centrist "third-way" democrat who often compromised or coopted Republican issues, e.g. welfare reform.

Obama was not as much of a centrist but he was obstructed heavily by the opposition.

I'll continue to blame the people who vote 90% in one direction over the ones who vote 90% the other lol.

Edit: you added some specific comments about immigration. This is correct, Democrats are not very pro-immigration. They are more pro-immigration than the GOP, e.g. DACA order vs. DACA repeal, but the two parties are pretty close on immigration. There is a much bigger gap on issues like healthcare.

You seem to think that if a party does not accomplish its policy objectives (closing gitmo, DACA) because the other party prevented it from accomplishing those objectives, it does not support them? interesting take :)

yes, he pardoned Roger Stone for obstructing the investigation into him

It's like history repeats itself. In Weimar Germany you had the fascists who wanted to persecute and scapegoat minorities and immigrants, but then the far left was also super intolerant of the fascists and actually killed some of them in street brawls.

The truly wise group were the conservatives who were repulsed by both sides but willing to work with the fascists.

It is not only the sheer pleasure of reading language used to its utmost, an indulgence found in the enduring literary accomplishments of Shakespeare or Dickens but somewhat lacking in the trendier, reportorial style of a Hemingway (who, after a hundred years, it seems safe to say has not reached the same level of immortal acclaim), but also if I may venture, a particular suitability to the kind of digressive, meandering, rich and nuanced thought, a precious and valuable part of human intellect, a rich roast which loses much of its savor when cut into bite-sized chunks, which recommends, contra all the style advice of today's factory-line English departments, an appreciation and a space for the continuation of the English of Milton and Gibbons and Melville as against the simplified, utilitarian style recommended in the fine article.

Gitmo was part of a larger war on terror, including the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, which is estimated to have caused millions of deaths. Torture and arbitrary detainment have been widespread. One of the very few flagrant criminals to face prosecution in these war crimes was recently pardoned.

Everywhere saw a similar shape of curve, i.e. exponential increase until the lockdown, then slow exponential decrease. The peak of the curve differed widely, and countries that were slow to lock down like the UK, Sweden and USA have seen some of the worst outcomes.

Correlating lockdown policy to outcome does not make sense because lockdowns are instituted in response to case levels in the first place. It is like correlating fire trucks and fires, and finding that fire trucks cause fires because there are more of them in dry, fire-prone areas.

Sweden provides something close to a natural experiment, it has similar culture and climate to its neighbors but a far worse outcome after it did not lock down.

Prisons are not especially weighted toward older people and they have seen outbreaks with as many as 80% being infected.

1. Dozens of localities have controlled the virus via lockdowns, social distancing and masking, they all show similar curves to NY but with lower peaks. NY therefore offers no evidence that herd immunity has been reached.

2. Your Spanish study shows 90% of those with a positive PCR test also had antibodies. The low symptomatic positive rate could be easily explained by other seasonal illnesses with identical symptoms.

3. There is no evidence beyond supposition that I can see for the Wuhan clinical workers having the virus. An alternative explanation is that protective equipment and protocols were effective.

4. The idea of 80% of the population being T-cell immune seems inconsistent with the outcomes on the Diamond Princess.

I think you are cherry-picking data to support a far-fetched theory. The outcomes in confined places where the virus infects everyone, like the Diamond Princess or nursing homes, seem especially hard to square with the idea of widespread t-cell immunity.

Edit: I was misremembering the Diamond Princess, not everyone on the cruise ship got the virus. However, Marion Correctional Institute in Ohio had 80% test positive for covid; the Life Care Center in Kirkland, Washington had 2/3 test positive. These don't seem consistent with widespread T-cell immunity.

The virus spread quite well in Wuhan and the South Korean church though. Why do you dismiss the significant policy differences as a sufficient explanation?

yes, he is wrong that Apple and Disney are pawns of the CCP, it's a ridiculous accusation from an alternate reality.

Barr didn't seem too concerned about foreign influence when it came to a national security advisor lying to the government about cash payments from Turkey and illegal coordination with Russia.