Bad News Thread

espola said:
The ultimate failed epidemic prediction --

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Always looking through a political lens.

@kickingandscreaming was pointing out the poor records of the "experts".

You look at that and immediately go political.

Evaluating how the experts performed should not be a political exercise. And yet you and others seem not to be able to do anything without using the political angle.
 
kickingandscreaming said:

Forecasting for COVID-19 has failed - PMC

Epidemic forecasting has a dubious track-record, and its failures became more prominent with COVID-19. Poor data input, wrong modeling assumptions, high sensitivity of estimates, lack of incorporation of epidemiological features, poor past evidence ...
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
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Interesting, but no surprise. Projections, forecasts and predictions are not medical science, they are simply scientific opinion and shouldn't be given any more weight than that. I disagree with the study's assessment that "Some (but not all) of these problems can be fixed." I think it would be more accurate to say "Few, if any, of these problems can be fixed." The underlying problem isn't methodology, its academic arrogance. It doesn't matter how expert you claim to be, you can't predict the future and its arrogant to think you can. I've said this before, if you could predict the future you wouldn't be working at some University lab, you'd be on the beach of your own private island in the Caribbean sipping Mojitos.

I've posted a number of times, but as a refresher I will post it again.
www.smithsonianmag.com

Why Experts are Almost Always Wrong

No one, not even the experts, really knows what's about to happen
www.smithsonianmag.com www.smithsonianmag.com
 
espola said:
The truth hurts.
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No it doesn't.

The US is basically in exactly the same place as pretty much every other W European country. I know early on the press and the Ds were saying the Euros got it right. Looking now we are all basically at the same place.

Kind of like CA vs TX or FL.

The virus did what it did.

Now back to the "experts" and their predictions which was the point of the @kickingandscreaming post.
 
Desert Hound said:
Always looking through a political lens.

@kickingandscreaming was pointing out the poor records of the "experts".

You look at that and immediately go political.

Evaluating how the experts performed should not be a political exercise. And yet you and others seem not to be able to do anything without using the political angle.
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Did you read the article beyond the headline? In the Appendix ("...a fool's confession...), the principal author (Ionnadis) recounts his own failed prediction that the deaths due to covid in the US would be around 10,000.

Ionnadis also rushes quickly by the possibility that the extreme measures (sanitation, handwashing, mask protocols, isolation, the shutdown of non-essential activities, etc) might have contributed to the fact that the worst-case scenarios did not evolve.

Other quotes from the article --

Let us be clear: even if millions of deaths did not happen this season, they may happen with the next wave, next season, or some new virus in the future. A doomsday forecast may come in handy to protect civilization when and if calamity hits.

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, we had randomized trials showing 38% reduced odds of influenza infection with hand washing and (non-statistically significant, but possible) 47% reduced odds with proper mask wearing.

Despite lack of trials, it is sensible and minimally disruptive to avoid mass gatherings and decrease unnecessary travel.
 
espola said:
The ultimate failed epidemic prediction --

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True. Knuckle head should have know what the makers of Lysol and Clorox wipes have known for decades. Corona has been around forever and never warranted the tyrannical shutdowns that you and Derv are advocates for.
 
Grace T. said:
Ok now stand in a field outside 18 yard from someone smoking. Can you smell it even in the open air? If so with aerosolized particles the holes (especially on the side of the mask) aren’t doing much to keep you protected and while stopping you from directly blowing in someone’s face are still filling up a poorly circulated room with virus particles.

more interesting (kids just did this for a science experiment in middle school btw) take a cherry throat lozenge, put a mask on, stand six feet away from someone, put a mask on yourself. Can you smell it?
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Your smoker experiment would be a fire hazard. You’d have to have the smoker wear the mask, with the cigarette inside the mask. Masks are to limit the source, remember? They work by limiting how far his breath can travel, not by filtering out the smoke.

I like the cherry lozenge experiment. The lozenge kid should be the class clown, because you want someone who is going to talk with their mouth full. Then try it again with different parameters. (masked, unmasked, inside, outside.) Ideally, each kid marks how much time it takes before they can identify today’s lozenge flavor. Would give you a decent idea of the relative value of masks and outdoors.

For the cigarettes, we all had to run that experiment as kids. 18 yards outside was nothing. Entering a room where several people had been smoking 20 minutes before? That was awful. But it tells us a lot about inside/outside and nothing about masks.
 
espola said:
A valuable graphic, but it doesn't go down to the size of the molecules you can smell in tobacco smoke or cherry lozenges.
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Don't know for sure about the throat lozenge for sure, but the smoke is not released in single molecules. Is the human nose even sensitive enough to smell a single molecule of tobacco smoke? The issue also isn't just the mask material and the holes in it, but the gaps along the side of the mask.
 
Grace T. said:
Don't know for sure about the throat lozenge for sure, but the smoke is not released in single molecules. Is the human nose even sensitive enough to smell a single molecule of tobacco smoke? The issue also isn't just the mask material and the holes in it, but the gaps along the side of the mask.
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You’re still trying to assess cloth as though it was a filter.

For the most part, a cloth mask is not acting as a filter. It is acting as a baffle. It slows your breath so it doesn’t travel as far before convection carries it up.

As long as your breath can’t go very far, it is working. If you can blow out the candle, it isn’t working. Your breath is going too far.
 
Grace T. said:
Don't know for sure about the throat lozenge for sure, but the smoke is not released in single molecules. Is the human nose even sensitive enough to smell a single molecule of tobacco smoke? The issue also isn't just the mask material and the holes in it, but the gaps along the side of the mask.
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Tobacco smoke is not a single chemical. Some of its components are simple (and therefore small) molecules that are readily detectable by smelling them, such as formaldehyde, acetaldehyde, benzene, and the like.

en.wikipedia.org

Tobacco smoke - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
 
dad4 said:
You’re still trying to assess cloth as though it was a filter.

For the most part, a cloth mask is not acting as a filter. It is acting as a baffle. It slows your breath so it doesn’t travel as far before convection carries it up.

As long as your breath can’t go very far, it is working. If you can blow out the candle, it isn’t working. Your breath is going too far.
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Like this? It still goes up which is why indoors in a poorly circulated room they aren't as good. They basically stop you from giving as high a viral load to the person right in front of you, but not from releasing the stuff into the environment of the poorly circulated room.


 
Grace T. said:
Like this? It still goes up which is why indoors in a poorly circulated room they aren't as good. They basically stop you from giving as high a viral load to the person right in front of you, but not from releasing the stuff into the environment of the poorly circulated room.


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That's why when they thought it was droplets this makes more sense, but if aerosolized, as the prior studies we've discussed, it can fill a room pretty quickly.
 
Grace T. said:
Like this? It still goes up which is why indoors in a poorly circulated room they aren't as good. They basically stop you from giving as high a viral load to the person right in front of you, but not from releasing the stuff into the environment of the poorly circulated room.


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Exactly. The mask keeps you from blowing virus directly into someone’s face as you talk to them. That’s it. The rest of the benefit is minor. But we talk to each other so much that the primary effect is significant.

Imagine you are directly in front of the head in the video. Do you want them to have a mask on? Or do you want to be directly in the viral plume?

The mask doesn’t get any less effective when you walk indoors. You’re just adding a risk that the mask isn’t able to help with.
 
dad4 said:
Exactly. The mask keeps you from blowing virus directly into someone’s face as you talk to them. That’s it. The rest of the benefit is minor. But we talk to each other so much that the primary effect is significant.

Imagine you are directly in front of the head in the video. Do you want them to have a mask on? Or do you want to be directly in the viral plume?

The mask doesn’t get any less effective when you walk indoors. You’re just adding a risk that the mask isn’t able to help with.
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o.k. fair. If true, then the messaging should have been wear a mask when in discussions with others, whether walking outside side by side, talking to the grocery store clerk, talking with the doctor, or in the McDonalds drive thru. Not masks are better than vaccines or if everyone wears masks COVID is controlled. This doesn't, BTW, obliviate the need for an indoor mask mandate (since there's still some marginal benefit to reducing overall viral loads indoors and it's hard to police people for when they are talking and when they aren't to others) but my objection has always been more the messaging than the actual policy.
 
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