kickingandscreaming
PREMIER
It's been a while. I missed it. Truly his greatest contribution to the thread.
Vaccine
- Thread starter Multi Sport
- Start date
Link to NEJM letter, discussing ways to estimate whether vaccination reduces your ability to spread the virus:So how does this work with the made up numbers and projections you try and create. You should be careful, people that use statistics in the wrong way can be very dangerous spreaders of misinformation!!!! But then again, maybe you are even smarter than the doctor and math modeler from BU?
Brooke Nichols, a health economist and infectious disease mathematical modeler at Boston University, said "vaccinated individuals can definitely infect other people. There is enough data to support this."
"While vaccinated individuals may be less infectious and infectious for a shorter duration of time they are by no means a dead-end host," Nichols said. "When calling it a pandemic of the unvaccinated, though, it makes it sound as those vaccinated individuals aren’t substantially contributing to new cases — which they are (particularly now). Unvaccinated individuals do, however, continue to contribute disproportionately to hospitalizations and deaths."
However, Nichols added, "I don’t think the data systems in place can tell us anything about the proportion of new infections that originated from a vaccinated or unvaccinated person."
Beware of claims that vaccinated can’t spread COVID-19
As President Joe Biden heads toward his second year in office of leading the country through a pandemic, he faces the chwww.politifact.com
Science is complicated Nichols thinks it can’t be accurately estimated with data systems. Others are busy building estimates based on housemates of vaccinated health care workers.
The two statements aren’t even in opposition. I’d certainly agree that a data system swag is no match for a housemate study.
whatithink
GOLD
I'm sure you are bright enough to understand the words I wrote, but can't help with the labelling - it must be a comfort to you.
You also may want to rethink India, say, and pause before going off on one as you do.
Bengal famine of 1943 - Wikipedia
Covidian
You use that term a lot. It's a new word to me, so I looked up the definition. There seems to be a lot of variability. Before I respond, could you enlighten us with what you intended to mean there?
Yawn. Covidian.
Good point about the Bengal famine. The other problem, though, it points out with this data set is how you take into account indirect deaths (other than by bomb). Even the Holocaust...does it count because the Nazis would have pursued the policy absent WWII? Spanish civil war? It's a good point, and another reason why the analogy doesn't really work. To even get close to COVID, you'd have to remove COVID deaths results from policy (such as the opiod and delayed treatments problems) from the deaths. I'm sure dad4 would have fun with that one!
I was mostly pointing out that “survival rate” is the appropriate metric for only extremely bad situations.
A worldwide event with a “99% survival rate“ is a catastrophe.
Two very big problems with your article. Most importantly, your letter doesn't include Omicron, which has drastically changed the way every scientist now approaches Covid and the spread. And even then, the letter states, "Given that vaccination reduces asymptomatic infection with SARS-CoV-2,2,3 it is plausible that vaccination reduces transmission; however, data from clinical trials and observational studies are lacking.4,5"
Plausible and lacking are far from concrete evidence. So once again, for you to make broad assumptions using your own math is dangerous misinformation that is harmful to the community.
So it's just a meaningless insult. That's what I thought.
EvilGoalie 21
GOLD
In that case, PubMed is your friend. Lots of population and lab-based analysis going on. Anything with "Free PMC" won't hit a paywall.
Double yawn.
Don‘t count me in for that. You don’t remove covid deaths resulting from policy.
If you subtract out the costs of covid policies, then you must also subtract out any benefits received from those same policies. It becomes speculative.
Better to look at the events, such as they were.
That's not the end of the thought experiment though. The argument has always been:
1. There's a real disconnect though between something being a global catastrophe and individual risk assessment. As I pointed out before, WWII may have been a global catastrophe but for my mother it was probably the best time of her life. For children COVID was never a threat. For the elderly it's been a real concern and a bigger catastrophe than the general population IFR suggests.
2. Even if it is a catastrophe, what exactly can we do about it? WWII was a man made decision. Had WWII happened or not it is likely the holocaust numbers would have happened anyways. The only thing that might have stopped that was an earlier decision by the allies to go to war either after Austria or Czechoslovakia. The San Francisco Earthquake, Black Death, and the Tonga volcano eruptions were also catastrophes. Irrespective of what we did with COVID, a certain amount of death was always going to be baked in. Again, short of a time machine where we go back and stop the likely lab leak.
Well, I think then we all agree, thanks in part to whatithink, that the analogy is of limited utility. At least we can agree on that.
Hey look....I thought espola assured us it wasn't about politics.
EvilGoalie 21
GOLD
The distinction in the highlighted sentence is basically saying that monitoring infection is an indirect metric for transmission. To more directly assess transmission you need something like viral titer loads in infected vaxx vs unvaxx people. In the intervening time studies along that line has been done and I've linked them at some point. A reduction in titers was observed.
The swerve we have seen this week on Covid restrictions are based on changing science and has nothing to do with these numbers below
WATCH: This new CNN poll on Biden is BRUTAL....
Approval - 41%
Disapproval - 58%
What has Biden done well?
56% - Nothing/disapprove of everything
Feeling about COVID pandemic?
75% burned out
WATCH: This new CNN poll on Biden is BRUTAL....
Approval - 41%
Disapproval - 58%
What has Biden done well?
56% - Nothing/disapprove of everything
Feeling about COVID pandemic?
75% burned out
Nevada just dropped its mask requirements. Hawaii its booster requirements for tourists. Looks like the big blue cities will be the last redoubts of COVID policy but they will kill their public school systems and downtowns as a result.
whatithink
GOLD
The analogy, as I took it, was at an holistic level of two events that impacted the world (S. America could easily have entered the war if some events went another way, and there was a lot of Nazi sympathizers there, as demo'd by it being a flight destination and safe haven for them after the war). The Nazi policy would have been restricted to Germany so less Holocaust deaths, Spanish Civil war predated WW2, Japan invaded Manchuria in 1937 and deaths from that are (I assume) included etc. and so on.
The general premise, again as I took it, was that quoting survivability rates of 99.5% (or whatever) is made to sound acceptable, when that as a % of 8B people results in millions or tens of millions of deaths.
The holistic comparison obviously falls apart when you drill into details as the events are not comparable.
I agree, but @dad4 isn't using those metrics, he is simply stating case rates, which is far from accurate and has been my whole argument with his numbers in the first place.
Were your viral load studies pre or post Omicron?
I am curious to know more about your mother's WW2 experience that made it seem so pleasant.
My own little contribution to parental history --when I was first learning about the Great Depression, I asked my mother how it affected her life. She said that because they lived on a farm they were already poor.