That’s the problem. 1 of the authors is a med student, 1 author is… I don’t exactly what her profession is, but she’s not a med student or clinician, and the 3rd author is a plastic surgeon… which means he likely knows very little about infectious diseases.
The last 3-4 paragraphs sound a lot like BS gibberish (throwing out impressive-sounding terms that may not be particularly precise) and are actually pretty bad. Whether they are accurate or not, I can’t say. But it is poorly written and so overly broad to the point of being meaningless, IMO.
The point is, why is that a problem? You can take what they have to say and choose to ignore what you wish, based on the authors’ limited credentials.
What are your credentials in this field? What are mine? None, really. But should that prevent us from reading and commenting on articles written by semi-intelligent academics with tangential backgrounds who have spent time thinking about it?
I’ve been a referee for more than one professional journal, and frankly if I received this paper as a draft, I’d have a number of editorial and content comments.
Keep in mind that this was an opinion piece (an editorial) in a campus publication, not meant as a scientific submission.
I’m a physician w/ a volunteer academic appointment at the local medical school, and the residency program of that school in my field is routinely considered the top program on the west coast (and has been for decades). I also have two published articles in peer-reviewed journals.
While I am not an infectious disease specialist, my credentials in terms of general medical knowledge run circles around the first two authors and are at least equal to the third.
My qualifications are more than sufficient to say that this “editorial” is sh*t and that I am deeply embarrassed for all of the authors.
Fair enough. I really don’t care to defend this particular article any further. My comments were more general in nature, regarding published remarks by almost anyone (DT excluded).
I’m not a medical expert. My PhD is in Aerospace Engineering, and I was a professor at two major universities, specializing in thermodynamics, gas dynamics, and combustion. I’ve also worked for a large contract research company that serves the US DoD.
At one point I did have to delve into microbiological phenomena, so that’s my only salient background. It’s amazing how much you can learn when you delve deeply into the literature, as a PhD working on a thesis would, about a narrow corner of a specialized field. For a fairly long period of time, I (and my peers) felt I was really quite expert in a particular subset of bacterial phenomena.
I’ve been following the social and medical aspects of The Great Pandemic of 2020 since the beginning, with considerable interest in all aspects, and have learned a lot. I have not, however, delved into the academic and government literature as I would have when working.
I’ve also got a lot out of this thread, especially posts with links to articles by Robert and Honkman, which have interesting content, whether or not I agree with them.
Does thermodynamics overlap w/ ventilation? My own impression is that ventilation and masking (even more than social distancing) is essential in this pandemic. I do plan to keep masking indoors (or in any crowded outdoor area) for at least a few wks after CA lifts its mandates b/c I assume any increase in infections will take wks to become apparent.
There was one fairly recent article where the authors used a theory of infection that was based on estimating the probability of a traffic accidents (so random collisions?). The authors concluded that masking could keep one safe indoors for several hrs, while social distancing (in absence of masking and good ventilation) was actually not so useful. Can’t remember where I read the article, though…
I do wonder if, as an engineer, you’d have some thoughts about ventilation.
I hate to utter his name, so I used DT for [donald trump].
Thermodynamics overlaps with almost everything, but some fields (like energy) more directly than others (ventilation). HVAC is an engineering branch all its own that is taught in some schools (including one university where I taught). Thermodynamics does play a significant role and is pre-requisite.
As a fluid dynamics specialist, I’ve had a great interest in ventilation and airflow, especially in confined spaces, in the context of virus spread, since the pandemic began. We’ve had quite the extensive discussion of that here on FTC going back to early last year, but mostly on another thread. The discussion included experimental observations, computational fluid dynamics (CFD), and synthesized data involving airborne releases in enclosed spaces.
There is a huge difference between voicing your opinion anonymous on a board like this about any topic or doing it in a public way through TV, newspaper, peer-reviewed journal articles, your Twitter account etc. with your full name and credentials. The moment you are using your full name and your background you have to be held to a completely different standard and then it is important to not mix up ideas vs facts. That’s part of the reason why we ended up with the covid mess in the US - people like Scott Atlas used it to influence policy even though they had no clue what they were talking about (but have PhD/MD so it must be true). Another case is Michael Levitt to use his Nobel Prize credentials to push unbelievable BS wrt Covid.
Same with this article - just because somebody has worked in a related field doesn’t make them even close to experts about covid (but everybody believes it’s true because it is from a journal and they are doctors).
And no, you can’t just voice your ideas in this context but write a lot of wrong facts, e.g. “ Unlike in 1918, DNA sequencing of COVID-19 can predict whether infected individuals will be symptomatic or asymptomatic, based on a single base change” which absolutely BS (and let’s not get into the last 3-4 paragraphs which are some of the worst drug development “assessments” I have read in many years).
Unfortunately especially academics tend to believe they know everything in every field and are allowed to abuse the peer-reviewed system where often only other academics with the same mindset look at the work which is clearly the cases with this paper (which shouldn’t have been published - but based on my own experience have been working several years at the interface of academia and industry isn’t terrible surprising)
Theoretical analysis aside, there have been investigations of real-world infections that have made it clear that distance is often irrelevant in an enclosed space with recirculated air.
Hypothetical example offered by the county: someone who tested positive for COVID-19 before dying in a car accident would have been included in the count.
Interesting. So previously, if on the day a person died, they tested positive for covid – whether or not they even had its symptoms – they were counted as having died from the virus. And there were no less than several hundred cases in which it was clear that wasn’t actually the case (such as, I suppose, deaths from a heart attack). Pretty ludicrous, really.
Another interesting comment in this article is this:
Deaths are often reported at different intervals and rarely on the day they actually occur.
Yet many publications, including the SD Union, report daily deaths.
This reminds me of the plot that’s updated daily on Worldometer that shows deaths per day (and a rolling 7-day average) in Sweden (which I’ve been interested in following). The plot, when looked at casually, appears to drop to near zero, a fallacy pointed out a while back by Nocharge. In fact, the Worldomenter plot always drops to near zero at the tail. The Swedish government on the other hand, according to Nocharge, waits two weeks before giving an official count, which has been running in the upper teens recently.
Some of the ways in which covid mortality data are gathered and presented can be really misleading. That’s nothing new, but the way Alemeda County was counting is a new one – for me, anyway.
There are a number of studies which have shown that covid often causes severe inflammation of heart tissue. For people with potential heart issues these covid related inflammation could then ultimately lead to a heart attack and in that case if would be correct to say that they died because of covid infection. We are just learning more and more (even for asymptomatic cases) who deep the impact of the virus on the human body, e.g. multiple organs, brain, nerves, blood vessels is and will be in the the long term
The systemic effects of covid are definitely a disturbing characteristic of the disease.
And yes, I suppose in the case of a heart attack, swollen structures could press on and constrict an artery, so that a smaller clot could initiate the attack.
I was just randomly using the example of a heart attack in the manner of a hypothetical death from a car accident.
I hope that the new criteria in Alemeda County take these things more carefully into account.
The problem is that to find this out in more detail you need an autopsy (no real other way to do it consistently). Some countries are doing it more routinely but the US is not one of them. Germany (or at least some parts of it) has done it on a more regular basis and this report from 80 cases shows that how far reaching covid impacts the body and ultimately causes death
From an epidemiological point of view, the question of whether a person died with or as a result of SARS-CoV-2 might be rather secondary. Nevertheless, the answer to this question may be important in individual cases not only for the relatives of those affected but also for the general population
It’s not really important (speaking for myself) that the death counts are exact.
Actually, the tallies of new covid cases and covid deaths in the daily news remind me of the body counts during the Vietnam War. Day after day the latest body count was right there in your face. They became morbid daily reminders of the horrors going on.
So I hope Alemeda County gets their act together a little better, but I’m not that concerned that their numbers were off somewhat in the past.