facts =/= ideas and opinions, is the problem.
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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)
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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.
That article was a mix of both “facts” and ideas/opinions. Look above the title. It’s listed as an Editorial.
The sentence in quotes that you referenced was extracted from a post by Robert in reply to Honkman – and was never answered.
I really don’t care to comment on that article any further.
An editorial doesn’t mean you can misrepresent facts or bring up “ideas” which have no scientific backing.
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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
I agree with this part of the Discussion Section:
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.
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Well, THAT’s on Gavin Newso…oh, wait.
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It’s been that way since before the change in CDC guidance, which Newsom ignored.
From the article:
For more than a month, California has been among the states with the lowest coronavirus case rates
No longer a vanguard for the rest of the nation, CA is bringing up the caboose.
Good news:
And more good news:
Oh, and T-Cell 101:
T-cells | Ask A Biologist (asu.edu)
Engagement of memory T-cells has also been among the currently favored immunotherapies for some metastasized cancers (especially the intravenous drug nivolumab, and its first cousins, ipilimumab and pembrolizumab). The mechanism is different, but the principle is the same. T-cells trained by these drugs succeed in marking cancer cells for removal by macrophages. They enable the cancer cells to be detected in spite of the “checkpoint” that cancer cells present. The “checkpoint” normally enables cancer cells to be overlooked by the immune system for normal “programmed death” cellular elimination. Consequently, cancer cells can reproduce indefinitely.
Those drugs are new, like the new covid-19 vaccines, but so far there appears to be reason to believe that both may confer very long-duration effectiveness. Newly hatched T-cells retain a “memory” of the information that their ancestors carried; which is to say, the necessary “data” are passed on from generation to generation as they reproduce.
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It will be interesting to see what comes of this:
https://www.yahoo.com/gma/2-passengers-test-positive-covid-003023545.html
Yes, it will.
I suppose that it’s possible that the two passengers were mildly infected with viral loads below detection thresholds at the time of testing/boarding.
But we shall see, I’m sure, since this is in the news. Neither of the two are experiencing symptoms.
Vaccinated people can develop low-level infections that are barely detectable and rarely transmissible. Some allowance has to be made for that.
Understood, but, to me, 2 people testing positive on a ship running at 30% capacity on a cruise of presumably limited duration and w/ limited port of call (and b/f protocol fatigue has set in) is pretty unimpressive. Scaling up to a ship at full capacity, longer trip, more ports of call, multipled by more ships in general…
But I will leave it to the stats and infectious disease folks to weigh in (in the press, I mean, not necessarily on the board).
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I am always wondering with places where they will check if you are fully vaccinated how many people will try to fake their paperwork
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My guess is “everyone who isn’t fully vaccinated.”