dagblog - Comments for ""The data is in — stop the panic and end the total isolation""

He's back..! He's from the

NCD — Wed, 02 Sep 2020 12:50:44 +0000

In reply to "The data is in — stop the panic and end the total isolation"

He's back..! He's from the Scaife funded Libertarian Hoover Institution, and he wants you to get COVID!

Fox News' latest quack, 'herd immunity' 'fatality rate of 0.01%' 99.99% wacko Dr. Atlas!

In one of his first meetings, he argued over the science of mask wearing. As Drs. Fauci and Birx maintained that drops in caseloads reflected public health measures such as social distancing and mask-wearing, Dr. Atlas insisted that peaks and declines could have merely been the virus running its course, senior administration officials said.

In other discussions, he argued that children cannot spread the virus, despite numerous studies that have shown that children can carry the virus, transmit it and die from it.

Remember another Hoover Institution great from March?

Hoover Senior Fellow Richard A Epstein, research team member at Hoover - published a paper on March 16 that forecast only 500 Americans would die of COVID, - see Coronavirus Perspective.

On March 23 Epstein updated his position in Coronavirus Overreaction:

In my column last week, I predicted that the world would eventually see about 50,000 deaths from the novel coronavirus, and the United States about 500. These two numbers are clearly not in sync.

If the first number holds, the total US deaths should be about 4 to 5 percent of that total, or about 2,000–2,500 deaths ...

The current US virus death total is 187,000. Epstein's new "total US deaths" is happening every 2 days.

Dr. Atlas wants it to go up, up, up, into the millions.

If Trump wants it, you know it is a crackpot, dangerous, bad, bad, very bad- 'next' Trump disaster.

I was really hopeful about

moat — Sat, 25 Apr 2020 22:13:10 +0000

In reply to well, it does look like this

I was really hopeful about the antibody tests when I first heard about them since I thought they might be a shortcut to getting data regarding population infection rates.

Eventually they will be. But they have to overcome problems with the tests themselves first. Once that is done and the relationship between the results upon immunity have been figured out, they also need to be administered in such a way that one is not only sampling a tiny segment of a population but a large portion of it. All the plans designed around integrating testing and reopening the economy call for that.

Another assumption in the anti-isolation arguments is that we have arrived at the peak. We have not reached a peak yet. It is more of a very long and wide plateau. Since this fact overturns many models, not just theirs, the path forward means accepting that we cannot extrapolate on what is happening in other countries too much because our response was nothing like other countries. In addition, the reasons for so much variation in percentages of infection to death is far from being understood.

I think there is a psychological element in not wanting to accept the dimensions of the thing. But it would not be so strong if we had a Federal plan of action instead of a smiley face pasted upon a locked bathroom door.

seems appropriate to plop

artappraiser — Sat, 25 Apr 2020 22:11:58 +0000

In reply to "The data is in — stop the panic and end the total isolation"

seems appropriate to plop here that W.H.O. is dashing hopes about the idea of "immunity passports" being a positive thing:

BBC News - Coronavirus: Immunity passports ‘could increase virus spread’ https://t.co/XhX8QDzLkP
— J. W. (@wolfjon4) April 25, 2020

well, it does look like this

artappraiser — Sat, 25 Apr 2020 21:25:31 +0000

In reply to "The data is in — stop the panic and end the total isolation"

well, it does look like this argument has been pretty thoroughly deconstructed from what you guys have posted here.

I happen to think, though, that's what's really important about it is that it has garnered so much attention. The takeaway for me is political/sociological: lots educated people desperately want to believe it is true! They are not ready psychologically for their old world to go "poof". The majority of Germans may be able to handle Merkl's tell it lke it is, pain is coming, they've got stories from grandparents that enable them to do that. I don't think a lot of Americans are. They want to believe anything is possible. Optimism of some kind required?

The authors are assholes, the

jollyroger — Sat, 25 Apr 2020 14:31:33 +0000

In reply to "The data is in — stop the panic and end the total isolation"

The authors are assholes, the data is flawed, the outcome is worthless...

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-who/no-evidence-th...

Most studies have shown that people who have recovered from infection have antibodies to the virus, the WHO said. However, some of them have very low levels of neutralizing antibodies in their blood, “suggesting that cellular immunity may also be critical for recovery”, it added.

As if on cue, NYT reports

rmrd0000 — Sat, 25 Apr 2020 13:45:08 +0000

In reply to Note this comes from the

As if on cue, NYT reports that the accuracy of many antibody tests is questionable.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/24/health/coronavirus-antibody-tests.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

Note this comes from the

rmrd0000 — Sat, 25 Apr 2020 13:39:15 +0000

In reply to "The data is in — stop the panic and end the total isolation"

Note this comes from the Hoover Institute and not from Stanford Medical.Center. The author is not a statistician.

The Stanford study of Santa Clara has come under criticism by statisticians

Both studies used an antibody test made by Premier Biotech company that has not been approved by the FDA and comes with an acknowledgment that it can record false positives.

Hundreds of antibody tests have emerged on the world market in recent weeks, including some that promise a result from a finger prick in just hours, an executive from the diagnostics and pharmaceutical company Roche told Reuters on Tuesday. None of them currently have FDA approval and some of them are “a disaster”, the Roche CEO, Severin Schwan, said.

Scientists also warn it hasn’t yet been definitively proven that getting Covid-19 once protects people from contracting it again. “We do not know if antibodies protect you and for how long,” Arthur Reingold, an epidemiology professor at UC Berkeley, told the Guardian last week.

Then there are concerns about the Stanford study’s sample and statistical analysis. The biggest criticism was that it estimated cases for the whole county’s population based on detecting only 50 positives out of 3,300 people sampled. And since the tests had a false positive rate in one assessment of two out of 371, critics argued all the Covid-19 cases detected by the tests in Santa Clara could conceivably have been false positives

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/23/coronavirus-antibody-studies-california-stanford

A similar argument of letting the disease run its course was published in the NYT by a former member of the Yale Medical faculty

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/20/opinion/coronavirus-pandemic-social-distancing.html?searchResultPosition=2

The proposal to let the disease run its course was attacked by current Yale faculty members

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/23/opinion/letters/coronavirus-quarantine.html

There will be no quick answers to find the truth.

Coronavirus is attacking the lungs, the heart, and the kidneys. It also attacks arteries and veins in the brain. Specialists in each area will investigate and find if there is a common thread or multiple separate mechanisms.