Coronavirus Outbreak

[nett]

Nett: If you had actually read the study you cited regarding vaccinations and asymptomatic spread of Covid you would have reached the discussion section of the paper where the authors write:

This study found an association between vaccination with BNT162b2 in hospital employees and a decreased risk of symptomatic and asymptomatic infections with SARS-CoV-2. Limitations include the observational design; short follow-up time; small cohort size, which led to an inability to match the 2 groups and unequal follow-up; differential temporal risk during the surveillance; and that the group choosing not to be vaccinated may have been more prone to higher-risk behavior. The unequal follow-up time and the latter 2 limitations may have biased the results in favor of vaccination. Further research is needed to determine whether a reduction in risk of asymptomatic infection leads to reduced transmission

The authors disclosed multiple plausible biases that led them to be unable to draw a conclusion on whether vaccination improved asymptomatic transmssion reduction. This is done to prevent people like you from cherry-picking studies, and enforcing inane vaccination policies on health care workers.

Delta is actually too new to have many long-term peer-reviewed studies about vaccines and transmissibility. But there is plenty of research to show that vaccines do reduce the transmissibility of Covid in general. Here is a discussion of the topic from Nature that was published recently: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02054-z

COVID vaccines slash viral spread – but Delta is an unknown

Studies show that vaccines reduce the spread of SARS-CoV-2 by more than 80%, but the Delta variant is creating fresh uncertainty.

Many vaccines have been shown to provide strong protection against COVID-19. Now, growing evidence finds that they also substantially reduce the risk of passing on the virus SARS-CoV-2 — crucial information for governments making decisions about how best to control the pandemic.

However, the studies were done before the highly transmissible Delta variant became prevalent — and scientists say it might be more easily spread by vaccinated people than are earlier variants.

Two studies1,2 from Israel, posted as preprints on 16 July, find that two doses of the vaccine made by pharmaceutical company Pfizer, based in New York City, and biotechnology company BioNTech, based in Mainz, Germany, are 81% effective at preventing SARS-CoV-2 infections. And vaccinated people who do get infected are up to 78% less likely to spread the virus to household members than are unvaccinated people. Overall, this adds up to very high protection against transmission, say researchers.

The studies reflect population-level trends, say researchers. “It’s good news,” says Natalie Dean, a biostatistician at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. “But it’s not quite good enough,” she notes, because it means that vaccinated people can still occasionally spread the infection.

And the highly transmissible Delta variant is a major source of uncertainty. The Israeli studies and others are based on the circulation of earlier variants, in particular Alpha, but research suggests that vaccines offer slightly reduced protection against Delta.

As for Israel. Scientists and data analysists are now considering that what is happening with Israeli data may be an example of something called "Simpsons Paradox" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox which happens when data in separate groups shows one strong tendency but disappears or reverses when the groups are combined. In this case in Israel, the unvaccinated population tilts strongly young and healthy while the older population is both more vaccinated and accounts for the bulk of severe covid cases. When data are not segregated by age you can get contradictory results from what age-segregated data show.

Here is a recent discussion by a Biostatistician and biomedical researcher on Simpson's paradox and how it may be confounding analysis of Israeli Covid data: https://www.covid-datascience.com/post/ ... vaccinated

In any event. You do whatever you want. We are obviously never going to agree. I'll leave others to decide whether being vaccinated or unvaccinated better reduces your risk of contracting Covid and spreading it on to others.

There's a lot to unpack about that analysis. I don't really have time to go through all of them right now, but A few obvious things:

If Simpson's paradox is at all in play here, it means that the two populations are that different, a common vaccination policy would be absurd.
An analysis will always be skewed towards which population is higher. If you reverse the analysis in a case like India's, you will get the opposite result.

Looking at overall case rates is more important than anything, and make this analysis basically null.

Here's the simple fact. Israel has a very high rate of vaccination in > 12 y/o. Despite that high rate of vaccination, they are experiencing case numbers rivaling what they experienced during the initial outbreak of COVID, because vaccines were available. the NYT article goes into detail about how their own experts are now questioning their vaccination strategy.

But young healthy people who work in health care still need to get the vaccine right? Your vacillation between fervor for vaccinating health care worker against will, and then providing milquetoast explanations like Simpson's paradox indicates to me that vaccination has become more a religion for you, than something based in data.

[Ken]

Nett: If you had actually read the study you cited regarding vaccinations and asymptomatic spread of Covid you would have reached the discussion section of the paper where the authors write:

This study found an association between vaccination with BNT162b2 in hospital employees and a decreased risk of symptomatic and asymptomatic infections with SARS-CoV-2. Limitations include the observational design; short follow-up time; small cohort size, which led to an inability to match the 2 groups and unequal follow-up; differential temporal risk during the surveillance; and that the group choosing not to be vaccinated may have been more prone to higher-risk behavior. The unequal follow-up time and the latter 2 limitations may have biased the results in favor of vaccination. Further research is needed to determine whether a reduction in risk of asymptomatic infection leads to reduced transmission

The authors disclosed multiple plausible biases that led them to be unable to draw a conclusion on whether vaccination improved asymptomatic transmssion reduction. This is done to prevent people like you from cherry-picking studies, and enforcing inane vaccination policies on health care workers.

Delta is actually too new to have many long-term peer-reviewed studies about vaccines and transmissibility. But there is plenty of research to show that vaccines do reduce the transmissibility of Covid in general. Here is a discussion of the topic from Nature that was published recently: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02054-z

COVID vaccines slash viral spread – but Delta is an unknown

Studies show that vaccines reduce the spread of SARS-CoV-2 by more than 80%, but the Delta variant is creating fresh uncertainty.

Many vaccines have been shown to provide strong protection against COVID-19. Now, growing evidence finds that they also substantially reduce the risk of passing on the virus SARS-CoV-2 — crucial information for governments making decisions about how best to control the pandemic.

However, the studies were done before the highly transmissible Delta variant became prevalent — and scientists say it might be more easily spread by vaccinated people than are earlier variants.

Two studies1,2 from Israel, posted as preprints on 16 July, find that two doses of the vaccine made by pharmaceutical company Pfizer, based in New York City, and biotechnology company BioNTech, based in Mainz, Germany, are 81% effective at preventing SARS-CoV-2 infections. And vaccinated people who do get infected are up to 78% less likely to spread the virus to household members than are unvaccinated people. Overall, this adds up to very high protection against transmission, say researchers.

The studies reflect population-level trends, say researchers. “It’s good news,” says Natalie Dean, a biostatistician at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. “But it’s not quite good enough,” she notes, because it means that vaccinated people can still occasionally spread the infection.

And the highly transmissible Delta variant is a major source of uncertainty. The Israeli studies and others are based on the circulation of earlier variants, in particular Alpha, but research suggests that vaccines offer slightly reduced protection against Delta.

As for Israel. Scientists and data analysists are now considering that what is happening with Israeli data may be an example of something called "Simpsons Paradox" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox which happens when data in separate groups shows one strong tendency but disappears or reverses when the groups are combined. In this case in Israel, the unvaccinated population tilts strongly young and healthy while the older population is both more vaccinated and accounts for the bulk of severe covid cases. When data are not segregated by age you can get contradictory results from what age-segregated data show.

Here is a recent discussion by a Biostatistician and biomedical researcher on Simpson's paradox and how it may be confounding analysis of Israeli Covid data: https://www.covid-datascience.com/post/ ... vaccinated

In any event. You do whatever you want. We are obviously never going to agree. I'll leave others to decide whether being vaccinated or unvaccinated better reduces your risk of contracting Covid and spreading it on to others.

There's a lot to unpack about that analysis. I don't really have time to go through all of them right now, but A few obvious things:

If Simpson's paradox is at all in play here, it means that the two populations are that different, a common vaccination policy would be absurd.
An analysis will always be skewed towards which population is higher. If you reverse the analysis in a case like India's, you will get the opposite result.

Looking at overall case rates is more important than anything, and make this analysis basically null.

Here's the simple fact. Israel has a very high rate of vaccination in > 12 y/o. Despite that high rate of vaccination, they are experiencing case numbers rivaling what they experienced during the initial outbreak of COVID, because vaccines were available. the NYT article goes into detail about how their own experts are now questioning their vaccination strategy.

But young healthy people who work in health care still need to get the vaccine right? Your vacillation between fervor for vaccinating health care worker against will, and then providing milquetoast explanations like Simpson's paradox indicates to me that vaccination has become more a religion for you, than something based in data.

I want to be done with this pandemic. I'm sick of it and what it has done to our lives. Like every single other pandemic in history I think the fastest way to be done with it is high or universal vaccine rates combined with other longstanding public health measures to reduce the spread like mask wearing when in close indoor contact with others that can't be avoided. That is how we beat smallpox, polio, tetanus, rubella, measles, whooping cough, diphtheria, and many others once deadly diseases.

What is your alternative plan for bringing the pandemic to an end? Do you have one? Or do you believe that 650,000 deaths and hospitals overflowing with patients is just "fake news"

[nett]

I want to be done with this pandemic. I'm sick of it and what it has done to our lives. Like every single other pandemic in history I think the fastest way to be done with it is high or universal vaccine rates combined with other longstanding public health measures to reduce the spread like mask wearing when in close indoor contact with others that can't be avoided.

How do you make people wear them properly? There are plenty of data driven mask efficacy studies. They make no difference at all

Israel did all those things, they're experiencing a wave of hospitalizations.

What is your alternative plan for bringing the pandemic to an end? Do you have one? Or do you believe that 650,000 deaths and hospitals overflowing with patients is just "fake news"

It's not fake news, but there might not be a `solution`. When you have an aging, unhealthy population, it catches up with you eventually. We have been spending an increasingly large amount of our GDP keeping very unhealthy people alive for my entire lifetime. The crisis has been there all along, we've just been able to ignore it up until now.

I certainly don't think it makes sense to continue with what we've done so far. The toll taken on younger people is too much. We're literally mortgaging our next few generations' mental and physical well being, so that unhealthy baby boomers don't have to feel left out while they quarantine, or wear a mask, or w/e they think they need to do to not get sick and die.

[mike]

More importantly, death counts are faltering instead of climbing sharply as with prior waves of the virus. The big rise in hospitalizations during this latest surge without an similar rise in deaths points to better therapies as well as perhaps less severe cases.

Is that really true though? We aren't really experiencing one consistent pandemic wave in this country. We are experiencing many multiple regional waves that are cresting and receding in different regions of the country independently. What do the death rates look like when we zoom into the locations where the pandemic is currently cresting? This is the data that I see as of today for Florida and Louisiana, two of the current epicenters. It looks like both deaths and hospitalizations are escalating as fast as in previous waves.

Rather than faltering, Florida's deaths in the past several days are far-outstripping the 7-day average which means they are actually accelerating exponentially rather than faltering. Look at the grey bars labeled "deaths" not the dark line which is the running 7-day average. Florida deaths as of today are higher than at any previous point in the pandemic going all the way back to March 2020. And Louisiana's death numbers are fast approaching their two previous peaks.

You wrote this just three days ago. It is interesting to see how quickly things have changed in Florida in terms of deaths. Look how they have nose-dived.



Cases are still hanging out at record highs although they look to have peaked.

[Ken]

This is what the NYT portal says is happening in Florida as of this moment



They also report data anomalies in recent days. To find out what they are talking about I flipped over to some Florida-based news sources like the Miami Herald and learned that the state changed the way it reports data in early August which is retrospectively changing numbers. https://www.miamiherald.com/news/corona ... 90064.html.

Here is what the Florida Sun Sentinel says about this change and how it has manifested itself in recent reports.



In other words, what they are saying is this change in how deaths are reported will ALWAYS show a downward tilting trend at the end of any graph because the data from last few days of reporting is always going to be incomplete. And then will eventually get added into the totals down the road when the numbers affect the older parts of the graph and not the current part.

Put another way, the drop in deaths at the tail end of the graph represents incomplete data not an actual drop in the deaths. Whether this is intentional or not is anyone's guess.

[nett]

I wondered about that. Because I couldn't confirm Mike's numbers anywhere else.

[Ken]

I want to be done with this pandemic. I'm sick of it and what it has done to our lives. Like every single other pandemic in history I think the fastest way to be done with it is high or universal vaccine rates combined with other longstanding public health measures to reduce the spread like mask wearing when in close indoor contact with others that can't be avoided.

How do you make people wear them properly? There are plenty of data driven mask efficacy studies. They make no difference at all

Israel did all those things, they're experiencing a wave of hospitalizations.

What is your alternative plan for bringing the pandemic to an end? Do you have one? Or do you believe that 650,000 deaths and hospitals overflowing with patients is just "fake news"

It's not fake news, but there might not be a `solution`. When you have an aging, unhealthy population, it catches up with you eventually. We have been spending an increasingly large amount of our GDP keeping very unhealthy people alive for my entire lifetime. The crisis has been there all along, we've just been able to ignore it up until now.

I certainly don't think it makes sense to continue with what we've done so far. The toll taken on younger people is too much. We're literally mortgaging our next few generations' mental and physical well being, so that unhealthy baby boomers don't have to feel left out while they quarantine, or wear a mask, or w/e they think they need to do to not get sick and die.

So you don't have a solution then? Just shrug and let the disease run its course?

Honestly that would be my solution too if we could just let sick people get sick and it didn't affect anyone else. But the waves of hospitalizations do effect everyone else. Right now in the southern states where hospitals are at or above capacity, people with non-Covid related medical issues are being medivaced long distances, often far out of state to find treatment. What does that mean? Aside from the inconvenience of being shipped to a hospital 1000 miles away they are being hit with expensive medivac bills and find that the new hospital that they are landing in is out-of-network for their insurer which means whatever treatment they are getting is going to cost a LOT LOT more. All because their local hospital is currently flooded by unvaccinated Covid patients. And we are asking medical professionals to spend tremendous amounts of time, effort, and risk to care for people with a preventable disease that they refused to prevent.

How many staff do you think would be left working in Covid wards if we gave all medical staff the option to not treat or work with unvaccinated patients? The same "personal choice" that the unvaccinated are touting for themselves?

[mike]

In other words, what they are saying is this change in how deaths are reported will ALWAYS show a downward tilting trend at the end of any graph because the data from last few days of reporting is always going to be incomplete. And then will eventually get added into the totals down the road when the numbers affect the older parts of the graph and not the current part.

Put another way, the drop in deaths at the tail end of the graph represents incomplete data not an actual drop in the deaths. Whether this is intentional or not is anyone's guess.

OK, that makes sense. In other words it's like the CDC's excess deaths charts, which become more accurate as time goes on. I haven't really paid much attention to any one state's charts other than watching Florida the last week or so.

[Josh]

So you don't have a solution then? Just shrug and let the disease run its course?

Do things like the did in Holmes County and you'll have the same results they did. The pandemic is basically over. The hospital isn't full - you can go get your necessary procedure done.

Honestly that would be my solution too if we could just let sick people get sick and it didn't affect anyone else. But the waves of hospitalizations do effect everyone else. Right now in the southern states where hospitals are at or above capacity, people with non-Covid related medical issues are being medivaced long distances, often far out of state to find treatment. What does that mean? Aside from the inconvenience of being shipped to a hospital 1000 miles away they are being hit with expensive medivac bills and find that the new hospital that they are landing in is out-of-network for their insurer which means whatever treatment they are getting is going to cost a LOT LOT more. All because their local hospital is currently flooded by unvaccinated Covid patients. And we are asking medical professionals to spend tremendous amounts of time, effort, and risk to care for people with a preventable disease that they refused to prevent.

How many staff do you think would be left working in Covid wards if we gave all medical staff the option to not treat or work with unvaccinated patients? The same "personal choice" that the unvaccinated are touting for themselves?

Vaccination isn't doing anything to stop what you described above.

Ultimately, COVID may just plain be victorious over modern, urban civilisation with its thirst for high speed travel, high population density and overcrowding, and the very unhealthy, obese, diabetic nature of modern Western life. There just might not be any cure for this.

Some people are demanding endless lockdowns and an almost complete loss of civil liberties in exchange for trying to avoid COVID. I suggest that such people migrate to Australia or New Zealand.

The rest of us are ready to get on with our lives, and accept COVID just as our ancestors accepted the common cold and influenza. Less virulent strains will mutate and evolve. People will adapt and their immune systems will grow stronger and healthier if they do. The weak and those who don't care of their health will, unfortunately, die off. The old will die off. This has been the nature of living in a fallen, sinful world ever since Adam & Eve had to mourn the first death of one of their children.

But if you want live to get back to normal.. embrace conservative Anabaptism and move to Holmes County.

[Robert]

So you don't have a solution then? Just shrug and let the disease run its course?

I say we treat it like every other aerosolized virus. Take multivitamins with zinc daily. Use early treatment when you get sick. HCQ and Ivermectin both work. Treat it early and reduce the severity. The patient then gets immunity and returns to a healthy life for 99.97% of patients.

Why will that not work?