outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

Yeah my Mom is genuinely spooked now that it has hit her general area. She's evolved from a denier, to a "it's other-people's-problem", to now she's wearing a mask/curbside pickup of groceries, sundries & provisions, etc. She's in a bit more of a town than where my cousin lives but still fairly rural compared to most of us who post here.

I harbor no ill-will towards my cousin, I legitimately hope he recovers but the only interaction I've had with him in the last few years is this comment on my daughter's IG account.

The story shouldn't have been framed as rural vs. populated but "I did everything right and then slipped up in this one way the state is all but encouraging us to do."

A friend's daughter (age 14) was thought to have "mono" back in March and was never tested for COVID. A short time later she had an onset of Type 1 diabetes and now the doctors think she had COVID and it triggered a genetic marker. Not sure if I'm relaying this medical information correctly but as far as I can tell that is the story.

milo otm, the way so many states have all but encouraged the spread of the virus in the name of keeping capital moving because the federal response to relief has been so miserable and catastrophic is really an enormous issue.

yes but the state paying people is equivalent to those souls being harvested by satan, unfortunately :(

the thing is if you did pay everybody to stay home, they'd fuckin do it, which is why the government can't possibly do it, because it makes too much sense. there'd still be people violating stay at home orders, obviously, but people wouldn't need distractions so much if they weren't worried about how they could survive the next 25 years after their lives are ruined by this pandemic.

Bootstraps ideology is among the most painful and pain-inflicting myths promulgated in this rotten country.

neanderthal and table otm, individualism is the real virus. watching all of this has really made me hate this country and its culture in a way i don't think i'll ever be able to shake.

like i'm fantasizing about what it might be like to live in a country that acknowledges and values collective existence and i hope some day i'll be able to experience that, even if it's just for an extended visit. i doubt i'll ever be able to permanently break free of this place considering my financial debts (which are very much tied to its dysfunctional systems in the first place, and not having the wherewithal to navigate them correctly).

I've seen people post GoFundMes and write "i wouldn't normally do this because I think GoFundMes are tacky..." and it's like, no no no, you have it backwards. It's not pathetic or weak to ask for help - the reason nobody should be doing GoFundMes for life expenses is because *they shouldn't fucking have to*.

the other thing is, many people wind up borrowing money from well-meaning friends and family in lieu of doing a GoFundMe, and then whose well-meaning friends and family wind up overdoing it and then they need help years later.

pretty much nobody should have to work 40 hours anymore, we barely need the human output due to years of automation. let people live in peace with a livable wage. ban eat billionaires.

hear hear.

More good news?

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/11/absolutely-remarkable-no-one-who-got-modernas-vaccine-trial-developed-severe-covid-19

i am SUPER not a statistician but:

30 out of 185 total cases in the placebo group developed severe symptoms. about 1 out of 6.

nobody out of 11 total cases in the vaccinated group developed severe symptoms. to match the placebo group it would have needed to be 2 out of 11.

feels like..... very small sample size going on here

The statisticianly way of looking at this is: Assume there is no difference between groups, and check how unlikely the observed outcome is. We have 196 cases, 30 of them severe.

So: Fill a sack with 196 balls, of which 185 are marked "placebo" and 11 are marked "vaccine". When we draw 30 balls out of the sack, what is the probability that zero have "vaccine" on them? This can be taken to mean: what is the probability of the outcome being 0 in a binomial distribution with 30 trials and probability 11/196.

The answer turns out to be just below 18%. Low enough to be mildly encouraging, not low enough to make the classical statistician give up his baseline assumption that the probability is the same in both groups. It is certainly not "absolutely remarkable", unless I'm missing something important here.

And to be entirely clear re Tracer's hunch: yes, this is about small sample sizes. If the entire study was, say, four times as big, and we had the numbers 120 out of 740 in placebo group severe, 0 out of 44 in vaccine group severe, the corresponding probability would be less than one in a thousand (rather more than one in six), and pretty much a clear-cut case.

parenthesis should be: "rather than more than one in six".

Tracer’s been away from spring training stats for a while

lol. thank you anatol for bringing the knowledge!!

i miss brunch so fuckin bad

Yes I made that point when they (or the other good one) first reported. There is very little evidence for the claim that “if you’ve been vaccinated and get covid then your chances of getting a bad case are reduced”. Certainly not evidence at the level to convince the the FDA etc. Obviously the fact that it reduces the chance you get it in the first place is very good, but this stuff seems like statistical illiteracy.

What is the sample size at which you would begin to find such a claim promising?

3.5 million

As my second post in a row up there says, it wouldn't have to be that much bigger to be pretty convincing.

What is the sample size at which you would begin to find such a claim promising?

― velcro-magnon (Ye Mad Puffin), Tuesday, December 1, 2020 11:07 AM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

it's already promising. but to make the claim convincing it would need to be higher. for a claim related to a vaccine (i.e. provides immunity) you need several tens of incidencs in the control group (50-100 typically, assuming a trial of many tens of thousands). assuming the vaccinated group sample of incidences is very small (0-10) that translates to sufficiently high confidence (~95%) that you're not looking at a fluke and there really is a difference between the control and treatment.

the standards are particularly high for vaccines because you're going to give them to healthy people, which implies that you need to be more certain the benefits exist because "first do no harm".

if the claim was "this is a treatment you can give to people who already have covid" (which it is not, except in the press, as far as i can tell) then 0/44 vs 11/740 (with no serious side effects) would certainly be enough to expand/continue the trial. but not enough to approve it as a treatment.

think of it like a poll. you ask 800 people who they are going to vote for. 740 say AOC and 44 say kanye. suppose 11 AOC supporters have green eyes and 0 kanye supporters do. you probably feel that we don't have enough information to say with any confidence that AOC's supporters are more likely to have green eyes than kanye. the kanye sample is too small .Same deal here.

(To put back of the envelope numbers on that, the uncertainty is roughly sqrt(sample size), so AOC's green eyed people are roughly 11+/-sqrt(740), which is anywhere from 0 to 40, i.e. 0% to 5%. kanye's are anywhere from 0 to sqrt(6), which is 0% to 15%. the range (the "confidence interval") 0-5% overlaps with 0-15%, which means you can't say anything with confidence. it's more likely than not that AOC's supporters are more green-eyed than kanye's, but it's certainly not 95% certain.)

"kanye's are anywhere from 0 to sqrt(44)" sorry.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/dec/02/pfizer-biontech-covid-vaccine-wins-licence-for-use-in-the-uk

The UK has become the first western country to license a vaccine against Covid, opening the way for mass immunisation with the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine to begin in those most at risk.

The vaccine has been authorised for emergency use by the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Authority (MHRA), ahead of decisions by the US and Europe. The MHRA was given power to approve the vaccine by the government under special regulations before 1 January, when it will become fully responsible for medicines authorisation in the UK after Brexit.

The first doses of the vaccine will arrive in the coming days, said the company. The UK has bought 40m doses of the vaccine, which has been shown to have 95% efficacy in its final trials.

Will be interesting when half the country has been vaccinated and the other half hasn't.

Even that should cut transmission a fair chunk, tbh? I thought they’d bought the Oxford one too, hope they bought a lot of refrigeration units for the Pfizer doses.

It’s only being given in hospitals in the UK initially for that reason (and yes if 50% of people are immune via vaccination that approaches what’s needed to eliminate community transmission, ie not quite herd immunity but outbreaks should be local and R much less than 1 so they die out pretty quickly).

I haven’t actually seen estimates of the herd immunity threshold for this one though so I’m kind of guessing. It’s higher than 50% (90% or something) for measles but measles is insanely contagious. No way is this one that high.

i think i've seen 70% bandied around

An interesting thing happens once you get to lower rates: contact tracing becomes doable/effective again, which can further reduce R. This is assuming you have competent and well funded public health authorities, and I suspect we’re going to find out over the months that this will be relevant that we ... don’t.

People avoiding contact tracing to protect their incomes is a big problem for contact tracing (along with the system been largely broken in places where local authorities aren't able to pick up the slack).

I'm hoping there's enough corresponding protect capitalism at all costs enthusiasm to counteract the growing antivaxx movement to help with the herd numbers.

Excl: Military converting mass vaccine centres
• LONDON Nightingale at ExCel
• EAST Robertson House, Stevenage
• SW Ashton Gate, Bristol
• SE Epsom racecourse, Surrey
• MIDLANDS Leicester racecourse
• NW Manchester Tennis & Football Club
• NE Newcastle Centre for Life

— Lucy Fisher (@LOS_Fisher) December 2, 2020

i can't see the vaccine rollout going any smoother than anything else in the last year, not least because of the temperature requirements and brexit being 4 weeks away.

and then we get into the haves and the havenots situation when there's already division in the government about lockdown. the vaccinated will be calling for opening up making the lives of the non-vaccinated more dangerous.

This will require robust messaging from governments, telling the vaccinated that it doesn't mean they can necessarily do exactly what they want as there'll still be a risk of transmission. So...expect the UK government to profoundly fuck that one up.

'mon the Jags!

(Scottish football reference alert)

You guys think we'll hit 50% adoption fast? I believe in vaccines but am still skeptical on these. Probably won't take it until we've seen a million or so safe cases. Think between (both warranted and unwarranted) skepticism, limited availablity and general public insanity it'll be a while. It'd be nice if we hit that by the end of 2021, but it might never happen.

I can't imagine we come close to 50% with this vaccine, not least because there's a suspicion/likelihood/possibility that this becomes an annual thing with a new vaccine each year, and a new one would then I assume already have to be rolled out mid-2021. As for skepticism, I dunno, I'm pretty confident in its apparent safety/efficacy. If I approached it with too much suspicion I'll inevitably glom on to the exceptions, which is partly what sends anti-vaxxers down that path. Then again, isn't there some hypothesis that the anti-vax movement stems at least in part from the mandatory flu vaccine campaign of 1976 and its own reported lapses in safety/efficacy?

Incidentally, it's sort of been buried beneath the noise, but the public health servants pretty much nailed the timeline back in March, didn't they? Second wave in the fall, vaccine available by mid 2021.

Some of these reported vaccines say they have 90-95% efficacy, but then you read in detail about the number of actual test subjects and the way they came to those numbers is... suspect.

For sure. But I have no idea how they do this stuff. The annual flu vaccine, for example, is different every year, does that mean they have to do a rigorous testing process annually? Must be no, right? Because sometimes the vaccine is less effective than predicted and sometimes more?

the flu vaccine is generally 3 or 4 vaccines, a different one for each different strain that they predict will be 'popular' that year. sometimes they predict wrongly so more people get flu. but that's not because the vaccine wasn't effective, you just didn't get the correct vaccine.

https://www.fda.gov/vaccines-blood-biologics/lot-release/influenza-vaccine-2020-2021-season

"The committee recommended that the quadrivalent formulation of egg-based influenza vaccines for the U.S. 2020-2021 influenza season contain the following:

an A/Guangdong-Maonan/SWL1536/2019 (H1N1) pdm09-like virus;
an A/HongKong/2671/2019 (H3N2)-like virus;
a B/Washington/02/2019- like virus (B/Victoria lineage);
a B/Phuket/3073/2013-like virus (B/Yamagata lineage)."

Do each of those individual vaccines bundled in the quad vaccine get thoroughly tested through rigorous trials for effectiveness each year? That's impressive, but it also seems...Sisyphean.

i can't see the vaccine rollout going any smoother than anything else in the last year,

this really

vaccines for some, miniature Union Jacks for others

We'll have red, white and blue running through our veins.

> Do each of those individual vaccines bundled in the quad vaccine get thoroughly tested through rigorous trials for effectiveness each year? That's impressive, but it also seems...Sisyphean.

dunno. but three of the strains look like they are new (based on the 2019)

how would you test them? deliberately infect people (or try to) with copies of the virus that you've somehow saved? can they test without people?

(she seemed a bit phased when i asked for the leaflet that came with my flu jab last year, but i wanted it for the list of strains. they just seem exotic somehow. i did go for a jab this year (on my birthday) but it was early and they were only doing at-risk people at the time and i never followed up)

ah, https://flucamp.com/

"Take part in a FluCamp study and be compensated for your time!

Viruses affect our immune systems in a variety of ways – some of which we don’t yet understand. Clinical studies are effective in researching how the body behaves when it encounters viruses, such as the common cold; both in healthy people, and those who suffer from conditions like asthma. Having a better understanding allows us to work out more effective and efficient treatments – and eventually even eradicate some of the most common viral illnesses altogether."

from £100 a day, 11-14 days. but you might die. 8)

i know no one wants to hear this, but: when you have 7+ billion people and we all require a cocktail of vaccines every year to preemptively guard against varieties of biological enemies across the world that we may come in to contact with, then we have way too many fucking people on the earth. "gaia theory" is not something i have ever taken seriously at all, but there is something to the idea that the giant thing that we all live on is actively trying to ward us off