The Coronavirus Thread

That foam is great for front damping to tone down treble though

 

What is happening during this pandemic is a proof that the major media organizations degenerated to the point when their business model actually prevents them from providing any objective, reliable information to the public.
The only sensible information we can find is coming from the non-media organizations using Internet to communicate directly to the public, like for example Johns Hopkins Hospital etc...
In the sea of bullshit, sensational "news", I think it is important to publicize the studies that actually use existing data, even if the data from certain sources are suspect. Here is the very comprehensive study from The Lancet:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(20)30243-7/fulltext#%20

 

How about government information, then? UK govt admitted, a few days ago, that death numbers had not included those who died at home.

This is where the media I read gets its information from. However my reading is very limited.

The media has about us much to go on as we do. That some, if not all, of it is presented with only partial knowledge and some bias goes without saying. Like... erm... us guys on the the internet!

 

Preposterous.

I am the very embodiment of impartiality and objectivity, this is a proven scientific fact.

 

Except for Taverius.

 

WSJ is alright, I just avoid the Opinions section. However, I could never get a good price on their subscription. I think it is a little high for me personally. And yes I agree on Al-J not sucking too hard.

 

Some very exciting news out of California. I just hope this can get through safety testing and into compassionate use ASAP:

 

Asymptomatic transmission: of 157 cases examined in Singapore, >6% were likely caught from people not yet showing symptoms:

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6914e1.htm

And of 468 cases examined from China outside Hubei, >12% developed symptoms before the likely infector did:

https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/6/20-0357_article

Conclusion: keep up the physical distancing.

 

Sounds too good to be true, so I will remain extremely sceptical. I’m also paranoid of the “I Am Legend” effect where the cure mutates and kills everyone!

Only half joking really. However what this guy is describing does sound incredible if it’s proven to work and be safe.

 

WTF, sorry that makes no sense. Garbage in, garbage out, and just adds to the confusion.

 

It's a bit more complex than that. No one has 100% reliable data, there are just too many variables, and statistical models are not to give us exact predictions. Any modeling technique will use some preprocessing of the data, attaching weighted significance to different segments of data. This is not a cookie cutter, modern statistical modeling is more sophisticated than that. There were examples when using the same data and different data preprocessing, based on partially subjective criteria, led to significantly different results, some confirmed, some other ,as you said, turned to be garbage.

 

While I agree somewhat with that - my high school comp-sci teacher first introduced me to the phrase GIGO long ago - it is not an absolute, otherwise without perfect data we would not bother studying at all. Key is accounting for data whose reliability is questionable and weighting it accordingly. We are talking about a domain that has pretty wide error bars anyway. Numbers from China for instance regarding numbers of cases/deaths should be considered poor data and weighted accordingly. Numbers from China on human trials for various treatments might actually be more statistically valuable. The same deal with modelling. A proper regime will have many models, most of which will be various degrees of wrong but that does not make them useless, because, as that same high school teacher explained years ago, there are lessons to be learned from getting the wrong answer as well.

Three truisms stacked together - garbage in, garbage out, but don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good, and try to learn from your mistakes.

 

Monoclonal antibodies are actually a proven and "old" methodology, they have just taken a long time to develop historically. The key breakthrough here was not reinventing the wheel, but using the SARS antibodies already developed, and starting with those. Without their computational immunology engine to "rejigger" those antibodies to work on SARS-CoV2 I don't think this would have gone anywhere.

The good news is that monoclonal antibody treatments are widely used today throughout the world, from Alzheimer's to Cancers of all sorts and even Ebola. I am a skeptic, but this really does sound promising.

 

I'm liking a lot of the positive news stories like this instead of the regular doom & gloom.

 

A precursor to this that has been used for many decades, back even to the dawn of modern medicine is the use of convalescent plasma. I think it may have been mentioned in this thread before. Basically taking blood from people who have recovered from a disease, filtering out the useful antibodies that helped them fight the disease, and transfusing it into others. This is still currently used as a treatment for Ebola as well and is being tested against COVID-19.

Being able to model and build these antibodies in a lab takes it to a whole new level, and really is the brave new world in our fight against viruses. What is interesting is that the researcher in your video originally developed his antibodies for use against SARS-1. The world was lucky that time in that virus, while being much more lethal, was also much less contagious than this new COV strain. Good to see there may still be positive results from lessons learned when we dodged that bullet, and that the time since has not been completely wasted.

 

Glad you don't work in my line of work, because your attitude would cost people their lives, and at the best you would be carted off in an ambulance, but more likely you would be carried off in a casket, from the beating the various trades on site would give you.

 

That almost sounds to me like an argument for holding back until the info is validated. Not everybody is gonna get the follow-up where one piece was tossed out. They may only see the first. Somebody else may only see the correct one and then take in something else drawing on the previous bad info and start making false correlations. There just isn't room or time for gray. If there's not enough there to objectively figure something out, what's left to do but move on with it? I say forget about it until it makes sense.

It's definitely messy, trying to pull data and make sense of it on the fly. It's not usually how we would go about looking for these sorts of answers. I'm not a fan of the constant stream of maybe-good, maybe-not information. It's really draining to sift through after a while. And then, when you're trying to have a conversation with a group of people and everyone has different sets of bad or dubious information... it gets pretty frustrating when a lot of what people put out not only contradicts other things, but neither sides of the contradiction have clear value or meaning. It's good to consider those things, but at some point it becomes sort of unhealthy to continually delve into that endeavor. I can see the effect it has on people all of the time. It's hard when you feel like there are important decisions to make and things to grasp, but all you get all day long from your sources are bits of data with unclear implications, wildly varying estimates, and speculation that may piece it together, but still can't be acted on.

As far as I'm concerned, my only job right now is to not catch it or spread it by keeping up with prevention measures and keeping up with what is happening locally. I am seriously beyond trying to grab the right bits of random information whizzing by at this point. It never ends.

Past that, the narratives go up and down like sandcastles. I'd rather have a smaller amount of good info than a bunch of stuff that may or may not mean anything, if I'm trying to take a realistic account of things. Unreliable narrators are fun in stories. Not as much when there are things on the line. That's not a game I want to play. All that the back-and-forth really does for people is add to the stress. It becomes like chasing the dragon, trying to figure out what's going on with little chance of doing so, for now. You never quite get there, so you keep trying to process it, while your life is severely limited and you have more time than you're used to. I think you have to be careful of how much of that you subject yourself to. After a certain point, watching/reading all of the news and reports hurts more than it helps.

I've been trying to keep myself sort of sequestered off from the chatter lately and I have to say, things are a lot better for me, heh. Not really an 'ignorance is bliss' thing. It's more like waiting until the end of the week to binge-watch a running show, instead of tormenting yourself by watching each episode as it comes out. I get my basic update for the day and then ignore the rest for 3-4 days at a time. If I want conflicting information on the situation, I can just listen to someone talk about it for a while. Dunno what that's really doing for me, though!

Sometimes it just gets in your head and has you spinning like a top. It's easier to just accept that there is no figuring this out right now, as far as any normal person out there is concerned. The data isn't going to be on point for a while... I don't see a point in trying to absorb all of it as it comes in when a bunch is gonna be tossed out or simply changed by the end of the week. I don't feel like watching it all whizz back and forth is a good use of energy. The last thing anyone needs right now is more confusion. People latch onto every new bit of info like it's a breakthrough... and then the next day it gets shot out of the sky. I don't see how that really helps anything.

 

Please remember the current "lock everything" approach is mostly based on the mathematical model developed by Imperial College using a simple virus spread formula, with almost no input in terms of data.

Neither is good option, but I fail to understand why the places that are best prepared to make a sensible determination should stop trying, and stop looking at data until they are perfect. If you look at the credentials in the Lancet article those are not wishful thinking amateurs, or what would be the worst, journalists.

Now we hope we can just wait it out, but I doubt it, that's it.
At some point we may face the situation when locking down the entire countries leads to a bigger catastrophe than the spread of the virus. The most difficult decisions will have to be made, and will be made either by politicians or individual people, as always, with limited information.

EDIT:

Yesterday Canadian government refused to release to the public the assessment, based on statistical models, that are being used to make the decisions regarding response to CV. There is a big discussion in Canadian press about it. Do we really prefer not to know until it is 100% accurate? ​