Coronavirus

[renim]

FWIW, just quickly looking at Aus stats

the fatalities are pretty low, up to 59year age, being 1 or less per gender per decade which make the stats quite non significant.
while this is not the IFR, its going to be pretty close.

 

[dhanson865]

France and Spain have seriously locked this down, apparently no new cases or deaths to speak of.

 

[SMAlset]

The San Jose Mercury News had this summary of Covid cases in the Bay Area counties.

Coronavirus: June 3 daily COVID-19 stats around Bay Area

 

[davepsilon]

When @Papafox posted the letter from scientists and doctors questioning the Lancet HCQ study, it was immediately dismissed by this thread.

Then, as is typical whenever information is posted that challenges the groupthink here, the personal attacks started, including questioning his intelligence repeatedly.

There has been a ton of interesting information on covid-19 that has come out in the past few weeks that isn't finding its way into this thread because anyone who posts information that disturbs the echo chamber is personally attacked.

I haven't seen anything this bad in the TMC investor forum, ever.

This is (supposedly) an investor thread. Good investors welcome information, especially information that challenges their beliefs. This thread is just the opposite.

No wonder the consensus view here was to short the market at the bottom, and miss out on 80-100+% gains in TSLA in the past couple months. Have to say I'm glad I did my own research and bought heavily in the low 500s while the doom and gloom squad here was recommending shorting the bottom.

View attachment 547566

If those are long term positions TSLA is likely to pay off. Short term I wouldn’t count your chickens before they hatch. I thought the squeeze on Tesla shorts last winter was epic but the fed appears to have engineered an everything squeeze of epic proportions. ... Or the most awe inspiring v-shaped asset recovery in the history of money. I don’t dare bet much against them. They have the whole world convinced they will succeed. And that might just work :O

 

[madodel]

The C.D.C. Waited ‘Its Entire Existence for This Moment.’ What Went Wrong?
New York Times - The technology was old, the data poor, the bureaucracy slow, the guidance confusing, the administration not in agreement. The coronavirus shook the world’s premier health agency, creating a loss of confidence and hampering the U.S. response to the crisis.

 

[dfwatt]

FWIW, just quickly looking at Aus stats
View attachment 547840
the fatalities are pretty low, up to 59year age, being 1 or less per gender per decade which make the stats quite non significant.
while this is not the IFR, its going to be pretty close.

View attachment 547842

Okay quit showing off!

 

[dfwatt]

The C.D.C. Waited ‘Its Entire Existence for This Moment.’ What Went Wrong?
New York Times - The technology was old, the data poor, the bureaucracy slow, the guidance confusing, the administration not in agreement. The coronavirus shook the world’s premier health agency, creating a loss of confidence and hampering the U.S. response to the crisis.

For reasons that remain opaque to me they simply forgot about the most basic epidemiologic principle in these kinds of rapidly spreading viral infections, which is testing and the ability to rapidly identify cases at scale. Everything is hinged to that capacity. They risked everything to develop some kind of gold standard test with three reagents and the logic behind that other than someone's grandiosity absolutely escapes me when there were already established and vetted tests that would have filled that Gap. In any case that kind of bad judgment smacks of character disorder at the top of the food chain.

PS and while I admire the New York Times piece and recommend that others read it there are times when I think it misses the forest for the trees. The series of mistakes and gaffs and missteps that it catalogs all fit fractal-like into a single and familiar pattern. It's the kind of disorganization that you see in cultures that overvalue individualism and competition over cooperation and community. This was a crisis that required an integrated and well-organized set of responses that spanned regions, and what we got was fragmentation and everybody in it so to speak for themselves. That's not the way to organize Public Health by definition. And while Trump plays a large role in exacerbating that kind of problem he certainly didn't start it. We need a public health system that actually is integrated across States and where communication is rapid modern efficient and cogent. And I would still argue that the failure of diagnostic testing at scale was pivotal and set the stage for much of what was to follow. We have been Flying Blind through most of this epidemic. The fact that we've now tested just under 6% of the population 5 months into this rolling disaster is simply and undeniably pathetic.

 

[AlanSubie4Life]

France and Spain have seriously locked this down, apparently no new cases or deaths to speak of.

View attachment 547844
View attachment 547845

Spain changed their reporting “system” a few days ago and the new method results in approximately zero deaths per day being reported.

Apparently, Spain doesn’t include deaths in their daily count unless they happened the day before they were reported. Literally the day before. If they aren’t reported on a given day, they aren’t reported the next day either (because they don’t satisfy the condition of having happened the day before they are reported). It is very odd.

"Only the cases in which the date of death is the day before the time of writing this report are added to the total on a daily basis"

Due to reporting lags, this system results in approximately zero deaths per day being reported.

Allegedly they will correct the counts once a week, but they have not got to that point yet.

Here’s a thread explaining the “system.”

https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1268450736398098433?s=21

Strange.

That is not to say they have not had success - they have. But it’s a bit misleading at the moment.

 

[AlanSubie4Life]

Old Downtown Las Vegas has reopened (distinct from the Strip, which is not in Las Vegas (it is in Paradise)).

https://twitter.com/mickakers/status/1268439955212079104?s=21

There are a lot of interesting tweets in his feed talking about the “measures” they are taking. They appear to be mostly performative to me. I’d like to point out that the advantage of effectively eliminating the virus prior to reopening is that you don’t have to worry much about ineffectual countermeasures. Oh well.

I guess we’ll see how this goes!

Here is an accompanying blog (I guess The Strip is reopening today):

Las Vegas casinos reopen after 78-day coronavirus closure — BLOG

I’m sure this will have no effect on California or Fremont or the Gigafactory.

Thank God what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.

 

[AlanSubie4Life]

The Lancet HCQ paper has been retracted, FWIW. So, need to continue to wait on RCTs of HCQ with zinc, etc.

The main contribution of this study was that it suggested an increase in mortality with HCQ. So that is no longer applicable/supported. In general the retracted study agreed with many other studies showing limited/no effectiveness of HCQ, and an increase in arrhythmias. But of course we need more data with proper, sizeable RCTs, with a lot of study participants reaching primary endpoints.

 

[dhanson865]

reddit thread on Study: Hydroxychloroquine doesn't prevent Covid-19 infection if exposed

actual study link: https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMoa2016638

has so many people posting the same old questions (I thought HCQ did this, not that, and vice versa). Links referenced in thread other than the title link:

Surgisphere: governments and WHO changed Covid-19 policy based on suspect data from tiny US company | Medical research | The Guardian

ICMR writes to WHO disagreeing with HCQ assessment, officials say international trial dosage four times higher than India (newindianexpress)

Hydroxychloroquine For Avoiding Infection? (sciencemag.org)

Six weeks of HCQ prophylaxis reduces likelihood of Covid-19 infection by 80% among symptomatic health care workers (Indian Journal of Medicine)

In vitro inhibition of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus by chloroquine (NCBI)

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2016638

“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” Nissen said. “Poor quality data does not help it only confuses the world. That’s exactly where we find ourselves, in a state of confusion.”

(Steven Nissen, a cardiologist and veteran clinical trialist at the Cleveland Clinic )

Keep in mind the WHO has resumed their evaluation since the Lancet and NEJM articles that halted their testing are now under review for questionable science.

These days, anything we think we know is worth a second look. Don't base your conclusions on how many people trumpet the results, because the Lancet article was be-all, end-all at one point. Now look where we are.

personally I don't care about any of these links, debunk them, tout them, ignore them as you like.

 

[bkp_duke]

This post is spot on.

This thread was hijacked by the liberal elitist many months ago.

You are not getting balanced information here.

The real physicians don't participate here.

Just posers.

This thread must be removed from sticky.

I've never voted for a democrat in my life, so this post better not be directed at me, sir.

 

[bkp_duke]

The Lancet HCQ paper has been retracted, FWIW. So, need to continue to wait on RCTs of HCQ with zinc, etc.

The main contribution of this study was that it suggested an increase in mortality with HCQ. So that is no longer applicable/supported. In general the retracted study agreed with many other studies showing limited/no effectiveness of HCQ, and an increase in arrhythmias. But of course we need more data with proper, sizeable RCTs, with a lot of study participants reaching primary endpoints.

View attachment 548001

So, reading that retraction notice . . . they are forced to retract it not necessarily because the data is wrong . . . but because the 3rd party that controls the database is refusing to give it over to them.

Am I reading that right? (2nd paragraph)

 

[AlanSubie4Life]

So, reading that retraction notice . . . they are forced to retract it not necessarily because the data is wrong . . . but because the 3rd party that controls the database is refusing to give it over to them.

Am I reading that right? (2nd paragraph)

Yes, that's correct. But there seem to be a lot of questions around the legitimacy of Surgisphere. I guess we'll see how it shakes out - whether real data is ever provided...

Anyway, we need to just have more RCTs at this point to put any remaining questions to rest. With actual data made available... I've made my predictions.

 

[bkp_duke]

Yes, that's correct. But there seem to be a lot of questions around the legitimacy of Surgisphere.

Anyway, we need to just have more RCTs at this point to put any remaining questions to rest. With actual data made available... I've made my predictions.

Concur, more data.

How the hell did a closed datasource like this ever make it past peer review?

 

[AlanSubie4Life]

How the hell did a closed datasource like this ever make it past peer review?

There seems to be a general consensus that this was a failure of the peer review and journal publishing process. Not the first time though.

Just because something is peer-reviewed doesn't make it correct, of course.

Can probably just follow the advice of the former directory of the CDC - seems like a reasonable "take:"

https://twitter.com/DrTomFrieden/status/1268628125530959874?s=20

 

[dhanson865]

newsweek.com/28-days-later-planet-apes-movie-monkeys-escape-covid-19-samples-1507402

The monkeys attacked a lab assistant before escaping with COVID-19 blood test samples in Dehli, India, as reported by the Times of India. One monkey was spotted sitting in a tree chewing on the sample collection kit, as locals said they feared the further spread of infection.


edit: uggh newsweek.com does some nasty autosubscribe notifications so don't follow the link unless you have full control of your web browser to clear that junk.

Monkeys snatch COVID-19 blood samples after attacking lab worker in India

 

[SVMike]

We need a public health system that actually is integrated across States and where communication is rapid modern efficient and cogent.

Do you mean to say that the CDC does not have rapid and modern communications?
I guess real time voice is well over 100 years old. But I think they have email and video conferencing.

Maybe you mean this

 

[dfwatt]

This post is spot on.
This thread was hijacked by the liberal elitist many months ago.
You are not getting balanced information here.
The real physicians don't participate here.
Just posers.
This thread must be removed from sticky.

This post might be the operational definition of Clueless in relationship to any scientific subject. You're cheering an announcement as though it's somehow validates a hard right position. Obviously, you don't know anything about the study or why the paper was retracted you're just trying to maintain a polarized and tribal environment here, my guess is simply because that's what you do everywhere you go. Sorry, Mission not accomplished.

There are multiple senior clinicians on this thread some of whom come from different political perspectives than I do but we have a strong commitment to the science and we agree for the most part about a wide range of issues, and even when we disagree I think at this point there's a healthy and large mutual respect. And that's the next point around which you seem deeply misguided and totally in the dark.

Science is not a place where an idea is judged to be Democratic or Republican, just about whether it has weight of evidence. Do you regard the theory of electromagnetism as Democratic or Republican? The absurdity of the question underlines the absurdity of your position in relationship to the scientific debate and inquiry into COVID19.

Trump and his ilk have succeeded in polarizing and politicizing nearly everything. There is of course some of that on this forum in terms of various tribal camps, but among the senior contributors to this thread, it's actually data that speaks and bull**** that walks. Your post is full of the latter and has nothing of the former. So take a walk please.

 

[Causalien]

On this thread, asymptomatic transmission was discussed before I joined it. Early example from January 31:

Wasn't it the Governor of Georgia who was amazed that people could show no symptoms and be contagious? That was in April, by which time pretty much everyone who wasn't in complete denial like said Governor knew that people could have COVID-19 and have few or no symptoms.

To add some history to this. Asymptomatic transmission were confirmed earlier in China (my source) around Jan 6th. The rumor of a bad pneumonia spreading through air in Wuhan started around end of October. Being cautious, I only really considered asymptomatic transmission as confirmed when the more credible German cases were published.