One thought I had recently is how up and downvotes on sites like HN must contribute to tunnel vision in debates. I know I have self-censored in the past knowing that something I would say would get downvoted into oblivion, and I've posted stuff that hasn't been very constructive but that I've known would be a crowd pleaser. This surely creates echo chambres resembling the opinions of the loudest in the community. Old vBulletin-style forums before likes and up/downvotes were a thing, where all you could do was quote-reply (and one-word "+1" and "disagree" replies were brutally deleted by zealous moderators), were perhaps in hindsight the closest to optimal we ever reached in the realm of textual online debates. What a sorry state of affairs.
At the same time I started listening to many interviews with Daniel Schmachtenberger. Mindblowing, but also quite abstract. Rebel Wisdom does some work on the meta-level, i.e. how we can become better at sensemaking. Whether it’s around COVID or the next thing. And that for me is really the main takeaway from this pandemic. We suck at collectively making sense of complex threats and enacting good policies. Even simpler issues like statistical deaths due to air pollution most people don’t quite take for what they are.
I’d be happy to get in contact, I’m trying to figure out what ways there are to connect people and create a community that does high efficiency-collective sensemaking. Something that gives a good and balanced picture of status quo truth quickly. But also something that allows to progressively dig deeper into details. If this resonates with you → [email protected]
Oh, and I totally agree about the message board presentation making a big difference. I posted a crucial comment providing the context to the JRE thing yesterday and it didn’t get any attention. But even on Twitter most people missed the context, so it’s no wonder our sensemaking is so inefficient. Imagine talking for an hour only to later realize the point of contention became 90% mute in the presence of a bit of new information. That’s how I saw this, but multiplied by thousands of people. What a waste of smart people’s time.
my un-educated thinking is
(1) kids catch covid like everyone else, they don't get bad symptoms, but they bring it home and give it to their parents, grandparents, etc. I know 3 families where this happened. Kids got it first, passed it on to everyone else.
(2) lockdowns and/or similar measures, have been needed to keep hospitalization numbers at or below capacity. Some people claim lockdowns are about power but I see zero political upsides to lockdowns so it's hard to see how proposing them is a power grab.
(3) vaccinations, same as above, needed to keep hospitalization numbers at or below capacity
Note: My personal anecdata, my unvacced 79yr old father died from covid 2 weeks ago. His wife has had a harsh case as well but at the moment it looks like she'll pull through.
t=-1: 70% were vaccinated
t= 0: 100% were vaccinated
t=+1: 100% were vaccinated & boostered
t=+2: 100% were vaccinated & double boostered
...Such a confusing, yet common stance. The flu vaccine is free, risk is essentially nil, and it reduces your chance of death across the board[1]:
> At a median follow‐up duration of 19.5 months, influenza vaccine was associated with a lower risk of all‐cause mortality (RR, 0.75; 95% CI, 0.60–0.93 [P=0.01]), cardiovascular mortality (RR, 0.82; 95% CI, 0.80–0.84 [P<0.001]), and major adverse cardiovascular events (RR, 0.87; 95% CI, 0.80–0.94 [P<0.001]) compared with control. The use of the influenza vaccine was not associated with a statistically significant reduction of myocardial infarction (RR, 0.73; 95% CI, 0.49–1.09 [P=0.12]) compared with control.
It's the biggest no-brainer since seatbelts.
Like fuck I’m gonna keep getting boosters but still need to show papers and wear masks. I’m not a sucker.
Consider if your first impulse is to deny the possibility of that last point. You’re probably not an evolutionary virologist, so the truth is you have no idea which mutations are next. Perhaps you think T-cell immunity will save you, but omicron already escapes >50% of T-cell antibody types in 21% of vaccinated or infected people. Will we develop better cross-neutralizing antibodies from omicron or will antigen imprinting doom us to suffering wave after wave of new variants, due to maintaining variant-specific immunity only?
I bet that feeling of self-righteousness is satisfying, isn’t it? Perhaps that’s because blaming other humans subconsciously lets you continue the illusion that humans were ever in control of the pandemic in the first place or that a real risk ever existed for you. Anger is a lot more comfortable than existential anxiety.
But the truth is, it’s not “the man” who’s keeping you down at all — the pandemic limitations you feel right now are the libertarian equivalent to your fist being restrained from meeting your neighbor’s nose.
https://www.healthcare.gov/how-plans-set-your-premiums/
Cellular immunity is highly durable and effective.
The question is not how long the immunity lasts (based on original SARS patients, probably multiple decades to a lifetime), but whether affinity-matured T-cells can sufficiently cover the antigen-space of future ACE2-binding spike proteins.
Somatic hypermutation might still be too complex to model computationally to answer that question outright.
Do you know whether this question is answerable in another way?
It’s impressive annual vaccination rates are as high as they are.
This tells me, when I'm 65, I should definitely be getting flu shots.
Much more and better explanation about flu shots here:
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/flu/in-depth/...
No, that's not what it tells you. Really, I can't help you if an article that spells this stuff out in great detail results in a response that indicates that you have not understood it, they spent a lot more time on this than I will be able to do in this context.
Not anti vax, not that it should matter for this argument.
What if I told you I don't wear a seatbelt?
I remember thinking much the same two decades ago when it was risk of death from terrorists vs bees.
The one part you left out is that there is a genetic component, so the first few ways were a form of selection against people who couldn't handle covid. It seems likely the the remaining population is much less susceptible to dying in future waves.
Flu would have looked like this the first time around, except when it arose, people didn't fly around the world or even really move a few miles from their home most of the time, which acted as a natural way to reduce outbreaks.
Most importantly, vaccine induced immunity still protects against severe disease that requires hospitalization.
More importantly, if the herd immunity is the question - omicron and vaccination might provide very robust immune protection.
Another thing to keep in mind - because omicron was so successful, it may have blocked the appearance of a new variant that is a derivative of it and the next similar variant that might appear that is neither some pre-omicron derivative nor close to omicron.
Vaccination with the original variant is not a bad bet because it is most likely just in the middle of every possible derivation from it.
And I still think the vaccines are substantially accelerating the end. So I'm not even sure what the complaint is. That it isn't the only factor? Sure, but it's a huge one, and one of few that we can control.
For a virus that supposedly just jumped from wild animals to humans, it'd be irresponsible to simultaneously think it couldn't happen again from any of the number of species potentially acting as reservoirs.
But, you need to stop equating ending the pandemic with eliminating the virus.
After the pandemic ends the virus will be with the human race for the rest of our natural lives most likely.
We live with HCoV-229E and HCoV-OC43 and all of us catch that and nobody considers the pandemics that started transmission of those viruses in the human race to still be pandemics.
When the disease burden drops sufficiently then the pandemic is over. Vaccines reduce the disease burden dramatically.
I've not seen a convincing argument against simply looking at excess deaths. This avoids all of the problems around classifcations of deaths with/from COVID, vaccination statuses, etc. It's much harder to disguise deaths or lack of deaths. EuroMOMO [1; scroll 60% down to the z-scores] shows excess deaths in Europe basically went back to normal in most countries after the European wave in spring 2020, long before vaccines were available. This was the case despite widely varying levels of lockdown stringency - with at least one country, Sweden, not doing any significant locking down at all. And many countries' peaks at this time were, if you scroll back in time, comparable in magnitude to excess deaths during previous winters. If you draw a line in your mind down the various countries' graphs at early 2021 when significant fractions of the populations of these countries were starting to get vaccinated, you will probably struggle to determine that they've had any real positive effect at all. Once you do that, consider an alternative hypothesis could better describe the data, for example that the virus is highly seasonal and we have very little control over it. Now, a bonus: change the age group from "all ages" to younger cohorts and observe that in many countries excess deaths did not shift from resembling noise during the entirely of the past 2 years. There are even some countries, not known for being paragons of good health such as Scotland, that barely saw any out of the ordinary excess deaths in the young during the whole period. I think people seem to think things are far worse than they actually are in most countries because of the panic created by media and politicians. This is why I am very unconvinced by the argument that vaccines have been helping to end the pandemic, at very least amongst most of those who have been locked down. It seems much more reasonable to me that other factors are at play here.
No country was even close to what you could call significantly vaccinated until mid-2021. The winter 20-21 wave is almost entirely unvaccinated populations.
The winter 21-22 is now mostly vaccinated and, surprise, it’s much lower (and unvaccinated are still the majority of deaths).
This argument also works against vaccine efficacy.
The upset from lockdowns and delayed or canceled treatments/surgeries is why. I don't think we have final numbers for 2021 yet, but the numbers from the US in 2020 showed a jump in non-covid deaths about half as big as covid deaths.
Cancer didn't have a big jump that year, but it is one of the things that got postponed diagnoses and treatments, because it doesn't kill immediately so it's not an emergency, so one expectation I've seen is for it to spike in 2021.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2778234#24...
This outcome was obvious to anybody paying attention in the beginning.
You do not see it? I see a long fat tail there.
There were 131500 excess deaths during weeks 1-8 and 230000 after that. Does it sound normal to you?
And for every age group below 65, 2021 has been worse than 2020 and worse than previous years except 2019 for 0-14 that was even worse than all pandemic years.
Are you intentionally blind to this?
You appear to think that we can somehow take each age group and somehow handle them much differently. Practice has showed that we all are connected.
Why are we getting such runover by omicron - kids in the schools and kindergartens. I do not blame them, it just is like it is.
You are missing the fact that the government and the media has been consistently dishonest and/or wrong at virtually every stage of the pandemic but they still act as what they say is sacrosanct and anyone that questions their edicts is committing some terrible sacrilege. People are also tired of the burdensome restrictions that are entirely performative (like masking in general) and harmful (masking in schools, especially among young children. Anyone who has eaten dinner in a packed restaurant with 200 other unmasked people but is then required to put on their mask for the 10 foot walk to the bathroom knows exactly how ridiculous and useless these restrictions are.
You say "they still act as what they say is sacrosanct and anyone that questions their edicts is committing some terrible sacrilege". I'm sorry I don't get what you're trying to say here. You can say this about any law. You're saying they act as if laws were important and needed to be unforced.
Finally, of course laws are "dumb", they are binary, you can ridicule any law by pushing it to its limit. Driving on this road at 100 km/h is legal, but suddenly at 100.001 it's illegal?? so yeah, when you're exactly in between a place where you must wear a mask and a place where you don't, it's as ridiculous as... any law really.
I’ve heard engineers complain saying things like “I got the vaccine, how come I haven’t gotten all my freedoms back yet? Why did I bother?” in the middle of an out break. The people whose job it is to look at complex systems fall short. Maximising their chances of getting severely ill is seen as an inconvenience.
Was there any other possible outcome?
Many states didn't regress during delta. They kept calm and carried on with normal. Only some states decided to regress. And the outcomes are almost identical--in the same ballpark at least.
They are dehumanizing.
Besides it doesn’t matter what you think about masks. The fact that many people resent wearing them is reason enough to rethink forcing people to wear them. We do live in society and not everybody considers Covid the only problem in existence. Especially post vaccine.
Maybe people want to move on? Mayne those people have incredibly valid reasons for they wish? Maybe the government should respect that?
It's a piece of cloth worn over your nose and mouth. How fragile is your sense of humanity?
> Besides it doesn’t matter what you think about masks. The fact that many people resent wearing them is reason enough to rethink forcing people to wear them.
I don't like wearing shoes, but that doesn't make shoe mandates (which are totally a thing, but only private businesses, not by government order) dehumanizing.
> We do live in society and not everybody considers Covid the only problem in existence.
Is that straw man dead yet?
> Especially post vaccine.
On this point, I actually agree. Would vaccine mandates be acceptable instead? It would be much more effective than mask mandates (which, while I have no real problem with them in principle, don't actually work that well because so many people don't wear them correctly).
I say this as someone who doesn't mind masks and wears them often.
I guess that's where we differ. I believe we should make our best decisions based on what science predicts. If there's unlikely to be a significant benefit, some are not happy to wear it. You are, but that's a personal choice.
There are lots of sacrifices we could make that would have an immediate and more tangible impact on health outcomes. Outlaw motor vehicles, mandatory vegetables, end alcohol sales. We don't do that because it would piss people off.
That’s an incredibly low bar you’re setting.
What do you think of the suffering of those who’d normally rely on lip reading?
Edit: since we already asked you twice not to do this, and you've continued, I've banned the account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
Just curious, but would you feel comfortable elaborating on how? I haven’t found them all that bad personally, but maybe there’s something I’m not as attuned to.
I resent it.
Masks turned a swath of a particular political party into some seriously sanctimonious assholes.
Sure we do. The word "quarantine" comes from the fact that during large stretches of human history we'd isolate people before entering new cities for the objectively true concern that they're bring in new pests. My grandparents traveled to the Americas from Europe and had the vaccination cards, had thorough medical examinations, and had to quarantine after coming from a ship full of sick people.
The entire history of human civilization is one big narrative of hygiene management. Sewage, water management, waste management, disease control.
I like my civilization more than I care for the whining of people ignorant of the unthinkable amounts of pain that diseases have caused. So, yeah, no problem calling you names, some people need to be reminded of their own ignorance every now and then.
Yes, compliance and knowing how to wear a mask has been an issue. That's not the same thing as "masks don't work."
This is a random place to put this, but I just want to point out that I think for the most part even mask wearing is not required anymore (unless you are sick, but why are you going anywhere sick?)
Part of the reason I put it here is that I want to make sure it's understood that despite the fact I'm pretty pro-vax, pro-mask and generally supported the lockdowns at the time -- we're past all that for now with Omicron. Things are still a mess, and the facts on the ground could change, but I think it's important that everybody gets on the same page that we're moving on.
The surgeons already know. Since the 1990s, there has been a general movement away from using surgical masks in the OR, due to accumulating evidence that they have no effect. (For example, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4480558/)
It is a literature review that didn’t find strong evidence for surgical mask effectiveness more because it hasn’t been researched deeply. And it notes that the absence of evidence does not indicate ineffectiveness of surgical masks, and rather a more significant research trial would have to be performed (and there were caveats to the feasibility of doing that as well).
Specific quotes from that article:
“What literature that is available on the subject tends to be dated with poorly explained methodology. There is also uncertainty over whether the results of such studies can be extrapolated to current surgical practice given the advent of new antiseptic techniques since they were completed.”
“It is clear that more studies are required before any absolute conclusions can be drawn regarding the effectiveness or, indeed, ineffectiveness of surgical masks. The published literature does suggest that it may be reasonable to further examine the need for masks in contemporary surgical practice given the interests of comfort, budget constraints and potential ease of communication, although any such study would undoubtedly have to be large and well controlled to prove causality given the low event frequency of surgical site infections.”
“It is important not to construe an absence of evidence for effectiveness with evidence for the absence of effectiveness. While there is a lack of evidence supporting the effectiveness of facemasks, there is similarly a lack of evidence supporting their ineffectiveness. With the information currently available, it would be imprudent to recommend the removal of facemasks from surgery. Instead, in the medical field where common practice can so easily become dogma, it is necessary to recognise the constant need to maintain a healthy scepticism towards established beliefs and to periodically re-evaluate and critically assess their scientific merit.”
At the end, they take the stance that while evidence doesn't support any benefit, it doesn't indicate harm either, so might as well continue using masks.
I don't deny that this is still a matter of controversy, compare Romney (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11289767/) with Belkin (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11886203/).
The most frequent complaint is that most research on the subject is not high quality, but what about those studies that are good? The most thorough clinical study is Tunevall (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1853618/), which clearly supports no benefit. There are apparently no high quality studies that support benefit.
Doesn’t exist.
I dont like being used as a lab rat. I refuse to participate in this uncontrolled experiment these public health experts are conducting.
Regardless of a mandate, people will do what they do even if it's not in their best interests, or in the interests of their loved ones, or the interests of their neighbors. They will smoke in public places, they will goto work sick, they will drive drunk. Frankly put, people can be jerks. So you put a mandate out there, and you do your best.
Masks work. In areas where mask utilization is high, there is good air filtration and people follow distancing rules, the spread is slowed.
Some measures are simply common sense practices and don't need an overwhelming amount of scientific studies to justify them. Particularly when the drawbacks to them are so minor, while the potential advantages are huge.
[0] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/handwashi...
Does it justify mandatory wearing of religious symbols and tattoos? After all, there are almost no drawbacks, and "potential" advantage is even bigger. It was considered "common sense" for millennia.
Before COVID-19, we had extensive analysis of previous pandemics, with the consistent judgment that public mask-wearing had no noticeable effect. For example, the DoD commissioned a study of the 1918-1920 pandemic. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30179067)
The latter question sounds insulting and dismissive, but it's actually posed in good faith. It highlights a genuine epistemological problem about the nature, limits, and validity of our knowledge about the pandemic. I can find studies on PubMed and elsewhere that back up virtually any belief, prejudice, policy, or therapy that I like. So can you. Where does that leave us, except with the obvious solution of trusting our local, state, and national health authorities?
From the 1918-1920 Spanish influenza pandemic onward, public health agencies have evaluated the effects of mask mandates and other non-pharmaceutical interventions. The consistent result of these epidemiological studies has been failure to detect a positive effect. A typical review article, which was I think the most quoted up until 2020 is Cowling (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20092668/).
From the discussion:
In conclusion there remains a substantial gap in the scientific literature on the effectiveness of face masks to reduce transmission of influenza virus infection. While there is some experimental evidence that masks should be able to reduce infectiousness under controlled conditions, there is less evidence on whether this translates to effectiveness in natural settings. There is little evidence to support the effectiveness of face masks to reduce the risk of infection.
I see virtually no evidence that suggests masks do anything meaningful to the spread of Covid—especially enough to justify forcing service workers to wear them 8 hours a day, 5 days a week for two years straight. Especially now that anybody can get a vaccine. Why should service workers be required to wear them? To protect fully vaccinated people who are still afraid of Covid? Seems pretty selfish to ask that if people. Especially when service workers get bullied and gaslight by rich tech workers who think “masks are virtually costles” while their only time masking is their 1 hour weekly trip to the grocery store…
These Covid measures are nothing more than forcing the lower class to protect the upper class (or at least pretends to. It’s all theater and we all know it). It is incredibly privileged to support any of the nonsense we’ve mandated the last two years.
Not my job, either. I'm not a doctor or public health authority. That's where I go for advice; do you have better sources in mind?
You might love masks but not everybody feels the same way. Leave people the hell alone.
"Leave people the hell alone" isn't an option, because you live in a populated, civilized nation rather than on a deserted private island. (I will note, however, that they won't shoot you at the border for trying to leave.)
Besides, asking kids to sacrifice their one and only childhood to protect fully vaccinated adults who are still afraid is a horrific public policy. Kids should never be asked to sacrifice for adults. That just isn’t how things work.
All over DFW superintendents are resigning. They see the damage they’ve done and are jumping ship as the chickens come home to roost. I suspect all over the nation school and county health leadership are getting out before the full scope of the damage they’ve caused is realized.
These anointed "experts" still have not told people to chill the fuck out about covid and children. We have two years of publicly available data saying they are at virtually no risk. Yet the CDC and Fauci both act like covid is some kind of grave danger to children.
Dig deep enough into most of the pro-"what we've done"'s arguments and they are nothing more than thinly disguised appeals to authority.