Many references to studies showing facemasks are NOT effective.
The WHO admits to to the BBC that they only recommended facemasks due to "political pressure". Again, the evidence for this is referenced.
In short, there is no correlation of lockdown measures and deaths. In fact, there is a slight correlation the other way. That places with the stricter lockdowns have more deaths. But there are a lot of deaths (and a lot of damage) from other things happening BECAUSE of the lockdown measures.
https://swprs.org/face-masks-evidence/
New coronavirus in/from China
Moderator: Peak Moderation
LJ is pointing out that it is less dangerous than the flu - just like the WHO did 3 days ago:
https://off-guardian.org/2020/10/08/who ... -than-flu/
If people here could just honestly admit "Im retired/a landlord/paid regardless, and the life of every other hustler is out of my view" that would at least be honest.
https://off-guardian.org/2020/10/08/who ... -than-flu/
If people here could just honestly admit "Im retired/a landlord/paid regardless, and the life of every other hustler is out of my view" that would at least be honest.
Concerning masks, what are your thoughts on variolation?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variolation
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2026913
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variolation
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2026913
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Initiation
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As pointed out in the NEJM article, it is purely a hypothesis. From the very start of the article.stumuz1 wrote:Concerning masks, what are your thoughts on variolation?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variolation
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2026913
There is also the usual debate about taking conclusions on the effectiveness of masks in a medical setting and applying them to face coverings in a public settings.it’s possible that one of the pillars of Covid-19 pandemic control — universal facial masking — might help reduce the severity of disease and ensure that a greater proportion of new infections are asymptomatic. If this hypothesis is borne out,
It is certainly possible and studies could be undertaken to demonstrate it, but should we base the implementation of disruptive mitigation measures on a hypothesis? I'm firmly in the no camp.
So far I have not seen anything decisive to stop me wearing facemarks in indoor public places (shops)
It just seems the core of good sense. It reduces viral load, and with the reduced viral load inoculation may be given.
I suppose we will never know. Big pharma will produce a vaccine and take all the credit.
It just seems the core of good sense. It reduces viral load, and with the reduced viral load inoculation may be given.
I suppose we will never know. Big pharma will produce a vaccine and take all the credit.
It would be pure guessing from me, but I do know some details.
If masks do anything, it helps stop a large fast infection from person A who is close to another person B. I doubt if there is much meaningful research on public individual mask WEARER effect [rather than group statistics]. Medical people on someone elses expense will change whenever possible. The public will just keep it in the car door and bang it on, so maybe that's worse than none for some bugs. I have seen cyclists wearing them which must be unhealthy. All masks have small loose fibres and usually outgass something. I have seen papers saying that T cell memory [something poorly understood] from small infections or related viruses reduces batflu severity - which is innoculation/variolation. Other papers say that there is little or no B cell memory for this bug. This the excuse for not antibody testing. The B cells are traditionally seen as the 'library' of old infections and T cells as the 'workers'. They are really both the same structure [lymphocytes], but programmed differently and they mature in different places B in bones, T in Thymus. They enter the blood from lymph [which is like the sticky gloop in raw meat and is an earlier circulation than blood in our evolution] when there is a fight.
My guess is that a regular very low dose eg visiting shops, fighting other winter bugs, not working in a recirculated air building like a hospital, office, could help keep the T cells sharp without too fast an attack to fight back. Lots of hi-dose VitD and B12, not the recommended malnutrition doses. I keep refusing the flu vaccine as I think it's market driven and very dubious. People have suffered real illness from it, and it may make batflu worse.
I think underground rail is probably just safer than a long bus or taxi ride because it has lots of air exchange.
If masks do anything, it helps stop a large fast infection from person A who is close to another person B. I doubt if there is much meaningful research on public individual mask WEARER effect [rather than group statistics]. Medical people on someone elses expense will change whenever possible. The public will just keep it in the car door and bang it on, so maybe that's worse than none for some bugs. I have seen cyclists wearing them which must be unhealthy. All masks have small loose fibres and usually outgass something. I have seen papers saying that T cell memory [something poorly understood] from small infections or related viruses reduces batflu severity - which is innoculation/variolation. Other papers say that there is little or no B cell memory for this bug. This the excuse for not antibody testing. The B cells are traditionally seen as the 'library' of old infections and T cells as the 'workers'. They are really both the same structure [lymphocytes], but programmed differently and they mature in different places B in bones, T in Thymus. They enter the blood from lymph [which is like the sticky gloop in raw meat and is an earlier circulation than blood in our evolution] when there is a fight.
My guess is that a regular very low dose eg visiting shops, fighting other winter bugs, not working in a recirculated air building like a hospital, office, could help keep the T cells sharp without too fast an attack to fight back. Lots of hi-dose VitD and B12, not the recommended malnutrition doses. I keep refusing the flu vaccine as I think it's market driven and very dubious. People have suffered real illness from it, and it may make batflu worse.
I think underground rail is probably just safer than a long bus or taxi ride because it has lots of air exchange.
I find myself with a lot of sympathy for the people who have to find an appropriate way to deal with the pandemic. Trying to balance people's mental wellbeing and jobs against potential loss of life must be a nightmare. It's not even something you can model numerically because how do you quantify the value of saving many jobs and people's mental health vs others dying? Immediately, you find yourself asking awful questions like "who was more productive?" and "would they have died soon anyway?"
As a former data modeller myself - albeit for oil markets - I stare at the data at https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/ with some fascination, and I wonder, if I had to model the expected number of deaths given the other data in this page, how would I do it?
The answer is that I couldn't. There's nothing in the data presented that explains why hospital admissions and deaths were so high in April, but then dropped (halved) in May while cases stayed on a plateau. There's also nothing to explain why deaths have remained so low now even as cases have soared to the heavens. So we end up having to speculate.
We could speculate the following hypotheses:
1) The virus took those most vulnerable in the first wave, so the death rate in the second will be naturally much lower.
2) The virus is now spreading mostly through younger people (especially at school and uni) who aren't much affected by it.
3) Masks didn't keep infections under control, but they might have reduced viral load and reduced symptom severity.
4) We've become better at treating covid symptoms to prevent them becoming life-threatening.
5) The virus itself has mutated into a more easily-spread but less-potent form.
6) We don't really know how many cases there were in the first peak since we were only testing people in hospital. This might explain why cases stayed high while deaths halved in May, as testing expanded.
And there are no doubt more of these - this is just off the top of my head.
The data I've seen doesn't really help us answer any of these questions, but I have to assume (or at least hope) the govt agencies do have some of these answers. They are after all vital when trying to figure out the best response.
Down here in Cornwall, we've had very low levels of covid cases, and the friends I've known who've tested positive have all been asymptomatic. This remained the case even during the mass influx of holidaymakers in August and September. We had one big outbreak from a meat packing factory, but most of the 100+ positive cases there were asymptomatic. Without track and trace, they would never have known they were positive.
Meanwhile, as a vicar, covid continues to massively hamper my job and forces us to behave in ways that run counter to good mental health. Church social groups can't meet without visibly depressing risk-mitigation. We can't offer a reassuring hug, shake hands, or even show a smile from under our masks. We can't offer Communion - the great shared meal of our faith, or meet in our homes to pray together or socialise. Weddings are limited to 15 people, Christenings to a mere 6, and funerals to 30, with everyone masked. All these restrictions - whether necessary or not - run counter to the spirit of loving kindness and community inclusion and companionship that the faith seeks to spread. (And all this is irrespective of harm to the economy, which has its own mental health issues for many).
Now I don't expect many of you to be sympathetic to church problems
but it does make me wonder when the restrictions can be considered to have become more harmful than the illness. Which brings us back to the start - how do you quantify one against the other?
Firstly it seems to me that the govt has not been competent in its response. Setting aside the question of whether it's taken the correct actions in a timely way, the implementation has continually been shambolic - not least the track & trace system which seems to have failed in every way imaginable, in IT terms, in human management terms, in logistical terms, and of course in results.
The govt has been trying to thread the needle of preserving economic activity while having enough lockdown to prevent covid spread. They openly focus on preventing socialising while encouraging work to continue. This is currently proving to be the worst of all worlds, as it's self-evidently not preventing covid spread while it's definitely making many people angry and depressed.
For me, it comes down to this: Do we believe (in the scientific sense) that covid deaths will inevitably rise back to the 1000/day level we saw in April, given the exponential rise in cases? I don't think any of us have the data to answer that, but PHE may have. If we believe deaths will stay low, then perhaps we need to acknowledge that actually the consequences of partial lockdowns on mental health and on the economy and on delays in hospital treatment for other illnesses is worse than allowing the virus to run its course.
Otherwise, if we do believe that deaths will inevitably rise with a two-week lag to covid cases then we need to consider something other than this ineffectual partial lockdown which is adding misery upon misery. Whether that's another full lockdown like March, or targeted only at vulnerable older people while younger people accept they're going to catch it and get on with keeping the economy going I don't have the data to take a view. But the status quo is failing spectacularly at the moment, and the only hope I really have is that a vaccine comes quickly to rescue us.
Sorry for the length of all this - just trying to think aloud as there's obviously huge tension between the various quantitative and qualitative evidence, and I struggle to get my head around it even though data analysis and forecasting was literally my job for many years. We're all being tossed on stormy seas and I can't really blame anyone for being angry. There are no obvious answers, and no one here is obviously right or wrong as none of us have the full picture. Peace x
As a former data modeller myself - albeit for oil markets - I stare at the data at https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/ with some fascination, and I wonder, if I had to model the expected number of deaths given the other data in this page, how would I do it?
The answer is that I couldn't. There's nothing in the data presented that explains why hospital admissions and deaths were so high in April, but then dropped (halved) in May while cases stayed on a plateau. There's also nothing to explain why deaths have remained so low now even as cases have soared to the heavens. So we end up having to speculate.
We could speculate the following hypotheses:
1) The virus took those most vulnerable in the first wave, so the death rate in the second will be naturally much lower.
2) The virus is now spreading mostly through younger people (especially at school and uni) who aren't much affected by it.
3) Masks didn't keep infections under control, but they might have reduced viral load and reduced symptom severity.
4) We've become better at treating covid symptoms to prevent them becoming life-threatening.
5) The virus itself has mutated into a more easily-spread but less-potent form.
6) We don't really know how many cases there were in the first peak since we were only testing people in hospital. This might explain why cases stayed high while deaths halved in May, as testing expanded.
And there are no doubt more of these - this is just off the top of my head.
The data I've seen doesn't really help us answer any of these questions, but I have to assume (or at least hope) the govt agencies do have some of these answers. They are after all vital when trying to figure out the best response.
Down here in Cornwall, we've had very low levels of covid cases, and the friends I've known who've tested positive have all been asymptomatic. This remained the case even during the mass influx of holidaymakers in August and September. We had one big outbreak from a meat packing factory, but most of the 100+ positive cases there were asymptomatic. Without track and trace, they would never have known they were positive.
Meanwhile, as a vicar, covid continues to massively hamper my job and forces us to behave in ways that run counter to good mental health. Church social groups can't meet without visibly depressing risk-mitigation. We can't offer a reassuring hug, shake hands, or even show a smile from under our masks. We can't offer Communion - the great shared meal of our faith, or meet in our homes to pray together or socialise. Weddings are limited to 15 people, Christenings to a mere 6, and funerals to 30, with everyone masked. All these restrictions - whether necessary or not - run counter to the spirit of loving kindness and community inclusion and companionship that the faith seeks to spread. (And all this is irrespective of harm to the economy, which has its own mental health issues for many).
Now I don't expect many of you to be sympathetic to church problems
but it does make me wonder when the restrictions can be considered to have become more harmful than the illness. Which brings us back to the start - how do you quantify one against the other?Firstly it seems to me that the govt has not been competent in its response. Setting aside the question of whether it's taken the correct actions in a timely way, the implementation has continually been shambolic - not least the track & trace system which seems to have failed in every way imaginable, in IT terms, in human management terms, in logistical terms, and of course in results.
The govt has been trying to thread the needle of preserving economic activity while having enough lockdown to prevent covid spread. They openly focus on preventing socialising while encouraging work to continue. This is currently proving to be the worst of all worlds, as it's self-evidently not preventing covid spread while it's definitely making many people angry and depressed.
For me, it comes down to this: Do we believe (in the scientific sense) that covid deaths will inevitably rise back to the 1000/day level we saw in April, given the exponential rise in cases? I don't think any of us have the data to answer that, but PHE may have. If we believe deaths will stay low, then perhaps we need to acknowledge that actually the consequences of partial lockdowns on mental health and on the economy and on delays in hospital treatment for other illnesses is worse than allowing the virus to run its course.
Otherwise, if we do believe that deaths will inevitably rise with a two-week lag to covid cases then we need to consider something other than this ineffectual partial lockdown which is adding misery upon misery. Whether that's another full lockdown like March, or targeted only at vulnerable older people while younger people accept they're going to catch it and get on with keeping the economy going I don't have the data to take a view. But the status quo is failing spectacularly at the moment, and the only hope I really have is that a vaccine comes quickly to rescue us.
Sorry for the length of all this - just trying to think aloud as there's obviously huge tension between the various quantitative and qualitative evidence, and I struggle to get my head around it even though data analysis and forecasting was literally my job for many years. We're all being tossed on stormy seas and I can't really blame anyone for being angry. There are no obvious answers, and no one here is obviously right or wrong as none of us have the full picture. Peace x
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Little John
Yes there is.RevdTess wrote:There's nothing in the data presented that explains why hospital admissions and deaths were so high in April, but then dropped (halved) in May while cases stayed on a plateau. There's also nothing to explain why deaths have remained so low now even as cases have soared to the heavens. So we end up having to speculate.
17,000 people died from the flu in England annually between 2014/15 and 2018/19 - with the yearly deaths varying widely from a high of 28,330 in 2014/15 to a low of 1,692 in 2018/19. Don't believe me? Check the data for yourself:
https://fullfact.org/health/coronavirus ... influenza/
This was due to an extremely mild influenza season last winter. Which, in turn, pointed to this year being another whopper for deaths as all of the "dry tinder" from last year succumbed this year. So, it is an extremely reasonable assumption to make that this year would have been up in the 30k range in any event.
Add in to that the massive fall in deaths by heart attack and stroke in 2020 thus far due to those otherwise statistically inevitable deaths being swapped over into the C19 column, it is also a reasonable assumption to make that this more than accounts for at least another 10k or so deaths attributed to the Covid19 column. Thus, the number of extra deaths would be marginal.
Which is exactly what has been seen.
This year's total deaths are barely above the average.
So, why did we have a relatively high death rate relative to infection rate in spring as compared to now?
Because you can't die twice. That's why.
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kenneal - lagger
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But this BBC article based on ONS statistics says "Covid deaths three times higher than flu and pneumonia"
"The mortality rate for Covid-19 is also significantly higher than influenza and pneumonia rates for both 2020 and the five-year average," said Sarah Caul, from the ONS.
Action is the antidote to despair - Joan Baez
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Little John
Meanwhile, the total death rate for this year is barely above the annual average. Alongside that, covid19 deaths do indeed account for (a) a spike in deaths in the spring accompanied by (b) an almost equally commensurate dip in deaths from all other sources, including influenza and, finally (c) death form all source, right now, are way below the average for this time of year. As mentioned above, the reason for that is because you cannot die twice.kenneal - lagger wrote:But this BBC article based on ONS statistics says "Covid deaths three times higher than flu and pneumonia""The mortality rate for Covid-19 is also significantly higher than influenza and pneumonia rates for both 2020 and the five-year average," said Sarah Caul, from the ONS.
Pesky things, facts, aren't they Ken Neil.
I see you are falling back on BBC "articles" again. You genuinely are sounding more and more like a Remainer day by day. Different Lyrics. Same tune. That's all.
I remember, in the dying days of the Referendum, the BBC, in its desperation to keep the establishment narrative alive, actually ran an "article" on how Brexit was going to cause us all to get gonorrhea.
They actually said that....
That's what you are starting to sound like Ken Neil.
Last edited by Little John on 09 Oct 2020, 16:33, edited 1 time in total.
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kenneal - lagger
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ONS statistics though.Little John wrote:............I see you are falling back on BBC "articles" again.
I am a Remainer, LJ. A Remainer inside to avoid the plague!You genuinely are sounding more and more like a Remainer day by day. Different Lyrics. Same tune. That's all.
Action is the antidote to despair - Joan Baez