Everyone one of those guys that is wearing a mask tilts me.
I tried to talk the wife Into me doing a one man demonstration about some of the shoddy science being done. Got vetoed.
If the mood and timing strikes I may write up my model and put it on my website for my consulting. May be some fire for IHME.
Again I’m not saying I have some mechanistic model that will react to all situations but in practice we have only seen four curves. They are all the same equation with different growth rates depending on social distancing. I didn’t even measure anything other than the observed constants. (I do hope we need a slower fifth constant for when we get really great at mask wearing but I’m thinking the improved masks will be balanced by less isolation plus the covidiots as a wild card.
I skim-read the full article, but I’m not an expert and can’t identify any issues with it or anything, should any exist. However I thought this bit, which I haven’t seen reported in news articles, was worth excerpting:
Finally, in contrary to the recent report that a viable viral isolate could not be obtained from stool samples, three of our viral isolates were extracted from stool samples, indicating that the SARS-CoV-2 is capable of replicating in stool samples.
You did fine. This thing is an odd duck because there is a long infective period without symptoms that force social isolation (staying home sick). The majority of people can walk around for 2 weeks.
So it has a group of carriers that can move around shedding (young and healthy) and a second group of victims. There is no pressure for this thing to get worse (unless that increases R0 but no pressure for it To get milder either. Of course if it starts killing the healthy as well as a high rate, then it will eventually attentuate. As 1918 teaches us that could be after a really huge number of deaths.
If we had a perfectly compliant society (totalitarian or very informed egalalitarian) you could device a strategy to screen the healthy and then have a big Covid gathering for them to try and get to herd immunity in the carrier group. It would cost a real number of lives. Take 50,000,000 of the carrier group and 0.1% IFR is still 50,000 dead. Theoretically we are talking what Sweden is doing sorta.
I’d rather fight like hell to save as many lives now and not willingly sacrifice. I hope treatment/vaccine arrives to save the rest down the road. Seems like sacrificing all your pawns in chess right away and expecting to win.
Appreciated and saved. For now, I am going to be honest and say I have hit the sauce after putting the girls to bed, and so I will not be concerning myself with serious subjects until tomorrow
It’s a corona virus, it’s sort of a given that this thing is gonna mutate quickly.
Basically, it’s in the virus’ best interest to be cool and not kill people too much. There’s a strong selection pressure to make it less lethal. That’s why the coronaviruses and influenza viruses that are endemic to humans are usually no big deal. Think about the common cold, we never consider locking down or even wearing masks when it’s cold season. So it passes through unhindered.
The problem with COVID-19 is that it’s adapted to be in bats or pangolins or whatever. It’s not meant to be in humans, so it’s killing more people than it really wants to. And we’re responding by locking down and scrambling to find vaccines to kill it.
Also, want to re-re-re-recommend the This Podcast Will Kill You podcast. It’s been one of the best sources of reliable information throughout all of this. Looks like they’re going out of their wheelhouse in the latest episode, but it should be good nontheless.
The toxoplasmosis episode is good too, but less relevant to today’s world events. They just released an episode on botulism, and it sounds pretty lit, can’t wait to hear it.
“The stock market is like a cranky toddler who needs a a nap and a snack” is one of the best analogies I’ve heard in a very long time. Fast forward to 33:30 on chapter 9, great stuff,
As someone called me out on, it doesn’t want to do anything. It mutates cause that’s what RNA viruses do and then what happens happens. (I’ve been trying hard to not personify the virus)
It’s such a tricky thought experiment about what direction the pressure is (pressure is the environmental conditions, host availability, etc). I keep saying it but the long infective period and especially in people not bedridden is so unusual. Fascinating as a scientist. Scary as hell as a human.
I’m being metaphorical when I talk about what the virus “wants.” You’re right that the virus doesn’t really “want” anything because it’s barely even a living thing. Still, there’s a strong selection pressure for these bugs to evolve become less lethal over time, and that’s why the ones that are zoonotic are so lethal.
I don’t think there is currently much selection pressure on SARS-CoV-2 to be less lethal. The long period before symptoms become severe make it pretty effective at spreading itself. In the study I linked upthread, they say that geographical variation in strains appear to have resulted from random bottlenecking phenomena rather than anything else.
There’s a tightrope respiratory viruses have to walk where they don’t want to be so lethal that they kill hosts too fast, but they do actually want to be pathological, because they want to cause infected hosts to cough and sneeze etc. So I’d be careful about assuming that all the selection pressure is in the direction of milder illness.
I know you know. I’ve been trying to be more precise. I feel a responsibility here to use correct but accessible language. Hard when I get pissed off about bad science like AB studies in the public sphere.
It’s just such a different beast that the time to attenuate (weaken) will likely be longer than our vaccine development timeline. And it might go the wrong way first.
Yeah adding to what I said above, in that preprint article, there was huge variation in the viral loads that different strains produced when infecting the same test cell line. Well, at least in the short term, higher viral loads are likely to be selected for, especially in scenarios of social distancing etc where we have deliberately made it harder for the virus to transmit itself. I think that’s much more relevant in terms of selection pressure than fatalities. When I look at places like Italy, it doesn’t seem like the lethality of the virus presented much of a problem in terms of the virus reaching new hosts. Seems like attenuation could be on a much longer timescale.
Unsurprisingly, the “Liberate” virus has infected Arizona. Second day of “patriot” protests at the state capitol.
Signs included:
My Body, My Choice, I Choose Work
My Freedom Doesn’t End Where Your Fears Begin
and my personal favorite (held by a guy wearing a mask!):
Fauci & Gates To The Guillotine
