A $20 box fan properly placed could do a lot of good for the world.
I donāt want this to be bad, who wants it to be bad? There are numerous studies pointing to asymptomatic and presymptomatic spread. I mean Iām pretty sure itās been contact traced repeatedly. I donāt know what the WHO is doing here but I donāt trust it.
Right itās more like 12 feet, but 6 feet stuck in the messaging. Masks work, but masks donāt help stuck in the messaging for many people.
Everyone wants the path of least resistance and whatever offers it will stick.
I think itās more likely the entire western world has decided that the peasants need to get back to work before they get any more restless.
A number of posters have straight-up decided they arenāt going to trust anything the WHO says.
Iām not sure whether to look at the data and think we are headed for disaster anymore or if somehow we will kind of luckbox this and continue to trend down. Where I live we have been OFB almost fully for over a month and we havenāt seen significant changes in the numbers. Kind of similar to what we see in Georgia. On the other hand what is happening in places like Texas, Florida and Arizona seems like a clear trend upwards but those places arenāt quite to catastrophe level yet.
Now there are still a ton of factors likely suppressing R right now like possible seasonal effects, some still taking heavy precaution, kids not in school, tons of WFH still, mask usage, businesses doing what they can in many cases. All of those stop being as big of mitigation factors as we get to fall in a few months. And even with all that we have essentially been flat in cases nationwide over the last 3 weeks.
I guess I am really struggling with what i think SHOULD be happening not exactly matching up with some of the data right now and not sure what to make of it.
Not going to say about COVID, but take vaccinesā¦if the WHO or whoever said ātake this and that now and the other laterā for my first kid and then 2.5 years later for my second kid said āoops, now itās this and these and whatnotāā¦Iād just do whatever they said both times and figure they had a good enough reason to change. And that may well have happened. I donāt know what vaccines my kids got. Itās on some sheet somewhere I think, maybe.
Not sure what reports youāre talking about here. Letās look at whatās being said here.
āPreliminary evidence from the earliest outbreaks indicated that the virus could spread from person-to-person contact, even if the carrier didnāt have symptoms. But WHO officials now say that while asymptomatic spread can occur, it is not the main way itās being transmitted.ā
Nothing in this statement is remotely surprising. Iām not sure why people are flipping their shits over that link or suggesting that the WHO is appeasing president Florida Man.
I know COVID isnāt the flu, but:
We performed a systematic review of published studies describing the relationship between viral shedding and disease transmission. Based on the available literature, we found that there is scant, if any, evidence that asymptomatic or presymptomatic individuals play an important role in influenza transmission. As such, recent articles concerning pandemic planning, some using transmission modeling, may have overestimated the effect of presymptomatic or asymptomatic influenza transmission. More definitive transmission studies are sorely needed.
Note: I am absolutely NOT trying to wager on this. Not here or IRL. I canāt stress this enough.
Assume we are using total deaths(USA only) as published on worldometers.
We are currently at ~110k.
What would be a sharp(meaning you beleive itās 50/50 likelihood) over/under for total # of USA deaths in 2020?
Answers other than ~350k appreciated. Although that might be the right answer.
Probably in the neighborhood of 270k would be where I would set the line. That is about 700 a day for the rest of the year.
As weāve also learned, it can save tens of thousands of lives in the UK when the temperature hits 25C.
Even I understood this - but I guess I could see how it could be misconstrued.
From the CDC:
Infectiousness of asymptomatic individuals relative to symptomatic individuals: The contribution to transmission of SARS-CoV-2 from asymptomatic individuals compared to the contribution to transmission of SARS-CoV-2 from symptomatic individuals. A parameter value of 50% means that an asymptomatic individual is half as infectious as a symptomatic individual, while a parameter value of 100% means that an asymptomatic individual is just as likely to transmit infection as a symptomatic individual. This parameter is especially challenging to estimate because studies that repeatedly test asymptomatic individuals over time are limited.
So, we have the CDC telling us this percentage is especially challenging to estimate but they figure itās maybe 40% and now with more data coming in the WHO is estimating that itās āvery rareā (whatever that means). Not sure where the outrage is coming from.
It now seems clear that the WHO statement used a completely different defn of āasymptomaticā than has generally been used for the past six months. Terrible terrible statement. Terrible terrible person making that statement. Clarification better be coming or heads will roll.
https://twitter.com/JamesSurowiecki/status/1270105750820577281?s=19
Stanning for the WHO is a thankless job.
Hereās a tweet thread by an actual expert.
https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1270105417838784512?s=19
[more tweets]
https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1270107823116914688?s=19
Iāve already done it - 6 months in Mexico and Central America.
Thatās certainly relevant. Itās just the sort of thing that strikes me as likely to go badly in some places, but perhaps not.