We had many pandemics. Why should this virus now be radically different? Our immune system would not have survived so long if we kept getting critically sick from virii our system has seen before.
Do not underestimate this disease. Especially the new Indian variant.
Having antibodies is not necessarily the same as being protected. Especially in the light of variants and the fact that antibodies can wane over time.
Google Corman-Drosten review if you want to go down this rabbit hole, it's both fascinating and horrifying to see the state of the art of pseudo-science.
Every clinical testing procedure has to be approved. Every used machine has to be approved and regularly calibrated. So you don't need a confidence intervall for each test, just one for the used procedure / equipment combination. That combination is tested and approved. Are the reults perfect? Of course not, no test is. And no, how many cycles and how the test is conducted is not up to the lab tech. And for re-infection, that's were you need a doctor to properly diagnose, don't you? And that doctor would use PCR test results as part of his diagnosis.
Antibody test detects past and current infection through T-cell memory of past encounters and that too is limited by how long the “learned” imprint of the virus can last (as short as 6-month by some “peer-reviewed” papers on COVID antibody memory. I would be most pressed to see what this aspect of duration of COVID-related T-cell memory turn out to be (but these data are sparse and not quite available to most of us). Antibody is the costlier test of two (also not being more used toward formulation of government policies as I think they should be).
Whereas, Smallpox, DTP and polio vaccine memory have established their multi-decade reliability.
There have been many pandemics, and many people have died; we try to prevent many people from dying.
Some pandemics have not much "survive" or end: Ebola, HIV, ... so we better double-check any new one before being ok with it.
This. No government or institution should downplay seriousness of pandemic even if virus is not as deadly as Ebola.
The seriousness of pandemic plays major role in containing it.
As a result of how easily it spreads, Covid-19 likely caused many more deaths than many otherwise much scarier diseases, including Ebola.
Those who die lose on average 10 years of life. Times 1%, that's about a month. The discrepancy of how much we've sacrificed to how little we've gained is absurd.
[1]: to give but one example, unemployment kills (more precisely, it's a risk factor). Rising unemployment causes additional deaths. Not a huge amount, but a measurable one for sure. We effectively killed some people to save others.
if "everyone" get infected with covid, the hospitals get incredibly overwhelmed, as well as many other services like ambulances, oxygen, funerals, ... this is recipe for chaos and much more deaths: much less treatment possible for other illnesses even not so dangerous ones at first, difficult disposal of bodies leading to other health problems, much less medical staff available over time (they die too!), ... many more people would actually die because of this.
But also who will choose who gets treatment and who doesn't? It's easy behind a screen to click on a button and say I'm ok with it, but it's different when there is a human in front of you, when there are relatives, ... and even if you are not the person who makes the choice, think about how statistics are tricky: 1 person dying out of 1'000'000 is not much on a spreadsheet, until that one is someone you know or love.
Finally, it would mean not so decent deaths for many who can't get a bed or oxygen: in corridors? in the streets? suffering from respiratory troubles? Would you accept that your parents or spouse die like this?
These are actually happening in some places right now, think about it, these people didn't choose the situation, it ain't pretty, we are lucky.
Anyway:
> many more people would actually die because of this.
Numbers, please?
> 1 person dying out of 1'000'000 is not much on a spreadsheet, until that one is someone you know or love.
...with a probability of 1/1000000, which still isn't much. Nothing tricky about it.
Now the probabilities are rather low because we make sure the virus doesn't spread too much (we lock everything down whenever it does). If we didn't however, we'd infect most of the population, hospitals would be overwhelmed, and we'd end up culling more than 3% of the world's population. Mostly elderly for sure, but still.
Even if we stick to actual numbers, let me give you the example of France. I'm r where I live, and the crisis was… let's be prudent and say "not expertly managed". We have over 109K deaths now. With our population, that's about 1.7 deaths per thousand people. Most of us here know some people who watched a close one die. It is much.
Incorrect. That's the CFR. The actual mortality rate (IFR) is between 0.5-1%. And that's without any useful treatment.
> And that's without taking into account the long term consequences of the survivors
There is no evidence that these aren't extremely rare.
Of course everyone is panicking when they're misinformed like that!
- We already have 4 other Corona Viruses endemic in the human population
- More than 80 percent of confirmed coronavirus cases are not severe (probably because T-Cell induced immunity is working very efficiently)
- Reported reinfections are minimal
I think these priors alone reduce the probability for ADE drastically. Don't you?
I was under the impression that virus formation (copying, mutations and all that) was indeed a statistical process. But maybe I am wrong?
For example, one can assume a gaussian distribution and estimate its mean and width using the mean and standard deviation of the data. Bayesian inference aims to directly extract the underlying probability distribution without assuming a fixed functional form.
In any case, one should be extremely skeptical when someone tries to apply such methods to sparse or cherry-picked data. Including SARS-CoV-2, there are only seven coronaviruses that are known to infect humans. This is an extremely small number to do statistics with.
Of course one can make educated guesses based on experiences with previous similar viruses (such as SARS-CoV). But using the language of Bayesian inference for this is just cargo cult science in my opinion.
Pretending that human reasoning is somehow equivalent to Bayesian inference (and abusing domain-specific terminology like "prior") is exactly the kind of cargo culting that Feynman wrote about. If there is no actual mathematical model and software implementation, you are not doing Bayesian inference (and the airplanes will just not land).
Should we ignore everything we know from the past?
As in, looking behind you
(I am talking about scientific knowledge that other knowledge can - and hopefully will - be build upon.)
> (I am talking about scientific knowledge that other knowledge can be build upon.)
This was added later. When talking purely about scientific knowledge, risk isn't a factor of course.
But we have, at times, behaved as if we had no idea if Covid would behave like literally any other coronavirus in existence. Even if we didn't strictly know that Covid had not mutated into something like HIV, it was irrational not to assume it.
Yes, expert consensus has been positive from almost day one, based on SARS-Cov-1 and other coronaviruses. Still, what we didn't know (and in some cases still don't):
* Is there anti-body dependent enhancement?
* Effects on/from variants?
* Effects from other coronaviruses?
* Role of severity of infection on protection?
* Clinical relevance of protection
* Epidemiological relevance of protection
* Mechanism of protection
* Duration of protection
etc.
BTW in most of Europe, recovered persons are on equal footing with the tested and vaccinated.
https://www.newsweek.com/dr-fauci-backed-controversial-wuhan...
There's evidence that it's synthetic
https://yurideigin.medium.com/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-throug...
https://nerdhaspower.weebly.com/ratg13-is-fake.html
Most of the researchers who are strongly denying the possibility of COVID-19 being synthesized in a lab have conflicting interests. Namely, they are associated with organizations that have directly collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of virology.
This virus has in all cases defied a lot of previous assumptions and humbled many healthcare professionals.
Living space for species carrying diseases has never been this constricted.
The plague was a very severe pandemic, but it was never global at one single point in time in the way COVID was in 2020; it slowly burned itself along the silk road.
Mobility is also a factor in transmission. MERS was fatal enough to burn itself out, but in a less mobile world it would've burned out even faster.