1,338 karma · joined April 14, 2009
The sample size is very small and they list other limitations to their findings, but:
"In conclusion, despite concerns of waning immunity, appropriate immunoassays can detect antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 at 8 months after infection in most asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic persons."
Florida has the second-oldest population in the U.S., but it's death rate per 100,000 is average among the states. NYC and NJ are two states with the highest death rate per 100,000.
"Longitudinal analysis shows durable and broad immune memory after SARS-CoV-2 infection with persisting antibody responses and memory B and T cells".
Is that good enough for you?
Also, Most of the re-infected in Israel were from the vaccinated population, even after you adjust for vaccinated vs. unvaccinated population sizes: https://www.deseret.com/coronavirus/2021/7/20/22584134/whats...
On the other hand, with natural immunity, even after your antibody count wanes in your bloodstream, you still have your bone marrow and memory B cells to protect you:https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34030176/
It's looking more and more like natural immunity will be more long-lived than vaccine immunity: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01442-9
TLDR: The CDC is dishonest and cherry-picks data to meet their narrative. Multiple peer-reviewed studies have shown natural immunity to work at least as well as vaccine immunity for COVID.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8209951/pdf/RMV...
https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-medicine/fulltext/S2666-37...
https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S2589-5370(21)0...
As far as I can tell, the analysis you link also continues to support the notion that natural immunity works wonderfully well, on par with or better than vaccine immunity as far as we can tell.
At this point we have the tools we need to be safe against COVID. Any adult that wants to get can vaccinated. Kids are under such low risk that they don't need to be vaccinated. The 2009 H1N1 flu killed 3 times as many children as COVID so far, and in half the time! Yet we didn't lock down, shut down schools, or torture our little children with masks during that pandemic. https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2009/12/making-s...
If you're immunocompromised or otherwise vulnerable even with the vaccine, then it is up to you to take extra precautions because COVID will be around forever.
COVID is not the equivalent of a population of tigers running rampant through our community. It's time for the fearmongering to stop and for us to get back to normal. And hospitals may need to adapt. Even during the height of the delta surge, data I've seen suggests that 80% or more of ICU beds are filled by non-COVID patients. Our hospitals are so designed for efficiency and cost reduction that we are incapable of handling surges of any kind, including ones that increase our ICU utilization by at most 25%. I see that more as a failure of our hospital systems than anything else.
The state of COVID is such that if you are an adult you can get vaccinated and you are safe enough, no matter what decisions others make. If you are not an adult then the risks to you are so low that you are safe anyways. The 2009 swine flu killed 3 times as many children in 9 months as COVID has killed in 18 months: https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2009/12/cdc-shar....
Yet This flu did not require masking, lockdowns, forced vaccinations, or any shutting down of schools.
If you are immunocompromised, or otherwise vulnerable even with the vaccine, then it is up to you to take extra precautions, like wearing an N95 in public or avoiding crowded areas.
COVID simply isn't deadly enough to warrant the curbing of freedom that is being done or the vilification of those not making choices we think they should. Get vaccinated if you want to and move on with your life. Stop forcing people to get vaccinated, especially those who've already been infected. And finally, get the government out of the business of mandates of any kind. They aren't needed. People have the tools already to protect themselves how they see fit.
If we adjust for my mistake and make 426 the denominator, the odds go up to 3.5%. If we take into account that at least half of cases go unreported, the odds drop to 1.75% or lower. If we take into account that 25% or more ICU COVID cases aren't really COVID-related, (hard to find data on that but it was what was reported that way for Florida last week), the odds go down to 1.3%.
I apparently read well enough to instantly spot that 10% ICU conversion of infected unvaccinated is a bogus number. And my Israel data mistake didn't affect my conclusions at all. Maybe you should work on your reading?
The CDC's report is a fantastic example as to why the CDC don't deserve our trust. They are dishonest. They cherry pick data to fit their narrative. They are unburdened by the constraints of peer review. They admit in their own study that it can't apply causation and yet they remain silent as the media run wild and report the study as causative fact.
This analysis has, to my knowledge, not been debunked at all: https://arieh.substack.com/p/inside-israels-delta-outbreak-p....
It shows natural immunity far outclassing vaccine immunity in Israel.
In terms of peer reviewed studies, they all show that natural immunity is fantastic:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2781112
https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S2589-5370(21)0...
https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-medicine/fulltext/S2666-37...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8209951/pdf/RMV...
The Israel data is clearly showing natural immunity doing better for COVID, and every other peer-reviewed study I have seen shows natural immunity doing "at least" as well as vaccinated immunity.
As to the delta variant overwhelming hospitals, that's partially because hospitals are firing nurses that won't get vaccinated. The lack of beds is primarily a staffing problem and hospitals are shooting themselves in the foot. I've also heard they have been underpaying nurses and some are just quitting or switching to better-paying contract work.
Second, the media and even some hospital administration officials are blatantly deceiving people on actual hospital status: https://www.dailysignal.com/2021/08/06/fact-checking-4-claim...
There's a whole section there debunking the claims, for instance, that hospitals in Florida are overwhelmed.
I don't think anyone thinks that "moving on" means forgetting, but I do think it does entail having the government get out of the business of mandating lockdowns, masks, or vaccines. The problem lies in the fact that the media were too successful in scaring people to death about COVID. It makes handling the virus in a sane way impossible without negative political fallout.
The page notes that it's case count isn't necessarily correct. This page shows the total case delta at 650 for today versus yesterday: https://covid-19.ontario.ca/data/case-numbers-and-spread
Whereas the spreadsheet from your page says 426. It's not even clear to me that the 650 number is accurate because not everyone may necessarily be reporting they have COVID. I know when my whole family got COVID we didn't report it to the government. I've seen estimates in the U.S. that actual case count is more than double reported case count: https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/07/us-covid...
Secondly, ICU case counts are based on people who are in the ICU and happen to have COVID, not people who are in the ICU primarily because of COVID. So for yesterday the delta in ICU COVID case count was 15, but we don't know how many of those net new 15 are actually in the ICU for COVID symptoms primarily.
So taking the raw numbers for yesterday's delta, that's 15 / 650 as a rough estimate (dividing the deltas isn't really what we want but it's the best I can come up with), and that lands us at 2.3%. I also believe that number is far too high for the other reasons outlined above.
For comparison, the numbers here seem to indicate a 5% chance of hospitalization for the unvaccinated: https://www.wbay.com/2021/08/19/covid-19-wisconsin-dhs-compa...
They give no ICU numbers, so we can expect the ICU odds to be closer to 2% again, and their data suffers from the same problems.
In reality, unvaccinated with natural immunity are likely more protected against the virus than the vaccinated. Israel's vaccination rates are among the highest in the world, and they've suffered the same delta outbreak as everyone else. Further, Israel has the most accurate and comprehensive data to date, and their numbers clearly show the naturally-immunized outperforming the vaccinated during their delta wave. They've since resorted to giving 3rd booster shots to the most vulnerable to compensate.
https://arieh.substack.com/p/inside-israels-delta-outbreak-p...
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/israel-delivers-boos...
The real issue is that COVID is likely going to become endemic, and at some point the world needs to face this and move on. Unfortunately, our politicians have been lying to us and using COVID as a tool to gain political power for so long, that they are unwilling to admit they were wrong and to steer us in the right direction. The best we can do is elect these people out.
Also, as good as the vaccines are against delta, natural immunity is doing even better: https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/dr-makary-says-natu...
https://www.deseret.com/coronavirus/2021/7/20/22584134/whats...
https://arieh.substack.com/p/inside-israels-delta-outbreak-p...
I've recently discovered Thomas Sowell and I'm really itching to find time to read his book on the subject: Discrimination and disparities.
For this particular comment thread, the issue people are discussing is a relatively recent and very dramatic shift in power over speech. Today, a handful of high-tech oligarchs are controlling and enforcing standards of speech with far more efficacy than governments. It gets even scarier when you realize that governments know this and are now pressuring these tech companies to do their bidding.
First, you want to write code whose style fits in with the team, project, and organization. If other people are writing high-level code chaining method calls like above and not worrying about performance, then you should write your code that way as well. It will fit in fine and no one will notice the performance impact because all the rest of the code is already equally slow.
On the other hand, there are certain architectural decisions that affect performance that can be hard to undo after the fact. Those decisions can be a little harder but it usually boils down to meeting short-term requirements. Unless your boss or org appreciates optimizations and you can sell it on your quarterly review that you saved X dollars due to optimized code, then why bother?
Your optimization may even cause conflict with people who don't like or appreciate it and don't like the extra complexity it might bring to the project. Or, if you ship with a fast-enough solution and the product's popularity grows to the point that scaling becomes hard, you can optimize it and look like a hero! Whereas, if you had optimized it in the first place pre-launch, your work could likely go un-appreciated.
It's a bit cynical of a take, but a useful one to consider, I think.
When someone proposes a rewrite for software, I ask him or her to think critically along the following questions:
1) What is the purpose of the rewrite? What do you hope to accomplish by it? What business objectives are furthered by the rewrite?
2) Explain in detail what is wrong the the existing code base, and why it is untenable to fix those problems piecemeal.
3) Explain in detail how the rewrite will avoid, overcome, or improve significantly on all the problems mentioned in 2).
In my most recent, case, and as I expect in many others, I couldn't convince anyone to engage on any of these questions.
For 1), we were told that the org planned to build significant new features on the product and the rewrite will help. However, the company's priorities changed significantly even as the rewrite was just getting started. By the time I left the company, I was not aware of any short or long-term plans to continue adding functionality to the now-rewritten product.
For 2), the level of detail was along the lines of "the code base is awful. I hate it!" And, that's about it. Question 3) is, of course, impossible to answer if you failed to answer 2).
Failure to be able to answer these types of questions is also in my eyes a strong indicator that you don't understand the existing product very well. And why would we? The existing team that built the thing had all left by that point, which is, in my experience, the norm, not the outlier. It's normal for devs to build something for a few years and then peace out, either via an internal transfer to another team or a new job opportunity.
I believe that much of software is knowledge acquisition, and much of the cost of software maintenance is in dealing with the failure to transfer and maintain acquired knowledge over time. Rewrites can be spurred by ignorance, and that same ignorance can lead to the rewrite taking much longer than expected.
Also, I'm not attacking you. I'm pointing out things you are uncomfortable with and unwilling to look at critically. That is far from attacking you.
I'm starting to think when you say "propaganda" you mean "anything I don't think is true or am unwilling to investigate further for myself."
If you are actually looking for some eyewitness accounts, Jordan Peterson has many podcasts where he interviews specific people that have experienced the ideological takeover themselves, including:
* Yeonmi Park: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yqa-SdJtT4
* Dr. Rima Azar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIw8mH7ZpFY
* Bret Weinstein: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2O_gW4VWZ5c
He has also interviewed one person who lost his job fighting the takeover in high school:
* Paul Rossi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysQBegyQP8A
He's also interviewed a self-identified liberal and former employee of New York Times that witnessed the takeover at the Times. Starting at minute 8 the conversation diverges into talking about her experience at University.
* Bari Weiss: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFTA9MJZ4KY&t=12s
Bari Weiss says it herself in this podcast, loosely quoted since I don't remember it exactly: If you as a liberal can't see the danger in what is happening, then you have your blinders on.
I would say the same holds true of people who can't see the takeover in education, which is already mostly complete.
Edit: I found the Bari Weiss quote at 43:06: "I have to be honest. At this point, if one can't see the way that this language has been hijacked and used as a kind of trojan horse strategy to smuggle in a hardened, zero-sum identity politics view of the world, to smuggle in a view of the world in which we have collective guilt or collective innocence literally based on the circumstances of our birth, that smuggle in a deeply anti-capitalist position, to smuggle in essentially a leftist illiberalism, then, I'm sorry. You have blinders on! The evidence is so overwhelming at this point.... I think it's because admitting that's true, is extremely psychologically scary, and socially scary, if you are a liberal."
1) Make change. Think really hard about it to make sure it's correct.
2) put out code review.
3) get approval. Merge change.
4) CI pipeline builds and deploys to prod.
5) absent of alerts must mean it works?
Even if you have no QA environment and nothing between you and prod, I've rarely seen deployment to prod take less than 30 minutes. That's an hour feedback cycle. Contrast with:
1) write code.
2) write unit tests.
3) run tests locally.
The feedback cycle, especially when you get iterative, can get as low as single digit seconds. I run my tests and see a bug. I fix the bug, then re-run the tests. Similarly, for a more complex feature, I can break the feature down into multiple cycles of build, test, verify.
And that's not even accounting for the overhead of managing feature flags, which is not free. In the best case, you need to at least release a second PR to remove the feature flag when the feature is successful. At my previous employer, this step was often forgotten and resulted in real, consequential technical debt as it became harder to figure out how the product behaved based on which feature flags were turned off or on.
If you have an experience leads you to believe that production testing can more productive than local automated testing, I at least have never seen it occur in and I find it difficult to even imagine it being true.
Perhaps the greatest inertial force against improving test automation is the truth that any change to a in-production product incurs risk, coupled with the fact that adding tests often requires refactoring to make the code more testable. Techniques like writing tests as you refactor never get employed because there is resistance to any refactoring occurring at all in the first place. The general principle followed is: "make the smallest change possible to accomplish the objective".
I feel like overcoming these forces requires bravery from management or the team, coupled with a longer term vision for the project. For some projects, which are limping along on life support, it may not even be worth it to improve code quality. However, for most other projects I believe there is a better balance to be had between not unnecessarily breaking the product and not being afraid to make relatively risky changes to improve maintainability of the product.
I am also agreed in that I anecdotally often see a disregard for automated testing. I am still trying to understand how to eliminate this tendency. I know that in every software project I've had a major hand in building, I've helped ensure automated testing, with a heavy emphasis on unit testing, become a major part of team culture, and I've always felt the tests more than paid for themselves over time, even in the relative short-term.