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If there's one truism about Covid-19 right now it's that we don't know much about viruses.

lostlogin 6y ago
Perhaps, but I’m awed with how much we do know and how quickly systems have come into place. New Zealand has been tracing its outbreaks. This has been valuable and has allowed origins be traced quickly and effectively. Maybe I’m too easily impressed by things like the below: “Using genomic analysis, researchers in New Zealand looked at more than half the confirmed cases in the country and found a staggering 277 separate introductions in the early months, but also that only 19 percent of introductions led to more than one additional case.” https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/09/k-overlooked-variable-driving-pandemic/616548/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/09/k-overloo...
- timr 6y ago
  "Perhaps, but I’m awed with how much we do know and how quickly systems have come into place." Unfortunately, there's a lot of unknown-unknownism going on in that stuff. I've had to watch painfully while people (even "experts") discover things like false-positive rates and PCR cycle count for the first time. It's a bit like living through years of undergraduate science education on fast-forward, but people only read the section headers and never fully grasp the details. Anyone who has actually done a lot of PCR could tell you, for example, that a cycle count in the high-30s is prone to noise, but somehow this became the broad standard we're using in the US. It's relevant to your comment because a lot of these systems are shoddy (as you would expect), and the confidence in their performance is based more on a faith in shiny things than actual science. So we do things like set up large-scale PCR surveillance, and forget to validate the overall false-positive rate of the system before we start drawing huge extrapolations from the data. Years later, we'll find out that the conclusions were wrong, but nobody will be paying attention by then.
  - nradov 6y ago
    Exactly. Anyone who has been out in public recently probably has little fragments of dead coronavirus genetic material in their respiratory tract, even if they're not infected or infectious. Torture the PCR machine enough and you can eventually squeeze a false positive out of it.
    - lostlogin 6y ago
      > Anyone who has been out in public recently probably has little fragments of dead coronavirus genetic material in their respiratory tract This problem is probably less relevant in NZ than most places. However thanks for the comment (and it’s parent), I didn’t know these things.
    - timr 6y ago
      Generally agree, but I think the bigger risk is the stray DNA floating around the lab, the medical office where the sample was collected, etc. Any walk-in clinic is almost certainly going to have a cross-contamination risk, for example.
rodamaral 6y ago
Not only we, but pretty much no one in the field. If you think about it, everybody got it all wrong, even the shape of the so called curve that was supposed to be flattened, the real number of cases, the mortality rate, the useless power of lockdowns in big countries, etc.

Perhaps, but I’m awed with how much we do know and how quickly systems have come into place. New Zealand has been tracing its outbreaks. This has been valuable and has allowed origins be traced quickly and effectively. Maybe I’m too easily impressed by things like the below: “Using genomic analysis, researchers in New Zealand looked at more than half the confirmed cases in the country and found a staggering 277 separate introductions in the early months, but also that only 19 percent of introductions led to more than one additional case.” https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/09/k-overlooked-variable-driving-pandemic/616548/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/09/k-overloo...

timr 6y ago
"Perhaps, but I’m awed with how much we do know and how quickly systems have come into place." Unfortunately, there's a lot of unknown-unknownism going on in that stuff. I've had to watch painfully while people (even "experts") discover things like false-positive rates and PCR cycle count for the first time. It's a bit like living through years of undergraduate science education on fast-forward, but people only read the section headers and never fully grasp the details. Anyone who has actually done a lot of PCR could tell you, for example, that a cycle count in the high-30s is prone to noise, but somehow this became the broad standard we're using in the US. It's relevant to your comment because a lot of these systems are shoddy (as you would expect), and the confidence in their performance is based more on a faith in shiny things than actual science. So we do things like set up large-scale PCR surveillance, and forget to validate the overall false-positive rate of the system before we start drawing huge extrapolations from the data. Years later, we'll find out that the conclusions were wrong, but nobody will be paying attention by then.
- nradov 6y ago
  Exactly. Anyone who has been out in public recently probably has little fragments of dead coronavirus genetic material in their respiratory tract, even if they're not infected or infectious. Torture the PCR machine enough and you can eventually squeeze a false positive out of it.
  - lostlogin 6y ago
    > Anyone who has been out in public recently probably has little fragments of dead coronavirus genetic material in their respiratory tract This problem is probably less relevant in NZ than most places. However thanks for the comment (and it’s parent), I didn’t know these things.
  - timr 6y ago
    Generally agree, but I think the bigger risk is the stray DNA floating around the lab, the medical office where the sample was collected, etc. Any walk-in clinic is almost certainly going to have a cross-contamination risk, for example.

rodamaral 6y ago

Not only we, but pretty much no one in the field. If you think about it, everybody got it all wrong, even the shape of the so called curve that was supposed to be flattened, the real number of cases, the mortality rate, the useless power of lockdowns in big countries, etc.