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How 700 Epidemiologists Are Living Now, and What They Think Is Next
- leetrout 6y agoAnother source that wasn’t paywalled for me https://news.yahoo.com/700-epidemiologists-living-now-think-201543203.html https://news.yahoo.com/700-epidemiologists-living-now-think-...
- xchaotic 6y agoTl;dr it will take a lot longer than most people expect to get back to ‘normal’. Summer 2021 being normal is a maybe at best.
- IAmGraydon 6y agoThe article said “many years”. Summer 2021 is a pipe dream. Early 2022 is a very optimistic possibility.
- maxerickson 6y agoThe US likely has something like 50 million people with acquired immunity (14.5 million have tested positive) and another 50 million people are slated to be vaccinated by March (this estimate is assuming weeks after the second doses), with tens of millions more each following month, so it can be sometime next year that the pandemic is waning here.
- claudeganon 6y agoI’m skeptical that vaccine production and distribution will in the US will scale that well. I certainly hope that it will happen, but given that the country has failed on just about every other pandemic related front tempers my perspective.
- maxerickson 6y agoThe cold chain for the Pfizer vaccine is tougher, but otherwise it's not radically different than flu vaccination (we do ~150 million of those each year in the US). The production estimates are coming from the vaccine companies also, so less likely to be victims of the administrative decline.
- claudeganon 6y agoEven achieving something comparable to prior year’s flu vaccination would not bring us anywhere close to the herd immunity threshold though. I’m not as concerned with production of the vaccine itself as the logistics involved. I find it hard to believe that a country that otherwise can’t deliver the basic protective necessities to frontline workers is suddenly going to pull out a logistical miracle out of their hats.
- maxerickson 6y agoSomething like 5 or 10 million people are acquiring natural immunity each week right now (it's maybe not that high, but there are 1 million+ positive tests each week, with quite high positivity rates, which indicates testing isn't sufficient to find all cases). It's a grim statistic, but the raging spread of the virus is accelerating the timetable for reaching herd immunity. 140 million vaccinated (approx the number of flu vaccinations administered last year) + tens of millions with natural immunity does put us close to the herd immunity threshold (the number of people that have immunity from an infection has big error bars of course, and there will likely be overlap)
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- free2OSS 6y agoNo Politicians framed the issue like this. Canceling school in 3 month bursts is a political move because it's much harder to tell a generation of parents their kids won't return to school for 2-3 years. Shame on our politicians, shame of Fauci for not making this clear.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoI think we’ve gotta start thinking about how to make people more comfortable with living freely post-vaccine. I’ve always been concerned about this as a downside of the “this is a super terrible disease” messaging - there’s a huge range of outcomes where the disease spread is merely mitigated rather than halted, and we’ve trained a lot of high-conscientiousness people to not accept that as a success. When I see experts talking about how they won’t ever go back to normal, I’m concerned about how much of the population will get stuck in that rut with them.
- IAmGraydon 6y agoThe experts are full of it if they say they’ll never return to normal. This is akin to saying “I’m never drinking again” after waking up with a hangover. Humans are programmed to quickly forget rare or non-recurring negative stimuli. It’s called fear extinction, and it does its job very well to keep us taking risks and seeking reward.
- throwaway2245 6y agoEpidemiologists likely do know something about human behaviour. One quote from this article: “For some, it has gone back to normal, and because of this, it will be two to three years before things are back to normal for the cautious, at least in the U.S.”
- michaelt 6y agoIsn't that partly just a prediction of vaccine production/uptake/effectiveness rates? After all, if the world can only produce 2 billion doses of vaccine a year it'll be a few years before international travel is back to normal. Some of the people surveyed may even have responded before vaccine clinical trial results came out...
- jasonv 6y agoIn the US, the rate of passport holding is pretty low.. life can return to “normal” here without a lot of international travel. Those who travel internationally may be a different subset when it comes to “back to normal”. Edit: “According to Census and State Department data, 21.4 million passports were issued in 2016, which is the most ever. That means 42 percent of Americans hold a passport, a growth of 15 percent since 2007. In 1990, only four percent of Americans had one.”
- nickthemagicman 6y agoThis virus has only killed 20,000 people under the age of 55 in America. That's way less than car accidents and the flu, etc. This is not a pandemic if you're under the age of 55 this isn't even the flu. So any epidemiologist under the age of 55 who is fearful... I wouldn't trust their math skills. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm
- kakkan 6y agoWhen you put the count like this, it gives you perspective. Do you have a source for this?
- nickthemagicman 6y agoHere's the link to the fact that only 20,000 people have died of Covid under the age of 55. Under the age of 55 is 80% of the population in America. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm
- ceejayoz 6y ago“I don’t care if my actions kill old/at-risk people” is indeed a perspective, but I’d argue it’s a bad one.
- eddiegoode 6y agoFriend of OP. He said his link to the Center for Disease Control age data was shadowbanned for some reason. Heres actual recent CDC data showing that only 20k people have died of Covid in the almost year so far. https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Death-Counts-by-Sex-Age-and-S/9bhg-hcku https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Death-Counts-...
- morelisp 6y agoComparing the entire flu population during completely unlimited movement to COVID in a healthier group during restricted movement is fraudulent and you should be ashamed of yourself and your propaganda.
- IAmGraydon 6y ago> The epidemiologists have almost entirely avoided other parts of pre-pandemic life — including activities that many Americans are doing now. Almost none said they had attended a sporting event, play or concert; met up with someone they didn’t know well; or attended a wedding or funeral. Sorry, where are these people living where it’s even possible to do these things?
- wolfram74 6y agoAre you asking in the sense, how are they accomplishing this, or how are they even given the choice of this? Because in the US, a lot of those things are still on the table.
- chollida1 6y agoWell Europe has people in soccer/football stadiums. The US has people in football(American style) in stadiums. The states has "famously" had several country music concerts that, well probably not a wise idea to attend, were packed. And I feel pretty confident saying that practically every country on the face of hte planet has atleast one wedding a day. I mean, I've been to 4 funerals over the summer and I live in Canada. Where are you that there are no funerals or visitations to attend?
- o-__-o 6y agoI see you don’t live in the south. Just got off a FaceTime with my sister in law who is currently at a farmers market with her kids. I am intrigued how others would respond to this, I just had to watch on in disbelief (these kind of actions are the norm down here)
- derwiki 6y agoI'd amend "south" to "rural" because I think it's similar in Montana and Ohio
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoFarmers markets were allowed and well-trafficked, even during lockdown, in every state I'm familiar with.
- sradman 6y ago> Of 23 activities of daily life that the survey asked about, there were only three that the majority of respondents had done in the last month: gathering outdoors with friends; bringing in mail without precautions; and running errands, like going to the grocery store or pharmacy. > Almost none said they had attended a sporting event, play or concert; met up with someone they didn’t know well; or attended a wedding or funeral. > Three-quarters of respondents said they planned to spend Christmas, Hanukkah or other winter holidays only with members of their household, or not celebrate at all, similar to how they spent Thanksgiving. > Most scientists say around 70 percent of the population will need to be immune for the United States to reach herd immunity, when the virus slows down significantly or stops.
- mynegation 6y agoA reminder: 70% number is probably based on the estimates of R_0~3.0 for Covid-19 (1-1/3). Even with partial vaccination some activities can be carefully resumed as long as R_t stays under 1.0.
- neom 6y agoI wish they would state what a "minority" of the epidemiologists is. 345 (slightly under half), that's a lot different in my mind to say, 7.
- a4444f 6y agoWhat is the difference between linguistic virus and RNA virus?
- a4444f 6y agoanswer: downvotes
- carapace 6y ago> But epidemiologists are a very cautious group. No... they are the correct norm of cautious, it's the rest of us that are blithely charging around recklessly with wild abandon. It's like how on Star Trek they were always beaming to new planets in their regular uniforms with no spacesuits or anything. The gimmick or conceit there was that the transporter filtered out nasty bugs during rematerialization. Until we have "magic" bug filters jet-setting is a disease vector. People are talking about "returning to normal" but there's no normal to return to: mass international rapid transit is not normal. Huge cities with millions of people are not normal. Nothing about the last ~N centuries is normal (for whatever value of N up to about 120 or so? Younger Dryas happened about 12Ky ago, eh? The Potbelly Hill dates from around the 10th millennium BCE[1]. Somewhere around there we started in with farms and cities. This has been the blink of an eye in evolutionary and geological timeframes. Everything we're doing is new and radical!) What I'm getting at is this: this won't be the last virus. Remember swine flu? SARS? Ebola? Zika? Hantavirus? Heck, Lyme? Polio is making a comeback, that's the one that paralyses children. We keep expanding into new wilderness. The "attack surface" of humanity is growing exponentially. There's no normal to go back to. (I really do hate to be such a downer, but I just don't see a lot of people taking the long view. Everyone is understandably eager to get back to pretending that viruses don't exist, but they do. Connect the goddamned dots.) [1] Göbekli Tepe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe
- StavrosK 6y ago> There's no normal to go back to. I mean, sure, if you define "normal" as something other than what was there before, okay, but then it becomes a moot point. There is a clear meaning to what "normal" means when people say it, and it's "whatever we were doing before". Who defines what "normal" really is, anyway?
- carapace 6y agoThat's what I mean, what we were doing before was exponential growth and the Industrial Revolution resulting in, specifically, mass international travel and huge numbers of people crammed together into mega-cities. The recent viral outbreaks aren't a one-off: they are the beginning of the new normal. We're victims of our own success.
- free2OSS 6y agoEpidemiologists are the experts, I'm baffled why so many people are asking physicians about coronavirus. Physicians are not scientists, they aren't supposed to make policy decisions. It goes to show how few people understand what Science is and probably more dangerously that Medical is mistakenly thought as Science. (Medical is older than the scientific revolution,it's a hybrid of Tradition/Authority/Art/Science)
- rscho 6y agoEpidemiologists are also MDs. And epidemiology also is a hybrid of the kind you mention. Dogmas exist in every science, and although it is true that clinical medicine is far behind other disciplines regarding getting rid of dogmas, things are improving steadily. Epidemiologists don't always understand better regarding what to do in practice. They understand things in their own manner shaped by their profession and that's exactly what we ask of them.
- jhbadger 6y agoSome are MDs, but most have a Ph.D or MPH (Master of Public Health) instead or in addition to a MD. Epidemiology is a science and one that is not well covered in medical schools.
- rscho 6y agoEpidemiology is a science as much as for instance infectiology is a science. An aggregate of best practices relying only partially on hard (experimental or mathematical) science. For example IMO, the Bradford Hill criteria are backed by informal reasoning and although seemingly trivially logical, are very much dogmatic in nature. It's true that many epidemiologists are not MDs, though. I formulated my thoughts badly in that regard.
- giardini 6y agoree2OSS says>"Epidemiologists are the experts"< Epidemiology of COVID-19 has been a train wreck. Indeed we must ask if epidemiology is a science at all. Interviewing 700 epidemiologists is a fool's errand providing no useful information. One might as well simplify the selection criteria and interview 700 (or better, simply 30) people of above-average intelligence. ree2OSS says>"Physicians are not scientists, they aren't supposed to make policy decisions."< I agree with the first sentence but not with the second. Most medical organizations/hospitals/institutions/clinics are headed up by physicians who make policy decisions all day long.
- hanoz 6y agoThese epidemiologists have some strange priorities in life. Only about 3% of them would have, if needed, attended a wedding or funeral. Ten times as many would have gone for a haircut.
- Pfhreak 6y agoMaybe they are better at assessing risk and understand the risk involved in attending a wedding or funeral.
- dzdt 6y agoA haircut exposes them to probably one person in close contact, with precautions like masks. A wedding or funeral has potentially a large number of close contacts and presents ethical issues of supporting the event even if the epidemiologist participating will take personal precautions.
- PaulRobinson 6y agoAll this tells you is that they believe weddings and funerals are likely higher risk than getting a haircut. I would agree that's a sensible assessment.
- ghaff 6y agoThe question though was what they had personally done. I am a bit surprised haircut was so high, not because a haircut is likely especially risky but because--to me--it seems so unnecessary, especially without being out and about a lot. Going to a dentist for a cleaning or whatever is maybe higher risk (more contact but medical professionals) but it also seems more important to stick with your schedule than getting your hair cut is. (Their answers also are presumably influenced by how frequently they would normally do the activities in question as well as the degree to which they're available at the moment. During normal times I'd be much more likely to have recently flown someplace than gone to a wedding or even a live sporting event.)
- subpixel 6y agoIf a funeral involved just two people, as does a haircut, more may have been down to attend.
- jbgyhv 6y agoCan you keep your highly politicol covid conspiracy theories off hackernews please?
- haltingproblem 6y agoTheir predictions of future human behavior are bunk. First, look at the heterogeneity in behavior across the epidemiologists - indoor dining, hanging out without social distancing and going to gyms! This lack of consensus indicates that epidemiologists do not think alike and hence that field is not a settled science. Second, life has mostly returned the normal in the far east where they have successfully contained the virus so far. This is before a vaccine. Human beings have short memories otherwise humans would not indulge in repeated destructive behavior on an individual (alcoholism) or societal level (bubbles, mass hysteria). Finally, after past pandemics like the Spanish flu, life did return to normal. The great depression more scarred human behavior than the Spanish flu ever did. Epidemiologists are essential during a pandemic to help us understand the virus, the properties of its spread and build models of human behavior along with risks/costs. We need to factor in their input along with advice from others. However, the notion that Epidemiologists are the best mediators of our behavior during and after this epidemic has been falsified. Why? Exhibit 1: Masking The consensus at the beginning of the pandemic and through most of the summer was that masks are not essential because we lack the evidence of it. Folks like Taleb et.al, Zeynep, Balaji, Howard et.al in the US who understand complex systems argued for masks back in Jan/Feb. This skepticism of masking because of lack of evidence probably bumped up death count by 50-90%. Exhibit 2: Epidemiology Models The models have been greatly off and as a modeler in an unrelated field, I could see the heterogeneity in the model predictions across models and intra-model volatility. When a bunch of models differ, the question is not which is right but are they all wrong? A lot of the models like the one from Imperial had predictions that moved by a lot and never converged to the observed behavior.
- crusty 6y ago"...look at the heterogeneity in behavior across the epidemiologists - indoor dining, hanging out without social distancing and going to gyms! This lack of consensus indicates that epidemiologists do not think alike and hence that field is not a settled science. Scientists exhibiting different personal behaviors has very minimal connection to scientific consensus. Is settled science that smoking causes lung disease and yet some doctors smoke. Just because you know what the "safe" behavior is doesn't mean you're going to do it. And if the question is, which of these have you done and not which of these do you think is safe to do, then the question isn't about best practices at all.