14 ms·

TWIW has kind of painted themselves into the corner by insisting that anything except biological evidence is irrelevant. The evidence for B.1.1.7 being more tra

by jsnell 6y ago

TWIW has kind of painted themselves into the corner by insisting that anything except biological evidence is irrelevant. The evidence for B.1.1.7 being more transmissive is quite solid, and seems to be getting more so as time goes on. But no matter how strong the statistical data is, it could never be good enough for them. So their policy recommendation ends up as "do nothing at all until there is 100% certain non-circumstantial evidence". The problem is that action now is way more valuable than action in 1-2 months. Mass vaccination is right around the corner, we just need to buy time to get there. If there is a substantially more transmissive variant around, that will make it much harder to buy that time. You need to be able to act on the balance of probabilities, not wait for perfect information. (And their claim that there's nothing we can do differently is just total bunk.) And because they run a popular podcast, their view gets massively amplified by being parroted in internet discussion.

SomeoneFromCA 6y ago
There is some other point I heard recently on Twitter - the appearance of new variants with increasingly faster speed of spread (BTW, if anyone remembers, there was a mutation in Australia, which had shorter incubation - 8 HOURS), may quite soon cause rise of true strains, and, it might potentially lead to the ADE, when suboptimal vaccines will make disease much worth instead of easing it.
- endgame 6y ago
  You're not thinking of the pizza worker in SA who told porkies, are you? https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/21/south-australia-makes-young-pizza-worker-scapegoat-for-covid-19-failures https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/21/south-australi...
  - SomeoneFromCA 6y ago
    Not sure, just read about it somewhere.
- bonzini 6y ago
  > 8 hours That seems weird, to be kind. Source?
  - SomeoneFromCA 6y ago
    Appears to be unreliable info. Anyway, this not my point. My point is ADE, which make vaccination a terrible disaster. ADE is known to happen in some diseases , including SARS-1.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
sigil 6y ago
What could we be doing differently beyond what we already should be doing? Are you referring to things like border closing?
- ALittleLight 6y ago
  I feel we (US) should absolutely be closing the border to the UK, Japan, Italy and whoever else has the new strain/variant. Why would we wait on this when the evidence suggests the new version is more infectious?
  - SomeoneFromCA 6y ago
    There must be some very special political reason for keeping borders with UK open, so even Fauci seem to approve it. I wonder what is it?
    - jtxx 6y ago
      I’ve been thinking about this as well, they also kept their borders open to US citizens despite most countries closing them. Perhaps Brexit closing trade doors with the EU could be resulting in a stronger relationship between the US & UK?
      - vixen99 6y ago
        Britain has closed one trade door but opened a new one with the EU. Specifically they have reached a “zero tariff-zero quota deal”. Not ratified by the British Parliament but no one supposes this won't be done in the next few days before the final break with the EU on the 31st December.
      - Izkata 6y ago
        Yeah, from a bit over a year ago: https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-boris-johnson-brexit-trade-deal-john-bolton-first-in-line-2019-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-boris-johnson-brexit-t... Though AFAIK it's kinda up in the air if Biden would go for the same thing.
m-ee 6y ago
What evidence are you saying is “quite solid”. So far everything has just a been inferred from the epidemiology and the error bars are extremely wide. I wouldn’t call that solid at all.
- SomeoneFromCA 6y ago
  What you consider a solid evidence?
  - anonymouse008 6y ago
    30% of people infected not able to walk a block without losing breath and being exhausted for a day — that’s enough evidence to say the risk profile has changed. Infection rate does not change outcome of recovery (unless it’s resource constrained like vents or meds) and to that point — we’ve walked back the immediacy of vents because they were actually harmful to recovery. So technically the resource management argument should be reduced in weight by some factor.
    - mns 6y ago
      Where is that 30% coming from?
      - anonymouse008 6y ago
        (Sorry GP) asked a personal opinion question and I offered one — My gut feeling tells me this pandemic is suffering from a similar phenomenon in user interface latency. The research shows that if the latency is under a few hundred milliseconds, we believe that we are in control of the device and our cause and effect matters. However, if the latency is longer than some hundred millisecond mark, we think the device is under someone else’s control and that our cause has no effect on the system — though in fact, it is the direct cause. To me, a pandemic kinda follows the same thought — if the disease isn’t having a direct, somewhat immediate effect (intuition says a couple days) to our actions, then it’s hard to issue broad, population level behavioral change that comes with direct costs to life and property - it’s just beyond the timeline for us to accept our actions (not wearing a mask or not distancing) as meaningful inputs to the pandemic system. Personal opinion: I have no trouble wearing a mask even after having covid, but the current gov’t approach is 100% not the way I’d approach this issue. I would approach the mask mandates and business shutdowns this way only if the disease symptoms were severely impacting (so that’s my symptom description with walking a block) a large set of the population (so that’s the 30%, no age brackets needed) — and to me, that number is about 1 in 3. Now the counterpoint to this, is that if there is a tipping point in the proposed pandemic that once it gets to a certain spread, it becomes that 1 in 3 statistic - but I digress, you get the point I believe. Edit: to tie this all together — there’s a lot of talk about increased sanctions from this new variant — but if the severity of symptoms do not change, only the transmissibility - it is a dangerous seed to sow amongst an already incredulous population.
mns 6y ago
Well, the preprint (https://cmmid.github.io/topics/covid19/reports/uk-novel-variant/2020_12_23_Transmissibility_and_severity_of_VOC_202012_01_in_England.pdf https://cmmid.github.io/topics/covid19/reports/uk-novel-vari...) from the UK has this: >Third, we modelled increased susceptibility among children (aged 0-19) by assuming they could be as susceptible as adults (aged 20+) to infection by VOC 202012/01 given exposure. Basically they applied their own model on a lot of noise and data and assumed certain things. It's wild were we are at this point after almost 12 months...Can't wait for the retraction of this, but by then the the harm will be done, and no one will care about the fact that most of the papers on COVID were just bad, rushed and eventually retracted, but the harm and panic they pushed out are already there and we will never be able to get over some of the things that they claimed.
- x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
  Wait, so the HN crowd is still on the "Covid-19 is a hoax" bandwagon?
- lozenge 6y ago
  The study says that model doesn't fit as well as other ones. The model isn't an assumption, it's testing possibilities. The same as any use of statistics involves testing a model.
- rualca 6y ago
  You're showing a fundamental misconception and outright ignorance of what research papers are, and more importantly what science is. For example, you're somehow assuming that academic papers about to be subjected to peer review are somehow milestones which write in stone the truth instead of what they actually are and always have been: a way to share data, observations, theories, hypothesis, and even assumptions on research topics. Researchers share their work not because it's bullet-proof but because it's food for thought that can be used to drive our understanding a bit further. And a paper is retracted only in extreme cases such as gross scientific malpractice such as fraud. Unless you have some info that you refused to share, I see no coherent and rational reason to indicate any of these papers should be retracted. Having strong emotionally-driven positions on a subject is not a reason to demand a paper should be retracted.
tomxor 6y ago
> The problem is that action now is way more valuable than action in 1-2 months [...] If there is a substantially more transmissive variant around, that will make it much harder to buy that time. But which action? I can see two class of possible cause that do not entirely overlap in response: A singular cause such as a strain; or fluctuations as the emergent behavior of a complex dynamic system. If incorrectly attributed to a localised strain, efforts may be ineffectively focused on creating division between larger populations while removing the public's focus on the more evenly distributed measures we are already employing. > You need to be able to act on the balance of probabilities, not wait for perfect information. How about the probabilities between the two class of above cause? We seem to have an innate bias towards inferring 1:1 causal relationships which makes a strain feel like a simple and attractive explanation. This bias fails miserably in the face of dynamic systems where behavior cannot usually be attributed to a single variable... IANAV, but the spread of infectious disease is without a doubt a complex dynamic system from which a significant degree of unpredictable behavior must emerge. To be honest this problem is not even particularly unique to this situation... The world is vast and complex, yet people usually want simple explanations - particularly for undesirable situations, something tangible to blame, a villain... The media continually exploit this desire and I cannot help but feel this is another example. A strain (real or not) makes for an excellent villain and story VS "chaos" which is extremely difficult for any reporter to spin an accessible narrative into.
- jsnell 6y ago
  That seems like just a fancier way of expressing TWIV's "we can't possibly know anything without lab experiments that establish the exact mechanisms, so we should do nothing" philosophy. The undeniable fact is that this variant has successfully replaced other already highly prevalent variants. That needs to be explained somehow. Could it be a founder effect? No. Could it be random chance? No. Of course a stochastic process could converge like this even with no selective advantage eventually. But the change has been too fast and too consistent in this case. Could it be a super-spreading event? No. The change has been continuous, and a single event would cause just a step-change in relative prevalance. Could it be the new variant being more transmissive, or having another similar selective advantage? Yes. Could it be an unspecified emergent behavior? I guess it could. But how are we supposed to reason about something that vague? We have a simple explanation that's consistent with the known facts, I feel that anyone proposing that it's just emergent behavior should be at least a little bit more specific.
tailspin2019 6y ago
> TWIW has kind of painted themselves into the corner by insisting that anything except biological evidence is irrelevant. I definitely don't know enough about this topic to say you're right, but as an avid layman listener of TWIV for 8+ months now, I've recently started thinking along the same lines. With the greatest of respect, Vincent Racaniello, while being clearly a true expert in the field, tends to take a very quick and polarised view to newly presented evidence, and can often sound like he's being overly dismissive to my layman's ears. To the degree where I end up thinking, "it can't be that black and white". I get the sense that sometimes the co-hosts would likely go for a more nuanced perspective, and often they do try to soften the edges around some of his opinions, but the podcast is very much his domain. By the same token, I've often heard him admit that he was wrong. The sign of a good scientist! So there's that. Being in the UK, and having received head-on the full barrage of "communication" from our Government during COVID, I have learnt to be sceptical of the messages they put out, and defaulted to "cynical" when first hearing their report of the new variant at the end of a recent press conference. The more time goes on though, the evidence does seem to be mounting that we should be looking at this very closely and not dismissing it out of hand. > The problem is that action now is way more valuable than action in 1-2 months. Completely agree. We have to use a balance here of scientific evidence, but also strategic thinking - which may not be 100% scientific - and the strategy may be that it's safer to assume this variant is more easily transmissible, and act accordingly, rather than wait for the science to catch up and prove it 100%. All of that said, re. TWIV - it has been a game-changer of a podcast for me during this pandemic. I thoroughly enjoy listening to the hosts, all of whom are generally good natured, clearly very experienced, and doing a good job overall of science communication. No view on COVID is going to be perfect, and in my view their output is a net positive (by far) even despite the above.
- InTheArena 6y ago
  As a long term listener of TWIV (4 years, IIRC), I think the service they have done for the community is priceless, especially once Daniel Griffin started doing his clinical updates. That said, I remember when COVID first started hitting, and their reaction was initially "meh", then like everyone else, it started to dawn on them how bad this was going to be. So still take their voices with a grain of salt. In the latest TWIV, their comment was that the things you would do to prevent COVID are the same no matter if it is a new Strain or not. That's true - but we also have to deal with a increasingly uncomfortable truth - in many places, the COVID incident and death rate are pretty much the same, despite dramatically different legal and social dictates around masking, etc. Italy, France, USA, UK, Spain, Belgium, etc are all within 10% of the total death per million population, for example. There is a weird cycle around COVID. Everyone reports on how awful it is somewhere, people draw a over-broad conclusion about the moral or scientific failures of the continent / state / country / red state / blue state, then that wave of covid waxes in one place, and wanes is another, and the cycle repeats again. This pattern continues despite different travel restrictions, different masking policies (way less then my state in the USA, for example), etc. SO I think the answer is not - we couldn't change anything - but rather - what is really the science behind this - and do we truly understand what is going on? I get that Vincent is burned out and has a knee jerk reaction, if I had to deal with all the insanity around the Hydrochloroquine crap I would be too.
yurlungur 6y ago
Yeah it really depends on how the numbers match up and how much risks you are willing to take given the degree of confidence in those numbers. By current accounts the vaccines will still work against this variant. So the last thing you want to happen is for the virus to catch the vulnerables in the last moment before they are vaccinated and essentially renders the whole vaccination program ineffective. Of course there's the debate of this whole pandemic about the harm to economy and people's lives etc. To me the majority of the damage has already been done and can't be undone. So I'd like the measures to be taken to end this ASAP, even if they are even stricter, and to mitigate the harm as much as possible. But I highly doubt that's what's going to happen. The actual policy effects may be neither here nor there.
- dehrmann 6y ago
  > By current accounts the vaccines will still work against this variant This isn't surprising because the variant hasn't really encountered the vaccines yet, so it's not an adaptation to them.
_cs2017_ 6y ago
Much as I like TWiV, they often present incorrect viewpoints. What you describe is one such example. TWiV suggests that anything short of convincing proof should be ignored. However, every bit of evidence updates our individual confidence to some extent. It's quite silly to draw an arbitrary line at a certain "quality" of evidence, and treat anything below that line as useless. I suspect that in an effort to debunk unreasonable and sensational stories in the media, TWiV got carried away, and started to sweep the subtleties under the carpet. It seems these days, it's really hard to find highly nuanced, carefully balanced, sources of information.
- SomeoneFromCA 6y ago
  They are doing this not the first time. They are extremely aggressive against any hypothesis about the lab origin of the pandemic - and yet it is increasingly becomes acceptable by the mainstream media (BBC News tried independently verify some claims, but had literaly obstacles (physical) on their way,set by Chinese government). Racaniello (?) was big defender of GoF experimentaion on flu during 2012-2015 moratorium on this research; Osterholm AFAIR was against. TWIV are strange people, it turns out. UCSF podcasts are way more professional.
m_mueller 6y ago
A lot of COVID discussions remind me of the history of Beri-Beri in Japan. Recommend everyone to read up on that one. Clinical purists who deny any validity to field data have cost many lifes going back longer than you think.
- inglor_cz 6y ago
  Hi, can you recommend me a good book on that?
  - m_mueller 6y ago
    Good rundown: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/rice-disease-mystery-edo-tokyo-navy-beriberi https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/rice-disease-mystery-e... "Takaki became navy surgeon general in 1885, yet other doctors attacked his theories and questioned his results. The sad result was that while the navy ate barley, the army ate only rice. According to Bay, the use of barley smacked of discredited traditional Japanese medicine to many Western-trained doctors. Plus, recruits were enticed into the army by promises of as much white rice as they could eat." 27 thousand deaths and a decree by the emperor later, and army doctors finally yielded to the evidence.
    - inglor_cz 6y ago
      Thank you! This is actually not-too-dissimilar to the story of scurvy in European navies in a more distant time. It took a lot of lives and most attempts to alleviate it were based on the totally false theory of humors. Doctors can be very resistant to change of paradigma. I wonder what is our scurvy or beri-beri; given how fat and diabetic the developed world has grown, maybe nutrition.

by jsnell 6y ago

SomeoneFromCA 6y ago

There is some other point I heard recently on Twitter - the appearance of new variants with increasingly faster speed of spread (BTW, if anyone remembers, there was a mutation in Australia, which had shorter incubation - 8 HOURS), may quite soon cause rise of true strains, and, it might potentially lead to the ADE, when suboptimal vaccines will make disease much worth instead of easing it.

endgame 6y ago
You're not thinking of the pizza worker in SA who told porkies, are you? https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/21/south-australia-makes-young-pizza-worker-scapegoat-for-covid-19-failures https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/21/south-australi...
- SomeoneFromCA 6y ago
  Not sure, just read about it somewhere.
bonzini 6y ago
> 8 hours That seems weird, to be kind. Source?
- SomeoneFromCA 6y ago
  Appears to be unreliable info. Anyway, this not my point. My point is ADE, which make vaccination a terrible disaster. ADE is known to happen in some diseases , including SARS-1.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]

sigil 6y ago

What could we be doing differently beyond what we already should be doing? Are you referring to things like border closing?

ALittleLight 6y ago
I feel we (US) should absolutely be closing the border to the UK, Japan, Italy and whoever else has the new strain/variant. Why would we wait on this when the evidence suggests the new version is more infectious?
- SomeoneFromCA 6y ago
  There must be some very special political reason for keeping borders with UK open, so even Fauci seem to approve it. I wonder what is it?
  - jtxx 6y ago
    I’ve been thinking about this as well, they also kept their borders open to US citizens despite most countries closing them. Perhaps Brexit closing trade doors with the EU could be resulting in a stronger relationship between the US & UK?
    - vixen99 6y ago
      Britain has closed one trade door but opened a new one with the EU. Specifically they have reached a “zero tariff-zero quota deal”. Not ratified by the British Parliament but no one supposes this won't be done in the next few days before the final break with the EU on the 31st December.
    - Izkata 6y ago
      Yeah, from a bit over a year ago: https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-boris-johnson-brexit-trade-deal-john-bolton-first-in-line-2019-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-boris-johnson-brexit-t... Though AFAIK it's kinda up in the air if Biden would go for the same thing.

m-ee 6y ago

What evidence are you saying is “quite solid”. So far everything has just a been inferred from the epidemiology and the error bars are extremely wide. I wouldn’t call that solid at all.

SomeoneFromCA 6y ago
What you consider a solid evidence?
- anonymouse008 6y ago
  30% of people infected not able to walk a block without losing breath and being exhausted for a day — that’s enough evidence to say the risk profile has changed. Infection rate does not change outcome of recovery (unless it’s resource constrained like vents or meds) and to that point — we’ve walked back the immediacy of vents because they were actually harmful to recovery. So technically the resource management argument should be reduced in weight by some factor.
  - mns 6y ago
    Where is that 30% coming from?
    - anonymouse008 6y ago
      (Sorry GP) asked a personal opinion question and I offered one — My gut feeling tells me this pandemic is suffering from a similar phenomenon in user interface latency. The research shows that if the latency is under a few hundred milliseconds, we believe that we are in control of the device and our cause and effect matters. However, if the latency is longer than some hundred millisecond mark, we think the device is under someone else’s control and that our cause has no effect on the system — though in fact, it is the direct cause. To me, a pandemic kinda follows the same thought — if the disease isn’t having a direct, somewhat immediate effect (intuition says a couple days) to our actions, then it’s hard to issue broad, population level behavioral change that comes with direct costs to life and property - it’s just beyond the timeline for us to accept our actions (not wearing a mask or not distancing) as meaningful inputs to the pandemic system. Personal opinion: I have no trouble wearing a mask even after having covid, but the current gov’t approach is 100% not the way I’d approach this issue. I would approach the mask mandates and business shutdowns this way only if the disease symptoms were severely impacting (so that’s my symptom description with walking a block) a large set of the population (so that’s the 30%, no age brackets needed) — and to me, that number is about 1 in 3. Now the counterpoint to this, is that if there is a tipping point in the proposed pandemic that once it gets to a certain spread, it becomes that 1 in 3 statistic - but I digress, you get the point I believe. Edit: to tie this all together — there’s a lot of talk about increased sanctions from this new variant — but if the severity of symptoms do not change, only the transmissibility - it is a dangerous seed to sow amongst an already incredulous population.

mns 6y ago

Well, the preprint (https://cmmid.github.io/topics/covid19/reports/uk-novel-variant/2020_12_23_Transmissibility_and_severity_of_VOC_202012_01_in_England.pdf https://cmmid.github.io/topics/covid19/reports/uk-novel-vari...) from the UK has this: >Third, we modelled increased susceptibility among children (aged 0-19) by assuming they could be as susceptible as adults (aged 20+) to infection by VOC 202012/01 given exposure. Basically they applied their own model on a lot of noise and data and assumed certain things. It's wild were we are at this point after almost 12 months...Can't wait for the retraction of this, but by then the the harm will be done, and no one will care about the fact that most of the papers on COVID were just bad, rushed and eventually retracted, but the harm and panic they pushed out are already there and we will never be able to get over some of the things that they claimed.

x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
Wait, so the HN crowd is still on the "Covid-19 is a hoax" bandwagon?
lozenge 6y ago
The study says that model doesn't fit as well as other ones. The model isn't an assumption, it's testing possibilities. The same as any use of statistics involves testing a model.
rualca 6y ago
You're showing a fundamental misconception and outright ignorance of what research papers are, and more importantly what science is. For example, you're somehow assuming that academic papers about to be subjected to peer review are somehow milestones which write in stone the truth instead of what they actually are and always have been: a way to share data, observations, theories, hypothesis, and even assumptions on research topics. Researchers share their work not because it's bullet-proof but because it's food for thought that can be used to drive our understanding a bit further. And a paper is retracted only in extreme cases such as gross scientific malpractice such as fraud. Unless you have some info that you refused to share, I see no coherent and rational reason to indicate any of these papers should be retracted. Having strong emotionally-driven positions on a subject is not a reason to demand a paper should be retracted.

tomxor 6y ago

> The problem is that action now is way more valuable than action in 1-2 months [...] If there is a substantially more transmissive variant around, that will make it much harder to buy that time. But which action? I can see two class of possible cause that do not entirely overlap in response: A singular cause such as a strain; or fluctuations as the emergent behavior of a complex dynamic system. If incorrectly attributed to a localised strain, efforts may be ineffectively focused on creating division between larger populations while removing the public's focus on the more evenly distributed measures we are already employing. > You need to be able to act on the balance of probabilities, not wait for perfect information. How about the probabilities between the two class of above cause? We seem to have an innate bias towards inferring 1:1 causal relationships which makes a strain feel like a simple and attractive explanation. This bias fails miserably in the face of dynamic systems where behavior cannot usually be attributed to a single variable... IANAV, but the spread of infectious disease is without a doubt a complex dynamic system from which a significant degree of unpredictable behavior must emerge. To be honest this problem is not even particularly unique to this situation... The world is vast and complex, yet people usually want simple explanations - particularly for undesirable situations, something tangible to blame, a villain... The media continually exploit this desire and I cannot help but feel this is another example. A strain (real or not) makes for an excellent villain and story VS "chaos" which is extremely difficult for any reporter to spin an accessible narrative into.

jsnell 6y ago
That seems like just a fancier way of expressing TWIV's "we can't possibly know anything without lab experiments that establish the exact mechanisms, so we should do nothing" philosophy. The undeniable fact is that this variant has successfully replaced other already highly prevalent variants. That needs to be explained somehow. Could it be a founder effect? No. Could it be random chance? No. Of course a stochastic process could converge like this even with no selective advantage eventually. But the change has been too fast and too consistent in this case. Could it be a super-spreading event? No. The change has been continuous, and a single event would cause just a step-change in relative prevalance. Could it be the new variant being more transmissive, or having another similar selective advantage? Yes. Could it be an unspecified emergent behavior? I guess it could. But how are we supposed to reason about something that vague? We have a simple explanation that's consistent with the known facts, I feel that anyone proposing that it's just emergent behavior should be at least a little bit more specific.

tailspin2019 6y ago

> TWIW has kind of painted themselves into the corner by insisting that anything except biological evidence is irrelevant. I definitely don't know enough about this topic to say you're right, but as an avid layman listener of TWIV for 8+ months now, I've recently started thinking along the same lines. With the greatest of respect, Vincent Racaniello, while being clearly a true expert in the field, tends to take a very quick and polarised view to newly presented evidence, and can often sound like he's being overly dismissive to my layman's ears. To the degree where I end up thinking, "it can't be that black and white". I get the sense that sometimes the co-hosts would likely go for a more nuanced perspective, and often they do try to soften the edges around some of his opinions, but the podcast is very much his domain. By the same token, I've often heard him admit that he was wrong. The sign of a good scientist! So there's that. Being in the UK, and having received head-on the full barrage of "communication" from our Government during COVID, I have learnt to be sceptical of the messages they put out, and defaulted to "cynical" when first hearing their report of the new variant at the end of a recent press conference. The more time goes on though, the evidence does seem to be mounting that we should be looking at this very closely and not dismissing it out of hand. > The problem is that action now is way more valuable than action in 1-2 months. Completely agree. We have to use a balance here of scientific evidence, but also strategic thinking - which may not be 100% scientific - and the strategy may be that it's safer to assume this variant is more easily transmissible, and act accordingly, rather than wait for the science to catch up and prove it 100%. All of that said, re. TWIV - it has been a game-changer of a podcast for me during this pandemic. I thoroughly enjoy listening to the hosts, all of whom are generally good natured, clearly very experienced, and doing a good job overall of science communication. No view on COVID is going to be perfect, and in my view their output is a net positive (by far) even despite the above.

InTheArena 6y ago
As a long term listener of TWIV (4 years, IIRC), I think the service they have done for the community is priceless, especially once Daniel Griffin started doing his clinical updates. That said, I remember when COVID first started hitting, and their reaction was initially "meh", then like everyone else, it started to dawn on them how bad this was going to be. So still take their voices with a grain of salt. In the latest TWIV, their comment was that the things you would do to prevent COVID are the same no matter if it is a new Strain or not. That's true - but we also have to deal with a increasingly uncomfortable truth - in many places, the COVID incident and death rate are pretty much the same, despite dramatically different legal and social dictates around masking, etc. Italy, France, USA, UK, Spain, Belgium, etc are all within 10% of the total death per million population, for example. There is a weird cycle around COVID. Everyone reports on how awful it is somewhere, people draw a over-broad conclusion about the moral or scientific failures of the continent / state / country / red state / blue state, then that wave of covid waxes in one place, and wanes is another, and the cycle repeats again. This pattern continues despite different travel restrictions, different masking policies (way less then my state in the USA, for example), etc. SO I think the answer is not - we couldn't change anything - but rather - what is really the science behind this - and do we truly understand what is going on? I get that Vincent is burned out and has a knee jerk reaction, if I had to deal with all the insanity around the Hydrochloroquine crap I would be too.

yurlungur 6y ago

Yeah it really depends on how the numbers match up and how much risks you are willing to take given the degree of confidence in those numbers. By current accounts the vaccines will still work against this variant. So the last thing you want to happen is for the virus to catch the vulnerables in the last moment before they are vaccinated and essentially renders the whole vaccination program ineffective. Of course there's the debate of this whole pandemic about the harm to economy and people's lives etc. To me the majority of the damage has already been done and can't be undone. So I'd like the measures to be taken to end this ASAP, even if they are even stricter, and to mitigate the harm as much as possible. But I highly doubt that's what's going to happen. The actual policy effects may be neither here nor there.

dehrmann 6y ago
> By current accounts the vaccines will still work against this variant This isn't surprising because the variant hasn't really encountered the vaccines yet, so it's not an adaptation to them.

_cs2017_ 6y ago

Much as I like TWiV, they often present incorrect viewpoints. What you describe is one such example. TWiV suggests that anything short of convincing proof should be ignored. However, every bit of evidence updates our individual confidence to some extent. It's quite silly to draw an arbitrary line at a certain "quality" of evidence, and treat anything below that line as useless. I suspect that in an effort to debunk unreasonable and sensational stories in the media, TWiV got carried away, and started to sweep the subtleties under the carpet. It seems these days, it's really hard to find highly nuanced, carefully balanced, sources of information.

SomeoneFromCA 6y ago
They are doing this not the first time. They are extremely aggressive against any hypothesis about the lab origin of the pandemic - and yet it is increasingly becomes acceptable by the mainstream media (BBC News tried independently verify some claims, but had literaly obstacles (physical) on their way,set by Chinese government). Racaniello (?) was big defender of GoF experimentaion on flu during 2012-2015 moratorium on this research; Osterholm AFAIR was against. TWIV are strange people, it turns out. UCSF podcasts are way more professional.

m_mueller 6y ago

A lot of COVID discussions remind me of the history of Beri-Beri in Japan. Recommend everyone to read up on that one. Clinical purists who deny any validity to field data have cost many lifes going back longer than you think.

inglor_cz 6y ago
Hi, can you recommend me a good book on that?
- m_mueller 6y ago
  Good rundown: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/rice-disease-mystery-edo-tokyo-navy-beriberi https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/rice-disease-mystery-e... "Takaki became navy surgeon general in 1885, yet other doctors attacked his theories and questioned his results. The sad result was that while the navy ate barley, the army ate only rice. According to Bay, the use of barley smacked of discredited traditional Japanese medicine to many Western-trained doctors. Plus, recruits were enticed into the army by promises of as much white rice as they could eat." 27 thousand deaths and a decree by the emperor later, and army doctors finally yielded to the evidence.
  - inglor_cz 6y ago
    Thank you! This is actually not-too-dissimilar to the story of scurvy in European navies in a more distant time. It took a lot of lives and most attempts to alleviate it were based on the totally false theory of humors. Doctors can be very resistant to change of paradigma. I wonder what is our scurvy or beri-beri; given how fat and diabetic the developed world has grown, maybe nutrition.