7 ms·

Disclaimer: I'm Irish, working in tech but my hobby that gets me more of a social life is involvement with an Irish political party. The new variant accounted

by Fordec 6y ago

Disclaimer: I'm Irish, working in tech but my hobby that gets me more of a social life is involvement with an Irish political party. The new variant accounted for 10-25% of these new cases over the period of that spike. The spike happened two weeks after Christmas when lock-down restrictions were lifted, as planned in October, so people could have a respite after 9 months of all this. Did the government misjudge just how much people would socially interact? You bet. But to claim that this event is a sign of things to come is to willfully ignore what Irish medical professionals (NPHET) are saying about what the root cause has been and fully buy into the government politicians attempts to cover their butts by blaming the new strain and not their own operational strategy. Also note that it is coming up to three weeks since Christmas and new infections today is half of what it was last week already and dropping.

randompwd 6y ago
Also let's not forget the porous border with Northern Ireland, which is suffering from London's stupid rules.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
cactus2093 6y ago
What everyone seems to be assuming is that this new strain will cause a constant increase in the reproduction number R of ~50% in every situation. I haven't really seen any discussion of if and why that is actually a good extrapolation to make. So for example in a specific situation, with a specific type of intermingling of a population in which the R value was, say, 1.2, we think the new strain caused that to increase to an R value of 1.8. How does it necessarily follow that taking intervention measures that bring the R value of the base strains down to, say, 0.8 would bring the R value of the new strain to exactly 1.2? There are just so many factors involved, it doesn't seem like this could possibly be knowable right now. So there may be some hope that things like getting everyone N95 masks and requiring their use, and closing down indoor activities, which are good measures to control the current strains anyway, could also bring down the reproduction number of the new strain below 1 as well. However, this is all a purely academic exercise anyway. Even in places that are being "aggressive" in countering the virus like San Francisco, we have done exactly nothing to react to new information in the past 1.5 months. Our "lockdown", which is entirely optional and has no teeth, is clearly not working, but we have neither removed it or strengthened it. The health department has exactly zero plans regarding the vaccine. It feels like we've just given up altogether, and we're praying that the private market saves us by somehow distributing the vaccines effectively. And on top of all that, we've handicapped the private market by making it illegal to distribute the vaccine to the vast majority of the population, even the elderly and vulnerable groups!
- potshot 6y ago
  > The health department has exactly zero plans regarding the vaccine I'm in San Francisco and a family member runs a specialty clinic here. They worked directly with the health department last week to get their staff vaccinated as part of Phase 1a described here: https://sf.gov/covid-19-vaccine-san-francisco https://sf.gov/covid-19-vaccine-san-francisco I'm not saying the performance so far is outstanding or good, but it's simply not true that the health department "has exactly zero plans regarding the vaccine".
  - cactus2093 6y ago
    I mean members of the board of supervisors can't even figure out if the health department has an actual plan or what it is https://twitter.com/MattHaneySF/status/1349189438241325057 https://twitter.com/MattHaneySF/status/1349189438241325057 I guess "exactly zero" is poor wording, but they seem to only have a very loosely defined plan that hasn't bothered going beyond phase 1A tier 1 even though vaccines started being distributed a month ago and 2/3 of them statewide are just sitting around.
- bonzini 6y ago
  There are cases where restrictions have an additive rather than multiplicative effect on the reproduction number, but after better modeling they often end up as ultimately multiplicative. For example, let's say you observe "closing schools" to bring Rt from 3 to 2.7, "closing offices" to bring Rt from 3 to 2.3, and "closing both" to bring RT from 3 to 2. What's really happening is not that the two restrictions have a -0.7 and -0.3 effect. Instead, the two apply to almost disjunct subsets of people. Therefore it is more accurate to say that the "closing both" restriction is a *0.66 reduction of the reproduction number, while "closing schools" and "closing offices" only apply that 0.66 factor to a subset of the population. What is really additive is the amount of people affected by the restriction.
lynchdt 6y ago
Also Irish. +1 on your assessment here. The virulent strain narrative was peddled by the Irish government who went against medical advice and tried to deflect blame. The evidence doesn’t support the narrative. I think the COVID-fatigue angle is quite interesting though. As critical as I am of the government they were under a lot of pressure from the populous to provide some sort of respite.
- ls612 6y ago
  Isn’t this last bit in some sense a good thing? Representative government changing policies to reflect a shift in the population’s preference after ten months of dealing with these restrictions?
  - Barrin92 6y ago
    Representative government caving to demands when the demands are terrible, like in this case, is not a good thing. In that moment what is needed is enough guts to see the measures through and fend interest groups off. Loss of leadership and movement towards "the customer is king" politics is responsible for a lot of mistakes in the response to this virus.
    - mam2 6y ago
      Hindsight is 10/10.
      - mschuster91 6y ago
        Uh, there was and is no "hindsight" involved here. The scientific consensus about coronavirus and how to fight it (wearing masks, lockdowns and contact tracing) was clear pretty shortly after the whole drama began. The problem was politicians, not just in the US, didn't have the guts to tell and explain their citizens that. The governments that did (New Zealand) or had prior epidemics experience / a population with a high compliance rate/trust in government (Japan, Taiwan) fared pretty well, as did the governments that resorted to authoritarian scale (China, Vietnam, Thailand). For what it's worth even European countries such as Italy showed that hard lockdowns were and are effective, but politicians chose to disregard that evidence and prayed for the second wave to never appear...
raverbashing 6y ago
Actually the new strain is already responsible for 45% of infections in Ireland (as per yesterday's NPHET briefing) while it was 10% at the beginning of the year IIRC So yeah it's not the whole story, but it is an important part of it.
- randomsearch 6y ago
  There really is no convincing evidence in the public domain that new variants have caused the increase in cases, and there is a very convincing alternative explanation that opening up the shops three weeks before Christmas then relaxing the rules over the holidays (the u turn coming too late) would cause it. If the new variant caused a big increase in R then I doubt the lockdown would have brought R under 1 in the U.K., which it clearly has, surprisingly from just about after Christmas. I started out healthily sceptical that the new variant was significantly more infectious, and now I’m extremely suspicious.
  - jsnell 6y ago
    Really? I would say the evidence is incredibly strong at this point, and it's very hard to explain it spreading this successfully via any effect other than selective advantage. The "founder effect" and "post facto identification" explanations are just not credible any more, given that the explosive growth of B.1.1.7 compared to the wildtype has continued for almost a month after it was raised as a concern, and the pattern having now repeated in at least three other countries with enough data to make prevalence estimates (Ireland, Denmark and Switzerland). What alternative explanation would you propose? If the new variant is 50% more transmissive, then to get R to 1 requires measures that would previously have taken R to about 0.66. Clearly that is possible to achieve. But it's also not really enough. Can they get it significantly below 1, and for how long?
wiredfool 6y ago
I'm not sure that it's really a 2 week thing. It was going badly before Christmas, compared to earlier, and the break of Christmas/St Stephens made a gap in the testing, and then it slammed upwards over the next week, overwhelming the IT and health professionals dealing with turning positive swab numbers into confirmed cases. By NYE, there were 9k tests in limbo that weren't in the stats. At the point where the daily positives get over 2k, that's with a different test population. They're no longer testing contacts of people with COVID, they're testing people with symptoms. The positive rate went from 8% -> 40% in that time. Anecdotally, I had no 1st order contacts with Covid (i.e., I know them well, rather than my sister's friend sort of thing), and over Christmas that went to more like 5 in three separate clusters.
me_me_me 6y ago
Also worth mentioning that due to low infection rates beforehand, the Irish population is more primed to be hit with bigger spike. Infection has more chance to spread as only few people are immune. Other EU countries that already had large numbers of their people immune after recovering from covid. And yeah, it was a perfect storm of badluck. Covid fatigue, xmas break, people from UK returning (with no oversight, spreading new strain) and of course Christmas dinner with uncles and aunts from each county :D

by Fordec 6y ago

randompwd 6y ago

Also let's not forget the porous border with Northern Ireland, which is suffering from London's stupid rules.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

cactus2093 6y ago

What everyone seems to be assuming is that this new strain will cause a constant increase in the reproduction number R of ~50% in every situation. I haven't really seen any discussion of if and why that is actually a good extrapolation to make. So for example in a specific situation, with a specific type of intermingling of a population in which the R value was, say, 1.2, we think the new strain caused that to increase to an R value of 1.8. How does it necessarily follow that taking intervention measures that bring the R value of the base strains down to, say, 0.8 would bring the R value of the new strain to exactly 1.2? There are just so many factors involved, it doesn't seem like this could possibly be knowable right now. So there may be some hope that things like getting everyone N95 masks and requiring their use, and closing down indoor activities, which are good measures to control the current strains anyway, could also bring down the reproduction number of the new strain below 1 as well. However, this is all a purely academic exercise anyway. Even in places that are being "aggressive" in countering the virus like San Francisco, we have done exactly nothing to react to new information in the past 1.5 months. Our "lockdown", which is entirely optional and has no teeth, is clearly not working, but we have neither removed it or strengthened it. The health department has exactly zero plans regarding the vaccine. It feels like we've just given up altogether, and we're praying that the private market saves us by somehow distributing the vaccines effectively. And on top of all that, we've handicapped the private market by making it illegal to distribute the vaccine to the vast majority of the population, even the elderly and vulnerable groups!

potshot 6y ago
> The health department has exactly zero plans regarding the vaccine I'm in San Francisco and a family member runs a specialty clinic here. They worked directly with the health department last week to get their staff vaccinated as part of Phase 1a described here: https://sf.gov/covid-19-vaccine-san-francisco https://sf.gov/covid-19-vaccine-san-francisco I'm not saying the performance so far is outstanding or good, but it's simply not true that the health department "has exactly zero plans regarding the vaccine".
- cactus2093 6y ago
  I mean members of the board of supervisors can't even figure out if the health department has an actual plan or what it is https://twitter.com/MattHaneySF/status/1349189438241325057 https://twitter.com/MattHaneySF/status/1349189438241325057 I guess "exactly zero" is poor wording, but they seem to only have a very loosely defined plan that hasn't bothered going beyond phase 1A tier 1 even though vaccines started being distributed a month ago and 2/3 of them statewide are just sitting around.
bonzini 6y ago
There are cases where restrictions have an additive rather than multiplicative effect on the reproduction number, but after better modeling they often end up as ultimately multiplicative. For example, let's say you observe "closing schools" to bring Rt from 3 to 2.7, "closing offices" to bring Rt from 3 to 2.3, and "closing both" to bring RT from 3 to 2. What's really happening is not that the two restrictions have a -0.7 and -0.3 effect. Instead, the two apply to almost disjunct subsets of people. Therefore it is more accurate to say that the "closing both" restriction is a *0.66 reduction of the reproduction number, while "closing schools" and "closing offices" only apply that 0.66 factor to a subset of the population. What is really additive is the amount of people affected by the restriction.

lynchdt 6y ago

Also Irish. +1 on your assessment here. The virulent strain narrative was peddled by the Irish government who went against medical advice and tried to deflect blame. The evidence doesn’t support the narrative. I think the COVID-fatigue angle is quite interesting though. As critical as I am of the government they were under a lot of pressure from the populous to provide some sort of respite.

ls612 6y ago
Isn’t this last bit in some sense a good thing? Representative government changing policies to reflect a shift in the population’s preference after ten months of dealing with these restrictions?
- Barrin92 6y ago
  Representative government caving to demands when the demands are terrible, like in this case, is not a good thing. In that moment what is needed is enough guts to see the measures through and fend interest groups off. Loss of leadership and movement towards "the customer is king" politics is responsible for a lot of mistakes in the response to this virus.
  - mam2 6y ago
    Hindsight is 10/10.
    - mschuster91 6y ago
      Uh, there was and is no "hindsight" involved here. The scientific consensus about coronavirus and how to fight it (wearing masks, lockdowns and contact tracing) was clear pretty shortly after the whole drama began. The problem was politicians, not just in the US, didn't have the guts to tell and explain their citizens that. The governments that did (New Zealand) or had prior epidemics experience / a population with a high compliance rate/trust in government (Japan, Taiwan) fared pretty well, as did the governments that resorted to authoritarian scale (China, Vietnam, Thailand). For what it's worth even European countries such as Italy showed that hard lockdowns were and are effective, but politicians chose to disregard that evidence and prayed for the second wave to never appear...

raverbashing 6y ago

Actually the new strain is already responsible for 45% of infections in Ireland (as per yesterday's NPHET briefing) while it was 10% at the beginning of the year IIRC So yeah it's not the whole story, but it is an important part of it.

randomsearch 6y ago
There really is no convincing evidence in the public domain that new variants have caused the increase in cases, and there is a very convincing alternative explanation that opening up the shops three weeks before Christmas then relaxing the rules over the holidays (the u turn coming too late) would cause it. If the new variant caused a big increase in R then I doubt the lockdown would have brought R under 1 in the U.K., which it clearly has, surprisingly from just about after Christmas. I started out healthily sceptical that the new variant was significantly more infectious, and now I’m extremely suspicious.
- jsnell 6y ago
  Really? I would say the evidence is incredibly strong at this point, and it's very hard to explain it spreading this successfully via any effect other than selective advantage. The "founder effect" and "post facto identification" explanations are just not credible any more, given that the explosive growth of B.1.1.7 compared to the wildtype has continued for almost a month after it was raised as a concern, and the pattern having now repeated in at least three other countries with enough data to make prevalence estimates (Ireland, Denmark and Switzerland). What alternative explanation would you propose? If the new variant is 50% more transmissive, then to get R to 1 requires measures that would previously have taken R to about 0.66. Clearly that is possible to achieve. But it's also not really enough. Can they get it significantly below 1, and for how long?

wiredfool 6y ago

I'm not sure that it's really a 2 week thing. It was going badly before Christmas, compared to earlier, and the break of Christmas/St Stephens made a gap in the testing, and then it slammed upwards over the next week, overwhelming the IT and health professionals dealing with turning positive swab numbers into confirmed cases. By NYE, there were 9k tests in limbo that weren't in the stats. At the point where the daily positives get over 2k, that's with a different test population. They're no longer testing contacts of people with COVID, they're testing people with symptoms. The positive rate went from 8% -> 40% in that time. Anecdotally, I had no 1st order contacts with Covid (i.e., I know them well, rather than my sister's friend sort of thing), and over Christmas that went to more like 5 in three separate clusters.

me_me_me 6y ago

Also worth mentioning that due to low infection rates beforehand, the Irish population is more primed to be hit with bigger spike. Infection has more chance to spread as only few people are immune. Other EU countries that already had large numbers of their people immune after recovering from covid. And yeah, it was a perfect storm of badluck. Covid fatigue, xmas break, people from UK returning (with no oversight, spreading new strain) and of course Christmas dinner with uncles and aunts from each county :D