9 ms·

A group of renown epidemiologists from Stanford, Oxford and Harvard demand: "Those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal

by Capira 6y ago

A group of renown epidemiologists from Stanford, Oxford and Harvard demand: "Those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal." http://gbdeclaration.org/ http://gbdeclaration.org/

mikeyouse 6y ago
Lol “renowned epidemiologists” who insisted the total US mortality would remain under 100k deaths. These clowns can be safely ignored.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- timr 6y ago
  None of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration said anything of the sort. This kind of çomment is unhelpful and uncharitable. It's an ad hominem attack.
  - mikeyouse 6y ago
    If you want to play the childish “list off logical fallacies” game, the original post was an appeal to authority. Feel free to read up on all the “amazing” work done by the signatories and their colleagues at Hoover and other beclowned institutions but whats the point of litigating something that’s been so conclusively proven already.
    - timr 6y ago
      I didn't "list off logical fallacies". You dismissed the authors, wholesale, because you asserted that they made a claim about something unrelated. That's an ad hominem attack.
  - gamblor956 6y ago
    No, but two of the 3 lead signatories claim that Sweden is a model for COVID response, despite Sweden having more COVID-related deaths and serious cases of COVID than all of its neighbors combined...
  - hilbertseries 6y ago
    > The declaration claims that increased infection of those at lower risk would lead to a build-up of immunity in the population that would eventually also protect those at higher risk from the SARS-CoV-2 virus We’ve seen what happens when the virus is allowed to run unchecked in populations. New variants start popping up that are resistant to the previous version. Further, this whole isolate those most likely to die doesn’t work. Due to things like... multigenerational households. Or people that don’t know they’re at risk etc.
    - timr 6y ago
      > New variants start popping up that are resistant to the previous version. There is no evidence that new variants have escaped natural immunity in any population. To date, all of the known variants are neutralized by existing antibodies and immune sera. This is a fact -- we've seen effects on titers in a few papers, but nothing has yet to escape immunity. That said, immune escape is probably inevitable -- this virus mutates far too quickly and has too many zoonotic reservoirs to prevent that from happening. To the extent that this occurs, a mix of natural and vaccine-induced immunity is likely the fastest and most robust way to suppress the virus.
  - ceejayoz 6y ago
    Here's Bhattacharya in the WSJ: https://www.wsj.com/articles/is-the-coronavirus-as-deadly-as-they-say-11585088464 https://www.wsj.com/articles/is-the-coronavirus-as-deadly-as... > An epidemic seed on Jan. 1 implies that by March 9 about six million people in the U.S. would have been infected. As of March 23, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there were 499 Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. If our surmise of six million cases is accurate, that’s a mortality rate of 0.01%, assuming a two week lag between infection and death. This is one-tenth of the flu mortality rate of 0.1%. Such a low death rate would be cause for optimism. A 0.01% mortality rate as asserted would mean 34k deaths in the USA. We're well over 10x that, and we're hardly finished yet.
    - timr 6y ago
      You are unfairly mis-representing the piece. They make a number of different calculations to estimate the IFR, based on observations available at the time. They then say the following: > This does not make Covid-19 a nonissue. The daily reports from Italy and across the U.S. show real struggles and overwhelmed health systems. But a 20,000- or 40,000-death epidemic is a far less severe problem than one that kills two million. Given the enormous consequences of decisions around Covid-19 response, getting clear data to guide decisions now is critical. We don’t know the true infection rate in the U.S. Antibody testing of representative samples to measure disease prevalence (including the recovered) is crucial. Nearly every day a new lab gets approval for antibody testing, so population testing using this technology is now feasible. > If we’re right about the limited scale of the epidemic, then measures focused on older populations and hospitals are sensible. Elective procedures will need to be rescheduled. Hospital resources will need to be reallocated to care for critically ill patients. Triage will need to improve. And policy makers will need to focus on reducing risks for older adults and people with underlying medical conditions. > A universal quarantine may not be worth the costs it imposes on the economy, community and individual mental and physical health. We should undertake immediate steps to evaluate the empirical basis of the current lockdowns. They're very clearly making point estimates to contrast with the prevalent IFR estimates of the time (~2%), which we now know were entirely wrong.
      - jehb 6y ago
  - dilyevsky 6y ago
    I googled that for you - https://www.wsj.com/articles/britains-professor-reopen-11591376796 https://www.wsj.com/articles/britains-professor-reopen-11591... Gupta said 500k deaths worst case in uk was bollocks (bc according to her everyone already got it). They are already at 100k with aggressive lockdowns. Does that sound like crackpottery to you?
    - timr 6y ago
      She's saying that Ferguson's projections were wrong. They certainly have been wrong -- wildly so -- in most of the world. He also projected 2.2M deaths in the United States, and that hospitals would be over-run in the UK even with interventions. The predictions from the original paper do not hold up well in retrospect: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/mrc-gida/2020-03-16-COVID19-Report-9.pdf https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/m...
      - dilyevsky 6y ago
        That piece of report doesn’t have us numbers. Gb looks totally in line with what had actually happened. 2.2M doesn’t sound unreasonable either since we are already almost at a quarter of that (assuming you even trust florida numbers). So she was wildly wrong, more so than other researchers, still clearly wrong but doubled down. So what’s your point exactly?
        timr 6y ago
        If you think "forecast was off by a factor of 5" (2.2M vs. 440k US; 500k vs. 100k UK) is "totally in line with what happened", there's probably not a lot for us to talk about. Gupta was saying that the Ferguson models were wrong. The models have...not been right. Objectively.
        dilyevsky 6y ago
        Can you read? “Do nothing” means do nothing. Us (and gb) clearly had done something (quite a lot actually) even when folks like yourself tried very hard to convince everyone not to
- arthurcolle 6y ago
  You're not factoring in president 45's incompetent handling of the pandemic as it spread through the US. The number "100,000" might have been a realistic figure as long as reopening hadn't been too premature.
  - ceejayoz 6y ago
    > as long as reopening hadn't been too premature The Barrington folks were among those pushing for that premature reopening. It's their whole thing.
- Capira 6y ago
  According to the CDC, the total number of deaths caused by Covid is about 6% of the people who died with a positive test result.
  - ceejayoz 6y ago
    That’s long debunked misinformation. https://www.factcheck.org/2020/09/cdc-did-not-admit-only-6-of-recorded-deaths-from-covid-19/ https://www.factcheck.org/2020/09/cdc-did-not-admit-only-6-o...
    - Capira 6y ago
      CDC states officially: "For 6% of the deaths, COVID-19 was the only cause mentioned." And the median age was above 80. A German professor performed about 100 autopsies and came to the same conclusion. BTW: Who pays this self-proclaimed "fact checker"?
      - ceejayoz 6y ago
        Yes. 6% have COVID as the only cause. That doesn't mean the other 94% weren't COVID deaths, just that their medical histories involved other conditions as well. > He noted that the 6% figure includes cases where COVID-19 was listed as the only cause of death. “That does not mean that someone who has hypertension or diabetes who dies of Covid didn’t die of Covid-19. They did,” Fauci said on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” Half the country has hypertension. Half the country has obesity. These fall in the 94% category, but chances are they weren't imminently dying of these things before getting COVID. As for funding: https://www.factcheck.org/our-funding/ https://www.factcheck.org/our-funding/
        Capira 6y ago
        Fauci is a highly controversial source. And I doubt you can make such absolute statements given that the data quality is so poor. Even the WHO stated that PCR tests cannot detect an infection. It is only an indicator for doctors to make a diagnosis. So, how can you be so sure? BTW: Seems like those self-proclaimed "fact checkers" are funded by the Annenberg Foundation which has close ties to big pharma...
- Capira 6y ago
  Even the German government stated that worldwide much more people will die because of lockdowns than with corona. https://www.handelsblatt.com/politik/deutschland/coronakrise-entwicklungsminister-mueller-an-den-folgen-der-lockdowns-werden-weit-mehr-menschen-sterben-als-am-virus/26209144.html https://www.handelsblatt.com/politik/deutschland/coronakrise...
DanBC 6y ago
Who on that list is a "renown epidemiologist"?
- timr 6y ago
  Sunetra Gupta is a professor of epidemiology at Oxford University: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunetra_Gupta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunetra_Gupta Jay Bhattacharya is a professor of Medicine at Stanford University, and a long-time researcher into public health policy: https://profiles.stanford.edu/jay-bhattacharya https://profiles.stanford.edu/jay-bhattacharya Martin Kulldorff is a professor of medicine at Harvard University and Brigham and Women's Hospital, with a long history of research into epidemiological models: https://www.dfhcc.harvard.edu/insider/member-detail/member/martin-kulldorff-phd/ https://www.dfhcc.harvard.edu/insider/member-detail/member/m... All of the authors are respected academics in the field of medicine, health policy and epidemiology.
  - ceejayoz 6y ago
    Gupta: "I think that the epidemic has largely come and is on the way out in [the United Kingdom]", in May 2020. Renowned people can still be full of shit. > All of the authors are respected academics in the field of medicine, health policy and epidemiology. s/are/were
    - timr 6y ago
      > Renowned people can still be full of shit. And this tone is certainly rational and charitable.
      - ceejayoz 6y ago
        She was demonstrably full of shit here. A claim that renowned people can't be full of shit would be the irrational one, I'd think.
        timr 6y ago
seppin 6y ago
Heard immunity. At this point. Seriously?

by Capira 6y ago

mikeyouse 6y ago

Lol “renowned epidemiologists” who insisted the total US mortality would remain under 100k deaths. These clowns can be safely ignored.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
timr 6y ago
None of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration said anything of the sort. This kind of çomment is unhelpful and uncharitable. It's an ad hominem attack.
- mikeyouse 6y ago
  If you want to play the childish “list off logical fallacies” game, the original post was an appeal to authority. Feel free to read up on all the “amazing” work done by the signatories and their colleagues at Hoover and other beclowned institutions but whats the point of litigating something that’s been so conclusively proven already.
  - timr 6y ago
    I didn't "list off logical fallacies". You dismissed the authors, wholesale, because you asserted that they made a claim about something unrelated. That's an ad hominem attack.
- gamblor956 6y ago
  No, but two of the 3 lead signatories claim that Sweden is a model for COVID response, despite Sweden having more COVID-related deaths and serious cases of COVID than all of its neighbors combined...
- hilbertseries 6y ago
  > The declaration claims that increased infection of those at lower risk would lead to a build-up of immunity in the population that would eventually also protect those at higher risk from the SARS-CoV-2 virus We’ve seen what happens when the virus is allowed to run unchecked in populations. New variants start popping up that are resistant to the previous version. Further, this whole isolate those most likely to die doesn’t work. Due to things like... multigenerational households. Or people that don’t know they’re at risk etc.
  - timr 6y ago
    > New variants start popping up that are resistant to the previous version. There is no evidence that new variants have escaped natural immunity in any population. To date, all of the known variants are neutralized by existing antibodies and immune sera. This is a fact -- we've seen effects on titers in a few papers, but nothing has yet to escape immunity. That said, immune escape is probably inevitable -- this virus mutates far too quickly and has too many zoonotic reservoirs to prevent that from happening. To the extent that this occurs, a mix of natural and vaccine-induced immunity is likely the fastest and most robust way to suppress the virus.
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  Here's Bhattacharya in the WSJ: https://www.wsj.com/articles/is-the-coronavirus-as-deadly-as-they-say-11585088464 https://www.wsj.com/articles/is-the-coronavirus-as-deadly-as... > An epidemic seed on Jan. 1 implies that by March 9 about six million people in the U.S. would have been infected. As of March 23, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there were 499 Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. If our surmise of six million cases is accurate, that’s a mortality rate of 0.01%, assuming a two week lag between infection and death. This is one-tenth of the flu mortality rate of 0.1%. Such a low death rate would be cause for optimism. A 0.01% mortality rate as asserted would mean 34k deaths in the USA. We're well over 10x that, and we're hardly finished yet.
  - timr 6y ago
    You are unfairly mis-representing the piece. They make a number of different calculations to estimate the IFR, based on observations available at the time. They then say the following: > This does not make Covid-19 a nonissue. The daily reports from Italy and across the U.S. show real struggles and overwhelmed health systems. But a 20,000- or 40,000-death epidemic is a far less severe problem than one that kills two million. Given the enormous consequences of decisions around Covid-19 response, getting clear data to guide decisions now is critical. We don’t know the true infection rate in the U.S. Antibody testing of representative samples to measure disease prevalence (including the recovered) is crucial. Nearly every day a new lab gets approval for antibody testing, so population testing using this technology is now feasible. > If we’re right about the limited scale of the epidemic, then measures focused on older populations and hospitals are sensible. Elective procedures will need to be rescheduled. Hospital resources will need to be reallocated to care for critically ill patients. Triage will need to improve. And policy makers will need to focus on reducing risks for older adults and people with underlying medical conditions. > A universal quarantine may not be worth the costs it imposes on the economy, community and individual mental and physical health. We should undertake immediate steps to evaluate the empirical basis of the current lockdowns. They're very clearly making point estimates to contrast with the prevalent IFR estimates of the time (~2%), which we now know were entirely wrong.
    - jehb 6y ago
- dilyevsky 6y ago
  I googled that for you - https://www.wsj.com/articles/britains-professor-reopen-11591376796 https://www.wsj.com/articles/britains-professor-reopen-11591... Gupta said 500k deaths worst case in uk was bollocks (bc according to her everyone already got it). They are already at 100k with aggressive lockdowns. Does that sound like crackpottery to you?
  - timr 6y ago
    She's saying that Ferguson's projections were wrong. They certainly have been wrong -- wildly so -- in most of the world. He also projected 2.2M deaths in the United States, and that hospitals would be over-run in the UK even with interventions. The predictions from the original paper do not hold up well in retrospect: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/mrc-gida/2020-03-16-COVID19-Report-9.pdf https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/m...
    - dilyevsky 6y ago
      That piece of report doesn’t have us numbers. Gb looks totally in line with what had actually happened. 2.2M doesn’t sound unreasonable either since we are already almost at a quarter of that (assuming you even trust florida numbers). So she was wildly wrong, more so than other researchers, still clearly wrong but doubled down. So what’s your point exactly?
      - timr 6y ago
        If you think "forecast was off by a factor of 5" (2.2M vs. 440k US; 500k vs. 100k UK) is "totally in line with what happened", there's probably not a lot for us to talk about. Gupta was saying that the Ferguson models were wrong. The models have...not been right. Objectively.
        dilyevsky 6y ago
        Can you read? “Do nothing” means do nothing. Us (and gb) clearly had done something (quite a lot actually) even when folks like yourself tried very hard to convince everyone not to
arthurcolle 6y ago
You're not factoring in president 45's incompetent handling of the pandemic as it spread through the US. The number "100,000" might have been a realistic figure as long as reopening hadn't been too premature.
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  > as long as reopening hadn't been too premature The Barrington folks were among those pushing for that premature reopening. It's their whole thing.
Capira 6y ago
According to the CDC, the total number of deaths caused by Covid is about 6% of the people who died with a positive test result.
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  That’s long debunked misinformation. https://www.factcheck.org/2020/09/cdc-did-not-admit-only-6-of-recorded-deaths-from-covid-19/ https://www.factcheck.org/2020/09/cdc-did-not-admit-only-6-o...
  - Capira 6y ago
    CDC states officially: "For 6% of the deaths, COVID-19 was the only cause mentioned." And the median age was above 80. A German professor performed about 100 autopsies and came to the same conclusion. BTW: Who pays this self-proclaimed "fact checker"?
    - ceejayoz 6y ago
      Yes. 6% have COVID as the only cause. That doesn't mean the other 94% weren't COVID deaths, just that their medical histories involved other conditions as well. > He noted that the 6% figure includes cases where COVID-19 was listed as the only cause of death. “That does not mean that someone who has hypertension or diabetes who dies of Covid didn’t die of Covid-19. They did,” Fauci said on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” Half the country has hypertension. Half the country has obesity. These fall in the 94% category, but chances are they weren't imminently dying of these things before getting COVID. As for funding: https://www.factcheck.org/our-funding/ https://www.factcheck.org/our-funding/
      - Capira 6y ago
        Fauci is a highly controversial source. And I doubt you can make such absolute statements given that the data quality is so poor. Even the WHO stated that PCR tests cannot detect an infection. It is only an indicator for doctors to make a diagnosis. So, how can you be so sure? BTW: Seems like those self-proclaimed "fact checkers" are funded by the Annenberg Foundation which has close ties to big pharma...
Capira 6y ago
Even the German government stated that worldwide much more people will die because of lockdowns than with corona. https://www.handelsblatt.com/politik/deutschland/coronakrise-entwicklungsminister-mueller-an-den-folgen-der-lockdowns-werden-weit-mehr-menschen-sterben-als-am-virus/26209144.html https://www.handelsblatt.com/politik/deutschland/coronakrise...

DanBC 6y ago

Who on that list is a "renown epidemiologist"?

timr 6y ago
Sunetra Gupta is a professor of epidemiology at Oxford University: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunetra_Gupta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunetra_Gupta Jay Bhattacharya is a professor of Medicine at Stanford University, and a long-time researcher into public health policy: https://profiles.stanford.edu/jay-bhattacharya https://profiles.stanford.edu/jay-bhattacharya Martin Kulldorff is a professor of medicine at Harvard University and Brigham and Women's Hospital, with a long history of research into epidemiological models: https://www.dfhcc.harvard.edu/insider/member-detail/member/martin-kulldorff-phd/ https://www.dfhcc.harvard.edu/insider/member-detail/member/m... All of the authors are respected academics in the field of medicine, health policy and epidemiology.
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  Gupta: "I think that the epidemic has largely come and is on the way out in [the United Kingdom]", in May 2020. Renowned people can still be full of shit. > All of the authors are respected academics in the field of medicine, health policy and epidemiology. s/are/were
  - timr 6y ago
    > Renowned people can still be full of shit. And this tone is certainly rational and charitable.
    - ceejayoz 6y ago
      She was demonstrably full of shit here. A claim that renowned people can't be full of shit would be the irrational one, I'd think.
      - timr 6y ago

seppin 6y ago

Heard immunity. At this point. Seriously?