7 ms·

Here’s a critique of the study if anyone is interested: (https://twitter.com/DrJBhattacharya/status/1664916036351852551 https://twitter.com/DrJBhattacharya/sta

Here’s a critique of the study if anyone is interested: (https://twitter.com/DrJBhattacharya/status/1664916036351852551 https://twitter.com/DrJBhattacharya/status/16649160363518525...) > It assumes that if a kid gets a fever first and then an adult in the house 1 to 7 days later, then the kid got covid and passed it to the adult. This is a bad way to infer the direction of transmission. It's possible that parents had a fever, but didn't bother to check themselves until after their kid developed a fever and they checked them. The paper does not even test a single participant for covid, so the fever might not represent covid at all. Nor does it check for other contacts the adult or kid may have had outside the house Additionally, the sample is self-selected: it consists of people who opt into a fever reporting app -- not representative of the population as a whole. The result is at odds with more careful contact tracing studies, like the Icelandic study from early 2020, which concludes the opposite. The paper is not a reliable guide to the relative risk that kids pose for disease spreading. More broadly, the paper has no policy import. Would closing schools have protected anyone from getting covid? The evidence from studies comparing places that closed them vs. places that opened them suggests no. I That closing schools is bad for the health of children is out of the scope of the ideas considered by this study.

DiogenesKynikos 3y ago
It's worth noting that Bhattacharya was one of the originators of the "Great Barrington Declaration," which advocated dropping almost all measures to limit the spread of SARS-CoV-2, with the aim of quickly achieving herd immunity through widespread infection. This was in mid-2020, before any vaccine was available. This strategy would likely have doubled the death rate in the United States, had it been implemented. That is to say, this study goes strongly against Bhattacharya's oft-expressed views on how the pandemic should have been handled, and one should approach Bhattacharya's criticisms with a good dose of skepticism.
- flybrand 3y ago
  This is a misrepresentation of ‘focused protection’ and Bhattacharya supported - and still supports - a vaccine strategy, which you insinuate he did not.
  - sudosysgen 3y ago
    The comment you're replying to clearly specified this was a strategy that was advocated before vaccines were available. If you believe, as the signatories of the declaration did, that natural immunity to the virus is possible, then it's not a vaccine focused strategy, it's a strategy that's independent to any vaccine. It's not as if anyone thought that such a strategy wouldn't lead to the infection of essentially all of humanity, and it doesn't say anywhere in it that they expect there not to be durable natural immunity (in which case the policy is self-defeating and absurd), so while it's not an antivax proposal, it's clearly not vaccine focused. It's plainly true that "focused protection" is a euphemism for letting the virus tear through the vast, the vast majority of the population.
    - orblivion 3y ago
      > the vast, the vast majority of the population The plan specifically is to (somehow) isolate vulnerable people and only "let er rip" for the rest of us. I'm skeptical on how this could have actually worked (or how well it actually did work in Florida), but that's the actual proposal.
      - DocSavage 3y ago
        There's the GBD proposal, and then there's the actual media tours by the GBD proponents, particularly on Fox, where COVID-19 was downplayed. Some of them famously wrote columns how there'd be maybe 10,000 fatalities and it was like the flu. Is it surprising that downplaying the virus also worked against spending huge amounts of money to protect the elderly? Like govt renting hotels to isolate elderly living with families? Or providing deliveries so they could stay at home?
        orblivion 3y ago
        I think Dr. Jay B seemed reasonable and honest enough. For instance you can find him saying that he's not comfortable comparing it to the flu, since he suspects flu deaths may be greatly overcounted. He talks now (not sure about before) about deliveries and hotels as you say. Etc. But yes, the loudest dissenters seemed to be contrarians, rather than people with a specific plan. They take a big mash of GBD, "lol it's not that bad, not everybody's going to get it", "lol everybody's going to get it so there's nothing we can do anyway", "we're not obligated to look out for other people anyway", etc etc with all the inherent contradictions. Any signal that went against "THE COVID NARRATIVE" they signal boosted. Something like insecurity must have been driving this stuff. I think some of the counter-maintstream points were right, particularly about being sober about tradeoffs, but overall it was a total embarrassment. Granted the other side wasn't much better.
jupp0r 3y ago
This critique is by one of the authors of the Great Barrington declaration who argued to just let COVID rip through the entire population before there were vaccines, so take that with a grain of salt too.
- flybrand 3y ago
  That is explicitly not what they argued for and is a misrepresentation of ‘focused protection.’ Plus, wouldn’t a reasonable critique not matter who wrote it?
  - Slava_Propanei 3y ago
    Critiques of Regime Thought come from non-approved sources.
  - SOLAR_FIELDS 3y ago
    > Plus, wouldn’t a reasonable critique not matter who wrote it? Of course, but one problem with scientific critiques like this is that they are written towards laymen (this is on Twitter) who probably don’t have the understanding of whether a critique is reasonable or not. So the identity of the person who is performing the critique does have value in that context. In a true peer review scenario it shouldn’t be that way, scientific critiques should be evaluated on their merits alone.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - superooled 3y ago
      This is also an excellent argument for why we should not unthinkingly trust statements from governments, given the tools of social manipulation they have available.
  - Spivak 3y ago
    The declaration is only a few paragraphs long and most of it is filler. The meat of the plan is let covid rip through the population, anything else misrepresents the goal of herd immunity. You can't build up natural immunity without transmission. The biggest flaw with this plan was that you can get infected with the now large family of viruses grouped into "covid" more than once. People don't actually build up as much immunity as the declaration presumes. The second biggest flaw was that there is zero chance you could protect only the high-risk populations. In the US the plan ended up being basically this but s/virus/vaccine/ because the vaccine gave stronger guarantees on avoiding transmission to high-risk groups but then that got weirdly political for some reason. If it was smallpox I bet those same people would have been breaking down the door for an "experimental" vaccine.
terminatornet 3y ago
https://stanforddaily.com/2023/05/25/stanford-professor-jay-bhattacharya-joins-ron-desantis-2024-presidential-campaign-kickoff/ https://stanforddaily.com/2023/05/25/stanford-professor-jay-... > During the live broadcast, Bhattacharya said it was “an absolute honor” to work with Desantis and praised what he described as DeSantis’ abilities to make decisions on COVID-19-related issues despite criticism. He expressed support for DeSantis’ rolling back certain pandemic-induced restrictions, including school closures, saying, “Governor, you did the right thing when you opened the schools.” https://www.miamiherald.com/news/health-care/article274876701.html https://www.miamiherald.com/news/health-care/article27487670... > From March 2020, when the pandemic began, through March 22, 2023, Florida recorded 7,542,869 COVID-19 cases and 87,141 deaths, the 12th highest rate in cases and deaths per 100,000 people among the 50 states and Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico. I'll be honest, if Jay Battacharya thinks Florida did a great job handling covid, i'm not sure i trust his judgement!
- orblivion 3y ago
  My understanding is that Florida did about average if you adjust by age (lots of elderly people there). Couple that with keeping the economy much more open and schools shutting down a lot less (if at all?), it makes it a lot better than average. That's the argument. With that in mind, I can't find a link to back up the claim about age-adjusted death rate ranking. I thought I saw one before. I found this one that goes by year: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/covid19_mortality_final/COVID19.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/covid19_mortality_... Looks like they did badly in 2021 and well in 2020. Ideally I'd want to look across all years, since that's the "when it's all said and done" question.
- benjaminwootton 3y ago
  They weren’t a particular outlier, which is notable considering how old their population is. And compatible with New York which through the kitchen sink at Covid. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-covid19-death-rates-us-by-state/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-covi...
  - 3y ago
fsckboy 3y ago
>> It assumes that if a kid gets a fever first ... then the kid got covid and passed it to the adult. > This is a bad way to infer the direction of transmission. do you think that skews statistics worse than declaring a person died of covid when they only died with covid, and launching a disciplinary investigation of the license of a senior physician who pointed out that there is a checkbox on the death certificate for exactly this declaration? When coupled with a 5 figure dollar bonus to the hospital for the number of "of covids" they came up with? but anyway, you think that so many more children caught it from their parents than from their peers AND the timing of the temperature measurements was always skewed in the wrong direction, that the errors don't wash, and that the researchers aren't as good at considering this as you are?

DiogenesKynikos 3y ago

It's worth noting that Bhattacharya was one of the originators of the "Great Barrington Declaration," which advocated dropping almost all measures to limit the spread of SARS-CoV-2, with the aim of quickly achieving herd immunity through widespread infection. This was in mid-2020, before any vaccine was available. This strategy would likely have doubled the death rate in the United States, had it been implemented. That is to say, this study goes strongly against Bhattacharya's oft-expressed views on how the pandemic should have been handled, and one should approach Bhattacharya's criticisms with a good dose of skepticism.

flybrand 3y ago
This is a misrepresentation of ‘focused protection’ and Bhattacharya supported - and still supports - a vaccine strategy, which you insinuate he did not.
- sudosysgen 3y ago
  The comment you're replying to clearly specified this was a strategy that was advocated before vaccines were available. If you believe, as the signatories of the declaration did, that natural immunity to the virus is possible, then it's not a vaccine focused strategy, it's a strategy that's independent to any vaccine. It's not as if anyone thought that such a strategy wouldn't lead to the infection of essentially all of humanity, and it doesn't say anywhere in it that they expect there not to be durable natural immunity (in which case the policy is self-defeating and absurd), so while it's not an antivax proposal, it's clearly not vaccine focused. It's plainly true that "focused protection" is a euphemism for letting the virus tear through the vast, the vast majority of the population.
  - orblivion 3y ago
    > the vast, the vast majority of the population The plan specifically is to (somehow) isolate vulnerable people and only "let er rip" for the rest of us. I'm skeptical on how this could have actually worked (or how well it actually did work in Florida), but that's the actual proposal.
    - DocSavage 3y ago
      There's the GBD proposal, and then there's the actual media tours by the GBD proponents, particularly on Fox, where COVID-19 was downplayed. Some of them famously wrote columns how there'd be maybe 10,000 fatalities and it was like the flu. Is it surprising that downplaying the virus also worked against spending huge amounts of money to protect the elderly? Like govt renting hotels to isolate elderly living with families? Or providing deliveries so they could stay at home?
      - orblivion 3y ago
        I think Dr. Jay B seemed reasonable and honest enough. For instance you can find him saying that he's not comfortable comparing it to the flu, since he suspects flu deaths may be greatly overcounted. He talks now (not sure about before) about deliveries and hotels as you say. Etc. But yes, the loudest dissenters seemed to be contrarians, rather than people with a specific plan. They take a big mash of GBD, "lol it's not that bad, not everybody's going to get it", "lol everybody's going to get it so there's nothing we can do anyway", "we're not obligated to look out for other people anyway", etc etc with all the inherent contradictions. Any signal that went against "THE COVID NARRATIVE" they signal boosted. Something like insecurity must have been driving this stuff. I think some of the counter-maintstream points were right, particularly about being sober about tradeoffs, but overall it was a total embarrassment. Granted the other side wasn't much better.

jupp0r 3y ago

This critique is by one of the authors of the Great Barrington declaration who argued to just let COVID rip through the entire population before there were vaccines, so take that with a grain of salt too.

flybrand 3y ago
That is explicitly not what they argued for and is a misrepresentation of ‘focused protection.’ Plus, wouldn’t a reasonable critique not matter who wrote it?
- Slava_Propanei 3y ago
  Critiques of Regime Thought come from non-approved sources.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 3y ago
  > Plus, wouldn’t a reasonable critique not matter who wrote it? Of course, but one problem with scientific critiques like this is that they are written towards laymen (this is on Twitter) who probably don’t have the understanding of whether a critique is reasonable or not. So the identity of the person who is performing the critique does have value in that context. In a true peer review scenario it shouldn’t be that way, scientific critiques should be evaluated on their merits alone.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - superooled 3y ago
    This is also an excellent argument for why we should not unthinkingly trust statements from governments, given the tools of social manipulation they have available.
- Spivak 3y ago
  The declaration is only a few paragraphs long and most of it is filler. The meat of the plan is let covid rip through the population, anything else misrepresents the goal of herd immunity. You can't build up natural immunity without transmission. The biggest flaw with this plan was that you can get infected with the now large family of viruses grouped into "covid" more than once. People don't actually build up as much immunity as the declaration presumes. The second biggest flaw was that there is zero chance you could protect only the high-risk populations. In the US the plan ended up being basically this but s/virus/vaccine/ because the vaccine gave stronger guarantees on avoiding transmission to high-risk groups but then that got weirdly political for some reason. If it was smallpox I bet those same people would have been breaking down the door for an "experimental" vaccine.

terminatornet 3y ago

https://stanforddaily.com/2023/05/25/stanford-professor-jay-bhattacharya-joins-ron-desantis-2024-presidential-campaign-kickoff/ https://stanforddaily.com/2023/05/25/stanford-professor-jay-... > During the live broadcast, Bhattacharya said it was “an absolute honor” to work with Desantis and praised what he described as DeSantis’ abilities to make decisions on COVID-19-related issues despite criticism. He expressed support for DeSantis’ rolling back certain pandemic-induced restrictions, including school closures, saying, “Governor, you did the right thing when you opened the schools.” https://www.miamiherald.com/news/health-care/article274876701.html https://www.miamiherald.com/news/health-care/article27487670... > From March 2020, when the pandemic began, through March 22, 2023, Florida recorded 7,542,869 COVID-19 cases and 87,141 deaths, the 12th highest rate in cases and deaths per 100,000 people among the 50 states and Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico. I'll be honest, if Jay Battacharya thinks Florida did a great job handling covid, i'm not sure i trust his judgement!

orblivion 3y ago
My understanding is that Florida did about average if you adjust by age (lots of elderly people there). Couple that with keeping the economy much more open and schools shutting down a lot less (if at all?), it makes it a lot better than average. That's the argument. With that in mind, I can't find a link to back up the claim about age-adjusted death rate ranking. I thought I saw one before. I found this one that goes by year: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/covid19_mortality_final/COVID19.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/covid19_mortality_... Looks like they did badly in 2021 and well in 2020. Ideally I'd want to look across all years, since that's the "when it's all said and done" question.
benjaminwootton 3y ago
They weren’t a particular outlier, which is notable considering how old their population is. And compatible with New York which through the kitchen sink at Covid. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-covid19-death-rates-us-by-state/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-covi...
- 3y ago

fsckboy 3y ago

>> It assumes that if a kid gets a fever first ... then the kid got covid and passed it to the adult. > This is a bad way to infer the direction of transmission. do you think that skews statistics worse than declaring a person died of covid when they only died with covid, and launching a disciplinary investigation of the license of a senior physician who pointed out that there is a checkbox on the death certificate for exactly this declaration? When coupled with a 5 figure dollar bonus to the hospital for the number of "of covids" they came up with? but anyway, you think that so many more children caught it from their parents than from their peers AND the timing of the temperature measurements was always skewed in the wrong direction, that the errors don't wash, and that the researchers aren't as good at considering this as you are?