Fomite

91 ms·

871.
by Fomite 5y ago
My grandfather screamed at his employees. It was abusive, and everyone knew it.
872.
by Fomite 5y ago
A few caveats to this, in addition to the spouse problem: 1) You are shackled to this for ten years. Dropping out early isn't just bad - it's a financial catastrophe. 2) It's based on qualified payments, not "time served
873.
by Fomite 5y ago
"doctors are surprised that COVID may do the same?" Doctors aren't. Epidemiologists aren't. We've been discussing and trying to study the long term effects of COVID-19 infections (and there were similar studies for
874.
by Fomite 5y ago
In medicine/public health/etc. there are two reasons: 1) medRxiv was relatively new, and while the COVID-19 pandemic was its moment, there are a lot of concerns about pre-peer review stuff, and the public, press, etc. not treating
875.
by Fomite 5y ago
The caveat for this is if some of your primary health risks are bleeding related, at which point it's counter-productive in many cases.
876.
by Fomite 5y ago
It's the dominant language among academic statisticians.
877.
by Fomite 5y ago
Two notes: 1) Shaming is a bad idea, even in that case. We see this in all manner of public health policies - shame isn't particularly effective as a motivating tool. It also leads to poor outcomes - like people with obesity getting me
878.
by Fomite 5y ago
The problem is not "Weight loss might be a good idea" but that the industry is swarming with scams, unregulated companies, and stuff that is actively harmful to health.
879.
by Fomite 5y ago
This is a frequent anti-vaxx talking point that well predates COVID-19. In most outbreaks in highly vaccinated populations, most of the cases will be in the vaccinated. We see this for measles and pertussis all the time. The rate will b
880.
by Fomite 5y ago
"I believe that's what the data says, but I have a really hard time reconciling it with common sense." Can you see why some people might be hesitant about basing medical treatment on "That's what the data says, but
881.
by Fomite 5y ago
But vanishingly rarely are diagnostic tests given and then the results ignored. That's not how consumers of healthcare nor clinicians work.
882.
by Fomite 5y ago
Less information can be better. Or more accurately, conditional probabilities can be better than unconditional probabilities. For example, a large number of unnecessary antibiotic treatments, which fuel resistance, are triggered by doing
883.
by Fomite 5y ago
"More information can never be harmful." In my particular field of biomedical research, there has recently been a push for "Diagnostic Stewardship" because more information has demonstrably been harmful to patient well-b
884.
by Fomite 5y ago
Yes. They've also caused three major epidemics in the past two decades - there's no reason they shouldn't have emerged historically from time to time.
885.
by Fomite 5y ago
Keep in mind that the timeline from medical research being published to entering practice can sometimes be measured in decades, and causal inference is swimming against the RCT-heavy currents of medical research. Several journals I publish
886.
by Fomite 5y ago
From the prospective of a STEM professor: Honestly? Don't shit on STEM courses. Encourage programs that produce well-rounded students in the liberal arts tradition. Most humanities departments are dependent on class enrollment - they a
887.
by Fomite 5y ago
They provide it in the form of a hazard ratio: "hazard ratio for resolution of symptoms, 1.07 [95% CI, 0.87 to 1.32]" So statistically, those on ivermectin recovered 1.07 times as quickly as those on placebo, but the uncertainty b
888.
by Fomite 5y ago
The Economist is a British magazine, and their Charlemagne commentator writes about Europe.
889.
by Fomite 5y ago
This. A perennial annoyance among infectious disease epidemiologists is how not seriously people take influenza. As noted, it kills tens of thousands of people a year, and both times I've gotten it, I've felt like I got hit by a b
890.
by Fomite 5y ago
Having worked with banked blood sample data before for influenza research, it's very, very much not representative.
891.
by Fomite 5y ago
Yet people also rant about publish-or-perish resulting in minimum publishable unit churning. Maybe the answer is some researchers just wrote a paper, non-typeset spacing is pretty wasteful, and Word does a bad job at tables, rather than som
892.
by Fomite 5y ago
"The 134 incremental crashes give rise to 31 incremental personal injuries in the vicinity of PokéStops. These account for 25% of the aggregate increase in the number of personal injuries experienced county-wide over the same time peri
893.
by Fomite 5y ago
I've read plenty of lengthy and long-winded papers from the 80's and earlier. Also it's not typeset, so it's taking up a lot more room than it appears to.
894.
by Fomite 5y ago
I refuse to use proctoring software in my classes. The COVID-19 monitoring stuff is a little trickier. Universities were between a rock and a hard place - don't do enough, and you will have an outbreak on campus, and there's a l
895.
by Fomite 5y ago
Honestly? No. In the face of a major pandemic, and with the size of the clinical trials and the effectiveness of the vaccines, the ethical obligations to the patients in the trial to unblind the results to get the participants vaccinated is
896.
by Fomite 5y ago
The debate between presenting absolute vs. relative rates is a really interesting one in epidemiology, for the record, with roots spanning everything from "absolute risk regression models are actually kind of tricky" to the early
897.
by Fomite 5y ago
MRSA (see also 'spider bites'), meningitis, adverse reactions to a drug, Staphylococcal scaled skin syndrome (especially in infants), Stevens-Johnson syndrome (which can be a reaction to medication), toxic shock syndrome, among ot
898.
by Fomite 5y ago
Note it depends on which "standardized vaccines of the past" you mean. The side effects for the smallpox vaccine were horrific by modern standards.
899.
by Fomite 5y ago
The speed and effectiveness are astounding. I was braced this fall for "It's probably worthwhile for high risk individuals" effectiveness metrics in the 50%'s.
900.
by Fomite 5y ago
Working with data from monitoring vaccine side effects were two of my early projects in graduate school. They are intensely monitored - vaccine data is some of the best quality data in the infectious disease world.

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