I would imagine it’s because it gives another tedious goalpost to move towards, thus ensuing they remain in control for at least another 6 months.
Where to go from here, though? Vaccinating new borns? Pets? A pivot to monkey pox?
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I tried to clarify because it was not clear what you meant by ‘dubious numbers’.
Risk assessment but by total numbers of potentially affected not by percentage.
Should not make any difference for most people who know basic math.
It’s rather clear what I meant, but you’d need to read the context and pay attention to the number we were discussing. It’s all in the thread above.
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The comment wasn’t really aimed at you - it was more a general criticism of governments waving hastily-cobbled-together models around as if they represent reality. “Flattening the curve” has been a persistent meme, and yet nobody has successfully flattened any curves - regardless of the nature of interventions (if any), and to the extent that “case numbers” even have any meaning, the trajectory of cases has been more-or-less identical across different populations. Taiwan had a particularly rapid upswing. It wasn’t so much a curve as a discontinuity. Despite that, no health services were overwhelmed in the making of this movie.
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Your familiarity with our current predicament, as well as your general numbercrunchological savvy, far surpasses mine, so I’m not in a position to disagree with you.
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I’m not trying to start (or re-start) a pee-peeing contest; I’m just curious about what your (or anybody else’s) take might be about these two successive February 2020 tweets by the previously-mentioned epidemiologist:
https://twitter.com/mlipsitch/status/1231431400546500608
https://twitter.com/mlipsitch/status/1231431890999140353
The above two tweets were physically near the other Marc Lipsitch tweet I linked to earlier.
This, I think, is an abstract of the referenced study:
The abstract is dated August 8, 2007, so the article predates our current pandemic.
I’ll have a proper look through them when I have time, but my first observation is that COVID-19 is not the 1918 flu. That particular strain of flu was an equal-opportunities killer, while COVID is not: it targets an incredibly specific and very small demographic. You can almost point at individuals and say, “you’re probably going to get a bad dose of it”, and “you’re going to be just fine”. So the point here is not really the mundane one of whether something superficially “works” or not, but how much it’s going to cost. Everything has a cost. If you’re going to spend money and effort on something, and you can pinpoint where that money and effort would be best spent (and where it would be wasted), why would you not go for the most effective and least-costly option? In the case of COVID, that would have been monitoring and early treatment of those at risk, and bolstering the health service to cope. Making any attempt to stop the spread among the other 99% almost certainly made the curve wider, but it cannot possibly have made it flatter because the vulnerable remained vulnerable, and they all got COVID eventually.
It’s pretty interesting that this paper was published in 2007, at a time when no national authority had lockdowns and suchlike in their (official) pandemic plans. Particularly interesting to see that phrase “social distancing” pop up, which I thought was a modern invention. Did they know something we didn’t?
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Not entirely disagreeing, just gently observing that now we’re on very human turf, even though it’s sometimes expressed in abstract terms:
I should note that Wikipedia’s Pinto article seems to defend Ford’s decision by saying that the public misunderstood or was misled about the meaning of the memo in question. Maybe Wikipedia is correct, but I’m suspicious. 
Edited to add: I want to be clear, just in case there’s any doubt, that for my part, it’s good to have people like you around here.
Yea that ain’t gonna happen when ba.5 gets going here.
Maybe not, but the epidemiologist who tweeted that also participated in a study on mitigating measures during the Great Flu of 1918 (-1919), so I don’t think he’s purely speculating:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.0610941104
Unless I’ve misread the study (which is possible–I didn’t read the whole thing), I think its position is that the flattened curve was similar to the tall curve in terms of the harm it represented, but that the mitigating measures made the harm more manageable.
In any case, I respectfully re-refer you to this:
Disagreement is good, as is playing devil’s advocate, as long as it’s done with the intent to approach the truth.
One can certainly understand the overreaction of the authorities at the beginning, and one could make a case for it on the basis of the precautionary principle - it’s better to try something and see if it works than to just assume it doesn’t work. I was actually an advocate of this approach early on, and posted on social media about the possible benefits of mask-wearing and handwashing. I didn’t think these things were going to be magic bullets, or that they should be mandated, but that they were worth trying to see what happened.
However, as the evidence trickled in - as scientists examined the “natural experiment” being conducted - it became clear that none of these interventions were actually doing much good, and a lot of them were doing overt harm. We also found out why some of them were no good (for example, we found out that SARS-CoV-2 doesn’t spread via fomites). And yet here we are, nearly three years in, with the CECC making the most outrageous claims, and using those claims to assert dictatorial authority over the government.
I had a look through the first paper and noted this:
Consistent with this hypothesis, cities in which multiple interventions were implemented at an early phase of the epidemic had peak death rates ≈50% lower than those that did not and had less-steep epidemic curves. Cities in which multiple interventions were implemented at an early phase of the epidemic also showed a trend toward lower cumulative excess mortality, but the difference was smaller (≈20%) and less statistically significant than that for peak death rates. This finding was not unexpected, given that few cities maintained NPIs longer than 6 weeks in 1918. Early implementation of certain interventions, including closure of schools, churches, and theaters, was associated with lower peak death rates, but no single intervention showed an association with improved aggregate outcomes for the 1918 phase of the pandemic.
There are various ways of paraphrasing this:
- Even if draconian measures work in the short term, they become increasingly costly (on many different dimensions) and can’t be maintained forever. They therefore have to be dropped … and Nature then picks up exactly where she left off.
- Imposing the maximum level of NPIs that a society can bear has only a marginal effect on excess mortality.
- If no single intervention shows an effect, it’s possible that the overall effect is a statistical artifact; or, at best, the overall effect is very small indeed.
Cities with more early NPIs also had fewer total excess deaths during the study period (Fig. 2b, Table 2, 1918 total), but this association was weaker: cities with three or fewer NPIs before CEPID = 20/100,000 experienced a median total excess death rate of 551/100,000, compared with a median rate of 405/100,000 in cities with four or more NPIs (P = 0.03).
P=0.03 is not very impressive - it suggests that the error bars on the measurements have some overlap, with (crudely speaking) a 1 in 30 chance that the observed difference is coincidental. . IMO the finding about cumulative total excess deaths is “not unexpected” for the reason I gave earlier: people who are likely to die are likely to die, and since “flattening the curve” amounts to nothing more than allowing them a few more months of life, it seems like a Pyrrhic victory. Would it not be better to find ways of ensuring that those people do not die at all? Or, at least, find ways of reducing the probability of them dying?
Now consider that the excess death rate in most countries during 2020-2022 has been so small that it’s hard to even come up with a plausible figure. The death rate due to COVID specifically is almost impossible to ascertain, thanks to deliberate obfuscation. We do know that it’s nothing close to 5/1000 except among the very old. In that context, NPIs are even harder to justify.
That very narrow conclusion is probably correct. So … what policy lessons should we draw from that? What seems most obvious to me is that there’s no point playing whack-a-mole if (a) you know it’s not going to do much good in the long run and (b) you have other options - and in the case of COVID, we did.
To be fair, Lipsitch makes these points himself in his Twitter thread. He doesn’t come across as a wild-eyed fanatic like Jonathan Van Tam. Considering the time he was writing (Feb 2020) he was giving a pretty level-headed view of the options.
Wherever possible, I think COVID-19 should be viewed in terms of the research we have on COVID-19, rather than generalising the research on other diseases. SARS-CoV-2 is not much like the flu viruses. It’s somewhat like the coronaviruses that cause the common cold, but even that is a pointless comparison when we have a wealth of information on how the various incarnations of this virus actually behave. IMO the CECC have been particularly remiss in ignoring the international literature - they’ve made frequent assertions which are flat-out contradicted by the reported facts elsewhere.
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Well, you certainly got me that time. I think I read the part where they say in effect, it just picks up where it left off, but I didn’t read far enough after that (maybe stopped by wishful thinking). I should have taken some real science courses.
This is gonna sound weird, but your position reminds me of General Kutuzov’s strategy (or at least Tolstoy’s depiction of it). Kutuzov was for letting nature take its course with Napoleon. Kutuzov fought and lost one battle (mitigating measures, because the Czar made him), then withdrew (let 'er rip) and let Russia herself (the vast land, the marauding peasants, the freelancing mounted partisans, and of course the horrendous weather) manage the Napoleon problem. Which worked out well for Kutuzov (not sure about everybody else, but that’s not really Kutuzov’s fault).
You haven’t converted me, but I sense that I’m becoming agnostic about the whole thing.
I think the course I enjoyed most (I guess it still shows) was the module on bullshit-spotting in scientific papers. the unfortunate fact is that most scientific papers are just expertly-polished turds. The most frequent criticism is “results do not support conclusions”, but there are a whole raft of possible faults that come up again and again. One particularly egregious COVID-related example was Andrew Hill’s admission that his conclusions about Ivermectin had been ghostwritten by his research sponsors, without even bothering to alter the actual experimental results (which showed a positive effect). Everyone involved knew that most people only read the abstract and the conclusions, and wouldn’t bother to drill down into the figures.
I had to go and Google that. It’s an interesting comparison, but I think one should be cautious about drawing comparisons between human conflicts and “wars” with Nature. Nature has non-human goals which humans often struggle to understand. Nature does not, for example, intend to “conquer” us in any way, or to subjugate us; and since she is several times more powerful than we are, a direct assault is quite literally like bringing a sharpened stick to a nuclear war.
There is no “rock and a hard place” choice - no “lockdowns or let’er rip, what’ll it be?”. At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, that’s the choice that They want you to believe in. Neither choice is sensible, but by convincing people that Nature taking its course would result in millions of deaths, They were able to sell lockdowns as the only possible course of action. Neil Ferguson at ICL was almost single-handedly responsible for that myth. The guy is a physicist, yet for some reason he’s managed to land a position as the world’s most influential epidemiologist. Kinda like the world’s most well-known computer salesman becoming the world’s most influential vaccinologist. But I digress. The point here is that COVID could have been dealt with like any other seasonal respiratory disease: identify those who are at risk, find treatment protocols that will help them, and get down to the business of treating them.
And in fact that’s what the doctors did … until they were told to cease and desist by the authorities. Those who refused to stop curing patients, and who insisted that treatment was not just possible but highly effective, were quickly hounded out of their jobs and banned from social media. Of course, that was done entirely for our own good. We can’t have doctors making important decisions about patient treatment when the politicians know better.
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Informative post.
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I coughed once on the bus cause the AC dried my throat and the guy beside me bolted to another seat.
Lmao.
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I do it all the time on the MRT. It’s amazing the space it creates.
Funny thing is, a Taiwanese person can be coughing up bits of lung and nobody bats an eyelid. A weiguoren just has to sniff, and they charge off to air-raid shelters.
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Well, foreigners must be more dangerous. Why else would we still need to quarantine them when they arrive in the country?
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I honestly give Taiwanese weird looks if they’re coughing. I personally feel they are less likely to test for multiple reasons lmao. Plus they’re out here coughing then spitting.
US could be open soon for unvaccinated people.
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It’s fairly obvious the deaths are predominantly just with Covid and the number is extremely insignificant. FFS can we just end every mandate and live normally. This is a freaking shitshow of China level absurdity.
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