It's been clear to anyone who believes data as opposed to their emotions that worldwide lockdowns haven't stopped the 'rona and masks haven't stopped the 'rona:
A recently completed research study by Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in cooperation with the Naval Medical Research Center and published in the New England Journal of Medicine has found that strict quarantine, tightly controlled social distancing, and continuous use of masks did absolutely nothing to contain the spread of COVID-19, and might even have increased its spread...
None of these strict lock down mandates, including continuous mask use, did anything to prevent transmission.
The control and test groups were Marines, and whose compliance was thus highly supervised:
More significantly, the control group of Marines who did not participate in this study, and thus were not under the same strict lock down rules, actually saw fewer infections, as shown on the table from the study to the right. While the difference wasn’t very large, it existed nonetheless. One could argue that the overuse of masks probably contributed to the higher numbers in the study group, since even in this tightly controlled setting it is still impossible to expect people to wear masks properly. Even if they replaced them regularly, it is unrealistic to expect people to never touch them while they wear them. Over long periods the masks will become havens for the virus, where the person breathes.
The study also demonstrated once again the relative harmlessness of the disease. Almost all of these young healthy Marine recruits who tested positive were asymptomatic, meaning that they wouldn’t have even known they were infected if they had not been participating. Furthermore, it appears no one even got very sick.
Once again, this data continues to reinforce the very very early data from March. COVID-19 is not dangerous to the young or healthy, and it will spread no matter what you do. The best way to beat it and thus protect the vulnerable older and sick population is to have it spread as fast as possible through the young and healthy population, so that it will die out quickly and thus no longer be a threat.
The people imposing these restrictions on us aren't abiding by them, either:
So who benefits from these useless restrictions? The people in power who get to impose them on the rest of us.I’ve seen this phenomenon called “the chump effect”: The rules only apply to the people who are willing to follow them, and you’re expected to shut your trap about anybody who doesn’t. You have to do what you’re told, even as you watch others flout the rules with no consequences. So you feel like a chump, and you resent it. If the rules don’t apply to everybody, why should they apply to anybody?
This is a really good way to break down a society.
Stick to teaching math ;)
ReplyDeleteThe last couple weeks have popped up three interesting studies. (Blogger won't let me post it in one, so I'll break it in three.)
ReplyDeleteFirst:
One in The Lancet Rheumatology on Nov 5th ( https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanrhe/article/PIIS2665-9913(20)30378-7/fulltext ) basically puts to bed forever the hydroxychloroquine question.
They pulled close to 200,000 medical records in the UK for people who had both covid and either Lupus or Rheumatoid Arthritis. They then split those into groups depending on whether they were being treated for Lupus or RA with HCQ prior to covid exposure. They then looked at the mortality rates for the HCQ vs non-HCQ groups, and they were statistically identical. HCQ had no prophylactic or early-use benefit.
That wasn't the interesting part of the study, though--to me anyway.
The HCQ group had an infection fatality rate for covid of 0.23% and the non-HCQ group had it at 0.22%.
That strikes me as the best data out there for the IFR, and even that would be high, since they started with only people who were diagnosed with covid. Plenty of people out there get covid either silently or they brush it off as a cold and never get a formal diagnosis. I've seen estimates for that of about 20%.
That puts the general IFR below 0.23%. I believe the CDC is still saying the IFR is probably around 0.65%
The last couple weeks have popped up three interesting studies. (Blogger won't let me post it in one, so I'll break it in three.)
ReplyDeleteSecond:
The second is the Marine study you mention. The study was written fairly badly, though, when it comes to the control group. A close reading, however, shows that the Behind the Black description is not correct.
All recruits underwent the exact same quarantine. The difference was only in the frequency of testing. The experiment was to see if monitoring the virus with early testing made a difference, not whether quarantine made a difference. They also wanted to test who was spreading it to whom, based on virus-strain testing in the end. (31% got it from their roommate.)
However, the Marines were asked to quarantine at home for 2 weeks prior to arrival at the campus; were kept in very, very strict quarantine the entire time--including lots of bleach, distancing, outdoor activities, double masking, no phones, etc. And they still got it. 1.9% in the frequent-testing group and 1.7% in the no-testing group. Serological testing showed that they were generally not getting it from their instructors, who were not in quarantine.
So the result was really: no matter how strong the quarantine, covid will still spread. And, really, anyone who has paid any attention to what has been happening in prisons and long-term care facilities, or who has seen "28 Weeks Later", could tell you that.
The last couple weeks have popped up three interesting studies. (Blogger won't let me post it in one, so I'll break it in three.)
ReplyDeleteThird:
The third study is the long awaited Danish Mask study. It doesn't read to me like the slam dunk it was suggested to be prior to release. Although, Healthy-Skeptic.com tears it apart, saying that there is so much extra caveat-ing in the paper, that it was obviously put in there in order to get the thing published, and if you strip that off, he thinks it's a strong paper, showing masking is a failure. ( https://healthy-skeptic.com/2020/11/18/flash-on-the-danish-mask-study/ )
The study put a significant number of well-masked people into a population undergoing fairly minimal transmission reduction efforts: no large gatherings, wash hands frequently, etc. The participants were all people who were out of the house for a significant period of every day. I think participants were out of the house at least 3 hours a day, and the median was 4.1 hours. The biggest cohort were "transportation" workers. At the time, pretty much no one else in the population was wearing masks, and at least some of the participants received some blow-back from people they came in contact with.
Darrin would be better at interpreting the statistics, but they showed there was no statistically significant difference between their masked cohort and their unmasked control group. But, then, they went on to say that the uncertainty in the statistics means they couldn't rule out a benefit of 23-46% for the mask wearers.
Then comes the part of the paper that shouldn't be there at all. The writers put in there (were they forced to by the journal in order to get published?) essentially a literature search on mask wearing protecting others from covid-positive wearers. This was not any part of the actual study, was not measured or monitored in any way by the researchers, and didn't need to be in the paper at all.
Nevertheless, I've seen many debunkers grabbing on to that part of the paper and saying: See! They found masks protect others, not necessarily the wearer!! See! See!
However, the paper actually added absolutely nothing to that debate, because it was outside the scope of their research.
Anonymous: interpreting data is what I do. You see, among other courses,I teach statistics.
ReplyDeleteAnd yes, I'm quite good at it.