Iron Crowned posted:

Haramstufe Rot posted:

She's a chemist tho

compshateme85 posted:

As for the two patients with nervous system reactions, one was determined to be an undiagnosed pre-existing case of MS (so not related), and the other was transverse myelitis (haven't heard if it was determined related or not).

Scarodactyl posted:

Yeah, it's a bit unclear in part because they didn't actually disclose details, what we have had to be leaked out. For instance we don't know how they are sure the MS is unrelated (maybe there were preexisting symptoms?) It'd be impossible to tell if the particular TM is related or not, it can just happen randomly after all--pretty much the only way to know is to keep going and see if it happens again. As is chances of TM happening randomly in the trial are quite low, but the chance of something happening is higher. So who knows. My personal guess is it is related but I hope not. We'll see ome way or another. Covid definitely can cause it too but I think there are something like three cases documented so far.
JnJ just started their phase 3, which is a similar adenovirus vaccine but with a single dose. Might be worth looking into.

compshateme85 posted:

AstraZeneca hasn't restarted the trial in the US because of politics. It's restarted in every other country.

QuarkJets posted:

Or probably it's just the FDA doing their job; public health experts criticized other health agencies for being too quick in resuming trials. In the UK they spent all of 1 day reviewing data before resuming theirs lol

Guy Axlerod posted:

Does anyone know if the various covid tracing apps share information? Say I get exposed to someone from out of state and they later test positive. Does their positive test result in State X (or Country Y) show up in my app from State Z?

Rat posted:

The caveat with this is I am familiar with my province's tracing app. How the actual positive reporting and contact tracing works varies greatly by location and by the apps themselves.

As far as I'm aware you both need to be running the same app at the same time. There's no cross-app reporting. The person using the app has to voluntarily report that they're positive and submit the information. The contact tracing app here will only notify you if you've been within 6 feet of a positive person for 15 minutes, useless for most possible points of contact. If you come into contact for shorter times or longer distances it doesn't count in the app. As far as I can tell the same is true of the Canadian national app.

So unless the out of state person downloaded and used the local state app you are running, and voluntarily reported they tested positive, and you were in contact for long enough at a short distance, it won't tell you anything. I'd have to look into other local contact tracing apps to see. As far as I have seen they are similar in their requirements in North America. If you tell me which app I could have a look.

compshateme85 posted:

The MHRA and EMA are known for being more stringent than the FDA.

And does anyone at this point think the FDA is actually doing their job? They're a political pawn now and everyone knows it.

Rat posted:

Grateful my company has extended WFH until January 2021 at least.

Rat posted:

The caveat with this is I am familiar with my province's tracing app. How the actual positive reporting and contact tracing works varies greatly by location and by the apps themselves.

As far as I'm aware you both need to be running the same app at the same time. There's no cross-app reporting. The person using the app has to voluntarily report that they're positive and submit the information. The contact tracing app here will only notify you if you've been within 6 feet of a positive person for 15 minutes, useless for most possible points of contact. If you come into contact for shorter times or longer distances it doesn't count in the app. As far as I can tell the same is true of the Canadian national app.

So unless the out of state person downloaded and used the local state app you are running, and voluntarily reported they tested positive, and you were in contact for long enough at a short distance, it won't tell you anything. I'd have to look into other local contact tracing apps to see. As far as I have seen they are similar in their requirements in North America. If you tell me which app I could have a look.

QuarkJets posted:

Everyone's concern is that the FDA may be too lenient. Delaying further trial signups is the opposite of that.

Inept posted:

Unless the vaccine czar, Moncef Slaoui, who has $10 million in Moderna stock, told the Trump admin to push the FDA to delay the AstraZenica testing to help his former company and his retirement portfolio out.

quote:

Slaoui agreed to sell stock worth $12 million and resign from the board of Moderna, the developer of a leading potential vaccine. But Slaoui insisted on keeping his roughly $10 million stake in his former company, GlaxoSmithKline, another contender in the Operation Warp Speed vaccine race. “I won’t leave those shares because that’s my retirement,” he has said. GlaxoSmithKline, working with Sanofi, has started human trials for a coronavirus vaccine using similar technology to Sanofi’s flu shot. It is supported by up to $2.1 billion from the U.S. government.

quote:

By now many people have heard about R0—the basic reproductive number of a pathogen, a measure of its contagiousness on average. But unless you’ve been reading scientific journals, you’re less likely to have encountered k, the measure of its dispersion. The definition of k is a mouthful, but it’s simply a way of asking whether a virus spreads in a steady manner or in big bursts, whereby one person infects many, all at once. After nine months of collecting epidemiological data, we know that this is an overdispersed pathogen, meaning that it tends to spread in clusters, but this knowledge has not yet fully entered our way of thinking about the pandemic—or our preventive practices.

quote:

Overdispersion and super-spreading of this virus are found in research across the globe. A growing number of studies estimate that a majority of infected people may not infect a single other person. A recent paper found that in Hong Kong, which had extensive testing and contact tracing, about 19 percent of cases were responsible for 80 percent of transmission, while 69 percent of cases did not infect another person. This finding is not rare: Multiple studies from the beginning have suggested that as few as 10 to 20 percent of infected people may be responsible for as much as 80 to 90 percent of transmission, and that many people barely transmit it.

quote:

Using genomic analysis, researchers in New Zealand looked at more than half the confirmed cases in the country and found a staggering 277 separate introductions in the early months, but also that only 19 percent of introductions led to more than one additional case. A recent review shows that this may even be true in congregate living spaces, such as nursing homes, and that multiple introductions may be necessary before an outbreak takes off. Meanwhile, in Daegu, South Korea, just one woman, dubbed Patient 31, generated more than 5,000 known cases in a megachurch cluster.

quote:

Hitoshi Oshitani, a member of the National COVID-19 Cluster Taskforce at Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare and a professor at Tohoku University who told me that Japan focused on the overdispersion impact from early on, likens his country’s approach to looking at a forest and trying to find the clusters, not the trees. Meanwhile, he believes, the Western world was getting distracted by the trees, and got lost among them. To fight a super-spreading disease effectively, policy makers need to figure out why super-spreading happens, and they need to understand how it affects everything, including our contact-tracing methods and our testing regimes.

quote:

Overdispersion should also inform our contact-tracing efforts. In fact, we may need to turn them upside down. Right now, many states and nations engage in what is called forward or prospective contact tracing. Once an infected person is identified, we try to find out with whom they interacted afterward so that we can warn, test, isolate, and quarantine these potential exposures. But that’s not the only way to trace contacts. And, because of overdispersion, it’s not necessarily where the most bang for the buck lies. Instead, in many cases, we should try to work backwards to see who first infected the subject.

Because of overdispersion, most people will have been infected by someone who also infected other people, because only a small percentage of people infect many at a time, whereas most infect zero or maybe one person. As Adam Kucharski, an epidemiologist and the author of the book The Rules of Contagion, explained to me, if we can use retrospective contact tracing to find the person who infected our patient, and then trace the forward contacts of the infecting person, we are generally going to find a lot more cases compared with forward-tracing contacts of the infected patient, which will merely identify potential exposures, many of which will not happen anyway, because most transmission chains die out on their own.

quote:

Perhaps one of the most interesting cases has been Japan, a country with middling luck that got hit early on and followed what appeared to be an unconventional model, not deploying mass testing and never fully shutting down. By the end of March, influential economists were publishing reports with dire warnings, predicting overloads in the hospital system and huge spikes in deaths. The predicted catastrophe never came to be, however, and although the country faced some future waves, there was never a large spike in deaths despite its aging population, uninterrupted use of mass transportation, dense cities, and lack of a formal lockdown.

It’s not that Japan was better situated than the United States in the beginning. Similar to the U.S. and Europe, Oshitani told me, Japan did not initially have the PCR capacity to do widespread testing. Nor could it impose a full lockdown or strict stay-at-home orders; even if that had been desirable, it would not have been legally possible in Japan.

Oshitani told me that in Japan, they had noticed the overdispersion characteristics of COVID-19 as early as February, and thus created a strategy focusing mostly on cluster-busting, which tries to prevent one cluster from igniting another. Oshitani said he believes that “the chain of transmission cannot be sustained without a chain of clusters or a megacluster.” Japan thus carried out a cluster-busting approach, including undertaking aggressive backward tracing to uncover clusters. Japan also focused on ventilation, counseling its population to avoid places where the three C’s come together—crowds in closed spaces in close contact, especially if there’s talking or singing—bringing together the science of overdispersion with the recognition of airborne aerosol transmission, as well as presymptomatic and asymptomatic transmission.

Illuminti posted:

quote:

69 percent of cases did not infect another person.

unpacked robinhood posted:

I'd like to know if we have a science problem or a journalists reporting on science problem because I vaguely remember being told the exact opposite 4 months ago.
Obviously I haven't done any due diligence myself.

Jabor posted:

One of the key things about "science" is that if you discover new information, you use that to update what you think about the world, instead of doggedly sticking to whatever your first assumption was.

Jabor posted:

One of the key things about "science" is that if you discover new information, you use that to update what you think about the world, instead of doggedly sticking to whatever your first assumption was.

unpacked robinhood posted:

Obviously but it's such a 180 from not long ago. A french study from June found that children don't spread covid to each other in school much, but get it at home from their parents.
Does it contradict the Indian study, is it such widely different environments that both studies can still inform policy locally, who loving knows.

That Works posted:

This is true.

Also, journalists reporting on science are often wildly inaccurate or just completely wrong. Often they ignore the presented facts and latch onto one bit of speculation in the discussion of the paper and run with that because it's more sensational etc. Scientists are generally bad at / have no real means to combat this either.

Der Shovel posted:

Finland passed 10 000 infections today.

It took ~two weeks to go from 9000 to 10000

Mithaldu posted:

Beartaco posted:

In order to adhere to lockdown rules you must first solve this system of linear equations.

Marmaduke! posted:

The whole thing is a catch 22 because they're too scared to enact any strong policies before the adverse effects are clear since if a lockdown successfully prevents outbreaks it makes it looks like you've overreacted and then the press and covidiots poo poo themselves over it.

i am harry posted:

New Scientist is a good science magazine employing science writers to bridge that gap between scientists and idiots

Schadenboner posted:

I cannot overstate just how sad this feedback loop has made me in land (not surprised, mind you, but still saddened).

E: I guess surprised, too? I'm well into Charlie Brown/Lucy territory here but I guess I grew up being taught that some things were inappropriate to politicize (but, of course, it doesn't actually work that way: norms only function when there are social structures in place to direct scorn at violators and those are long gone)?

quote:

Does the app work outside of the state of New York?

Exposure Notification technology is set up based on the region that you are in (in the US, it is based on the State that you are in). By downloading the COVID Alert NY App and going through the onboarding process, your phone will automatically set your Exposure Notification region to New York. If you travel outside of the state of New York, your phone may continue to exchange anonymous keys with out of state contacts, but you will only receive Exposure Notifications based on your exposure to other app users using same Exposure Notification key server as New York (through the Association of Public Health Laboratories).

John_A_Tallon posted:

Haven't people with various radical positions seeking to normalize their positions actively torn down and sabotaged social shaming as a control measure?