"General infection rates and respiratory diseases always go up in September and October. I've had a cold every September since my daughter started nursery." @JuliaHB1

"We want them infected."

"I’ve asked so many people if they know anyone who has had Covid. Hardly anyone. Two people knew someone (not close) who’d died. Without daily news would we even know there was an epidemic?" @allisonpearson

"There hasn’t been a 'second spike' anywhere. Not in Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Holland, Norway, Denmark, Switzerland... not in any US states… nowhere. Utter balls." @toadmeister

"Lockdowns don't work."

"Sweden settled in for the long haul, and now doesn't need to worry about a second surge." @DanielJHannan

"So many on Twitter dancing on the head of a pin when it comes to Sweden because they don’t like the data."

"Covid deaths in Sweden remain low."

"Sweden settled in for the long haul, and now doesn't need to worry about a second surge."

"Switzerland and Austria - the new Swedens?"

"In all of them the epidemic is now (in terms of positive test results) either in decline or plateauing."

"Lockdowns don't work."

"It's called the autumn. Every autumn we see an increase in respiratory diseases. It happens every single year."

"It's called the autumn. Every autumn we see an increase in respiratory diseases. It happens every single year."

"Trust your eyes, not the fake news."

"The number is almost nothing. Because we’ve gotten control of this thing, we understand how it works. They have the therapeutics to be able to deal with this."

"Scotland is not doing better than the rest of the UK."

"Only a small increase in bed demand. No pandemic."

"I'm going to go out on a limb and predict there will be no 'second spike' - not now, and not in autumn either. The virus has melted into thin air."

"Respiratory deaths rise in Northern countries at this time of year."

"Switzerland is doing better than most."

"European Countries are sadly getting clobbered by the China Virus."

"There's always a surge in respiratory illnesses in Europe during autumn."

"The peak of infections was two weeks before we locked down."

"If Sweden succeeds, lockdowns will all have been for nothing."

"We should look at Sweden and learn from their experience."

"Lockdowns don't work."

30 June 2020. Fauci: "I would not be surprised if we go up to 100,000 a day if this does not turn around, and so I am very concerned." Trump: "He's a little bit of an alarmist."

"Infections are going down, not up."

"Each part of the world offers a control in the lockdown experiment. To justify the lockdowns, those places wouldn't just have to lag behind this or that neighbour; they'd have to stick out like sore thumbs."

"Cases in Belgium already started to drop before the national lockdown on 2 Nov." [Narrator: Belgium closed all bars and restaurants on 19 October and introduced a curfew between midnight and 5 am]

"South Dakota is the Sweden of the USA."

"There is no science to suggest a second wave should happen."

"It will be over by Christmas."

"The rate of new infections had peaked before the imposition of the lockdown in March."

"We have made tremendous progress."

"We are very close to reaching herd immunity."

"The coronavirus isn't going to kill you. It really isn't."

"The pandemic in the UK is over."

"Infection rates go up in winter and down in summer."

"People in Asia have a natural immunity against coronaviruses."

"Sweden did it right because they didn't go into full lockdown."

"What we are seeing now is normal for this time of the year."

"There is no second wave."

30/n So AT BEST assuming there are no other errors, the estimate of the years of life lost due to school closures should be divided by 5

29/n If I re-run the meta-analysis they've purported to use with the correct numbers, we end up with this graph instead. A relative reduction in risk of death of 5% for every year of schooling This is A QUARTER of the estimate used in the study

28/n However you slice it, it's inappropriate to just bung these two estimates together into a model and treat them as separate. I would argue that the Mazumder paper is probably a better estimate, but either way what they've done here is wrong

27/n You see, Lleras-Muney compiled an estimate based on a number of factors on the reduction in risk from 1 year of extra schooling. Mazumder, three years later, took that same database and re-analyzed it considering additional factors, and estimated a lower reduction

26/n So the number is wrong, but this brings us to another issue - the two papers at the top that were double-weighted...are ON THE SAME DATASET This is a massive issue

25/n Mazumder (2008) did not find a relative risk of 0.65 (0-1.3), it found an RR of 0.89 (0.74-1.04) The paper is here. I've read it very carefully and this appears to be the main finding from the author https://chicagofed.org/publications/economic-perspectives/2008/2qtr2008-part1-mazumder

24/n Firstly, we have these top 2 papers. Because they're from the US, they are more heavily weighted than the others (this is arbitrary, but whatever) Except the values for the second paper are flatly incorrect

23/n This number is the ENTIRE BASIS for the paper. If schooling reduces mortality by less than 25%, then the number of deaths caused by missed school days will drop as well And we have a problem, because this 25% figure is...wrong

22/n Ok, there's another HUGE problem with the study The findings are entirely based on the idea that an extra year of schooling reduces your risk of death by 25%, a figure reached by aggregating studies in a meta-analysis model

21/n Also, what's the impact of parents/carers getting sick and dying? Presumably this will have an outsized impact on the children it affects, which would cause (based on this model) large increases in YLL

20/n Another point I've been thinking about - the authors fail to consider the impact of an ongoing epidemic on school attendance. Lots of cases in the local area probably impacts schooling as well!

19/n Many further criticisms of this paper that I missed in this also excellent thread. It appears that almost none of the assumptions in the paper make any sense at all

18/n I should add - I am not saying that closing schools is necessarily a positive in this thread. What I AM saying, however, is that we could not possibly know whether it was or not from this paper

17/n At best, what we've got here is a very rough inference about what the impact of school closures could possibly have been (as long as US kids in 2020 are the same as Argentinians in 1977), compared to an undercount of the impact of what COVID-19 probably was

16/n It may be possible to do a rigorous cost/benefit of school closures, but I really don't see how this can be considered one

15/n Ultimately, what we get in the end - the "98.1% probability" figure - makes almost no sense at all. Even if the Argentinian study was applicable to the US situation, which it clearly isn't, the counterfactual is just inappropriate

14/n (This is also a problem for the YLL calculation for children missing school, FYI, it is FAR more complex than just missing educational attainment. So many potential things that are not included here!)

13/n Where are the years of lost life due to ICU stays? Hospitalizations? Disability, mental health issues, avoided care due to full hospitals, etc etc etc???

12/n But, if we're comparing the total impact of missed education on children over a lifetime, this makes no sense. COVID-19 has many other harms, after all, some of which are disputed but many of which are easily attributable

11/n Next, the authors did something odd. They decided to compare this to the DIRECT mortality from COVID-19. This means that they are only counting people who have died as a direct result of the disease

10.5/n (Also, whether the impact of teachers formally striking on children in the 70s is the same as missing days of in-person education during a pandemic in 2020...I would say probably not)

10/n It should also be noted that the impact of TEACHERS' STRIKES on ARGENTINIAN CHILDREN may not mean much when we're talking about American children, some % of whom could learn at home and thus were not explicitly missing class

9/n Indeed, the main analysis of this paper explicitly excludes the impact of missing secondary education because their data was incomplete and many Argentinian children in the cohort at the time did not attend secondary school

8/n Note there that I said ASSOCIATION. This is a key point. The authors of this paper WARN AGAINST USING IT CAUSALLY because, among other issues, the data for children in Argentina in the 70s and 80s (especially schoolkids) was not great

7/n This is a long and fascinating examination of the association between teachers' strikes in Argentina and the eventual earnings that children achieved when they grew up

6/n Firstly, the paper that all of this extrapolation is based on - reference 14. This is where the authors got the relationship between days of schooling missed and overall educational attainment

5/n Now, that sounds very robust. 98.1% probability is extremely certain! It's also, as far as I can tell, an incredibly meaningless number. NONE OF THIS IS THE SLIGHTEST BIT CERTAIN

4/n They then compared this with estimates of the number of years of life lost due to COVID-19 already, and found that the loss of educational attainment caused more death (with 98.1% probability!)

3/n Specifically, they said: 1. Children miss days of school 2. Days of school cause decreased educational attainment 3. Decreased educational attainment causes less life

2/n Paper is here. It's actually very simple, basically the authors took an estimate of how many days of school kids lost due to closures during COVID-19, an estimate of how much that impacts their years of life, and multiplied out

Ok, so I've had a read of this paper (which has been all over the news) that says quite explicitly that closing schools will probably cause more years of life lost than leaving them open in a pandemic Let's do some peer-review on twitter! 1/n

presumably the "disambiguation" between the scenarios has happened now? so, is the model still featuring in Independent Sage recommendations? are there further revisions/fixes coming? does this change perceptions on more 'mainstream' epidem. models?

..even under pessimistic assumptions about loss of humoral immunity endowed by antibodies." 7/n

"Put simply, an effective herd immunity—that works hand-in-hand appropriate public health and local lockdown measures—requires less than 20% seroprevalence. This seroprevalence has already been reached in many countries and is sufficient to preclude a traumatic second wave, 6/n

and .. 5/n

Please see 50 for a more comprehensive analysis. Note that in a month or two, death rates should disambiguate between these scenarios." 4/n

..of contact tracing (FTTIS)—modelled as the probability of self-isolating, given one is infected but asymptomatic. It can be seen that even with a relatively low efficacy of 25%, elimination is possible by November, with convergence to zero fatality rates... 3/n

"These posterior predictions suggest that, under the assumption that immunity endures for a year or two, there may be a mild inflation of fatality rates over the autumn, peaking at about 30 per day. This second wave could be eliminated completely with an increase in the efficacy

I just had cause to revisit the Friston modelling paper from Sept: https://medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.09.01.20185876v1.full.pdf… 1/n

Google doing its job here. Our revelations about the Koch funded libertarian think tanks behind the discredited Herd Immunity theory is public interest journalism

Google is censoring The Great Barrington Declaration. When you search for it you’re directed to a conspiracy theory from Byline Times

Some really great resources & discussions in this thread. The tl;dr is (1) yes, the vaccine trials included some people who had previously had COVID; and (2) in general vaccination plans will include those who have previously been sick/infected. Thanks all!

Good question for immunologists like @michaelmina_lab @VirusesImmunity and @PeterHotez.

Share of unemployed who have been out of work at least 27 weeks (i.e., the "long-term unemployed")

% change in employment of parents since Feb (not seasonally adjusted) https://washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/12/04/november-jobs-report-slowdown-economy-recovery

Also, FWIW, Trump is still on track to be the first president since modern employment statistics began to leave office with fewer jobs than existed at his inauguration.

That's just raw numbers of jobs, by the way. Does not account for growth in population over a three-year period, which would imply we need more jobs than we had pre-pandemic.

If the November pace of job growth continues, it will take *more than three years* before we recover all the jobs lost in the spring.

The jobs hole remains very, very deep. Today, the U.S. economy still has a greater jobs deficit than was the case at the very worst point of every previous postwar recession, including the Great Recession

Most of the time, this probably doesn't matter much if infection rates are low even in the placebo group. But I'm surprised I haven't seen people talk about it. I assume this is a well-known result? Any concern about comparing efficacy estimates across time and place?

Of course you can work this all out analytically for various models of exposure risk. Here's a little illustration that @evokerr put together for a vaccine that blocks 90% of infections.. You can think of N as measuring number of close contacts with people in the community.

With a good vaccine, the treatment group effectively "sees" a lower rate of exposure than the placebo group. As the disease gets more prevalent, the case count in the placebo group starts to saturate first, while that in the treatment group continue to increase nearly linearly.

So as exposure risk increases, the number of cases in a group increases sub-linearly. Suppose half the group is contracting the disease during the study, and then you double the exposure. Assuming homogeneity and independence etc you'd now expect about 3/4 of the group to get it.

My colleague @evokerr pointed out that estimates of vaccine efficacy also depend on prevalence. The logic is pretty simple. Efficacy is defined as one minus the risk ratio of treatment to placebo. The key observation is you can only get COVID once.

A somewhat technical thread about measuring vaccine efficacy. We're used to the notion that certain properties of tests for disease depend on prevalence: positive and negative predictive value do, for example, whereas sensitivity and specificity do not.

On average, one person in the U.S. died of Covid-19 every 43 seconds last week. On this morning’s @CNNnewsroom, @Christi_Paul and @MartinSavidge marked this sobering fact with 43 seconds of silence.

Provenance and @FuJoMedia are delighted to support Age of Misinformation by @CEST_Official & @ElsevierConnect Our countering disinformation panel will be chaired by @CullotyEileen with insights from @rsarmitage @vitalbacrivello @TGrandjouan @STWorg @TZerback & @GianfredaStella

Why did I hedge my original post with "I don't have a background in medical ethics but...."? Because people who can provide context like this. Thread:

More on this issue. https://nytimes.com/2020/12/02/health/covid-vaccine-placebo-group.html…

I don't have a background in medical ethics but this makes me uncomfortable unless it was very clearly explained to study participants at enrollment, and to some degree even then. h/t @RMCarpiano https://nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2033538…

9) ...and we just got a new confirmation of a mink #SARSCoV2 spike protein mutation... that has also made it into humans. Luckily this one our vaccines and antibodies still recognize. But we might not be so lucky if pandemic drags in a large mink reservoir from which to emerge.

8) MINK EPIDEMIC IN OREGON. “The mink is currently the only animal known to pass the coronavirus back to humans. There’s also concern that the virus can mutate inside mink populations and lead to new strains that might resist vaccines.”

7) Also, @michaelmina_lab has said vaccine escape is unlikely, but he admits there is currently one potential vulnerability—almost all current vaccines target immunity development against #SARSCoV2’s current spike protein. While best , we are putting eggs into one basket.

6) While “vaccine escape” is unlikely, we can’t be sure yet. And Dr Anderson points out #SARSCoV2, while has a low substitution rate, actually has a high recombination rate.

5) and why should we care most of all? Two words: “vaccine escape”. If we let the #SARSCoV2 establish itself in another species permanently, there is greater chance of it long term. We cannot let this coronavirus linger on this planet and evolved in “unexpected” pathways.

4) With sooooo many minks infected in Denmark and elsewhere, immunologist Dr Anderson is “concerned” about possible “unexpected evolutionary pathways”. This is why there is a movement to cull the minks and eliminate all mink farming. But this has stalled in Denmark.

3) As pointed out, in Denmark, minks outnumber total humans by over 2x. And attack rates of #SARSCoV2 in minks is sometimes 90% of all exposed minks. So yeah, that’s why Danish leaders are worried about mink #COVID19

2) More worrisome about minks: In Denmark, minks at a farm that got infected months ago later became **reinfected recently**—including with symptoms. Random sampling of 36 animals brought up 26 positives - all reinfected. This needs further study. https://tv2nord.dk/amp/119200?__twitter_impression=true

HUMANMINKSHUMAN transmission on mink farms in NL. 68% of the tested farm workers and/or contacts had evidence of #SARSCoV2 infection. The coronavirus mutated & even evolved within minks before transmitted back to humans—& keeps #COVID19 perpetuating. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/11/09/science.abe5901.full…

COVID meets Brexit in the UK

In some parts of the country, 31% of care home staff come from the EU. Some areas already have a 26% vacancy rate. And on January 1, EU recruitment will plummet because workers earn less than the £26,500 threshold. A very predictable recruitment crisis on top of the Covid crisis.

More on this kind of thing in my latest blogpost, just up: http://deevybee.blogspot.com/2020/12/faux-peer-reviewed-journals-threat-to.html… Reviewing such papers reveals journals that publish more 'letters' than articles, with minimal publication lags - but are listed on Web of Science

A researcher reads an online news article about a family suicide in another country and writes it up more or less verbatim as a "case report", with a spurious reference to homicide. WTF @wileyglobal? 10.1111/ppc.12686 News article (trans by Google in pic): https://bengali.news18.com/news/crime/old-man-with-his-wife-and-son-commits-suicide-in-their-residence-at-kolkata-ss-459859.html…

lol ok.

We need a #2020goodnews trend. Here's one: Science keeps getting more open. One indicator from @OSFramework: * OSF users posted 9,349 files of data or other research content PER DAY * OSF users made 5,633 files public PER DAY EVERY DAY in 2020 #openscience is accelerating

Divination by scatomancy works. Or: shit don’t lie.

Our 1st Covid-19 wastewater tests since Thanksgiving just came in - virus levels are up significantly citywide. I hope that all of #BTV will look at this graph and see what I see: a call to action, to stop gathering with other households, and to get tested ASAP if you have

One year ago today: Korea reports 230 new confirmed cases for a new total of 833, now the largest outbreak outside mainland China. 5 days ago, it was only 31 cases. While the majority of the cases are still linked to the Shincheonji church, they are now spread across South Korea.

I'm quite happy to engage in debate over the interpretation of data, but I'm disappointed with the tactics some people use. If you pay attention, you'll see people who don't (and can't) identify errors of fact, but rather resort to ad hominem attacks. Keep an eye out for that.

Finally, since I'm in the mood to point out unprofessional behaviour, I'd like to make some comments of a general nature (not directed to Dr Cevik).

Now, the point of this thread is not to seek sympathy or to arrange a pile-on. I don't want to see anyone behaving inappropriately toward Dr Cevik as a result. But I do want people to know what happened. Primarily, I hope calling out such behaviour will prevent a repeat of it.

Disagreements are to be expected from time to time, and I've had my fair share of those. Debate is integral to science, and I welcome it. But attempting to silence others' opinions is unacceptable. It is unbecoming of a scientist, and utterly incompatible with free inquiry.

I've been an academic for a long time - longer than my fresh-faced profile picture might suggest. Not once in my career have I ever encountered such unprofessional behaviour from a colleague, and I'm not going to put up with it.

She listed an astonishing 12 complaints (yes, 12!), said the article was grossly inaccurate, and asked for the article to be retracted. However, no errors of fact were identified, so the article has not been retracted.

I thought that was pretty strange, but laughed the matter off. After all, the complaint didn't go anywhere and I was supported by my university. But last week, she made a complaint to a publisher about an article I recently wrote. It was this article:

I don't like to dwell on negatives, but something important happened recently that I'd like to make public. Shortly before Christmas, @mugecevik made a complaint to my university about me. When asked for details, she didn't provide any. My employer took a dim view of the matter.

2.3 million people were vaccinated within 13 days in Bangladesh

13/ Apparently this type of tactic has a name, "the moat and the bailey", kind of like an inverse straw man. Thanks @raj_a_mehta

12/ Some replies say "just block those scientists." Unfortunately, not that easy. Some of these folks are well-known, are routinely interviewed by major news media. And they attack many different ppl this way. If we block, can't counter the misinformation they spread at times.

11/ This latter tactic is particularly harmful, because it starts to create a perception on Field X that "Field Y is attacking the younger members of Field X, thus the scientists from Field Y are a******s" Which creates barriers to collab. btw fields, precisely when most needed!

10/ One other feature of the "group attack", is that often they seem to call in to colleagues who may be unaware of the tactics. So new scientists barge in, who have been told "so and so are personally attacking me" and they join the fray. Having been manipulated into doing so.

9/ I look forward to continuing to talk with the large majority of scientists in Twitter who do so honestly and candidly. And I hope this may help a few people in identifying the more negative tactics.

8/ I ask all scientists to focus and engage on the arguments. What is the evidence for and against a given hypothesis? That's where Twitter convos can be extraordinary, enabling sorely-needed connections between fields , and that are far slower through journals and conferences.

7/ And you see this over and over. The same groups of scientists using the same sneaking tactics to avoid having to debate arguments. It took me quite a while to understand this pattern. I write this so that others perhaps can learn to recognize it faster.

6/ And they often work in groups. Once this dynamic is established, quickly other scientists show up in the conversation quickly, and join in denouncing the (non-existent) personal attack, trying to discredit me ("you don't know anything about X") instead of engaging argument.

5/ In some cases they play the victim. After they denounce the (non-existent) personal attack from me, they continue with "you are a senior researcher attacking poor me junior / female / etc. researcher" In a public forum like Twitter this can be very hard to counter.

4/ The trickier one are groups of scientists that when confronted with an argument they don't have a real answer to, when I press for an answer for the argument, they say that it is a personal attack from me.

3/ But there are some more nefarious behaviors out there. The simpler one is the scientist that resorts to personal "ad hominem" attacks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem), as in politics: to combat a scientific argument, discredit the person. I just ignore and block those folks.

2/ First of all say that 95% of the scientists in Twitter are great. This is one of the 2 main reasons I use twitter, that I can e.g. ask questions from experts in other fields and they'll reply etc. (The other reason is the ability to provide info to the population directly)

1/ Some reflections on scientific Twitter sociology I hadn't used Twitter much before the pandemic. I was used to the politics of peer-review, grants, large studies etc. But scientific Twitter can be the Wild West by comparison.

2/2 But to make people feel ok about publicly being wrong we need mechanisms for downplaying influence of ego. Twitter, however, in large parts, feels like a big ego enhancement machine. It's not a natural fit.

indeed -reminds me of the Koudenberg talk at SciBeh workshop on politeness online. More generally, to have debate focussed entirely on argument requires making people feel *more comfortable* about publicly being proven wrong. 1/2

both your points on "ending" and "pressing" as derailment tool, seem right to me. The better social media tool for science discourse I dream of has tools for both of these: we need tools for mining and linking arguments such that overall arguments/exchanges are cumulative!

And if you've been on twitter a bit, it's impossible not to notice that "pressing" people on twitter a tactic that people use all the time to derail convos, to troll, etc; so of course people are going to sometimes be repulsed by it, even when used by well-intentioned peers.

To be clear, I'm not condoning twitter pile-ons, etc. But getting on twitter and acting like people (literally anyone) owe you a response is just not going to go well. It's ok to just let the "argument" end and move on.

One thought is that we generally don't "press" strangers or even colleagues in face to face conversations, and when we do, it's usually perceived as pretty aggressive. Not sure why anyone would expect it to work better on twitter.

more on science Twitter - we need better tools, and better understanding of how the medium interacts with content! Join our efforts at http://Scibeh.org

A person with the virus who, say, has lunch with friends is a witness to an event in which the virus was possibly transmitted, and a suspect who might have transmitted it to others. Our new paper in PoPS @lorraine_hope @rachelz @drayeshaverrall and Jamie Robertson

I think of strength of inference resting on P(not E|not H) (for coronavirus case). Search determines the conditional probability (and by total probability of course prob of evidence) but it isn't itself the evidence. So, was siding with R. against what I thought you meant ;-)

2/2 Having conducted experiments on lay understanding of arguments from ignorance, in my experience, people intuitively understand probabilistic impact of factors, such as quality of search, that moderate strength. Rather than build on that, we work against it with slogan!

you absolutely did (and I would have been disappointed if you hadn't ;-)! It was a general comment prompted by the fact that the title of the article you linked to doesn't (as is widespread), and I actually genuinely think this is part of the "problem" in pedagogical terms. 1/2

All the times the down-players were plain wrong: https://time.graphics/line/455000

Watching high profile covid-deniers and down-players on here continue to spew their conspiracy theory crap even as cases & hospitalisations hit record levels & ICUs start to get overrun is one of the most depressing spectacles imaginable. What the f*ck is wrong with them?

There are also consistent public health experts since Feb. UK govt chose to listen to certain voices & not others, & to invite certain views onto SAGE & not others. Chancellor Sunak invited Heneghan, Gupta & Tegnell to advise on strategy. That says it all.Quote Tweet

The experts have now changed their minds on testing arrivals, masks, mass gatherings, mass testing, herd immunity...

This shows how tiny and irrelevant the libertarian/anti-mask/freedomloving/Coviddeniers are: media shld ignore them and those crazed MPs.Shameful PM waits for YouGov poll to tell him what to do, too many deaths later.

Would you support or oppose the UK going into another national lockdown? Support: 79% Oppose: 16% Via @YouGov Jan 4

Our 4th dashboard launches today at http://torontoafterthefirstwave.com. It focuses on changes in work, revealing a range of employment impacts experienced in Toronto during COVID-19. This dashboard includes StatsCan data, a survey of office vacancy rates, and some novel LinkedIN data.

Replying to @BrianNosek @SLLancaster and 2 othersVery cool - and it already has a list of glossaries to build on

A thing I feel is weird about how we are all reacting to this pandemic: mourning is still so individual & private. It surprises me there aren’t campaigns for armbands, ribbons, wreaths on doors, or some sort of flag in the window to say “a loved one was lost to COVID here”.

It's good that opening up will be done in stages, though more could be done to ensure we don’t fail after the 1st stage and end up back in lockdown due to hospitals filling up again with unvaccinated people. I hope the government don't end up regretting not doing the above. END

4. Cases may not be going down so quickly anymore – look at the last ~2 weeks data - so infections and hospitalisations could go up rapidly, especially without 1-3 above.

3. Why not stagger school opening rather than send all year groups back at once?

The reason we are in this third lockdown is because of the anti lockdowners like Lord Sumption ..We are going in circles, countries who have done well controlled the virus and now have an economic recovery ..And every life matters #GMB @devisridhar speaking truth to power

Last night @SliderCuts & I discussed qq his 95k+ followers have about #COVID19 vaccines. Went on > 1.5 hrs in the end!! Pple have reasonable concerns that need to be heard and understood & happy to (hopefully) help address. Watch here https://instagram.com/tv/CLcu-UFB8Xy/?igshid=irvs1mlis0o9… @IndependentSage

(the fridge metaphor adapted from @ESYudkowsky's old post on how even movements dedicated to rationality can slide into becoming cults) https://lesswrong.com/posts/yEjaj7PWacno5EvWa/every-cause-wants-to-be-a-cult

“What have they got against democracy,” sighs the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea

Writing the word “sceptical” on your movement doesn’t make you sceptics, any more than writing the word “cold” on a box makes it a fridge. Scepticism involves work, real work, assessing and revising your own beliefs, not just reflexively rejecting what you see as orthodoxy

IMPORTANT NOTE: Health Ministry sources are briefing that these numbers should be "taken with an asterisk" and are likely to change as data comes in. One particular question raised was whether ethnic and socioeconomic factors were included in building the control group.

For people asking me: I'm not a medical expect, but I don't expect to see results this strong for the Astrazeneca vaccine. The AZ vaccine is great. The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines look like they're miracles.

Alternatively, there could be some herd effects starting to happen in mostly-vaccinated populations compared to towns with low numbers of vaccinated people.

This new data from Israel's Health Ministry, published a few minutes ago, is SO good that I'm actually a little suspicious of it. Could be a function of the short dosing interval giving a few weeks of very high antibodies?

Yet more good news on the Pfizer vaccine, showing even higher effectiveness 14 days after 2nd dose. Effectiveness: 95.8% at preventing infection 98% at preventing symptoms 98.9% at preventing hospitalisations 99.2% at stopping serious disease 98.9% at preventing death

Our next Covid-19: known unknowns webinar is about vaccines for covid-19. Find out more and register >> http://ow.ly/LQCy50DFYF7 @AllysonPollock @drphilhammond @mendel_random @bengoldacre #CovidUnknowns #COVID19

I'm happy to move to more refined statistical measures where there is good reason for them, and, as a scientist, I am happy to take whatever answer the data give us

The average Swede lives in a more densely populated area than the average German.

Erik, it's equally a bit disingenuous to directly compare, say, Germany to Sweden, given that former has 9 direct neighbours, and a population density almost 10 x greater. Sweden had a *huge* natural advantage, revealed in direct comparisons with other nordic countries.

Periodic reminder that in terms of outcomes, Swedish corona policy is thoroughly average in EU comparison – not exactly a model to be emulated by the rest of the world, nor a crime against humanity that should be prosecuted in the Hague.

details about human contact networks matter, as epidemiologists pointed out last spring. https://youtube.com/watch?v=BrrGxJT6-iA… If you think I am wrong about the relevant parameters for Sweden, I'd love to hear more. One place to start is saying how it differs from other Nordic countries

"Huge" inferred ("disingenuous?) causalities (you answer Erik by name but yours?). Do you think that the population is scattered equally over the country (do you suppose the same "advantage" for Brazil and Russia too?)? Number of neighbours when flight from further away imported?

Erik, it's equally a bit disingenuous to directly compare, say, Germany to Sweden, given that former has 9 direct neighbours, and a population density almost 10 x greater. Sweden had a *huge* natural advantage, revealed in direct comparisons with other nordic countries.

Periodic reminder that in terms of outcomes, Swedish corona policy is thoroughly average in EU comparison – not exactly a model to be emulated by the rest of the world, nor a crime against humanity that should be prosecuted in the Hague.

might it be possible for you to quickly scan the pages of the reference I indicated? it would probably make the discussion easier

Since i don't even see what we are conversating over at this point in time anymore what is your specific objection.

not really in this case, though....mine wasn't a general anti -Wikipedia reflex, but one specific to this entry- I did go and check it out before replying ;-)

Sure a bit dated and not my "go to" but for general discussion works most times.

sorry, I have a theoretical position on this, having worked on args. from ignorance quite a bit in last 15 years. I think Wikipedia article is poor and outdated. Suggestions: https://researchgate.net/profile/Ulrike_Hahn/publication/286232860_Rational_Argument/links/5694bd9d08aeab58a9a375a2/Rational-Argument.pdf… pps. 282-286

Where as evidence of absence is a deductive argument which must hold true absence of evidence isn't a valid inductive argument but a reversal of burden of proof in this context, a "argument of ignorance fallacy" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance

Moreover, when it comes to thinking about the inference from a logical perspective, the key to understanding (I think) is that there can be direct evidence for, direct evidence against, and no evidence. You need to consider 3 possibilities, see reference I sent earlier

the error here is that most inference is non-deductive, so the fact that something doesn't follow logically from something else, doesn't mean there is no evidence for it

premise (abcense of evidence) does contradict. In short if I have no evidence, than this just means that and nothing follows logically from that, especially for the absence of other things. Does this make sense?

As far as I got right now, my savest appearing argument is, that the fallacy is correct and true in its current state - abcense of evidence is no evidence of abcense - because if I conclude something from the abcense of evidence, this conclusion in itself is evidence which the

Very interesting method of testing once current concentration level ;) "We know things are true by them not being false and is proved by what would have to be true if the true thing was false." In this state I get it, but its really hard for me to follow.

this example may be to complex but in short how it follow in this conversation is we know things are true by them not being false and is proved by what would have to be true if the true thing was false.

No even in that it's proven by the contrary being false. How does a missile know where it is?

That's not what I meant, but certainly that is true. If there is evidence for something, then there literally cannot be "no evidence" for it. There is evidence. But what I meant was that if something is not true, then there is an absence of evidence for it.