8,703 Matching Annotations
  1. Dec 2020
    1. Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health. The results (to name a few) include lower childhood vaccination rates, worsening cardiovascular disease outcomes, fewer cancer screenings and deteriorating mental health – leading to greater excess mortality in years to come, with the working class and younger members of society carrying the heaviest burden.

      The cure is worse than the disease.

    1. My COVID coping strategy is stats. They are my feeble way of trying to control, or at least comprehend, the uncontrollable. If you follow me on Twitter, you know this. I cannot shut up about the numbers.

      My same strategy

  2. Nov 2020
    1. these trials are intended to pass the lowest possible barrier of success. As this is being written, the FDA is poised to announce tougher standards for a Covid-19 vaccine in the near future. It is my hope that these new standards for an EUA will at a minimum include requirements for protections from infection itself, protections from severe virus-related disease leading to hospitalization, and a significant improvement in Covid-19 related mortality.
    2. These trials all clearly focus on eliminating symptoms of Covid-19, and not infections themselves. Asymptomatic infection is listed as a secondary objective in these trials when they should be of critical importance. 
    3. Vaccine efficacy is typically proved by large clinical trials over several years. The pharmaceutical companies intend to do trials ranging from thirty thousand to sixty thousand participants. This scale of study would be sufficient for testing vaccine efficacy. The first surprise found upon a closer reading of the protocols reveals that each study intends to complete interim and primary analyses that at most include 164 participants. 
    4. Three of the vaccine protocols—Moderna, Pfizer, and AstraZeneca—do not require that their vaccine prevent serious disease only that they prevent moderate symptoms which may be as mild as cough, or headache.
    1. It can be observed that at Ct = 25, up to 70% of patients remain positive in culture and that at Ct = 30 this value drops to 20%. At Ct = 35, the value we used to report a positive result for PCR, <3% of cultures are positive.

      Main observation

    1. Generally it takes a week or two after a person has been infected before they start to produce IgG, and with covid, you’re generally only infectious for about a week after you start to have symptoms, so antibody tests are not designed to find active infections. Instead the purpose is to see if you have had an infection in the past.

      It takes a week or two for an infected person to start producing the antibody IgG which is the type of antibody that typically gets tested for.

      [[Z: Antibody tests are only useful to see if you had an infection in the past]]

    2. In most clinical settings (including the one I work in), all the doctor is provided with is a positive or negative result. No mention is made of the number of cycles used to produce the positive result.

      [[Z: The number of PCR cycles has not been standardized, and is usually not even mentioned to the doctor]]

    3. If you get a positive PCR test and you want to be sure that what you’re finding is a true positive, then you have to perform a viral culture. What this means is that you take the sample, add it to respiratory cells in a petri dish, and see if you can get those cells to start producing new virus particles. If they do, then you know you have a true positive result. For this reason, viral culture is considered the “gold standard” method for diagnosis of viral infections. However, this method is rarely used in clinical practice, which means that in reality, a diagnosis is often made based entirely on the PCR test.

      [[Z: A positive PCR should be followed by a viral culture test to see if you're dealing with a live infection]]

      After a positive PCR test, you don't know if the virus is alive or not. To find this out you can add it to respiratory cells (in the case of a respiratory virus) and see if they start producing virus particles).

      [[Z: Viral culture tests are rarely used in clinical practice]]

      Positive diagnoses of COVID-19 are done base on PCR only.

    4. One thing that’s important to understand at this point is that PCR is only detecting sequences of the viral genome, it is not able to detect whole viral particles, so it is not able to tell you whether what you are finding is live virus, or just non-infectious fragments of viral genome.

      PCR only tells you if you're detecting sequences of the viral genome. It doesn't tell you that what you're finding is live virus or not.

    1. I don’t think that what we are seeing is a “second wave”. I think we are seeing a seasonal effect. It’s important to keep some perspective. As I explained earlier in this article, cases are a very poor way to determine how active the virus is in the population. In Sweden, the number of tests being carried out is now eight times higher than in the spring. That is why we should instead be looking at hospitalizations, ICU admissions, and deaths.

      Sebastian Rushworth MD. believes that what we're seeing in Sweden is not a second wave, but simply the seasonal effects of COVID.

    2. I think it’ll probably be a few years before we know the full extent to which people were harmed by this. As an example, the hospital in Uppsala experienced 50% fewer admissions due to cardiac infarctions (“heart attacks”) during the peak period, while the hospitals in Stockholm experienced 40% fewer admissions. We know that people who have a cardiac infarction and don’t get emergency treatment have a significantly increased risk of dying in the immediate future, and also have a greater risk of developing long term complications such as heart failure.

      A hospital in Uppsala saw 50% fewer cases of heart attacks during the peak COVID-19 period. The author posits that people might have been avoiding the emergency room out of fear or out of consideration. This might lead to more deaths later, however, as not getting treatment after a heart attack leads to higher chances of developing long-term complications.

    3. The Swedish Public Health authority has never admitted that the goal of their chosen strategy is to reach herd immunity. However, from an epidemiological stand point, all strategies depend on reaching herd immunity in one way or another. A vaccination based strategy also builds on getting to herd immunity, it just chooses a different way to reach it. At some point in the relatively near future, every country on Earth will have developed herd immunity to covid, either by letting the disease spread until that point is reached, or by vaccinating enough people to reach that point.

      All pandemic strategies end up reaching herd immunity.

    1. October 29

      There's been some question about whether or not the executive session that led to Lutz's ouster was born of a regular meeting, and thus subject to the requirement that 'the presiding officer of a governing body shall publicly announce the purpose for excluding the public from the meeting place' (RCW 42.30.110(2)).

      The Internet Archive's snapshots of https://srhd.org/programs-and-services/board-of-health/meetings on

      contain references to, respectively, the regular meetings of

      (For that matter, the next meeting is currently listed as a regular meeting.)

      While no snapshots were taken between 2020-09-25 and 2020-10-28, it seems that, indeed, Thursday's meeting was initially public.

  3. Oct 2020
    1. Landi, F., Marzetti, E., Sanguinetti, M., Ciciarello, F., Tritto, M., Benvenuto, F., Bramato, G., Brandi, V., Carfì, A., D’Angelo, E., Fusco, D., Lo Monaco, M. R., Martone, A. M., Pagano, F., Rocchi, S., Rota, E., Russo, A., Salerno, A., Cattani, P., … Bernabei, on behalf of the G. A. C.-19 G. T. (n.d.). Should face masks be worn to contain the spread of COVID-19 in the postlockdown phase? Transactions of The Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. https://doi.org/10.1093/trstmh/traa085