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What we know and what we don’t know

lvhiker

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Mar 10, 2002
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Football got underway for the three P5 conferences and the NFL this week. Some games will have fans and others won’t. Meanwhile the B10 and Pac12 are not playing, at least not at the moment. I read about campuses having a 1000+ cases of COVID-19 and various teams having clusters of cases but there appears to be little follow up. What fraction of the cases are asymtomatic? Are any of these cases on campuses serious enough to require hospitalization? It is too soon to know about longer term effects, but that information is important.

So the impact of COVID-19 on campuses is mostly unknown. At the moment, experiments with variable constraints are taking place on campuses. I assume we will know more in a month or two.

Meanwhile we know the following. Between 30,000 and 40,000 new cases of COVID-19 are reported daily. At the moment, the average number of deaths/day is around 750. The number of deaths is approximately 1 to 2 percent of the total cases. I don’t know what fraction of the “recovered“ people are dealing with long term symptoms. If these general population numbers apply even remotely to campuses, schools with 1000+ cases may be seeing tens of fatalities— a scary thought.

The unknowns make any prediction fraught with uncertainty. But I am confident that by January, lawsuits will be filed on behalf of athletes denied the opportunity to play and for those who played but got sick. Also, god forbid, on behalf of ordinary students who died fro COVID-19.

These are strange and uncertain times. Stay safe. Go rebels.
 
Duh! I think if a student dies from COVID-19, I think a clever lawyer will be able to argue negligence. The future is opaque. Time will lead to some clarity. Stay tuned.
 
Football got underway for the three P5 conferences and the NFL this week. Some games will have fans and others won’t. Meanwhile the B10 and Pac12 are not playing, at least not at the moment. I read about campuses having a 1000+ cases of COVID-19 and various teams having clusters of cases but there appears to be little follow up. What fraction of the cases are asymtomatic? Are any of these cases on campuses serious enough to require hospitalization? It is too soon to know about longer term effects, but that information is important.

So the impact of COVID-19 on campuses is mostly unknown. At the moment, experiments with variable constraints are taking place on campuses. I assume we will know more in a month or two.

Meanwhile we know the following. Between 30,000 and 40,000 new cases of COVID-19 are reported daily. At the moment, the average number of deaths/day is around 750. The number of deaths is approximately 1 to 2 percent of the total cases. I don’t know what fraction of the “recovered“ people are dealing with long term symptoms. If these general population numbers apply even remotely to campuses, schools with 1000+ cases may be seeing tens of fatalities— a scary thought.

The unknowns make any prediction fraught with uncertainty. But I am confident that by January, lawsuits will be filed on behalf of athletes denied the opportunity to play and for those who played but got sick. Also, god forbid, on behalf of ordinary students who died fro COVID-19.

These are strange and uncertain times. Stay safe. Go rebels.
Ah, good old fashioned fear mongering that flies in the face of science and the real numbers.

Stay indoors. Hunker down. Return to the surface of the earth in 2025.
 
Fear mongering? I just think two P5 conferences punted though the B10 may change its position. Three decided to play this fall. Your crystal ball may be better than mine, but I truly don’t know if at the end of the fall semester, It will be obvious that one decision was clearly better than the other. If it turns out that in retrospect, one decision looks better, there will be lawsuits. Not something that I agree with. Where is the fear mongering?
 
Fear mongering? I just think two P5 conferences punted though the B10 may change its position. Three decided to play this fall. Your crystal ball may be better than mine, but I truly don’t know if at the end of the fall semester, It will be obvious that one decision was clearly better than the other. If it turns out that in retrospect, one decision looks better, there will be lawsuits. Not something that I agree with. Where is the fear mongering?
You’re a scientist. A physical scientist but science is science. You’re a smart dude. You know how to read studies, you know to interpret stats.

If you are relying on the predominant narratives and not uncovering things yourself in your capable manner, that’s up to you. As a scientist, if you choose to use what you’ve learned over the years, you should know when to ask why and how and be able to come up with things that are sensible to your scientific mind and it could spur you on to learn more.

Of course, I’m not saying you HAVE to do that, you have zero obligation to do that. But you are far more capable of deciphering truth and certainly of rooting out the bullshit.

The fear mongering? The numbers you stated are shit, especially as it relates to true impact.

Basically what I’m saying is there is a ton of evidence that flies in the face of what’s generally considered “the truth” and it has people unnecessarily scared beyond shitless.
 
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You’re a scientist. A physical scientist but science is science. You’re a smart dude. You know how to read studies, you know to interpret stats.

If you are relying on the predominant narratives and not uncovering things yourself in your capable manner, that’s up to you. As a scientist, if you choose to use what you’ve learned over the years, you should know when to ask why and how and be able to come up with things that are sensible to your scientific mind and it could spur you on to learn more.

Of course, I’m not saying you HAVE to do that, you have zero obligation to do that. But you are far more capable of deciphering truth and certainly of rooting out the bullshit.

The fear mongering? The numbers you stated are shit, especially as it relates to true impact.

Basically what I’m saying is there is a ton of evidence that flies in the face of what’s generally considered “the truth” and it has people unnecessarily scared beyond shitless.
I’d add - and I think you’d probably agree with me on this - that science should NEVER be political, it should be about the search for truths.

Then ask yourself, is politics in any way in play with this thing?

I think you’d agree that it is, from many angles. Which to me means there’s a ton of horseshit out there being pushed from every side.

Which is why I try to look as deeply as I can using a more focused eye. At least to the best of my ability.

As an example - I can speak to this because I do the actual testing. Do you know that the American labs (quest, cdc, labcorp) that turn out the most covid results run it at 40+ amplification cycles? My lab is only 30, which is better.

Many foreign countries run it at 20 amplifications.

So what’s that mean? Way more positives in the USA and a high percentage of a combination of false positives and far past asymptomatic/minor infections with full recovery.

Germany can run 1000 USA covid positive samples and get 100 positives. The US can run 1000 German negative samples and get 700 positives.

The difference in amplification cycles is huge. 20 cycles vs 40 cycles isn’t “twice as much”. It’s logarithmic. 2^20 difference.

So ... that’s just one tiny aspect. But it flips the National and worldwide numbers on their ear.
 
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Football got underway for the three P5 conferences and the NFL this week. Some games will have fans and others won’t. Meanwhile the B10 and Pac12 are not playing, at least not at the moment. I read about campuses having a 1000+ cases of COVID-19 and various teams having clusters of cases but there appears to be little follow up. What fraction of the cases are asymtomatic? Are any of these cases on campuses serious enough to require hospitalization? It is too soon to know about longer term effects, but that information is important.

So the impact of COVID-19 on campuses is mostly unknown. At the moment, experiments with variable constraints are taking place on campuses. I assume we will know more in a month or two.

Meanwhile we know the following. Between 30,000 and 40,000 new cases of COVID-19 are reported daily. At the moment, the average number of deaths/day is around 750. The number of deaths is approximately 1 to 2 percent of the total cases. I don’t know what fraction of the “recovered“ people are dealing with long term symptoms. If these general population numbers apply even remotely to campuses, schools with 1000+ cases may be seeing tens of fatalities— a scary thought.

The unknowns make any prediction fraught with uncertainty. But I am confident that by January, lawsuits will be filed on behalf of athletes denied the opportunity to play and for those who played but got sick. Also, god forbid, on behalf of ordinary students who died fro COVID-19.

These are strange and uncertain times. Stay safe. Go rebels.


There's little follow up because there is no reason to report on healthy people.

Not trying to be an ass, but that is the least at risk age bracket. Yes an outlier here and there but look at the number of deaths in the 20-30 age bracket from Covid complications.

Here's better way to look at it.

CDC estimates 10x more people have had it beyond confirmed cases.

Take Vegas.

60k confirmed cases.

That means roughly 540k people never felt sick enough to go to the hospital or even get a test.
 
There's little follow up because there is no reason to report on healthy people.

Not trying to be an ass, but that is the least at risk age bracket. Yes an outlier here and there but look at the number of deaths in the 20-30 age bracket from Covid complications.

Here's better way to look at it.

CDC estimates 10x more people have had it beyond confirmed cases.

Take Vegas.

60k confirmed cases.

That means roughly 540k people never felt sick enough to go to the hospital or even get a test.
And of the 60K, who knows how many took advantage of the free test and were asymptomatic/lightly sick, false positives?

Hospitalization rates and deaths are the best benchmarks right now. And even deaths - not sure about Nevada, but nationally, there’s some degree of laundering going on (check stats for YTD vs historical cancer deaths, cardiac deaths, non-Covid pneumonia deaths, etc). These numbers are nearly the same year to year. Not this year, those deaths are all way down. Especially those with “symptoms“ of covid (they share some symptoms with every transmissible disease) but no positive Covid test - being tagged as suspicious for Covid - being tagged as a covid death.

The disease is real, it kills. Not as much as everyone thought in the beginning, not close. And with where we are at this point? Cmon.

As for long term effects? I’m not going to deny they may exist. But check those long term effects for bacterial pneumonia, mycoplasma, TB, the Flu, and so many others.

It’s impossible to ever get it, but oh, I’d LOVE to have an indisputable truth of this whole thing. Whatever that truth is, it’s closer to a bad flu than it is 1918. Probably closer to H2N2 1957 or H3N2 1968.
 
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I agree there is way too much politics involved. But it seems not that complicated for a university that has reported 1500 positive tests, to follow up with what happened to those 1500 students. A small longitudinal study. A thousand had no or mild symptom, 300 a fever that lasted a week, etc.

Telling me how many people tested positive, tells me very little. The excess deaths over the average is much more useful. In any case, we will learn more over the next couple of years.
 
I agree there is way too much politics involved. But it seems not that complicated for a university that has reported 1500 positive tests, to follow up with what happened to those 1500 students. A small longitudinal study. A thousand had no or mild symptom, 300 a fever that lasted a week, etc.

Telling me how many people tested positive, tells me very little. The excess deaths over the average is much more useful. In any case, we will learn more over the next couple of years.
But there’s plenty of info right now that says … different approach.
 
I agree there is way too much politics involved. But it seems not that complicated for a university that has reported 1500 positive tests, to follow up with what happened to those 1500 students. A small longitudinal study. A thousand had no or mild symptom, 300 a fever that lasted a week, etc.

Telling me how many people tested positive, tells me very little. The excess deaths over the average is much more useful. In any case, we will learn more over the next couple of years.

Agreed. It's the biggest issue in how this has been covered.

My guess would be that all are doing fine, otherwise it would be all over the news.
 
Some schools have had 1500 or more cases reported. I was just saying it would be nice to know more details of those cases.
 
Some schools have had 1500 or more cases reported. I was just saying it would be nice to know more details of those cases.

Right.

And I'm basically saying if there were any cases resulting in death it would be all over the news.

You aren't going to hear a lick about 1500 college aged kids having the sniffles and feeling fine a week or two later.
 
Right.

And I'm basically saying if there were any cases resulting in death it would be all over the news.

You aren't going to hear a lick about 1500 college aged kids having the sniffles and feeling fine a week or two later.
Haven’t gone campus by campus, but I’ve read numbers 50x that, with very, very low hospitalizations. If that’s a truth and this is the way we should be reacting, we need to do the same every flu season. Maybe more, since flu has a higher mortality for that age grouping than covid.

I’m not stir crazy, I’m not missing sports, I’ve always been pretty adaptable. So I’m not “pissed” that I can’t do those things. I’m hot that 2+2=5 is being shoved down throats as the predominant narrative.

If this thing made any sense whatsoever... no problems with the decisions. But early on, and you know this bull since you are on confi, the things I was doing in my daily job were telling me that which is being pushed is wrong. How wrong? Didn’t know at the time, I just knew that shit was not adding up anywhere near the way it’s beem presented. And then I try to sink my teeth into more.
 
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Haven’t gone campus by campus, but I’ve read numbers 50x that, with very, very low hospitalizations. If that’s a truth and this is the way we should be reacting, we need to do the same every flu season. Maybe more, since flu has a higher mortality for that age grouping than covid.

I’m not stir crazy, I’m not missing sports, I’ve always been pretty adaptable. So I’m not “pissed” that I can’t do those things. I’m hot that 2+2=5 is being shoved down throats as the predominant narrative.

If this thing made any sense whatsoever... no problems with the decisions. But early on, and you know this bull since you are on confi, the things I was doing in my daily job were telling me that which is being pushed is wrong. How wrong? Didn’t know at the time, I just knew that shit was not adding up anywhere near the way it’s beem presented. And then I try to sink my teeth into more.


I mentioned before, because of my wife's job,, I get to see some of the metrics that are driving policy, notably CCSD. None if it makes any sense.

Two people can look at the same exact data and draw up completely different proposals.
 
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I will add that I work for the biggest hospital system in the Houston area. We have the highest percentage of the COVID cases in the area. I get daily updates.

A few months ago we had a surge. It was around 4th of July. Bars were re opening and not following the rules, people got together for the holiday, and the protests no doubt played a part. We had up to 1200 cases being hospitalized at once. It pushed our limits and we had to cancel elective surgeries again for a week, but we never turned people away.

Since then, though positive tests get reported as being high, the amount of people being hospitalized have fallen dramatically. We have been under 200 cases this week.

It seems like either there are many false positives, or people aren't getting that sick anymore. Probably both. Maybe the virus has weakened over time. Who knows.

It is frustrating that positive tests are the number one thing being reported, but no one talks about severity of symptoms. And absolutely no one talks about ways to strengthen your immune system.
 
I will add that I work for the biggest hospital system in the Houston area. We have the highest percentage of the COVID cases in the area. I get daily updates.

A few months ago we had a surge. It was around 4th of July. Bars were re opening and not following the rules, people got together for the holiday, and the protests no doubt played a part. We had up to 1200 cases being hospitalized at once. It pushed our limits and we had to cancel elective surgeries again for a week, but we never turned people away.

Since then, though positive tests get reported as being high, the amount of people being hospitalized have fallen dramatically. We have been under 200 cases this week.

It seems like either there are many false positives, or people aren't getting that sick anymore. Probably both. Maybe the virus has weakened over time. Who knows.

It is frustrating that positive tests are the number one thing being reported, but no one talks about severity of symptoms. And absolutely no one talks about ways to strengthen your immune system.
Positives is a bullshit number. It really is. It’s their flavor of the day metric to push, that’s why they want so many people tested. And that’s why a lot of testing is free. They want positives.

The problem with positives is they may be false positives. They may be currently infected but asymptomatic positives. They may be past asymptomatic positives. Or they may be past infected positives who test again. Also, some duplicate positives will be in there.

PCR is the best we have but it’s not the greatest tool for testing. If a hospital amplifies at 43 cycles vs a hospital that tests at 30 cycles, there is going to be a huge difference in the number of positives. 2^13 copies of RNA more is ALOT.

The 30 cycle hospital May call it negative and the 43 hospital call the same sample a positive. That’s a problem. 43 is way too much.

But they’ll keep pushing positives and use it as the metric to stay shut down.

If you are sick and need to go to the hospital, you’ll get tested. If you aren’t sick, no reason to get tested. Have the sniffles and that’s it? Still no reason to get tested ... other than to give the states the positives they need for mandates.
 
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