> Some people will say that this essay is a missed opportunity: “How can you write this essay without mentioning crypto even once?”
Or money, for that matter. If beliefs are network effects, then money sits at the base layer of that network.
So not only does Bitcoin (the "crypto" protocol most resistant to centralization) occupy an unusual position in the universe of software networks, but it it's deep, deep down in the base layer of shared beliefs due to the monetary aspect.
> In 1998, Zimov brought the first horses to what he called Pleistocene Park, a fenced tract of land an hour’s boat ride from the research station. Since then, the park has grown to eight square miles, and it is now home to a hundred and fifty animals, not just horses but bison, sheep, yaks, and camels. To give them a head start, Nikita sped about the territory in the family’s “tank”—a hefty, all-terrain transport vehicle on treads—knocking down trees and undergrowth.
For more on the human angle, see this piece, which includes a fascinating video:
This attitude is a major reason why public education is so utterly messed up in the US. All of the social and mental work that should be done elsewhere is simply not done. Time after time, the schools (and police) are called on as the last line of defense for a failing society.
It's not working. The additional strain on schools has turned the mission of public education into a series of brush fires in which staff and administrators just lurch from one crisis to another. The unequal way that education gets funded means that some districts see much more of this than others. But the problem is spreading.
Teachers are not trained to function as warehousers for youth. Nor are they given the resources to serve the role you and far too many parents want them to serve.
When the schools fail there is literally nothing behind them. They're the end of the line. This is the point where all the chickens come home to roost and society starts to fail, one kid at a time. The pandemic should be a wake up call. It doesn't look like it will be.
> This attitude is a major reason why public education is so utterly messed up in the US. All of the social and mental work that should be done elsewhere is simply not done. Time after time, the schools (and police) are called on as the last line of defense for a failing society.
I completely agree. But we can't fix this in the next few weeks, so for now keeping schools open for those who need it is the thing to do.
> ... It's been a couple months and I have achieved nothing. Not a single PR merged. ...
There's a lot to be said for getting into a rhythm of picking an issue, solving it, and merging it. Doing it a few times can be a real confidence booster.
What's the reason behind having no PRs merged? Did you create them, only to have them rejected? Have you not completed the work for any? Is there nobody to review them?
Also, just how big are the issues in your tracker?
I'm going to assume that everything is in place to get a PR merged. Given that, try to find a way to shave off an issue from a larger issue. Go for the smallest possible unit of work that might be useful. Then focus on getting that one PR merged. Rinse and repeat.
I've teed up maybe 6 PRs, but it is hard to find who's actually responsible to review things and get sign-off one way or the other. The iteration speed is also very slow and deploys are pretty high risk, so it's hard to throw things at the wall and see what sticks.
High-risk deploys and slow iterations is not on you but on engineering management.
Not knowing who's responsible for reviewing your code is also not on you but on your manager, bad onboarding, bad documentation and general communication. Still you can check in the repo who's been working recently on adjacent work and reach out to them on slack/whatever and ask them.
I suggest to try and get small wins (like merging those PRs) as soon as possible and then pause and reconsider if this startup is for you. BTW, I don't see the "constant failure" you mention in the title anywhere, more like not being lucky with startups, which is normal since often they are shitshows.
Don't compare yourself to (selected, "successful") other people, compare yourself with the other possible selfs in different multiverses, how many of those for ex didn't take any risks and are in a worse position?
Also, this is more for maybe a professional therapist that for me but it looks to me that your definition of "failure" is unhealthy or too hard on yourself? sorry for the assumption but you are probably working on the area you want and like (technology) and being paid well for it. That puts you in the top 90% or whatever of people in <insert 1st world country> and 99.99% in the world (I know it's not consolation for feelings).
I have a therapist, but sometimes it can be difficult to talk through these things with someone who doesn't know the field or the ground truth.
My big stressor is that I have hit the jackpot, and where do I go from here? So many people I know have settled into a comfortable groove, but work is by far the biggest stressor in my life, it's ruining my health, and I don't really have a path out. Continually churning applying for new jobs or dropping out of tech altogether don't seem very appealing.
Similar to another comment - it sounds like you’ve made good money, you’ve landed tech jobs several times, and you’ve got good feedback from your peers - that is successful, you should take some time to take pride in what you have achieved so far.
I think there’s 2 things for you to think about. Firstly, comparing yourself to everyone else you will always find people who have done better in some area than you, that’s no failure on your part, that is the reality that every person exists in. It’s hard sometimes to appreciate yourself, I certainly have bouts of this.
Secondly, when you’re working in an organisation, you’re not solely responsible for making some project succeed, shipping some feature or whatever it is. If there are processes making progress very difficult, that’s not your fault. It’s easy to internally create all this pressure on yourself to meet your own standards, but sometimes you’re thrown into a situation where external factors out of your control prevent you from meeting what you yourself deem acceptable performance - that’s not on you. You can raise the issues that are blocking you, you can suggest ideas for improvements, but in a company, most of the time you cannot fix these things alone. I have found that my stress increases when I don’t understand what it is that is preventing me from performing, and when I put it all on myself to fix. Identifying the issues and absolving myself of the responsibility to fix all of them have been the best things I’ve done for my work stress levels.
Are they happy or are their parents happy at their “success”. Go watch some Frasier, it’s good for some perspective on success and happiness across career, family, personal baggage.
If you're feeling this pain your colleagues are as well. Small improvements in this area are yeoman's work that's often appreciated by peers, if not management. When I've been in a rut making baby steps in tooling has helped get me moving again.
If you can't find someone to review your stuff, is there someone you can raise this with who might be able to help? It sounds like a management/communication issue.
> Searching my inbox, I found an email from April 16, 2020 where I told someone who’d me asked that the lab-leak hypothesis seemed entirely plausible to me, that in fact I couldn’t understand why it wasn’t being investigated more, but that I was hesitant to blog about these matters. As I wrote seven months ago, I now see my lack of courage as having been a personal failing. Obviously, I’m just a quantum computing theorist, not a biologist, so I don’t have to have any opinion at all about the origin of COVID-19 … but I did, and I didn’t share it only because of the likelihood that I’d be called an idiot on social media. Having now read Chan and Ridley, though, I think I’d take being called an idiot for this book review more as a positive signal about my courage than as a negative signal about my reasoning skills!
The groupthink around the lab leak hypothesis, and especially that letter signed by scientists in the early days of the pandemic, has done a lot of damage. The problem is that is isn't just this topic. About a dozen other topics have become minefields of politics and mind control masquerading as science. We only see the idiocy of this approach in the case of the lab leak because the consensus has crumbled.
Hopefully, this won't be the last wall to fall under its own weight.
"that letter signed by scientists" does not do justice to the fact that the organizer of that letter had a severe conflict of interest that he failed to disclose. Like why the hell would a scientist not disclose that??! Having been a scientist myself it boggles the mind.
I think it's "Statement in support of the scientists, public health professionals, and medical professionals of China combatting COVID-19" in the Lancet from Feb 19 2020:
The rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data on this outbreak is now being threatened by rumours and misinformation around its origins. We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin....We declare no competing interests.
They later published an "Addendum: competing interests and the origins of SARS-CoV-2" in June 2021:
Peter Daszak has expanded on his disclosure statements for three pieces relating to COVID-19 that he co-authored or contributed to in The Lancet—the February, 2020, Correspondence, as well as a Commission Statement and a Comment for the Lancet COVID-19 Commission.
And there's as yet no academic/systemic consequence for them not declaring this blatant conflict of interest. That sends a big bold message to future scientists considering whether or not to declare them honestly.
reading the description of the conflict and paraphrasing Upton Sinclair I would say it is hard for someone to admit a conflict, if their continuing access to funding is dependent on keeping it hidden.
I reread aaronsons blogpost more carefully and I take back my "??!". Daszak is very possibly avoiding the trauma of having had the experience of trying to save lives and ending up resulting in -15m lives saved. That's a unique experience in human existence that goes even beyond the Sinclair quote. I can't honestly say I wouldn't do the same thing, and I've historically done the right thing -- issued corrections two of the n < 10 papers I have to my name.
Daszak is already getting lynched, at least mediatically. Do a search in his name on ddg, see what the top result is. I'd say it's a crackpot website but in fact it seems it was all written by a covid19 victim. I'd probably move to an Antarctic research station until people forget, as opposed to confortably living in a country where every crackpot and their neighbour has access to firearms.
I got into a slightly heated argument with my mother when she claimed that "China had manufactured the virus in a lab" - I didn't even consider the possibility of virus manufacture for study and a possible leak happening, I just assumed she was being fed propaganda that this was the beginning of some kind of bio-war being started by China. So that is my failing, and after reading more about the lab-leak hypothesis I learned to hold my tongue and be curious about such left-field claims instead of judgemental
One of my favorite fallacies is the fallacy fallacy. Just because one used fallacious reasoning, doesn't mean they're wrong. e.g. I can give a bad reason for why 16/64 = 1/4, just cross out the 6's, but just because the reason is bad doesn't mean the result is wrong.
Yes, this case has generated an amount of "Hitler was a vegetarian" cases.
More "shockingly", some perceived in certain circles that an amount of "odd actors" acted to throw gasoline on every spark, enticing savage gut reactions. Another blow to civilization, opinion benders encouraging towards the dismissal of clean evaluation, mining the pillar that after "He said we walk using feet!!!" the response should be "Actually, ", not "Boo!".
Jeff McKissack, a mail carrier in Houston, Texas, transformed a small suburban lot near his wood frame house into The Orange Show in honor of his favorite fruit.
I super appreciate your willingness to share a small moment of intellectual humility - they are too rare and I hope that it will inspire at least one other person to approach at least one other issue with a similar spirit.
I know that my thinking and behavior has benefited from the small subset of people who have been willing to do so publicly in the past.
Indeed. one of my favorite learnings in life is the power of admitting when I'm wrong (which is often enough). Quite an empowering decision and also relationahip building.
However there are times when people find it so unusual that they see it as weakness and instead of admitting their own wrong, try to capitalise on an opprtunity (perceived weakness).
One exception though is playing chess online, where my ego is yet to be mastered.
I use self-deprecating humor a lot. And some people, usually the ones who don't pick up on the irony, also use it as an opportunity to attack. It's quite sad when you think about it :)
The problem with this is that it could very well be the case that she was being fed propaganda or just repeating something written on facebook by a randomer before more details were known. The fact that it could turn out to be true makes it very difficult to know how to take future similar statements because they probably have a higher likelihood of being wrong if they come from similar sources.
The intertwined nature of country, financial and personnel relationships is not easy for people to understand.
I was just at a gathering the other day where a woman couldn't comprehend that the lab in Wuhan is a joint venture with US public resources, US private sector resources, Chinese resources, and personnel from both countries and others, which includes Dr. Fauci.
She had, until that point, mostly been enamored by Dr. Fauci and mostly been quite angry at Wuhan as a general disavowal of the CCP.
There is nothing to conclude from any of that observation alone, aside from noticing gaps in US federal oversight. Many people will just spiral into some other rabbit hole since nuance isn't their strongsuit. We still have to react to the pandemic whether that bolsters a lab leak hypothesis, or leads to a smoking gun, or not.
If only the American president at the time had been more responsible and less inflammatory it would have resulted in a lot less reflexive aggression - asian people beaten in the street included.
The CCP is not very responsible if they know and hide it or if they don't and refuse to look, but to their defense, it's also because it will be used and reused to their detriment (possibly deserved) if proven. Having a sound diplomatic strategy would have maybe helped convince them otherwise, but it was apparently more interesting to ALSO play down the virus in the U.S. for whatever reason and make absolutely clear that China would pay a dear price for it. So hard to blame China :s
Also yes, there will be both good and bad consequences to every action, or inaction.
But ffs give the dust time to settle before doing the after action analysis.
--
I mostly blame the popular medias for boosting and accelerating the human tendency for fear, outrage, blame. Knowing this about ourselves, that crap has to be toned down.
Writing this now, I guess I'm just repeating the "thinking, fast and slow" critique.
> You could argue that it doesn't matter that much where the internet's content is hosted. And whilst that's true to some degree a truly self-controlled personal website differs a lot from a social media site in the details.
The author goes on to list four factors that favor blogs over "social media." He's missing one though - building your own brand vs. building someone else's. When you engage with Twitter, Facebook, and the like, you're building those brands mainly. When you write your own blog, you're 100% building your own brand. This is an asset that you own and, barring very unusual circumstances, can't be taken away.
It's up to you to make something with that asset, which can be extremely valuable for a number of reasons.
Well, that's somehow buried in my third and fourth points but admittedly not as worked out as you've put it here. I tried to focus more on the credibility that your maintained online presence gives you, but of course it also builds your brand.
> Intellectual loneliness is a challenge that many people feel, but nobody talks about. It’s built on a paradox where you feel alive when you’re learning on the Internet but soul-crushed when you try to talk about those same ideas with friends and family.
The author doesn't say, but it would be very illuminating to know, what happens when the author meets with the authors of the books and internet works they admire so much? Do they hit it off instantly? Or does the whole thing feel disappointing in the end?
Also, I don't see the "paradox" in preferring the Internet. It's part of a pattern when you zoom out a bit.
> 2021 was not too kind to me. I discovered that I not only have OCD but OCPD, a personality disorder.
Then later...
> I simply have to accept that there is nothing out there for me. That I will be miserable as long as I continue to work in tech, and that nothing will ever bring me joy in this space ever again. And I have the C++ committee to thank for this.
It sounds like the author has made a self-diagnosis, and is not currently seeking treatment with a licensed therapist. There is no language around addressing the disorder, and plenty of blaming external forces.
If so, it might be worth exploring the option of therapy.
> All staff members preparing to depart to the station had to undergo a PCR test in Belgium two hours before leaving for South Africa, take a PCR test five days after their arrival in Cape Town, where they also had to quarantine for ten days. Another test was required when leaving Cape Town for Antarctica and another PCR test had to be undergone five days after arrival.
This is clear evidence that the current paradigm for dealing with the pandemic is ineffective at best.
I don't think it's clear evidence of this, but you could definitely say it's not 100% effective. Whether it is useful is not something that you cannot determine from this story alone.
The problem is being 99.9% effective just isn't good enough. One person slips through and it's all over. It isn't realistically possible to keep covid out of areas.
It is understood that it's not 100% effective, we enforce these restrictions upon ourselves in part so that we just slow it down and spread it out over time, so that medical centers are not overwhelmed and unable to provide care to those who really it, so that we have time to create better and better therapeutics.
I always thought the whole prevention thing is because we want to “flatten the curve”, remember? Not to prevent every single infection, which is impossible.
As another fun example, the doctor (and only the doctor) overwintering in Antartica needs to have had their appendix out.
Medical evacuations are tricky, especially in the winter, and the logic is that the (single) doctor could remove someone else's appendix, but it would much harder for them to remove their own. Leonid Rogozov did remove his own in the 1960s, but I think most stations would prefer to avoid a repeat of that.
In the US there are literally thousands of different public health agencies headed by health officers with strategies ranging from herd immunity by any means necessary to attempting COVID 0. Vague gripes about public health tag lines in such a fractured environment is unproductive.
That’s really not true though. 99.9% effective might not be good enough for an Antarctic research base, but that’s a pretty unusual circumstance. We’d be thrilled if our current countermeasures against Covid were 99.9% effective; we would’ve ended this in 2020 if that were the case.
If I understand correctly, you can mathematically model how effective countermeasures have to be in order to suppress a virus with a given R0. Given that the measles vaccine is 93% effective and sufficient to suppress one of the most infectious diseases we’ve ever seen (R0 of 12-18), I think 99.9% would be in the overkill category.
Can you give a source for that 93% efficiency of measles vaccine? Accuracy for 2 digits is very suspicious. Measles symptoms depend strongly on nutrition deficiencies with insufficient vitamin C being especially bad. If that is not the case, one can be asymptomatic and then we never know about infection.
> The MMR vaccine is very safe and effective. Two doses of MMR vaccine are about 97% effective at preventing measles; one dose is about 93% effective.
Prevention of Measles, Rubella, Congenital Rubella Syndrome, and Mumps, 2013 Summary Recommendations of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) at https://www.jstor.org/stable/24832555
> One dose of measles-containing vaccine administered at age ≥12 months was approximately 94% effective in preventing measles (range: 39%–98%) in studies conducted in the WHO Region of the Americas (141,142). Measles outbreaks among populations that have received 2 doses of measles-containing vaccine are uncommon. The effectiveness of 2 doses of measles-containing vaccine was ≥99% in two studies conducted in the United States and 67%, 85%–≥94%, and 100% in three studies in Canada (142–146). The range in 2-dose vaccine effectiveness in the Canadian studies can be attributed to extremely small numbers (i.e., in the study with a 2-dose vaccine effectiveness of 67%, one 2-dose vaccinated person with measles and one unvaccinated person with measles were reported [145]). This range of effectiveness also can be attributed to age at vaccination (i.e., the 85% vaccine effectiveness represented children vaccinated at age 12 months, whereas the ≥94% vaccine effectiveness represented children vaccinated at age ≥15 months [146]). Furthermore, two studies found the incremental effectiveness of 2 doses was 89% and 94%, compared with 1 dose of measles-containing vaccine (145,147). Similar estimates of vaccine effectiveness have been reported from Australia and Europe (Table 1) (141).
No mention of vitamin C. Given that "After exposure, up to 90% of susceptible persons develop measles", it seems very unlikely that differences in vitamin C play an important role.
You write "depend strongly on nutrition deficiencies", which my cited article describes as "In low to middle income countries where malnutrition is common, measles is often more severe and the case-fatality ratio can be as high as 25%".
That's calorie deficient, but not specifically vitamin deficient.
Thanks for the links. “About 93%” is much more sensible then 93%. As for vitamins there was an old study [1] :
Child mortality due to measles is 200 to 400 times greater in malnourished children in less developed countries than those in developed ones. In addition, measles brings about consumption of nutrients in marginally nourished children, so they will also do worse if not supplemented during infection.
I strongly disagree - ashtonkem's description is quite sensible. I don't expect HN comments to be more precise than medical professionals.
That is, it's easy to find scholarly papers published by doctors which don't add the "about" like:
"Measles vaccine is highly effective, with 1 dose being 93% effective and 2 doses being 97% effective at preventing measles." from "Measles Outbreak — Minnesota April–May 2017" by authors from the Minnesota Department of Health, at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5687591/
"Based on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data, one dose of MMR vaccine is 93% effective against MeV, 78% effective against mumps virus (MuV), and 97% effective against rubella." by authors from The Ohio State University at https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/118/12/e2026153118.full.pd... .
Yes, I already mentioned malnutrition as a known factor.
I asked for substantiation of your statement "insufficient vitamin C being especially bad."
You cited reference doesn't even mention vitamin C.
Delivery of the two doses of vaccine needed to achieve >90% immunity is accomplished by routine immunization of infants at 9–15 months of age followed by a second dose delivered before school entry or by periodic mass vaccination campaigns. B
I am extremely skeptical about precise numbers in medicine. The biology just does not work in that way. And it does no matter if the number comes from HN comments or peer-reviewed journal article. It signals that with very high probability that at best those who gave the number do not understand what they are talking about. At worst in can be just an arbitrary number where the extra precision was used to give a sense of legitimacy.
And note how much better the claim from the original article sounds: the efficiency of at least 90%. Which tells that even if one follow a reasonable lifestyle that minimizes chances of getting the infection (or at least feed infants in a reasonable way as we are talking about <2 years old), then still the vaccine reduces the chance of infection by a factor of 10.
And yes, it was stupid for me to rely on the memory when claiming about particular vitamin.
> And it does no matter if the number comes from HN comments or peer-reviewed journal article.
I’m sorry, that’s absurd. You will always be picking pedantic fights with people if you expect everyone everywhere to meet the standards of peer reviewed medicine.
From the outside picking a fight over the difference between “93%” and “about 93%” on a technology board is pedantic to the point of being suspicious.
Seeing people very critical of vaccine studies of a successfully eradicated disease that has had a long time since to evaluate that success aside a really generous benefit of the doubt given to vague claims about vitamin supplements makes me sad.
We can be observant and suspicious about the healthcare industry while also admitting that there is science being done. They manufacture vitamin C supplements, too. They make money whether you buy the regulated stuff or the unregulated stuff.
I don’t know. If a medicine cures 99 % of all cases (or even 10 %) would you say it’s ineffective? I’d say it’s effective, but depending on the your overall goal, not effective enough (if you’d like to call it ineffective, it would be ineffective with respect to a certain macro outcome, not with respect to individual cases). At some minuscule percentage (let’s say 0,1 %) I would probably be tempted to actually starting to call it ineffective.
It would be to anyone thinking about this logically, but belief in the measures seems to have become like a religion to some. The craziest discussion I had about this was with a friend who insisted the number of administered tests for a given location hadn't risen in 2021. I showed them the official government stats but they still claimed there hadn't been a rise. When I sent them a graph they said they'd looked at it and it confirms there was no rise. The graph showed a clear rise, like line going straight up!
How do you even deal with this? I can have more rational discussions with fundamental Christians.
Right. Because something needs to be airtight 100% successful with 100% compliance and 100% enforcement or nothing at all. As with American politics, there is no gray area ever.
I completely disagree with your statement. The goals of the current paradigm of dealing with the pandemic is to minimize the strain on various processes from a public health perspective. Anything moving the needle is effective. That's why guidelines are like 'gatherings of 20 people or more'. It's to minimize spread, not completely obliterate it.
Comparing this incident with public health directives is disingenuous at best. It's the exact same line of thinking about masks. Oh, masks aren't 100% effective in preventing infection. Therefore, they're useless so nobody should wear them, ever.
We've also sent some people to the IIS and they didn't test positive. What does that say about the current paradigm?
I’m not so sure; respectfully disagree. This only talks about process stricture, not efficacy or process compliance/lapse. Plausible hypothesis, but needs more data.
If I've learned something about people during the pandemic, it's that the average person is far less intelligent and far less compliant than I previously believed. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to find out this was caused by people not complying with protocols. Or at the very least, not having an understanding of the fact that COVID transmission is aerosol, and that breathing reshared air even for a few seconds is a high risk activity.
I would call that uneducated rather than unintelligent. Not everyone is an expert on Covid-19, most people here aren't. We look for and rely on trusted sources to get our information about it.
But many mainstream trusted sources have been carrying out misinformation/divertion campaigns by focusing prevention on hand hygiene and vaccination, instead of explaining the actual mechanism of transmission. So unless they're curious and proactive about searching for neutral information (which is orthogonal to intelligence), many people by default believe transmission happens by touching surfaces, or cannot happen when one has taken vaccines, for instance.
Reminds me of the fact that you can fool people into believing the school system is effective, that a record number of tractors was produced, that the leader got elected with 96% of the vote, but you simply cannot fool people into thinking they aren't starving to death.
Scientists heading to the Belgian station are probably fairly smart. As for compliance, my experience with highly intelligent people is that they tend to be less compliant or predictable than others, so you may be right that this was due to a lapse in compliance.
When things don't make any sense, or show poor results, it's hard to comply to, which has been the case in the last two years with our betters on a power trip.
Yep. Likely self-supervised isolation/quarantine and someone broke the rules.
That said, omicron is apparently insanely infectious, so it could have been something as simple as a member of the ground crew being inside the plane for a bit to stock or check something.
Or some asymptomatic carrier administering a set of the test, or some of the cleaning staff coughing in the room before the tests.
That they focused on the person action (quarantines, tests) and not the environment (transfer shuttles, testing rooms, bathrooms and dressing rooms) kids hints the latter as a source. After all, you drop your mask during testing, and I've seen places doing it in a small, unventilated room with no pause between each person.
Two options: quarantine bubble failure or incubation longer than .. 15 days?
Both are possible, though the former is more likely. 5 day intervals for incubation seem too short for 100% safety. I believe omicron has some data points of longer incubation already.
Third option: flawed hypothesis. Swabbing the nose or throat and performing subsequent RT-PCR analysis is not an infallable indicator of whether or not someone is free from the virus SARS-CoV-2 or infected with or likely to become infected with the respiratory disease COVID-19. Before 2020 such tests were typically only used as a part of a diagnosis by a medical professional upon consultation, typically also alongside symptoms. The limitations of testing were well understood before 2020 but somehow that all got lost in the panic.
Another point is that there are animal reservoirs for SARS-CoV-2. We've known this since well before the zero-covid debacle, making such a plan was doomed to fail, as it did. It's likely that the virus can live in intestinal tracts of animals, including humans, for long periods without being detected and destroyed by the host's immune system. This makes the use of negative nose/throat swab tests as a guarantee of no subsequent infection a fallacy.
The way we deal with COVID is to stop testing asymptomatic people and use the plethora of effective early treatment protocols we've developed since as early as December 2019 to vastly reduce the need for hospital treatment in those that do develop symptoms.
> Nose swabs reveal whether you're shedding the particles and thus infectious. It doesn't matter if you're infected if you're not shedding the virus.
No, they really don't. Swabbing for RNA picks up gene fragments that may or may not be from infectious virus -- it's why we see positive tests for months after infection in some people.
Swabbing for viral protein is debatably more likely to detect the thing of interest (the virus itself, in some semblance of functioning order), but these tests also have a high false-negative rate (around 10% for the better tests I've seen; I have never heard of a test with a sub-percent FN rate, as you claim). You can be shedding live virus and these tests won't pick it up, either because you're not shedding enough, or because the antibodies in the test don't bind to the protein in your sample for whatever reason.
Either way, you're measuring a proxy for what you really care about. A true test of infection involves taking a sample and incubating in cell culture. Nobody does this, except to validate the original tests and provide clear positive and negative samples. It's slow and orders of magnitude more expensive than even PCR testing. But this is the direct test for infectious virus. Everything else is an approximation.
(Let me be clear, though: I wholeheartedly support the use of antigen tests -- even ones with low sensitivity -- over the insanity we're doing now in the US. It's just bad to misrepresent what they're actually doing.)
Agree with all of this. PCR literally involves amplifying segments of genetic material so it can be detected. All you need is a segment of genetic material, not the whole virus.
However, I’m not sure the value in antigen testing? Sure, when you’re traveling or have to into a higher risk situation.
But Singapore decided to freely give out antigen tests and what happened was people who tested positive showed up at the ER. And the antigen tests weren’t reliable, so PCR had to confirm. And they have a high vaccination rate so after all that testing the answer was “go home and if you get really sick, come back”.
It finally dawned on them that could just be the message anyways - if you don’t feel bad, don’t worry. If you do, you can test but don’t seek medical care unless you have severe symptoms.
The value of cheap, ubiquitous antigen testing is that you can be pretty sure that you don't have the virus, which allows scared people to have some sense of control. Even though these tests have a high false-positive rate, it's pretty unlikely that you'll test negative on multiple independent tests, so the cheap and ubiquitous part is important. Scared people can fixate their fear on a metric that actually correlates with transmission. Negative test? No need to freak out about going to the store.
That said, your point is well-taken that people can be idiots about testing positive. We do need to get over this fear and accept that the virus is endemic, and that vaccines work to prevent serious illness. We're now talking about miniscule risks that we would have rightfully shrugged off in any previous year, but folks have been terrorized, and they're desperately looking for control. Any tool that can calm that fear is a good tool.
> Nose swabs reveal whether you're shedding the particles and thus infectious.
On the "shedding" point, not necessarily. The virus can be present in but contained by the immune response from the mucosae of the upper respiratory tract in such a way that it is unable to spread into the lungs and cause COVID-19, yet not shed in large enough quantities to infect others. Given time, a healthy immune system will deal with the virus in the nose and throat, often without the host even noticing. Such a situation would set off a PCR or rapid test but not present a meaningful COVID-19 infection risk to the others. (In fact, one hypothesis for why positive cases rise soon after vaccination and booster campaigns start is because of the well understood phenomenon of reduced immune response for a short time after vaccination, giving such virus already present in the upper respiratory tract at time of vaccination the edge it needs to get into the lungs.)
And the cycle thresholds on PCR tests are often set nonsensically high making them sensitive to quantities of virus and viral debris far lower than the quantity required to meaningfully infect either the host or someone else via shedding. They can also trigger positive on not just virus but viral debris for months after recovery from COVID-19 infection. (A test can be too sensitive, especially when used as the only evidence to force someone and their contacts to isolate and in some cases not earn an income for weeks.)
> It doesn't matter if you're infected if you're not shedding the virus.
I agree, but I'm not sure if the Belgian authorities, who seem to use PCR positives as a COVID-19 diagnosis, and PCR negatives as a guarantee of safety from infection risk to others, would. The article does what most articles these days do, conflating presence of SARS-CoV-2 debris on a swab with COVID-19 disease diagnosis. It incorrectly claims 2/3rds of the 25 staff have COVID-19, when given that none seem to have symptoms of the disease it's likely a case of oversensitive tests. Let's not also forget that these tests are mostly (at least all the ones I've seen) called COVID-19 tests.
> Given time, a healthy immune system will deal with the virus in the nose and throat, often without the host even noticing.
Ah ok, so that might explain why there's a significant number of people who say that they had covid without difficulty, at least of they didn't test false positive.
Thanks for explaining the nuance - I've heard a lot of this before but it's refreshing how succinctly you captured it.
There's a weak link somewhere--I wonder if it's flight crews in this case. If the pilot and other crew for the leg from South Africa to Antarctica weren't also isolating 10 days and tested at the same time, then there's your infection vector.
There’s also the factor that some people have a longer incubation period. Early on in the pandemic there were reports of some people having 21-27 day incubation periods before testing positive and getting sick. I think it’s less common now with delta and omicron but likely still possible in rare instances.
Not even then. If they can verify 100% compliance, we can adjust our estimates about the false negative rate of these tests (which we already know not to be perfect)
(And maybe not even that. There could have been an infection between the tests “when leaving Cape Town for Antarctica” and actual departure)
I'd say "overkill" over ineffective. I do think that if all of these scientists were dying of the virus it was extremely ineffective, but thankfully they are not.
One would be to stop sending groups of people to that station.
Whether or not that's "realistic" is another question. It really depends on what's at stake, which is not clear yet. But the point is that governments around the world may face a very similar question in the weeks ahead.
Everyone wants this. We should do it slowly, but we should do it.
In the US, omnicron is going fast. Hopefully, and I say this with week old information in a huge information-differential environment that evolves hourly, omnicron itself is a step towards mitigation.
IIRC, this is a well known rhetoric technique: flood the opponent with irrelevant facts, so he doesnt have time to refute them all. But that's for in person debates, with finite time to respond.
This is one of the worst nitpicks I've ever seen in my life. "Normal" implies removing all virus related mandates and restrictions. It's obvious what gp meant
Or money, for that matter. If beliefs are network effects, then money sits at the base layer of that network.
So not only does Bitcoin (the "crypto" protocol most resistant to centralization) occupy an unusual position in the universe of software networks, but it it's deep, deep down in the base layer of shared beliefs due to the monetary aspect.