Coronavirus in the United States - news and thoughts

Ah, when proven that study is useless, now you say every study outside a lab is useless as well. Good one. One can’t ascertain what contributed to the very small increase in efficacy. I know everyone wants to point to masks since this is a lot of people’s religion, but unfortunately that isn’t able to be done with this “study” without taking huge leaps of faith.

 

Who’s moving goalposts. With how unreliable PCR tests are, there are two things to count, hospitalizations and deaths. So, when one area is getting hit with a wave of delta, it’s not exactly a fair comparison to do a short time period of comparison. But you know that already and just wanted to point out the difference for political purposes.

 

Or maybe wait until autumn

 

Then you know that the problem with including death rates from the first few weeks of the pandemic is that we didn't know how to treat it and only a handful of states were seeing an uptick in those early days. Yet you still do it.

 

You misread, again. He didn't say those studies are useless, he said those studies have limitations. There is a meaningful difference.

 

Uh, no, the study has not been proven useless. It has been proven to have a different result than you like. There is an important difference to most of us.

There was no increase in efficacy, whatever that means in this case. There was a decrease in infection rates and changes in behavior.

There is a tradeoff in every study. Lab studies are highly controlled, letting you isolate the mechanism perfectly. The downside is that they might not be externally valid outside of all of the controls.

Natural experiments, such as this study, are externally valid and show the effects of a treatment in a real world setting, but don't isolate mechanisms as well as lab studies. That is true for the Danish mask study as well, which can't definitely rule out a ton of counter explanations to their results, as the author's correctly pointed out in the text of that study. You ignored that because you liked what you could spin their results to be (despite the fact that the author's explicitly disputed your spin on their results in the paper). You attempt to isolate mechanisms through appropriate randomization (which it appears these authors did) and try to use statistical controls for things that can't be randomized away (which these authors also did by finding gaps that continued to exist after the randomization and controlling for them).

Observational studies limit observation bias, which exists whenever participants know they are being observed, but generally can only provide associations, not causal results. At best, you can create a synthetic control of some form, but there are weaknesses inherent in this. But for the most part, it is difficult to apply the results beyond association.

At this point, we now have lab studies showing masks are effective at containing particles, which makes them effective at slowing the spread of disease, a natural experiment showing that increased mask usage, especially for more effective masks like surgical masks (there should be no gap due to masking effectiveness if masks weren't the cause), is effective at slowing spread at a community level, and a variety of observational studies showing that mask wearing is associated with slower spread. That is all science can do. Provide three different views, each with unique strengths and weaknesses, answering the same question in the same way: masks lower spread rates. Sorry that the results didn't turn out how you thought they would.

 

Unh, I noticed that also. But I’ve stopped reading mos5 his posts. So much inaccurate info - too little time in the day for me to waste it like that.

 

the hell it is. You obviously don’t know anything about long haulers. Or anyone that’s been in the icu. Or anyone working in hospitals. Or know anything about others attempting medical procedures. Or anything on costs of treating Covid.

 

link?

 

This amused me today.

 

'Is this my life now?': Clemson defensive end Justin Foster's -- and my -- struggle with long-haul COVID

Happy ending for his story, he got the vaccine and his body has recovered enough that he is able to play football again. Still has a lot of weird stuff going on that the doctors can't fully explain, but life is like that sometimes.

 

We knew how to handle it. We saw what happened in Italy. Can’t help it if Cuomo sent sick elderly patients back to nursing homes and then hid the data. Yeah. One thing DeSantis did right was lock down nursing homes and not let Covid+ patients back in there. That the other northern states followed suit is on them. Stupid. But hey, keep making it political. Not surprised.

 

I know you desperately want to be right about something, so I guess the only way is to take a “study” and draw some conclusions even though there are multiple things in play. I guess being wrong on lockdowns, school closures and masks has you wishing for answers that aren’t there. Maybe next time.

 

long haulers LOL. Already showed that is garbage as well. Maybe we should mask kids under 2. Maybe that will help LOL.

 

Textbook projection. Replies to a post that isn't political, makes political comments, then accuses the original post of being political.

 

I’ve skipped a few pages at times so not sure if discussed. Anyone mixing vaccine producers? Heard a person on CNN say it was fine. I am 2 in on Pfizer. Had not considered getting a different one for the third.

 

Lol, take the L. You and your favorite twitter accounts were wrong on masks. The research shows it. You wanted an RCT using real world data. Now you have it. Deal with it. Sorry. Better luck next time.

 

Total nonsense. NY shut down within a couple of weeks of the first covid cases reported there. But even then it was too late as covid was already entrenched in the population. If you look at the numbers from May 2020 on, NY has done vastly better than Florida has.

As for the nursing home stuff, it was a mistake for Cuomo to send covid patients back to the nursing homes, but there was no room at the hospitals. At least NY is now requiring nursing home employees to be vaccinated. Why won't DeSantis do that? Why would anyone allow someone who is not vaccinated to work at a nursing home?

 

So ny shut the barn door after the horses left,big deal, cuomo's damage was done.

 

What’s political? That some governors stupid decision to send Covid+ patients back to nursing homes? If DeSantis did it I’d call him out for being stupid. Keep playing politics. I’ll pass