CV and mad panic behaviour

[LP]

Ahh - it's our turn.

Our boy (10) tested -ve on a RAT before school yesterday.  Got home, looked like crap.  Had a temp of 39, tested again and +ve.

Sorry to hear that Dodge, I hope he is all clear and you're good to go ASAP.

As mild as Omicron can be it's still a massive inconvenience and worth taking seriously just in case.

It's a weird situation here, this time of year weather changing we see people getting sore throats and sniffles from the usual aircon on / aircon off cycles you get in office buildings. It's incredibly disruptive now because in the past you just took it for granted, now it's stay home get a test, come in get a sore throat, stay home get a test, rinse and repeat, people can't make any assumptions anymore because they just know if they do they might be shizen out of luck! Must be even worse around schools.

In the middle of all this, after all that time locking down and doing the right thing, it's masks off which feels a bit premature!

[Mav]

Sorry to hear that, Dodge. It's a bit of a conundrum, Apparently, Pfizer's vaccine for kids doesn't do much for them. It does help reduce the severity of symptoms but the protection only lasts for about 1 month! How can you stop Covid circulating amongst kids at school?

[dodge]

It's more a PITA then anything.  He is particularly shattered about missing all the cricket stuff this weekend.  The kids' school has been lucky - it's not very big (~300), but less than 20 cases.  Other bigger schools around us have had up to 25% staff and students away - that's disruptive.

We're (again) very lucky - we get free RATs from school for the kids and both our sets of parents get a free box a month being elderly - some have been passed on to us.  Not what the system was designed for, but we won't say no.

One lesson is that if there is a +ve RAT and you're not convinced, ignore it and get a PCR.  We've had friends get a false +ve RAT and report it, then tell their school that the PCR has come back -ve.  Bad luck.  The schools have to go by what was originally reported.

[Mav]

The accuracy of tests has to be considered alongside how rare (or otherwise) an illness is.

A common problem in probability classes is as follows:

A test for a certain rare disease is assumed to be correct 95% of the time: if a person has the disease, the test result is +ve with a probability of 0.95  & if the person doesn't have the disease the test result is negative with probability 0.95. A person drawn at random from a certain population has a 0.1% chance of having the disease.

Q. What's the probability that a random person who tests positive actually has the disease?

Due to the vagaries of conditional probability, the answer is surprisingly 0.01866 (1.866%). You'd think a test that's 95% would translate to a 95% chance of a correct positive, wouldn't you?

Of course, the chance of a random person having Covid is higher than 0.1% given that around 0.1% of the Victorian population are reported as new daily cases.

[Mav]

Jim Jordan promises to "investigate" Dr. Fauci if GOP retakes the House this year, Salon.

For conspiracy theorists, the "Lab Leak Theory" is just like the door-to-door salesman's foot in the door: it's not the objective - it's only a means to an end. In this case, the end is to blame those who are battling Covid with creating it and handing it to the Chinese as a bio-weapon.

At the center of this theory is the allegation that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) at one point provided a grant to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for "gain-of-function" research, a process in which a virus is genetically altered in order to anticipate ways it may mutate in the future. Supporters of the lab leak theory contend, by that logic, that the coronavirus which causes COVID-19 is a man-made "supervirus," generated in a lab, whose origins have been covered up by leading health officials, including Fauci.

According to the Washington Post, there is no clear evidence that the NIH funded any such research. Furthermore, most scientists have concluded that the lab leak theory is unlikely, although it cannot entirely be ruled out. The dearth of evidence for the claim hasn't stopped conservatives from repeatedly accusing Fauci of masterminding the pandemic.

...

On Sunday, the New York Times cited two extensive new studies backing the idea that COVID-19 originated from a live animal market in Wuhan, China. This was largely the consensus earlier into the pandemic.

Jordan appeared unconvinced, writing of the report this week: "These aren't new facts or new studies. This 'new' info is from the same crew that told Fauci it came from a lab but suspiciously changed their tune and were rewarded with a 9 million dollar grant."

According to the Times, the two novel studies have been verified by multiple independent experts, which renders the lab leak increasingly unlikely.

"When you look at all of the evidence together, it's an extraordinarily clear picture that the pandemic started at the Huanan market," said Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona.

Yes, the fact the Chinese blocked an international investigation into the outbreak adds fuel to the conspiracy. But let's face it, the reflex of the Chinese is to deny & control the story. I'd imagine stray comments about who farted in the lift would see the loose lips sent off for "re-education", let alone more substantial criticisms (e.g. Peng Shuai).

[LP]

But let's face it, the reflex of the Chinese is to deny & control the story. I'd imagine stray comments about who farted in the lift would see the loose lips sent off for "re-education", let alone more substantial criticisms (e.g. Peng Shuai).

I've seen first-hand a young woman detained simply because she walked into the line of an "official" as they got out of a car, not actually making contact or colliding, just got in the way because she was focussed on her phone while walking down Hengshan Rd. If she had paused and dipped her head like the other locals she would have been allowed to to go on her way!

[LP]

I heard a podcast yesterday, the former author, flat earther and anti-vaxer and COVID conspiracist Rob Skiba died last year from COVID.

A sad end to a parasite who basically profited from selling conspiracy theory books to gullible people, well at least we can't accuse him of not walking the walk!

[Mav]

Here's a very good (and long) article in Scientific American regarding the Lab Leak Theory: The Lab-Leak Hypothesis Made It Harder for Scientists to Seek the Truth.

It articulated quite nicely a process it called "conspiratorial cognition":

In normal scientific inquiry, as evidence emerges, the remaining space for plausible hypotheses narrows. Some facets continue to be supported, and others are contradicted and eventually precluded altogether. Some of the strongest advocates for a lab origin for SARS-CoV-2 changed their views as they learned more. Baltimore, for instance, withdrew his “smoking gun” comment when challenged by additional evidence, conceding that a natural origin was also possible. Revising or rejecting failed hypotheses in light of refuting evidence is central to the scientific process. Not so with conspiracy theories and pseudoscience. One of their hallmarks is that they are self-sealing: as more evidence against the conspiracy emerges, adherents keep the theory alive by dismissing contrary evidence as further proof of the conspiracy, creating an ever more elaborate and complicated theory.

[DJC]

There is a comprehensive article in Nature too, "The COVID lab-leak hypothesis: what scientists do and don’t know".  It dates to June but still provides a good overview of the various hypotheses:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01529-3

Another feature of SARS-CoV-2 that has drawn attention is a combination of nucleotides that underlie a segment of the furin cleavage site: CGG (these encode the amino acid arginine). A Medium article that speculates on a lab origin for SARS-CoV-2 quotes David Baltimore, a Nobel laureate and professor emeritus at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, as saying that viruses don’t usually have that particular code for arginine, but humans often do — a “smoking gun”, hinting that researchers might have tampered with SARS-CoV-2’s genome.

Andersen says that Baltimore was incorrect about that detail, however. In SARS-CoV-2, about 3% of the nucleotides encoding arginine are CGG, he says. And he points out that around 5% of those encoding arginine in the virus that caused the original SARS epidemic are CGG, too. In an e-mail to Nature, Baltimore says Andersen could be correct that evolution produced SARS-CoV-2, but adds that “there are other possibilities and they need careful consideration, which is all I meant to be saying”.

The article concludes:

As Biden's investigation commences and the WHO considers the next phase in its origin study, pandemic experts are bracing themselves for a long road ahead. “We want an answer,” says Jason Kindrachuk, a virologist at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada. “But we may have to keep piecing bits of evidence together as weeks and months and years move forward.”

[capcom]

And we'll pass the 6 million mark of global deaths by Saturday ... if we haven't already.