To Vaccinate or Not---The Rat Flu Odyssey Continues

[MultiVerse]

The "or something to that effect" is a heavily skewed study population. For some reason, in that stage of the pandemic, or at least in that study population, the Italians weren't finding many infections in young people (Table 1). So that study population is severely biased toward old people, hence the higher CFR.

While I'm critiquing that study, it's worth noting their cited study limitations. It's a very simple study with no attempt to compensate for known limitations. A casual reader is easily misinformed (hey Zuck, listening?). Still a useful study, especially early in the pandemic.

1.7% is a better CFR estimate than 14% for most populations. I don't know why the earlier graph comparing diseases used a high CFR number. When I make crude estimates of US CFR, I get numbers around 1.5 or 2, depending on time period. E.g., with the 7 day average at 142k daily cases, I feel confident saying we'll see 2000 deaths per day (7 day average) 4 weeks from now (mid-September).

Get the shot people.

Yeah, it will vary according to demographics and the current average age of COVID-19 cases. If the average infection age is lower case fatality rates are lower. If the average infection age is higher case fatality rates are higher. It will also vary according to availability of treatments and/or availability of vaccines. With that in mind, what happened in Italy happened in large part because the population was caught unawares and as a result lots of people became infected including lots of older people who might have otherwise been protected. The main thing to keep in mind is things like CFR or reproduction numbers or whatever are best thought of as functions with lots of variables that can change.

[mcski]

Kinda hope that dude suffered a bit in that ICU

[skaredshtles]

When it comes to the jab you just can't reach some people - prime example:

GOP Leader Who Fought Against Vaccine Dies After Weekslong Battle With Coronavirus
Pressley Stutts, a Republican leader in South Carolina, shared conspiracy theories


Pressley Stutts, a Republican leader in South Carolina who fought COVID-19 vaccination efforts, died on Thursday of the coronavirus after a weekslong battle, including six days spent on a ventilator, The Greenville News reported.

Stutts, a 64-year-old veteran, frequently shared conspiracy theories about the virus, the vaccines and the 2020 election on Facebook, including in posts made from his ICU bed.

Stutts served as an executive committee member of the Greenville County Republican Party and the leader of the Greenville Tea Party. He protested Vice President Kamala Harris when she visited the area in June to promote vaccination and called the effort an “ungodly initiative.”

Stutts also praised a state effort to strip funding from schools that imposed mask mandates or testing requirements, and was angry about $10 gift card incentives for vaccination, writing to his 5,000 followers: “Do not sell your body nor your soul no matter the asking price.”

In July, Stutts shared a Facebook post dismissing the delta variant, which was likely the one that ended his life.

On Aug. 1 ― the day he went into the ICU ― Stutts insisted he had “always contended that COVID was very real” and called it “a deadly bio-weapon perpetrated upon the people of the world by enemies foreign, and perhaps domestic.”

He also posted conspiracy theories about the virus online. Last year, he dismissed masks as an “illusion,” claimed in December that there had been no increase in deaths in 2020, and said, “the American public has been gaslighted by the medical industrial complex.”

A research letter published in April calculated 522,368 excess deaths in 2020, an increase of 22.9% over 2019. Earlier this year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated 545,600 to 660,200 excess deaths from Jan. 26, 2020, through Feb. 27, 2021.

[jono]

Huh... well I guess I've missed his community video posts on SM. We have regular posts by different people in different positions of our city/county government and they are always "do your part, wear a mask and social distance" and our County Health which ran the mass vax site where I volunteered was very proactive in encouraging getting the jab. County Health still has regular posts re: pop-up clinics and on-site mobile vax at community events so I don't get this at all.


Edit/add: okay... so I found and read this piece and have to call BS. All this information is out there and during the prior time of mask mandates all businesses posted signs that said "by order of the Governor and per CDC guidelines masks and social distancing are required." What more do you need? How would a local mandate make any difference? That would just be redundant. If people claim they need to hear it from our local government then they aren't going to do it anyway IMO. All the information the person in this article says she needs is available on community health FB pages as well as state and federal sites she just wants to be spoon fed. Some battles just can't be won no matter what you do. This little town has its anti-people just like every other town and city across the globe.

https://www.npr.org/2021/08/19/10294...covid-hot-spot

While I had to chuckle at the spandex runner, I agree the piece seemed oddly biased. I actually searched their site out because I was curious what his response to that interview would be. He makes some valid points and maybe if he's this bad at articulating his position those points are better than they first appear.

[abraham]

Huh, so Orlando's asking people to reduce their water use so oxygen meant for water treatment can go to covid patients.

And meanwhile Mississippi poison control says >70% of their calls are related to ingestion of invermectin purchased at livestock supply centers.


Fucking embarrassing.

[LongShortLong]

No doubt is a difficult question but one that they must know how to answer, otherwise how can they take down any content? Zuck was up there saying they took down ### content and the question back was "how many users looked at it, spread it around, etc." and he said it was impossible for FB to answer that question? I call bullshit. That is exactly the type of data they sell or use as justification for charging to advertise on their platform.

I would also flip it on you and take your idea the other direction. If what you say is true then they could not take down any content because it would be impossible. We know that's not the case, so acting like they can't analyze how many people saw content they took down is just straight up false.

I wouldn't characterize it as outrage journalism, rather it's merely asking a very straightforward question that demonstrates that FB is not really interested in curtailing disinformation/misinformation, it's all for show in other words so they can act like they're doing something, while not turning off a ton of their users and also allowing crap to continue to spread.

ETA: I would expect CBS, NBC, ABC to know as well. This shouldn't be that difficult for them. A story is found to be false that they put on their platforms, they can't figure out how many people clicked on it via the web? Again, that seems really unlikely.

Ok, I missed the context that they were asking how many users interacted (looked at / spread) with ### content that Facebook identified and took down. They probably don't track interaction in this way, though if they collected enough data, and retained it, they could do an analysis and produce an answer. The answer would turn out to be really fishy if you looked at it closely, due to problems with the data and problems with the definition of interaction.

The simple answer is that taking down content is a front end problem, and analyzing data is a backend problem. They certainly collect data and create metrics that tell them how much the content removal affects their business. Probably changes in user engagement (whatever that means), and likely changes in revenue. They probably don't the answer ABC wanted (there's no business value).

I don't work at Facebook, and don't know what data they collect nor how they store it. I did work at a different data foundry, in the big data department. Often, what sounds like a simple question turns out to be unanswerable, requires a lot of analyst hours, or is computationally expensive to obtain. Often we'd use the answer to a similar question.

For the "how many spread it around" question, I'd expect Facebook has the data for how many spread it on Facebook. They have no data about how many spread it around on other platforms they don't own. For platforms they do own, they may have policies that prevent the cross-platform analysis, or they may have architected the systems intentionally to block that analysis (e.g. perhaps to protect user privacy).

For the "how many saw it" question (on Facebook), this also has complexities. Facebook likely tracks every time they serve the post. They may not know whether a web browser actually showed it to the user, and they certainly don't know if the user actually read it. They may use trackers that indicate how long a post was likely visible on the page. How long before you want to count it as seen?

What about different content types? Post vs comment vs ad vs news, etc. The relevant data will be collected and stored differently for each. Likely difficult to analyze in common to answer the question.

How many of Facebook's viewers are real humans? Any popular web service gets a shit ton of fake requests, often automated. There's money to be made by deceiving Facebook. Those need to be detected and filtered.

Data storage and retention. All of this data is probably not in a live database, waiting for a SQL query. Instead, Facebook has specific business questions they want answered, and the data storage, retention, and processing will be designed with the business questions in mind. It's possible that when they take down content, they also break a relationship necessary to answer a question about it.

Policy and law. Do company policies permit the desired analysis? Oooh, just thought of something - all those Euros with their GDPR might be deleting their data. Facebook may not keep uniform data across countries.

Data storage is expensive at Facebook's scale, so they will only retain it while it's useful. It's entirely possible some of the data needed to answer the question is only in the live server and not retained for later analysis or is only retained a short time.

So anyway, let's assume they have all the data. And they are willing to commit the analyst time and compute resources to answer the question. Then they can make a decent guess, certainly a guess good enough to sell ads and adjust the post rank. This guess is almost certainly not suitable for release by the CEO on national television.

I think it's likely Facebook can get answers to similar questions, answers good enough for internal purposes, but not the exact question asked, nor suitable for external use. Zuckerberg could commit resources to get a better answer, one suitable for release.

Did the interviewer ask the followup "why is it impossible?"
/blog. sorry

[CarlMega]

And



Still got my greatest....hits.

[PB]

Huh, so Orlando's asking people to reduce their water use so oxygen meant for water treatment can go to covid patients.

And meanwhile Mississippi poison control says >70% of their calls are related to ingestion of invermectin purchased at livestock supply centers.


Fucking embarrassing.

RLY
Any openings in bird or reptile groups?

[dunfree]

RLY
Any openings in bird or reptile groups?

Trying to sell macaw shit as a covid cure? “Boa constrict your covid away!”

[Danno]

.

[mfcf13]

Huh, so Orlando's asking people to reduce their water use so oxygen meant for water treatment can go to covid patients.

And meanwhile Mississippi poison control says >70% of their calls are related to ingestion of invermectin purchased at livestock supply centers.


Fucking embarrassing.

Did you see the photos of the Florida library with people writhing in pain on the floor as they waited for triage treatment?

We're past embarrassing to 'sickeningly shameful failure'.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2021/08/...reatment-site/

[Bunion 2020]

Called a friend of mine today to check in on how she is doing. She and Hubby are moving to a pretty cool small town east of Helena Mt. from where they live now near Livingston, White Sulfur Springs.

Her mom is really sick with Covid, day 10. The subject of vaccines came up, no surprise her mom and dad aren't vaccinated but they have always been into vitamins and holistic medicine and are way religious. Then the discussion turned to masks, according to her they are bullshit. At one time she was an EMT.

Her husband is a ER doc. I didn't ask what he thought.

I am afraid she has lost her shit.

[Conundrum]

I am afraid she has lost her shit.

And maybe one of her parents.

[yeahman]

Friend's new fb profile pic lol.

[mfcf13]

Called a friend of mine today to check in on how she is doing. She and Hubby are moving to a pretty cool small town east of Helena Mt. from where they live now near Livingston, White Sulfur Springs.

Her mom is really sick with Covid, day 10. The subject of vaccines came up, no surprise her mom and dad aren't vaccinated but they have always been into vitamins and holistic medicine and are way religious. Then the discussion turned to masks, according to her they are bullshit. At one time she was an EMT.

Her husband is a ER doc. I didn't ask what he thought.

I am afraid she has lost her shit.

Note to self: don't end up in an ER in Helena MT.

[Conundrum]

Friend's new fb profile pic lol.

Too serious of a thread to ask for nudies...yes...no...?

[Bunion 2020]

Note to self: don't end up in an ER in Helena MT.

Actually he is an ER doc in the UP of Michigan and commutes. He is close to retirement and getting a PHD in Theology so he can write Jesus books. Her folks were always deeply religious and she was not. I think that pendulum is starting to swing as well.

We were talking about me going up to WSS to visit and I was going to look at property as an exit strategy from what has become Bozeangles. After discussing the local political scene there and looking at the local listings I am much less inclined to look in that direction.

[The AD]

Actually he is an ER doc in the UP of Michigan and commutes.

That's a hell of a commute.

[bodywhomper]

Commutes from MT to MI?

[Bunion 2020]

Commutes from MT to MI?

Yep, his frequent flier miles are amazing. 7 days on 21 off.

[XXX-er]

yeah i know or know of MD's who do locums in the arctic or even a regular practise in narth east BC while living in Victoria

Got a ski bro who lives in BC and operates in Alberta, depending on the patents BMI they used to make an extra surcharge for operating on the obese in Alberta, AKA " yee-haw we got us a bimmer "

[MagnificentUnicorn]

Female general surgeon this morning told me she had to put a chest tube in a ventilated probed patient in ICU, she needed consent so she walked next door and got consent from the patient’s daughter who’s on BIPAP for Covid. You can’t make this shit up.


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[jackattack]

Female general surgeon this morning told me she had to put a chest tube in a ventilated probed patient in ICU, she needed consent so she walked next door and got consent from the patient’s daughter who’s on BIPAP for Covid. You can’t make this shit up.


Sent from my iPhone using TGR Forums

The surgeon’s gender is relevant because a male surgeon wouldn’t seek consent.

[Chugachjed]

I got vaccinated then I got covid. WTF fauci

[MultiVerse]

There are more infections now, so more people likely to encounter virus and get infected. The vaccine is not a forcefield that stops the virus from entering. It trains your immune system to respond to infection to prevent disease.