This Study suffers from at least one significant methodological flaw. They did not evaluate the same individuals pre- and post Covid infection but instead evaluated people as a group who were either previously infected or not. While they did try to correct for some socio-economic factors such as age their data did not allow them to factor in the socio-economic discrepancies in the distribution of early Covid cases which overwhelmingly hit service industry workers with direct customer exposure. People with Graduate Degrees were much more frequently able to self isolate and work from home than people without a high school equivalent degree. What I find to be quite sad, is the fact that these researchers were actually in a position to retest a subset of the original test takers as more than 10% completed a follow up survey in December 2020 which surfaced 275 individuals who had contracted Covid after their first participation in the study. Retesting those, as well as the >8000 individuals who had no change in Covid status to control for increase in age, increase in points due to getting better at the test with repeated exposure etc, would have been a sufficiently large dataset to actually confirm or rule out at least large effect sizes.
I think it's reasonable to be way more cautious about COVID than the "just a flu" and "it'll become endemic" (for some value of 'endemic') crowd seem to think.
The UK brain imaging study is a (small, not-yet-peer-reviewed) data point in that direction also:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.11.21258690v...
There seems to be somewhat of suggestion that COVID may have serious long-term neurological effects. Given the massive numbers that it has affected already (and how many it would affect if it becomes endemic), even relatively small risk factors (i.e. single digit percentages) for things like Lewy body dementia and Parkinsons could have huge effect on public health.
It's worth reminding ourselves that we don't have any data on the mid-to-long term effects of COVID beyond about a 2 year window.
> I think it's reasonable to be way more cautious about COVID than the "just a flu" and "it'll become endemic" (for some value of 'endemic') crowd seem to think.
But unless you want to live like a recluse in a bunker, what are your options?
The way I see it, you're bound to catch it no matter how many precautions you take. Case in point: I know a guy with paranoid level of precautions that still got it and while he was confined with his family none of them caught it (this was before we had any vaccines in my country).
> But unless you want to live like a recluse in a bunker, what are your options?
We can:
• Try not to get infected
• If inevitable: Get as little of it as we can
• Help the body clear the illness and after-effects
• Contract the illness as late as possible, as medicine advances faster than mutations
• Seek to support the science of figuring this thing out
• Do this together
• Seek to reduce the amount of contagious people in our local and global environment
Practically, we can:
• Wear masks. Better masks are better
• Use air conditioning, advocate for air conditioning and fresh air
• Exercise. Eat well. Go outside.
• Get vaccinated
• Read papers
• Discuss the science
• Participate in studies
• Fund science
• Explain to people what the scientific process is and how we know what we know
• Should we arrive at the opinion that certain substances, drugs, or supplements may have a protective effect, we might take those
• We can be the living scientific process: When we choose to experiment, seek to carefully note down the results and publish them
• Help others
• Fund healthcare for those who are less well off than we are
• Establish robust social immunity by discussing the options we do have to reduce infection
I think we need to put considerably more effort into discussing existing and new scientific endeavors before we consider funding. I am not saying we should pause or reduce funding, but rather the reach of our public coffers has increasingly exceeded our understanding of what we are or are not accomplishing with that funding.
The amount of noise, publicity, and politicization of scientific research makes it very difficult to wisely set public policy at both the national and local levels.
I would agree, although not completely – but will I also claim that this falls under discussing, studying, funding, and doing more science %D
Ah, and, it didn’t occur to me to make the distinction, but I was thinking of personal and direct funding of science. As something each of us might arguably do. It’s interesting to consider it because we arrive at the same question: What to fund?
> Seek to support the science of figuring this thing out
It's "funny" because a few months ago, I read that it was definitely an airborne virus, so hands contagion was absolutely not a concern.
Then yesterday I read the complete opposite.
In both case, they were reputable scientists.
Thanks for the advises anyway.
Exactly! And which leads us to asking: How do we know???
> But unless you want to live like a recluse in a bunker, what are your options?
It depends on work and family circumstances. But, stuff that works:
* Be outdoors, and socialize outdoors
* If in indoor unventilated spaces, wear a mask. Ideally N95 if lots of people and they aren’t mask
* Exercise more caution during local waves
* If socializing with others indoors, open a window. This can be done even during heat waves or winter: the greater the temp differential the more the air circulation for a given amount of window opening. Doesn’t raise costs too much, yet people treat it as impossible
* Buy a hepa filter for your home. Humidifiers can also help in winter
* Avoid indoor restaurants and bars and unmasked venues
* In risky venues, choose glasses over contacts. Eye protection is another layer
* Don’t hang out with symptomatic or unvaccinated people
* Get vaccinated
Whether you should choose to do this is another thing, but that’s what to do if you don’t want to catch a respiratory virus.
This above is consistent with: seeing friends, small indoor gatherings, travel (wear n95 + glasses!), etc. It certainly isn’t living in a bunker.
It does present problems during winter though, and it is also quite inconvenient in places with frequent large waves. Small ventilated indoor gatherings with vaccinated friends should be ok in low prevalence, but are risky in a big wave, for example.
I would quite literally rather contract covid than live like that for any period of time.
Difference being that Covid restrictions take away the free choice of the individual, remove restrictions and let each get on with their lives as they choose.
I should add, of course, that I mainly wrote that for those who 1. Really would like to avoid catching the virus for now, but 2. Think it requires ungodly levels of isolation to do
What I wrote is less social than the average (one hopes) but more social than a lot of people lived the past year!
But if you’d rather live less restricted and are vaccinated, go nuts. The vaccines protect quite well against severe disease and it doesn’t strike me as a bad choice to not worry about it.
There is absolutely no way that we can implement the above, WITHOUT losing a lot of what makes us humans in the process.
I'd rather keep our pre-Covid level of human interaction than limiting it forever.
But to each their own, one thing is that we must remove all restrictions so that each can choose their own way freely.
This last part is what politicians have a hard time to realize, but it's a necessity.
Literally nothing in my list was a covid restriction. It is a list of things someone can do if they decide they don’t want to catch covid at the moment while we wait for more info.
Delta, so far, seems to infect whole households with ease in a way that we didn't see. Sydney, Australia is on severe lockdown at the moment thanks to a delta outbreak (it hasn't helped that, like many countries that handled the lockdown/test-and-trace methodology well, we fucked up the vaccination program).
I would imagine that a combination of mass vaccination (which seems to reduce transmission, although not by as much as was hoped) - and continued reasonable measures (mask wearing in crowded indoor places, better ventilation) we could achieve eventual elimination.
Alternately, on route to this less-than-comfortable-outcome, we could make strides in treating the long-term illness, improve short-term treatments and improve vaccines.
The other option is that maybe we'll work our way through the entire Greek alphabet of variations (and beyond; perhaps the Omega variation is followed by double-Alpha) with a large pool of sick people and vaccine escape whack-a-mole because people decided there was no options between "live in a bunker" and "free for all".
> Delta, so far, seems to infect whole households with ease in a way that we didn't see.
According to the latest data out of the UK, Delta is approximately as contagious as Alpha:
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
There is simply no basis for these claims of dramatically increased contagion. It’s a meme that was based on early speculation, and repeated mindlessly by the press.
> According to the latest data out of the UK, Delta is approximately as contagious as Alpha
Are you talking about page 34, which compares secondary attack rate week by week? Can you explain how you read that chart?
> what are your options?
We're a year and a half into it. We have the data. Aside from vaccination and some degree of proper ventilation, you need to:
1. Not be old. 2. Not be fat.
We talk a lot about #1, but #2 is taboo. We, as a society, prefers that you die unnecessarily young from COVID than feel a little bit of shame. Not to mention #2 was already murdering nearly half a million Americans annually on its own prior to COVID.
This needs to be fixed. Sugar/corn industry lobbyists and fast food advertisers should have been publicly hanged decades ago. Now we have even more incentive to address the issue, but I suppose slowly dying at the age of 37, gasping for breath, is a small price to pay to avoid feeling slightly negative about being 300lbs or impact the dividends of the Coca Cola Corporation.
You are absolutely right.
Number 2 is hard to fix as lobbyists and fast food companies have a lot of influence.
But it is concerning that of US women from age 20 and up, 60% or more are considered overweight.
A woman 50 years old has an average weight of 80 kg, using the Miller ideal weight formula and a height of 170 cm, the weight should be 62.5 kg.
https://www.healthline.com/health/womens-health/average-weig...
There should be some kind of reward or benefit for those that can keep to the ideal weight for a longer period of say 1 year.
>but #2 is taboo.
where?
There’s no reason to believe catching COVID-19 is inevitable. Consider that the best estimates about the Spanish flu of 1918 are that about a third of the world caught it before that pandemic ended. Today we have much better knowledge and hygiene, and extremely effective vaccines.
Most people in the world have not contracted COVID-19. Personal precautions are well understood and vaccine distribution is well underway.
I’m sorry that your friend contracted it. In contrast I would characterize my family’s precautions as normal, and none of us have contracted it. Two of us are now vaccinated as well.
The Spanish Flu never went away, it just became "The Flu™".
> But unless you want to live like a recluse in a bunker, what are your options?
You mean like social distancing, wear respiratory masks in closed spaces, revise public spaces to improve air filtering and forced congregations, improve public transportation to avoid high concentration of passengers, and don't force returns to office in industries that do not require them?
You're talking about bunkers and recluses as if you are totally unaware that a) working from home means neither and b) people overwhelmingly prefer it.
There are no options obviously.
I am fully vaccinated, if you offer me a booster I will take it. If you offer me whatever, I will take it.
At that point I have done all I can do. If someone wants to stay in a bunker because things are beyond their risk preference then they should not be forced out of the bunker.
Forcing me back in a bunker though being fully vaccinated is absolute bullshit if anyone can get vaccinated.
Exactly, at some point the cure will become worse than the disease. The fact this makes people uncomfortable is no reason to push it under the rug!
It’s hard to confidently assert that the cure is worse than the disease if we don’t know the long-term effects of the disease yet. (Which is why we’re discussing the Lancet article.)
How many years of lockdown will people put up with?
I could see some places where someone’s entire childhood memory is being under lockdown.
Yes, intellectually speaking, 20 months is not an entire childhood. But from a relative perspective- let’s take a five year old- that’s about 40% of his lifetime to date. That feels very significant to him/her.
That said, having kids that age, I would say my kids handled this pandemic way better than most adults. They adapt quicker and don’t have the emotional baggage (“masks are an evil plot to control the population” for example) to get through.
We have been lucky that they were able to attend school in person though - very strict COVID protocols plus a small population ensured that we never had an outbreak. Things would have been different if we didn’t have that ability.
On a personal level, get vaccinated. That seems to reduce risks by a factor of at least 1000.
On a social level: use the Aus model. Actually lockdown, get case numbers down to the 10s per million. The UK, US etc model is the opposite, it relies on having as many people as possible infected and not really engaging in any full lockdowns. So far that's meant more and longer lockdowns. It's also meant more variants. And it means the maximum number of people with long term effects. It's the worst of all worlds, even the economic one.
That study is somewhat alarming, but I think they were only looking specifically at parts of the brain related to smell and taste, not the brain as a whole, as stated here:
"Based on prior expectations based on animal models and post mortem findings, we chose to focus a priori our primary analyses on a subset of 332 regions-of-interest (297 of which passed the reproducibility thresholding) from the available IDPs that anatomically corresponds to the telencephalic primary and secondary connections of the olfactory and gustatory cortex"
It is endemic. What you think of that fact is irrelevant. It’s a contagious respiratory virus with multiple animal reservoirs. Even if you could somehow vaccinate every person on earth tomorrow, the virus would still be here.
This virus is not going to be eliminated, and it’s well past time to move on from that discussion.
I was just thinking about this today as I prepare for another transatlantic flight: we seem to all be planning for a time when mask mandates and lockdowns are over.
But what if they're never over?
The US and Western Europe have, by now, enough high-quality vaccine for everyone, and we're all stuck at, what, 60% of the population vaccinated?
A bunch of people died, a bunch of people went broke, but during this pandemic the rich have mostly gotten a whole lot richer. Even the rich who don't think of themselves as rich: own a house in Silicon Valley, have a dozen years of 401K and some stock -- these people have done very well.
We have to fight the virus; but we also have to fight the anti-vaxxers and the apathetic, and we have to do it in a world where the people with real power are actually gonna be just fine if everything locks down for four months out of every year.
I've started trying to imagine life in that kind of future. Say two lockdowns every year, in a good year it's a month each time, in a bad year maybe you're locked in your apartment half the time, and that's for people who get their booster shot every year.
Maybe forever. What does society look like in that scenario?
> But what if they're never over?
They’re over. The only people clinging to them are either playing political games, or are completely uninformed about the scientific evidence (and yes, I include the CDC and LA county’s public health authorities in those groups).
Masks were maybe slightly better than nothing when we didn’t have vaccines. They are utterly pointless now. There is zero evidence that they have any marginal benefit in a vaccinated population. This stuff has risen to the level of superstition, and like any superstition, there will be adherents who refuse to let go. That’s fine, but they’re not reflecting science or rational thinking. They are marginal.
Those who are scared of the virus should get vaccinated. Those who are not can do whatever they like, but their choices do not affect me, and they don’t affect you.
Smallpox is gone and polio is almost gone.
We have the technology to completely eradicate the 2019 novel coronavirus if we have the collective will to use it.
Other coronaviruses will evolve to infect humans, yes. We’ll never eradicate infectious disease in general. But we’re talking about one specific distinctive virus here. One for which we already have multiple effective vaccines.
Oh stop it.
Smallpox has exactly one host (us), had an amazingly effective vaccine, the virus doesn’t mutate quickly or spread as readily, and it still took almost 200 years to eradicate it.
Polio is NOT eradicated, it spreads only through contact with fecal matter, and the remaining areas where it is endemic make a great illustration of exactly why this virus isn’t going anywhere either: Afghanistan and Pakistan.
That you would suggest that either of these make an argument for eradication of a flu-like illness with multiple non-human hosts shows how detached from reality you have become.
SARS-COV-2 is a single distinct virus with little variation. While it appears to be able to infect some domestic animals from human hosts, we have yet to find an animal reservoir. (If we had, that would be the end of the lab leak theory.)
And we have two vaccines against it with near 95% effectiveness, which compares with the estimated effectiveness of the smallpox vaccine.
If you want another point of comparison, look at measles. It’s not eradicated, but it’s not endemic either. In fact it is quite rare (far rarer than the flu) in counties with competent child vaccination programs.
> small, not-yet-peer-reviewed) datapoint in that direction
Since we tend to mock such studies when done by antivax, we should also reserve all judgement here. Let’s keep the bar high for good science, the last year has been a flourish of unverified correlated statistics.
> Given massive numbers it has affected already
I don’t think people optimize for normal life either. For example, lockdowns do provoke effects which are at least as dangerous: We spend billions a year telling people to move more to fight obesity, so we are 100% sure that lockdowns have a negative effect on obesity and cardiovascular diseases, but also families breaking up, unemployment, loneliness, lack of sports (maybe close to weight gains of a 5-10 pounds in average, I’d be curious), and all those factors multiply further in the future and increase the risk of asthma, cancer, suicide, mental breakdowns (including knife attacks), we haven’t see the real delayed effects.
So, overreaction already killed more than even the (reasonable) estimated worst case scenario.
Let’s not focus just on Covid, and let’s look at everything else we don’t generally care about. My rule is, since they don’t care for my suicide, which is about 2 orders of magnitude higher than my Covid risk, I won’t vaccinate.
I love how you pivot from "demanding peer review" and a "high bar for science" to unleashing a great pile of anecdata about overreaction. Much of the science on depression and social ill effects of lockdowns is no more conclusive, but you're already 100% convinced of it, even making up numbers for average weight gain.
I find it bizarre that all the stuff about depression, unemployment, etc is always neatly pigeonholed into "lockdown did it". Yeah, like if we were all just going about our business having Brazil-levels of disease and death , we'd all be really cheerful and gainfully employed.
Anti-lockdown people somehow interpret the world entirely through this narrow lens - perhaps some people are depressed/suicidal thanks to dread of the disease or personal losses of friends/family members to the disease. There's an amazing rush to judgement to assume that all the risks are due to lockdown, especially in countries that have high rates - as yet I don't think we know what suicide and unemployment rates are for people with Long COVID.
It's something of a right-wing bit of unpleasantry to say this, but "facts don't care about your feelings" (ugh). If there is a looming risk of - say - 2% of long COVID suffers getting Lewy Body Dementia or Parkinson's as a result of "mild COVID", that's a lot of new horrible cases - potentially with years of suffering involved.
If these ill effects are in fact looming, they will ensure that 'bad lockdown' stuff is lost in the noise.
I'm not advocating 'lock everyone down hard forever'; I just think this is a counterpoint to the whole "freedom day" nonsense where it's assumed that once we have a goodly portion of people vaccinated we can just let the virus rage through the population unchecked.
>So, overreaction already killed more than even the (reasonable) estimated worst case scenario.
How did you come to this conclusion?
>My rule is, since they don’t care for my suicide, which is about 2 orders of magnitude higher than my Covid risk, I won’t vaccinate.
Not sure if I'm reading this correctly but basically not vaccinating out of spite?
Since you also focus that you want to keep a high bar for good science, where are you studies that claim that “ overreaction already killed more than even the (reasonable) estimated worst case scenario”?
Results: The study shows ~1 IQ point decline for non-hospitalized Covid patients.
Full table:
Covid, no respiratory difficulty: 0.4 IQ point loss
Covid, respiratory difficulty, no home assistance: 1 IQ point loss
Covid, respiratory difficulty, with home assistance: 2 IQ point loss
Covid, hospitalized, without ventilation: 4 IQ point loss
Covid, hospitalized, with ventilation: 7 IQ point lossI wonder if you can even reliably measure a 0.4 IQ point loss. Factors such as aging, changes in environment, perhaps even work from home will act as confounding influences.
On the other hand, 7 IQ point loss on ventilation does not surprise me as much. Being in a half-suffocated state for weeks must have some adverse effect on oxygen-hungry brain.
My follow-up question is how damage accumulates. We're on-track for COVID19 becoming a thing, where we'll catch mutations over and over and over.
We’ll know afterwards.
There's never been a disease that's that bad, fortunately.
The black death came closest, but I feel it's safe to say COVID is nowhere near that.
> I wonder if you can even reliably measure a 0.4 IQ point loss.
Which is why one never ever trusts an article or paper with a bare number as claim. Confidence intervals, p-values, standard deviation, whatever it is, there are ways to tell whether it's significant or what the odds are that it's noise.
I haven't read the article btw so I don't know if it does, but since we're talking about a bare number, the answer to your question is that it indeed by itself doesn't tell us anything about measurability even if it had been five points.
I'll take the 1IQ loss if it means society can stop this health theater farce. I've probably lost more than that already from the lockdowns.
Well, the important question is whether the number of deaths and total number of IQ points lost in case of "stopping this theater" would be better or worse compare to the points and lives lost caused by the "theater".
That's only The important question if quality of life is not a factor in your calculations. We could make all speed limits 5mph and save a lot of lives, but there are more important things than lives, and societies have all agreed about that.
Note that ventilation for more than a week alone damages organs - no corona needed.
Not so bad for the worst disease in history I guess?
COVID might be the worst infectious disease in recent memory, but it is far from the worst disease in history.
FYI: the lancet has unfortunately become a rather alarmist journal of late. There are several articles citing "bbc.co.uk" as fact which is similar to a Russian source citing "rt.com". Those articles in turn getting cited by the beeb in the uk to publish daily mail style FUD headlines which are quickly buried on the site.
Ignoring this, I think most other comments cover the fact that this study has the normal problem with this type of study. Poor stats which aren't statistically corrected for the subset the population who end up in hospital due to covid. (or again the subset with symptoms strong enough to be tested and diagnosed)
The "its just a flu" crowd have unfortunate points that many conditions sound like immunological effects brought on by a severe reaction to a virus in some way. Yes this is a different flu, but again we know this is not smallpocks or ebola and we should be taking advantage of this to determine the poorly understood impacts of covid virii on long term health of those who end up sick.
> which aren't statistically corrected for the subset the population who end up in hospital due to covid
What subset do you mean?
Not everyone in the pre-vaccine world would have ended up on a ventilator due to covid.
If the was a subset of the population who are at risk due to covid. (other than the over 80s the sake of argument). Its difficult to know how much an impact on this subset the virus will be having. Its easiest to assess this by looking at those of the population on who did end up in hospital and trying to determine common effects by looking at those who contacted them and comparing the probabilities.
Ultimately the end goal is to infer how much of a risk impact this would/could have on the total population.
Failing to correct for the statistical population differences before making an inference is akin to saying A&E centers in the US or the EU are great for preventing tiger attacks. They don't treat it due to there not being so many tigers.
Again reporting on the worst case scenario for the virus impact on over 80s as being something that would/could impact 8yo people is obviously incorrect and potentially dishonest.
I think you expect more from the study than it explicitly says.
From the abstract: "Interpretation. These results accord with reports of ‘Long Covid’ cognitive symptoms that persist into the early-chronic phase. They should act as a clarion call for further research with longitudinal and neuroimaging cohorts..."
Yes, the impact and recovery will be different between those people. They didn't intend the paper to be a complete answer and with the method they used, it would be impossible to achieve. What you ask for is interesting and I hope other papers will be published digging deeper, but why not accept this result for what it is?
> and how the published result will be interpreted.
I think we lost that long time ago when news started hyping up any study containing "cancer" and reporting their ideas as "researchers say".
The best we can do is discuss details as we do here, but without the hyperbole. There are claims made by the study and there are things not done in it. (whether missed or not possible to do from the data) Let's acknowledge them. But I think the "winning the lottery" is just going ad absurdum. If you'd like to see the split of impact for smaller groups, it will have to come from another paper. But it doesn't make this paper wrong or show "poor stats".
There are several articles citing "bbc.co.uk" as fact which is similar to a Russian source citing "rt.com".
Not remotely similar; whatever their flaws, the BBC is still internationally respected for impartiality and professionalism, and the UK is still a country that values the freedom of ideas and expression of them.
I'm sorry but frankly no. You are so demonstrably incorrect on this assertion.
There are many areas where RT report really well and have been rewarded. I however wouldn't ever trust them as a reputable source of the status of the Russian vaccination program or Russian voting.
Frankly this is common sense, read the foreign reporting on any issue in a country to balance what is correct and what is being magnipulated regardless of who is reporting on it. This is how grown ups are supposed to use the Internet rather than falling into a bubble of trusting 3or4 sites as gospel.
The same way I would be weary of the BBC reporting on any topic remotely close to the political arena in the uk at the time.
The beeb are getting demonstrably concerningly biased their manipulation or changes to page ranking within their site. They regularly do publish quoting lancet pages without directly linking to them, the story then falls out of the ranking within 24hr and the external index engines struggle to find the static published content they still have. It's they're it's "just gone". This is not a result of reasonable reporting or sensible journalism. When the article is mistitled for clicks this is even worse.
I'm being nice to aunty beeb here. I want it to exist. But pretending it's currently an infallable entity and is unbiased is an insult to its heritage.
Me: whatever their flaws...
You: But pretending it's currently an infallable entity...
Completely not what I said.
Seriously, you should be more careful with your words: twice wide of the mark now - in just two comments.
Impartiality and professionalism with a global context is a bit of an absolutist statement.
They're an award winning news organisation with international respect and something worth being proud of certainly, but they're far from globally impartial or completely professional.
>BBC is still internationally respected for impartiality and professionalism
It may still hold some latent respect from the pre-david kelly days but it has fully transitioned to being an rt-like government mouthpiece.
A recent yougov poll found the british public considered them among the least trustworthy media outlets.
Honestly, if they were actually a government mouthpiece it'd probably improve the quality of the BBC's Covid reporting at this point. They seem to be pushing this idea that everything the government is doing is wrong and incompetent, and they don't think it violates their standards in any way to publish claims that they know are false and then quietly pull them a month later with no correction after they've had the desired effect in order to achieve this.
>They seem to be pushing this idea that everything the government is doing is wrong and incompetent
Hard to cover this truth up completely. Did you think the UK got 128,000 COVID deaths by doing everything right?
They're giving a platform to Dominic Cummings (I assume you're referring to this?). For better or worse his claims would come out sooner or later. It's more controllable if it comes out via the BBC. Propaganda management is not all about pushing good stories and hiding bad ones it's also about damage control on negative stories and ideally owning the ones you won't ever be able to suppress.
By owning the story they were better poised to claim that Cummings was just a liar who was bitter about being kicked out, for instance.
The paper has a paragraph or two dedicated to the software used:
> All Cognitron tests were programmed in HTML5 with JavaScript by AH and WT. They were hosted on a custom server system (Cognitron) on the Amazon EC2 that can support diverse studies via custom websites. The server system was specifically developed to handle spikey acquisition profiles that are characteristic of main-stream media collaborative studies, fitting the number of server instances in an automated manner to rapid changes in demand. Here, maximum concurrent participants landing on the website information page was ~36,000, with this occurring at the point of the documentary airing on BBC2 in May.
Why wouldn't they also publish the source code? I took a couple of minutes to play with the test and I think I found some bugs. I would love to check myself. Isn't it quite important to audit the source code, given that it is the thing that collected the data?
If they don’t share it we can safely assume it’s shitty
It almost certainly is. And that's not entirely awful its a tool used by scientists to do work.
(it is inexcusable in 2021 in my personal opinion, but in many ways science is still in the dark ages wrt some of the tools being used, just as the ML community is learning a lot about things like reproducability and falsafiability from scientists with experience here)
I just with the community would share code more to prevent common mistakes and repeated effort and so we can all learn.
Imagine a world with publically well documented code that helps people learn science rather than scientists having to teach coders what they want and codes having to teach scientists intracasies of languages and hardware choices.
When a person(s) says they programmed it in HTLM5, you know they fucked up.
Are there ever any hopeful reports published about Covid-19. It's just one constant miserable study after another in the news. Yeah we get it we need to be hiding under our beds in fear of the invisible entity that could strike. It is relentless, obviously people just cant get enough of it cause it has been front page news for 1 1/2 years now.
> Are there ever any hopeful reports published about Covid-19
Vaccine administration data (about 31 million doses are currently being administered per day, and production continues to ramp).
Like, I'm not sure what you're looking for. No-one is going to publish a (credible) report saying "actually, covid is nice". The main avenue for hope is vaccination, and while that's not going perfectly, if you told someone in May 2020 that by July 2021 we'd have administered 3.8 billion vaccines, they would probably have been very sceptical, to say the least. It is the most rapid vaccine programme in history.
This study is honestly quite hopeful. For the last year we've been bombarded with propaganda that long covid is going to cause brain damage and turn you into a fogged up idiot. This study which is not even controlled or pre-post tested at all, and which is primed to show worse effects than the truth due to placebo effects, shows less than 1 IQ point loss for people who don't need hospitalization. Compared to what doomers want us to believe, this is great news.
Certainly. There was a study on low long term impacts on children for example.
Bad news spreads easier than good. The news is mostly bad but some good news is what I mentioned above + high vaccine efficacy against severe disease.
How vaccines affect long covid type stuff is a big open question, but early doctor anecdotes suggest they lower it. That would be great news.
> study on low long term impacts on children for example
How can that be proven? This pandemic is less than two years old.
I think it looked at effects six months out. It’s of course theoretically possible for an effect to manifest after 60 years but not six months, but normally you’d expect some short run differences too.
Just what I've seen today in the news:
- positive study results validating stretched vaccine schedules
- more and easier vaccine availability locally
- infection rate in the region trending slightly downwards
- some new theories/results (didn't read the full article) regarding immunity in children
- some signs vaccine scepticism in some US states is decreasing
Yes, there are regular hopeful reports published about vaccination and other measures reducing deaths and illness.
The majority of reports regarding vaccination are those chastising anyone who hasn't dared got their shot yet along with continued threats of restrictions to our lives until an almost impossible target is met in the near future. Those 'other measures' that include lockdowns, limited social interaction and financial hardship are not positive at all.
Why is the target impossible? We have had successful nationwide vaccine programs in the past. Polio is a distant memory because of this.
I only asked why the target is impossible.
Hahahaa. The media sells you fear because they know it will keep you tuned in. It doesn't matter what thr current 'issue' is. They will always sell whatever will most likely keep you coming back.
News is pure entertainment. Its like a horror movie.
It's more than the media. The politicians (at least in my country, France) are using it to take much more power than a democracy should ever allow.
In the US we have seen unelected people in previously ignored roles relish the new found attention and power they have received.
Pointless lockdowns with arbitrary milestones that they are able to prescribe, daily zoom briefings where all eyes are on them as they explain “the science”.
For many, this is their 15 minutes of fame. Don’t expect them to give up that power and pseudo-celebrity easily. The attempts to scare and bully people will get more desperate as these people see their time in the spotlight coming to an end.
the most alarming thing in france is that almost everyone in the middle/upper social groups is completely convinced the government is right and that it's worth it (aka : it'll get us rid of covid).
The only people worried about constitution at the moment are weirdos, extremists, and a very small number of people genuinly concerned about human rights in their own country.
I'm more and more seing this covid period as a perfect example on how this country could turn into a totalitarian regime as long as it's for the good cause(tm). It also another example on how china is definitely becoming a major cultural influence over the world.
I believe it is much larger number of people who have reasoned concerns about the governments approach.
The narrative being pushed to us is anyone who might have a different opinion to that of the authorities is a 'weirdo' or 'conspiracy theorist'. At any protest, the media will always show that 'anti-vax, bill gates conspiracy' guy holding up his sign and lumping everyone into that group. The majority of those protesting are rational people worried about their jobs, their businesses closing, their children's education and what the economic fallout will do to basic services like health, education, infrastructure.
Same for Canada.
In the UK were almost 70% vaccinated (adults, 2 jabs). So it's getting back to BAU here.
Canada had 47 million vaccinations (so ~23M if we’re assume 2 doses) with a total population of 37M. Google says “at least one dose” is 70% while “2 doses” is 54.4% of the population.
People are definitely taking the vaccination program seriously. The big question now is getting the final long tail vaccinated. While obviously there will be a subset which will always resist it.
The numbers coming out of the US show 99% of the deaths are unvaccinated people along with 97% of people hospitalized.
The numbers coming out of the US are not representative of what other countries have been seeing. Apparently it's more like 60% of people who're hospitalized that are unvaccinated in the UK, for example, and that's pretty in line with other countries with reasonably successful vaccination campaigns.
In Australia I believe its around 13.6% vaccinated at this stage. If we were able to match the UK vaccination numbers at this moment, we would be a shining example of managing CovID. But we screwed up, we dropped the ball on vaccinations and pretended we could continue to keep Covid at bay indefinitely, and failed.
Yes but the magical news stats from "experts" say I could die if I crossed the road without looking so I'll stay at home and order off amazon... </wishingiwasjoking>
Why not just... Look before crossing?
My first, selfish question: When will the article that examines cognitive function in recovered people who were fully vaccinated before contracting COVID arrive?
Reading the results, the less severe the case the less severe the impact. Effects were severe for hospitalized patients, and mild for mild cases. Hospitalization is rare among vaccinated people.
That'll take a long time.
Since the vaccines are excellent at preventing serious outcomes, a fairly large share of the infected won't even go to a physician, and therefore getting a representative sample of infected people will be all of difficult, expensive and time-consuming.
Maybe there exists a set of people who ⓐ resembles the general population and ⓑ will be tested routinely and often for years to come, such that an accurate statistical picture can be found. But I can't think of any now.
OT - how do you make those circled symbols? A tool or do you have a nice keyboard combo for it? It makes this in-line summing up of points much clearer, I like it at least at first sight.
I really like those ;) They're not as practically useful as —, ⅓, → and a few others, but I really like them. I type compose (a) to get ⓐ. See https://rant.gulbrandsen.priv.no/xcompose for how I did it, it's mostly a matter of using someone else's .xcompose file from github.
That may depend (or be influenced by) on whether the results are negative or positive versus unvaccinated and who advertises in said journal.
Looking at Figure one in the PDF[1], I don't think I do well on this test at all. I mean "lion is to feline as close is to distant, true/false"? Or, "Emotional Discrimination"? What is the "correct" answer there?
I can deduce that "Patronymic" is "a name derived from the name of a father or ancestor", but I do not believe many native speakers I cross paths with can.
In any case, studies like this mention the total number of people who took the test (81,337 participants), but then, by definition, the effects come from small subgroups. E.g.,
> People who had been hospitalised showed substantial scaled global performance deficits dependent on whether they were (-0.47 standard deviations (SDs) N = 44) vs. were not (-0.26 SDs N = 148) put onto a ventilator. Those who remained at home (i.e., without inpatient support) showed small statistically significant global performance deficits (assisted at home for respiratory difficulty -0.13 SD N = 173; no medical assistance but respiratory difficulty -0.07 SDs N = 3,386; ill without respiratory difficulty -0.04 SDs N = 8,938).
The 44 people who were put on ventilators are different on other dimensions. It is hard to separate the effects of the news ("you have a horrible disease"), the medical treatment, and the psychological torment associated with being in a hospital during this time from the actual effects of the actual virus.
[1]: https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S2589-5370%2821...
It's very hard to believe that you're able to make such a complex and erudite argument as this, and yet you're utterly unable to parse something as simple as "lion is to feline as close is to distant, true/false". Both tasks require the same basic skills.
The question I'm interested in: What are the general cognitive deficits in the population caused by disease?
The evidence I've been reading the last decade+ suggests that disease is much more damaging than is generally acknowledged. But, as shown by the coronavirus, the costs of stopping (or, more realistically, delaying) them are huge. I'm wondering if, in my lifetime, we're going to see a plan for dealing with Herpes.
> But, as shown by the coronavirus, the costs of stopping (or, more realistically, delaying) them are huge
If we all wore $2 N95-equivalent masks, spread out 6 feet whenever convenient, did outside whatever can be done outside, and received a vaccine at (roughly) the same time, COVID19 would be gone.
The costs are huge because we made them huge.
We ignore COVID19 when case counts are low, giving it a chance to mutate and spread. We take extreme measures when hospitals start filling up, shutting down schools and businesses.
See Korea, China, Taiwan, etc. for examples of reasonable-cost ways to control COVID19.
Well, yeah. Pretty much all problems humans face are caused by humans. And death, which is still forced on us by the laws of entropy.
You'll find that the systems that can force the unwilling to buy $2 masks, spread out 6 feet and get vaccinated are worse than the disease. If you recognise that the government can compel people to be healthy it opens up some terrifying cans of worms.
I think it depends on how it's done.
I'd like to see this implemented with roughly the same systems which make me wear a bicycle helmet, a seatbelt, or have turn signals, which I don't find so scary.
In these systems, you have a law. You have law enforcement. Law enforcement doesn't catch everyone, and doesn't have particularly aggressive police powers.
I'm fearful it will be implemented with the same systems which make us register guns and have background checks, track bank transfers over $10,000, check IDs when buying cold medicine, or track us as we travel.
In these systems, you have law enforcement. Enforcement is given tools to track and monitor what people do just in case someone might be a criminal.
I'm not quite sure I see the difference.
You pass a law:
- Requiring vaccinations, or a $800 fine
- Permitting private venues to verify vaccination status by looking at vaccine cards (e.g. employers, concerts, etc.)
- Make it a crime to forge vaccine cards
- International travel already has yellow vaccine books, and it's well-established to check vaccines upon entry to/from high-risk countries
You don't implement any infrastructure to track vaccinations. I show my vaccine card when I enter a concert, same as I do when ordering alcohol. No one records anything.
The bar for intentionally breaking laws is much higher than not getting a vaccine. I think most people will follow laws voluntarily. Most of the ones who don't follow the law won't get caught, but a few will.
It's not about compelling others to be healthy, it's about preventing you from infecting others.
the results hint at your question:
"The scale of the observed deficit [of people who had covid] was not insubstantial; the 0.47 SD global composite score reduction for the hospitalized with ventilator sub-group was greater than the average 10-year decline in global performance between the ages of 20 to 70 within this dataset. It was larger than the mean deficit of 480 people who indicated they had previously suffered a stroke (−0.24SDs) and the 998 who reported learning disabilities (−0.38SDs). For comparison, in a classic intelligence test, 0.47 SDs equates to a 7-point difference in IQ." edit: well, on further thought, a stroke is not the same as a disease but still there's insight here.
It’s not 7 points reduction for anyone who had COVID, I think that’s specific to cases which had to be on a ventilator.
> Cognitive problems in those who have required a lengthy hospital stay or intubation are expected [[19]]. What is less clear is whether milder cases who have not been hospitalized also can suffer objectively measurable cognitive deficits. Measuring such associations is challenging.
I think most of these deficits are for the hospitalized. It will be interesting to see the why. Is it the virus itself? Is it the treatment? Combination? Or is it the extreme long term anxiety.
Not sure what is the current state of the research but I seem to recall that some researchers mentioned that COVID19 could break through the brain blood barrier and therefore could also affect the brain in unknown ways:
Lengthy hospital stays, particularly intubation, is associated with cognitive decline. https://pulmccm.org/critical-care-review/cognitive-impairmen...
Most likely the lack of oxygen to the brain
What's strange is that they didn't control for obesity or occupation. It's known that being more obese leads to worse symptoms. It's known that chance of infection is higher among retail workers and such, who have lower IQs than people working from home.
The IQ correlation in this study is: Covid, no respiratory difficulty: 0.4 IQ point loss Covid, respiratory difficulty, no home assistance: 1 IQ point loss Covid, respiratory difficulty, with home assistance: 2 IQ point loss Covid, hospitalized, without ventilation: 4 IQ point loss Covid, hospitalized, with ventilation: 7 IQ point loss
Let's ignore the respirator segment because lack of oxygen like that can surely cause problems and I don't think anyone is really arguing against it. Without a before test, the only thing this study can reasonably show (if you call 1IQ point showing anything) is that fat people or cashiers are ever so slightly less intelligent.
Honesty people, I was expecting on the order of 5-10 IQ points from the popularity and activity of this article. An average of 1IQ in a study with no control group and no pre-post test? Come on.
Has anyone heard of weight related COVID issues? I know of 2 people who’s weight ballooned immediately post COVID despite not changing eating or exercise habits and despite a year passing they haven’t been able to lose any weight and doctors haven’t been able to figure out why.
I would hazard a guess that it's because their calories consumed is exceeding their calories used. I would recommend for them to eat fewer calories
That's the secret that GP says doctors haven't been able to figure out..?
Since COVID will become endemic like HIV, I wonder if the average IQ around the works will experience a measurable downwards blip.
It’s interesting that this will likely contribute to further inequality as the rich had access to vaccines first and the uneducated are more likely to be skeptical of vaccines (note: everyone is skeptical, but the domain of skepticism is different for people depending on political leanings).
Could also do the opposite as anti-medicine people are killed off. We'll see.
Assuming they are wrong about their reasons for refusing the vax. Otherwise the reverse.
But really so few people of reproductive age die of the disease anyway it's unlikely to produce much effect.
You're getting downvoted for snark, and it's a morbid thought, but it might be true. In places where the vaccine is readily available and statistically only the unvaccinated are dying, you'd expect the population's average intelligence to increase as people die of the disease.
Does anyone know why these medicinal studies do not seem to use more modern statistical methods of observational causal inference?
I mean yes you can not RCT and yes a linear model should be the baseline, but then why not go ahead and do some synth control or double ML, or heck, take the survey twice and do some matched diff and diff?
Surely more can be done or not?
I want to believe this, however, as far as I can tell, the design finds a correlation between severity of covid and IQ. One other possible explanation is that healthy immune system correlates both with lesser covid symptoms and higher IQ (less inflammation/whatever).
As another comment has mentioned, the best way to try to measure for this would be to have a pre-post, which could only be done on those who hadn't had it yet at the time of the first test but then later got at. Since vaccines are now a factor, and may correlate to intelligence, the study may not be possible in an ethical manner.
Would this have been published if they found no cognitive deficit?
They did not have a control group for “being locked inside for a year” which I bet also has a pretty bog effect on cognition.
What would be the goal? If the bog effect exists , the possible extremes are "being locked inside makes infections more common" which should not impact the result (adding people to both pools), or "being locked inside prevents all infections" which would make the deficit larger than reported. (but as noted, it's a call for further study rather than a precise result)
Given that most people were locked inside for a year, and those who didn't get COVID are even more likely to have followed lockdown rules, any control group measured right now would be reflecting the "locked inside" condition.
Another selfish question: do we know if this cognitive deficit is also found in teenagers who contracted the virus?
Preliminary evidence: Yes.
https://s3.amazonaws.com/media2.fairhealth.org/whitepaper/as...
Is the obvious "smarter people are better at avoiding covid" theory disproven?
I wonder what the discussion would be if the same study was posted but "in people who were vaccinated against Covid-19".
I didn't see a regression table in the paper. Did I miss something?
It just looked like a series of graphs and summary statistic tables.
The Cognitive deficits in people can be clearly see in most health scientists.
Just like many other viral and bacterial infections, then. No surprise here.
You mean some, it is not the majority. And often viral, not bacterial.
The flu have this effect for sure.
The issue is that those cognitive disfunctions hit young people who were not hospitalized, or hospitalized only for safety (monitoring them with oxy at the ready). I know of one professionnal classical dancer, 26, who cannot coordinate following Covid, and was luckily already near the end of her career. But still, for some trade, this might be an issue, especially if Covid become as endemic as the flu
> The flu have this effect for sure.
Any references or background to this?
It's weird because there are major media campaigns to encourage people to have a flu jab (UK) and "flu causes [irreversible] cognitive dysfunction" would be a major 'seller'.
I can also see that governments could have been reluctant to spread such information - if it's true - as it would change attitudes to schooling; schools being known to be a major vector for spreading flu.
Well, sorry, i said "for sure" because i was hit by the flu october 2019, and my recovery left me weaker to other respiratory diseases (first time asthma) and caused me balances issue for a year. But ancdata is not data, so i'm sorry. Let's say chickenpox, West Nile?
Btw, i did not say "irreversible". I did lost a summer of training, probably because of the flu, and this is irreversible, but i'm pretty sure my balance is OK now (i had asthma 3 weeks ago, so the respiratory sytsem damage is not repaired however)
In what scenario does it bot become endemic?
Full vaccination. A few countries (developed countries with high levels of vaccine acceptance) will be able to vaccinate virtually everyone over 16 within the next month or so, maybe everyone over 12 (though there is likely to be way more hesitancy there almost everywhere). At that point, it's likely to be suppressed in those countries, and that may reduce hesitancy elsewhere, and so on.
A number of diseases that were once globally endemic are now regionally endemic (eg polio, two countries), or eradicated (smallpox). Generally due to vaccination.
If everyone develops immunity, either by vaccine or infection, and it dies out on its own i assume would be the only way
I'm not aware of similarities with other infections. Care to cite sources?
Influenza can trigger numerous issues.
My mother ended up on anti-seizure tablets after the last flu outbreak having spent five days in intensive care.
The flu brought on a fit and hypo-natremia. It took months before she could walk properly again.
Our success against infectious diseases has left a generation or two with insufficient fear of them.
I’ve seen people catch a bad cold on Wednesday and be dead from pneumonia on Sunday.
The impact from Covid isn’t new. It’s just a rediscovery of why we spent the twentieth century on an all out war against infectious diseases and septicaemia.
Maybe. However, the rates at which I'm seeing long Covid seem entirely novel. Something like 30% of all cases in a recent study show signs of it, including mild cases. I admit there are overlaps in fatigue syndrome (and should've phrased my original comment differently), but AFAIK we've usually only seen that in severe infections with other diseases while we're seeing abnormally high rates of (to varying degrees) cognitive impairment even in mild or asymptomatic Covid infections.
(Not OP) Viral infection can have this effect. The flu for sure, but also the varicella virus (i think this is the translation?) do too. West Nile virus also?
Its definitly not the majority of viruses, and i'm not sure bacterial (benefit of the doubt here). Don't tell me you never exagerate a little :P
> varicella virus (i think this is the translation?)
chickenpox.
:)
Post Viral Fatigue Syndrome
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_fatigue_syndrome#Viral...
Many infections (viral or bacterial) can cause long term inflammation, and inflammation can have such effects. Now what would really need to be measured if the degree of change is really different with COVID vs other infections.
That's rather a surprise to me, given the lack of recognition of post-viral fatigue!
there are studies connecting chronic fatigue syndrome to increased B-cells numbers (like it happens after viral infections like flu for example, and i'd guess after covid too) https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/are-b-cells-to-blame...
They did not have the bravery to control for race. You might as well throw it in the trash, it is already politically colored junk.
Are you implying that covid infections depend on the race? If not then controlling for socio-economic attributes should fulfill the role that you'd often see approximated via race. And if yes - could you link a relevant paper?
They did control for race.
And no, controlling for socio-economic attributes does not fulfill the role "approximated via race."
Statistically, racial differences tend to include:
- Cultural differences, including preferences for field-of-work, family structure, socialization patterns, etc., all of which affects R0
- Economic differences (e.g. Does one need to take a Tylenol and show up to work even when sick?)
- In some cases, medical differences (e.g. vitamin D, which appears to play a major role in COVID19)
- Geographic differences (communities tend to segregate by race, and outbreaks are geographic in nature)
- Trust of institutions (which impacts vaccination, testing, and treatment rates)
... and so on.
This is about group-level statistics, and isn't helpful with individuals.
But if you're doing a population study, yes, this is an important control.
> In some cases, medical differences
Sickle cell disease is an example of this, as it mostly appears in black people ("Sub-saharan descent").
I like vitamin D since we have a clear mechanism-of-action specifically for COVID19:
- We adapt skin color based on latitude to maintain vitamin D levels and prevent sunburns at different levels of sun exposure.
- At this point, we have incredible strong correlations between vitamin D and COVID19 outcomes.
They tried to control for uneven sociodemographic distribution of virus prevalence. Why would explicitly controlling for race be any more useful than that?
The question was about COVID's effects on IQ. For example, there's a consistent one standard deviation IQ difference between Whites and Africa-Americans. Feel like it should be an important factor to get the better signal rather than a proxy (education) out there when talking about effects on IQ.
The controlled for "racial-ethnic group". How does this differ?
There's growing concern from the pro lockdown lancet that people will try and move past them.
There's never concern about consequences from lockdowns, virtually mandatory vaccines on trial until 2023 (through coercion and segregation), delays in any other health ailment, etc.
In many places around Europe we no longer have freedom nor the constitutions matter. We're looking at this type of hygiene theater for years to come and people keep bringing up the likes of the Lancet and Sage to keep the fear mongering and pretend a zero covid at any cost is possible while increasing dystopian measures.
Compare the hailed Australia/Israel/New Zealand dystopian futures with many states in the US (like Florida/Texas) that didn't succumb to the dystopia through fearmongering.
2 weeks passed many times. It's now time to stop the damage that's being done in the name of "protecting people". It's not that different from the security theater after 9/11. Just because you DO something doesn't mean it's a good thing.
Edit: I know this will get downvoted as it's par for the course of anything in HN that doesn't toe the line of more LDs and hygiene theater (and US based partisanship) but this is for those who are disenfranchised and are not interested in petty left/right divisions and more to stand up against increasing authoritarianism and apartheid. Specially in some European countries.
I disagree with you on most of this. Looking at the all cause mortality graphs for the US is pretty sobering, and comparing to the relatively much more flat all cause mortality graph for australia is all the reason i need to be pro lockdown. It seems pretty clear that lockdowns work, and also that governments dont want to be locked down any longer than necessary- because it is bad for the economy. But hospitals being over capacity like in the UK or india is also pretty bad, and i see healthcare as being one of the pillars of civilisation.
I do see some 'cleanliness theatre', but the thing about r values is that little things help a lot. Washing hands regularly, wearing a mask. I havnt a cold in 18 months, which is pretty unheard of for me, because everyone is taking a bit more care. If only covid were 'only' as contagious as the cold, we probably would have beaten it already.
> If only covid were 'only' as contagious as the cold, we probably would have beaten it already
Nope. When numbers go down, we relax. When hospitals fill up, we lock down. It doesn't matter how contagious COVID is. It will remain at endemic levels forever, on the path we're on.
We've turned a billion dollar problem into a multi-trillion dollar one in February 2020. Now, we're turning it into a tens-of-trillions-of-dollars problem.
100% N95-equivalent masks. 100% vaccination. 6 foot distancing whenever possible. Outdoors whenever possible. That would still get COVID today, but it might not in a year. Delta and Gamma are concerning, and we'll only see more mutations, and ones better able to jump our mitigation measures.
We beat sars-1 just fine, and mers, mainly by quarantining infected. Sars-1 literally no longer exists. This is very strong proof that we would have beat covid too, if it were less contagious.
I think it's a better example of random chance. We had a series of diseases. We didn't heed that as a warning. One eventually (and predictably) slipped out.
> I disagree with you on most of this. Looking at the all cause mortality graphs for the US is pretty sobering, and comparing to the relatively much more flat all cause mortality graph for australia is all the reason i need to be pro lockdown.
You're literally doing what I said. You're using the one metric to justify never ending lockdowns. Because lockdowns Haven't worked or we wouldn't be having them again in Australia. Unless life needs to be continuously cycled lockdowns. Which is preposterous and something many of us warned against. There's no exit strategy out of hygiene theater. Only the blame game.
As for your comment about govs having the best intentions. That's clearly false. They've shown they care about prolonging their political positions so that trumps anything. Which is why protests that are politically convenient can go ahead while those that go against lockdowns are attacked in many ways.
Healthcare in Ireland, for example, has always been bad and "over capacity". Every flu season. That hasn't changed. They haven't invested in healthcare really. Your lockdown proposal will only mean forever lockdowns and, now, a 2 tier society where those who don't comply with every rule get blamed while their businesses and lives get destroyed and politicians are exempt from those rules.
Your anecdotes about colds are ridiculous. I haven't either and I haven't been a germophobe like you seem to now. I've travelled and I've exercised with people and met people against the fascist regulations and will keep doing so. The problem is that, even if I manage to "save myself by moving around" from this insane apartheid and fascist state of things, in the name of the greater good, millions will suffer while the laptop hackernews socially awkward class stays at home with their back yards and their online yoga.
You've had 16 months of screwing people out of choice to live how they see fit. Now you'll attack anyone who doesn't yield Every bit of the way including medical procedures. Now 100% vaccination rate seems to be the goal as to why you can't have freedoms back. It's insane. It's wrong. It's wrong in 1930 levels of wrong. Enough is enough. /Rant
> Because lockdowns Haven't worked or we wouldn't be having them again in Australia.
But australia has beat many flare ups by locking down, right back to 0. The fact it keeps coming back from countries that dont lock down is hardly proof lockdowns never work.
The thing about r values is it doesnt need everybody to be washing their hands, just enough to break the chain. If the person who would have infected you never caught it, then you wont get it, and so on.
>You're literally doing what I said. You're using the one metric to justify never ending lockdowns
Total deaths? Yeah im using that metric. A lot of people have died, australias response shows they died unnecessarily.
I never understood why the right decided to be against logical public health measures and decided to tie their ideaology to it. It never use to be like this. Care to explain?
Lockdowns are massive restrictions of individual freedom, which is something the right claims to care about and sometimes actually does.
Actually, the aligned with "US democrats" (not the left, necessarily) made the whole thing political by going against anything Trump did (like banning travel From China being racist or the ties with the lab leak theory).
It used to be the left would stand against authoritarianism. Skepticism. Now it's seen as a duty to support corporate interestes, gov excuses, not question anything (or you'll help the right).
There's nothing logical about Lockdowns. It was never done before and has done nothing in terms of excess deaths while There's ample examples of the damage and inequality
But again, HN types from the laptop class are fine at home, advancing in life, not caring that much about others but pretending they do with the approved virtue signalling. It's disgusting.
Banning travel from China was a nonsense response because US got exposed via Europe. Similarly, prioritizing investigating the lab leak theory without real evidence at the same time as tons of people were dying seemed messed up.
False:
1) 100,000 passengers per week were arriving from China to the US. Of course, all air travel should have been banned.
Which many countries have since done, confirming Trump's decision.
2) any epidemic study starts with finding Patient Zero and the source. Oh, except for corona from Wuhan. Why is that?
>Compare the hailed Australia/Israel/New Zealand dystopian futures with many states in the US (like Florida/Texas) that didn't succumb to the dystopia through fearmongering.
Texas (29M) and Florida (21M) have a somewhat comparable population to Oz (25M). I think I'll take our (Oz) numbers over theirs in a heartbeat. Whatever we're doing it's clearly not theater.
> There's never concern about consequences from lockdowns, virtually mandatory vaccines on trial until 2023 (through coercion and segregation), delays in any other health ailment, etc.
Is this some kind of a "who can build the biggest straw man" competition?
No. It's a "enough is enough" comment.
I know that hackernews types who have largely not been affected that much, specially US based, will be fine downvoting and promoting more propaganda, segregation and fearmongering but those that do are morally corrupt to the core and I'm tired at pretending otherwise.
HN is populated by the very liberal types. This study had access to racial data (see Q5) yet it chose to not control for it. The result might have shown that contracting the disease acts as an IQ test itself. But Lancet was behind other trash releases too earlier.
Every possible test of intelligence, and everything that correlates with intelligence, all points toward the same conclusion that there is a link between race and intelligence.
IQ, income, education, crime rate, school achievement, quite literally every possible measure that you would expect to correlate with intelligence also correlates with race. This occurs even when you control for factors like income. The myth and the lie that there is no link is often said and never shown. The evidence is overwhelming and the burden of rejection is on the deniers at this point.
> biased measure of intelligence such as IQ tests
Where's the evidence that IQ tests are biased? They're supposed to estimate the g-factor. I'm sure that if they were biased estimates of the g-factor they'd be recalibrated ASAP to estimate it in an unbiased way.
So all the anti-maskers are what race now? You might want to bring body armor when you tell them the verdict, if you’re going South.
Did the control for being an anti-vaxxer and anti-lockdown?
Regrettably cynical view but I’ve seen first hand 3 people use long covid symptoms to extend pandemic related benefits which are paying at a rate approximate to their past/current jobs.
At both the micro and macro level there are perverse incentives beginning to form that will make this thing roll on longer than it has too
Incidental bad actors don't invalidate the entire approach of safeguarding people's livelihoods. The 3 people you describe would likely try to exploit any system unfairly. The perfect is the enemy of the good here as in most other places.
Yeah agreed they would and do. I’m not saying it invalidates anything but what this may indicate is inflated numbers which in the current situation causes overreaction.
None of the pandemic benefits in the US required people to claim to have long covid symptoms.
Where did anyone mention the US?
Or is this just the classic assumption that all people on the internet are American?
Funny how no other nation does that.
Not everyone using HN lives in the US.
There's a UK brain imaging study - small, due to the fact that one required the "lucky" confluence of having participated in the study before the COVID-19 epidemic, and having gotten COVID - showing the kind of longitudinal effects you are asking for. Alarmingly, it shows shrinkage of various brain structures even among the mildly ill.
Note this is a not-yet-peer-reviewed preprint.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.11.21258690v...
IMO, while I'm not inclined to take either study at face value immediately, I think a serious person should be equally reluctant to join the "it's just a flu" camp either.
Looking at the scatter plot from their most statistically significant finding (parahippocampal gray matter change), the effect size is tiny, and the variance is large. Nearly half the case participants had more gray matter after getting COVID.
https://i.ibb.co/5YcxJHH/EDB20654-900-A-427-C-8063-B5-FA667-...
As I've stated elsewhere, apparently everyone on HN understands what acceptable levels of "parahippocampal gray matter change" might be, which is reassuring.
"Nearly half the case participants had more gray matter after getting COVID" - as did the controls. It's almost like there's variability in the readings. If only someone would invent a subspeciality of mathematics about how to interpret noisy data and attempt to draw conclusions about the results.
I'm not totally sold on this study either, mind you. I'm just amazed at how many people are rushing to judgement in the other direction - the whole "just a flu" conclusion is wildly premature.
> It's almost like there's variability in the readings. If only someone would invent a subspeciality of mathematics about how to interpret noisy data and attempt to draw conclusions about the results.
Yes, I mention the high variance. And indeed there are standard ways to interpret the effect size magnitude, given noisy data. The authors chose not to report Cohen's d. They do provide an r value (.16), which we can use to compute the the coefficient of determination. Since you are an advocate for reliance on traditional statistical interpretations, you should appreciate the meaning of r^2=.025
Furthermore the authors report a P=.01. They bootstrap this P, presumably because alpha significance level after multiple comparison adjustment renders cutoff well below .01. They also claim no a priori hypothesis wrt. gray matter increase or decrease. A 2-tailed alpha is typically shifted from p<.05 to p<.01 which their measured P value does not surpass. Nevertheless they claim statistical significance. Finally, after normalization, there is roughly an equal chance any given person will have more or less gray matter after getting covid - this doesn't require one to glean the importance of each ounce of gray matter to understand the effect size is small. I contend there is good reason this study has not yet passed peer review, if it ever will.
That's not what I see in that plot. I see a distribution shift, with zero linkage between before and after cases that would suggest "Half had more gray matter"
Figure 2 is the one you want https://els-jbs-prod-cdn.jbs.elsevierhealth.com/cms/attachme...
Which does show effect increasing with severity of the case. I've seen plots like that before in similar articles.
See also table 2.
> I think a serious person should be equally reluctant to join the "it's just a flu" camp either.
The long-term effects of flu are not studied that well, by the way. On the basis we're used to it from before such studies were possible.
None of those symptoms we hear about, getting our breath, unable to smell, brain fog etc., none of them are new. And they imply internal damage that lasts.
Apart from the effect size in that study being pretty low, theres the obvious sampling problem in that sort of people regularly having their brain imaged are not normal!
I'm not clear on what level of "pretty low" I'd have to see before being reassured here. I guess it's HN, where I'm the only dummy who doesn't know what acceptable changes in everyday metrics like "Parahippocampal gyrus thickness" and "Lateral orbitofrontal cortex volume" are.
Your second remark is also peculiar: the "obvious sampling problem" to which you allude is either (1) a subtler-than-expected-point about the UK Biobank's program (designed to be a mass participation program to observe longitudinal effects in previous healthy or as yet undiagnosed people) or (2) evidence you are just making stuff up.
I dunno, I just have anxiety and the docs only feel safe ruling certain stuff out after either a CT or MRI. If I ever contract COVID I can look back through multiple years of history.
we are up to 2 billion+ covid infections globally, so if 1% have Long Haul…where the hell are they?
A large number of these infections are simply too recent for "long haul" Covid to have settled in.
There's also not a globally accepted definition of the syndrome yet, so it won't show up in stats.
If you go by "still experiencing at least one symptom after 3 months", it's closer to 10-20% than 1% : https://twitter.com/Dr2NisreenAlwan/status/13775492575703162...
Another study found that around a third of these 10-20% consider it debilitating (significantly affects their daily lives)
How did that study control for the effects of being locked inside for a year or losing your job? Or past diagnosis with hypochondriac syndromes like fibromyalgia?
Where did you read that number (2B+ Covid infections)?
Assume covid tests find about 1 out of 5 total infections
In most countries they are probably dead.
It's 200 million or 0.2 billion
According to the CDC, the US has had an (estimated) 100M+ infections as of mid-April[0] and Europe had 50M+ as of last week.[1]
I don't know the appropriate way to extrapolate out but we're well past 200M globally.
0: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
1: https://graphics.reuters.com/world-coronavirus-tracker-and-m...
Why do you think adjusting the model for: "Nuisance variables were age, sex, racial-ethnicity, gender, handedness, first language (English vs other), country of residence (UK vs other), education level, vocational status and annual earning." doesn't cover what you ask for here? (including graduate degrees) With the described adjustments and enough data points, the distribution of infection cases shouldn't matter.
Or are you making some other point I'm missing?
Statistical adjustments at a population level will be much less useful than the pre post design above.
Getting estimates from the same people will provide a much lower variance estimaion of any potential effect.
Also, adding hospital records to this study would potentially provide a better estimation.
All studies have flaws, but this one does look pretty reasonable (the principal components method used should have been better described, for instance, and confidence bounds on the effect sizes would have been super useful).
The "pre post" is not much of a design, unless we've had a long-term practice to force random healthy people into scanning their brains, or we have a time machine.
There are always medical studies running for other purposes that involve doing brain scans on otherwise healthy people. One of my relatives participated in such a study. Presumably those same subjects could be enrolled in a "pre post" study for COVID-19 effects.
Nonetheless, it would be a better design. Horribly impractical, but really useful.
Correcting a model is always a somewhat subjective process that can introduce bias, especially when it is done after the study is completed pre-publication. I am not at all opposed to such adjustments and I was actually involved in a research project that improved on pure chance based randomized selection of trial participants into different buckets (substance/placebo) by weighing in the necessary adjustments in the selection phase. That is why I’m intimately familiar with the state of the art in academia. Novel approaches, such as the one I worked on, are unpopular with reviewers which makes them unpopular with researchers even though they would allow, for faster trials, with smaller cohorts or alternatively to find smaller effect sizes. My criticism of the OP Study however is not the adjustments per se, which as you point out seem reasonable (although we don’t know what alternative corrections they could have made with the available data and what impact that would have had on their findings)but the fact that they had what was needed to conduct one of the rare properly executed longitudinal studies on this question and wasted that opportunity.
With so many variables to adjust for the error bars should be huge.
The paper discusses how the variables were handled and lists the error for estimates. Is your objection that they calculated it wrong? Or that/how they used a linear model for adjustments? What's the range for "huge"?
We don't know what the SNR is. It would be great if the paper included the linear regression values and fit analysis. It could be rubbish or not - but we don't have the data to confirm or deny that.
I get the objection, but I'm getting annoyed at comments that state what's invalid with the study where we don't have the data available for that claim. What's wrong with "we don't know if the study is valid since we don't have details on X"?
Also those symptoms look very similar to stress, anxiety and depression. Which I think are to be expected after contracting a pandemic level virus and being forced to isolate. I would like to see results after treating or controlling for those conditions.
I have an autoimmune decease and factor 5. Very similar symptoms as long term covid. Lots of inflammation, brain fog, cognitive defects.
I spent years being dismissed as depressed Or having anxiety. When I finally was diagnosed and started treating condition with medications I could handle my cognitive problems and depression lifted.
Support groups for autoimmune conditions are full of people who routinely are dismissed by doctors.
A few years ago I suffered from an autoimmune issue for about 3 months. It took most of that time just to convince a doctor to give me meloxicam, which is just strong panadol/aspirin really. Having a chronic fever for a few months really made it hard to do anything more substantial than play video games.
I don't know how we teach general practitioners, but we are doing something horribly wrong. A lot of long covid people must be finding this out too, and it is just super sad.
A big part is people are typically afraid, or don’t have the opportunity, to get a second opinion.
One of my biggest lessons early in life was that not all doctors are the same (by a long shot). This is why it’s so important to see specialists related to your condition. And ultimately you’re going to be most responsible for getting proper care as often only you know what you’re experiencing.
Medicine and pathology are far to wide of subjects for generalists to operate efficiently across every field and niche. Which is why specialization is so important and connecting the patients to the right specialists.
There’s a lot of analogies to technology, where people tend to expect the experts to do and know everything and completely defer to them. I think we all have experienced this with our parents or people who didn’t grow up with computers. When ultimately the individual is always going to be a huge part of the puzzle and must accept that fact.
It’s really unfortunate the position they’re put in. It’sa hangover from the 1800s really when they were part of the professions and almost minor aristocracy. We need more competent technicians who are willing to work with their clients and admit that they don’t know the answer and then actually do the research.
Can you share a bit more about your autoimmune disease?
What disease was it? What kind of medications have helped you?
I'm suffering from some kind of autoimmune-like disease with similar symptoms and trying to figure out what's wrong with me.
Sjogrens. Second most common after lupus. Lots of neurological complications.
Plaqunial helped a lot, but I can’t tolerate it. Shame, it works well. Steroids are good for ending a flare but it’s hard to get prescribed, also side effects.
What really worked for me me was * blood thinners for cognitive defects * Avoid triggers, direct sun, sugar, caffeine, spice * autoimmune protocol diet * magnesium, vit d, e, b complex, fish oil
Get blood work done for each kind. ANA test as a starting point.
For me Early Sjo test confined diagnosis.
Make a list of ALL symptoms and take it with you to all doctors. A Neuro-ophthalmologist was the first to say Sjogrens based only off my sheet.
An elimination diet is probably the best place to start. I ate nothing but sweet potatoes for a month, my symptoms all cleared up. Stated coming back when I introduced random foods.
That’s how I started following AIP diet
If COVID causes stress, anxiety, and depression, why wouldn’t that count as a legitimate effect of the disease?
I agree. I suspect many "long covid" cases are probably not caused by covid, but by the lockdown and psychological impact of this phenomenon.
People complaining of fatigue or having difficulty concentrating or having brain fog are in some studies already counted as suffering from long covid. No causual relationship required.
That suspicion goes against what the people who are dealing with this every day are saying. What makes you suspect this?
A friend of mine is a doctor and we were chatting about long covid 2 days ago, his description of it seemed pretty cut and dried to me - e.g. a swimmer here in Glasgow with hopes of getting to the 2024 olympics is currently unable to train due to breathing issues post-covid. They’re supposed to be fully immersed in training right now but can’t since covid in December 2020.
In my case it was a mix of information, increased cranial pressure, and minor clots.
Was a nightmare getting those under control but my symptoms eased up. Then I got covid and it all started up again. Took months to get back to a baseline, but symptoms were identical, aside from loss of smell.
> Have you read the diagnosis criteria and studies regarding long covid? I have read a few, and I see that many are using the widest net possible to define long covid, (...)
I really don't understand what point you tried to make.
The whole point of scientific papers is to gather and document findings in a way to be subjected to critical analysis and serve as food for thought.
From your own example, which unfortunately is completely unsubstantiated, documenting symptoms reported by patients is a good starting point to form hypothesis to be verified or rejected.
That conclusion raises skepticism based on the appearance of motivated reasoning and confirmation bias, but there's insufficient data for a firm conclusion.
I find it pretty concerning that they don’t mention this issue in their discussion section, which was also the first thing that came to mind when reading the abstract: people who’ve caught COVID may differ significantly from those who didn’t. Did none of the authors nor the reviewers think of this?
Have you seen "2.4. Statistical methods" and "Table 1" which discuss this? The whole paper is available below the abstract.
Yes, they control for various variables that they know about. I’m not convinced this gets rid of the bias (e.g. they don’t control for working from home, many others). It is not true that they discuss this obvious objection in either 2.4 or Table 1. They only discuss methods they’ve used that very partially mitigate the issue, without mentioning the problem.
How/why do you think working from home would affect the results of the infected and not infected group? We can throw lots of possible ways to divide the samples of course, but I'd like to understand why you chose that example. (and what's the threshold for "they should've mentioned criteria X")
If about 10% of participants followed up, wouldn’t there be a possibility of non-response/self-selection bias in the pre-post study? If I suffered cognitive deficit, I’d be more/less (I’d think less) likely to follow up.
Wait, what about this:
"A common challenge in studies of COVID-19 is that differences between people who have vs. have not been ill could relate to premorbid differences. To address this issue, a linear model was trained on the broader independent GBIT dataset (N = 269,264) to predict general cognitive performance based on age (to the third order), sex, handedness, ethnicity, first language, country of residence, occupational status and earnings. "
That's ridiculously bad. In effect their logic is:
"We controlled for various things in the original regression, but hey, there still could be unmeasured confounders that make people who got COVID score less on IQ tests, even before they got COVID! (Like coming from a poorer background, other health vulnerabilities etc. etc. etc.) Unfortunately, we don't have a measure of IQ from before they got COVID. So, we estimated one using a set of variables that we do have measures for!"
Erm... if those extra variables predict IQ, then why not just add them as controls? And of course, if you do so, then you'll still hit the problem that there are plenty of potential unmeasured confounders out there. This is just a silly way to pretend you've controlled for something, when in fact you can't.
The quality of statistics in medicine is so bad. Disgracefully bad. In particular, the Lancet seems to be a serial offender.
I agree it's curious they didn't retest individuals at followup, although it's much easier to ask if they contracted COVID than to have them retest.
However, they did determine those individuals who contracted COVID were not different in their premorbid test performance from those who did not later contract COVID. This is a big part of what a "complete" longitudinal design would get you.
Let's say you did get that test data on follow-up. If post-COVID people who were infected were different cognitively, and not different premorbidly, that would suggest COVID was involved. If they weren't different cognitively, you'd have to explain why the first wave of individuals were different based on COVID history but not the later wave. Still important to show but maybe a different set of explanatory challenges.
Not to mention that many people just aren't smart enough to evaluate risk and understand how to protect themselves in a pandemic. Just today I saw a guy on the metro wearing disposable latex gloves but no mask on the metro. He was obviously concerned about covid but had no concept of how it's transmitted. Some of the other PPE mishaps I've seen would be hilarious of they weren't so sad.
They note though that the follow up population that had caught covid after testing didn't differ significantly from those that didn't.
That seems to add credibility here to a causal mechanism as opposed to a background correlation of risk of infection they are missing.
>> suffers from at least one significant methodological flaw
Is this not a randomised control trial? As I understand it, RCT is usually referred to as the “gold standard” - why would the gold standard be a flaw in this case?
What you describe sounds to me, a layman, as an improvement over and above but if RCT is good enough normally, why discount it entirely in this case because there’s some other improvement could be made?
> Is this not a randomised control trial?
No. I am not quite sure how one might even think the words apply here.
If it were, participants would be randomly assigned to the the "control" group where they do not get Covid, but would be told they had Covid (to control for the negative placebo of being told they are now afflicted with a horrible long term malady) and the "treatment" group which would actually be given a Covid infection. Assuming such a study were doable, one can then use a "within participant" comparison which is much more powerful than comparing statistics across groups.
>> We sought to confirm whether there was an association between cross-sectional cognitive performance data from 81,337 participants who between January and December 2020 undertook a clinically validated web-optimized assessment as part of the Great British Intelligence Test, and questionnaire items capturing self-report of suspected and confirmed COVID-19 infection and respiratory symptoms.
There is no randomized assignment here. Susceptibility to report a Covid infection without positive proof is a confounding variable. I suspect that susceptibility is correlated with other cognitive issues.
A "within participant" comparison as the GP brought up would avoid these kinds of issues.
How can it be a randomized controlled trial? Did they randomize a group from the general population in advance and then randomly and blindly, but in a controlled fashion, infect part of the subjects and did they then consider the effects without looking at whether they were the infected people or the control group, until the conclusion of the study?
That’s what’s require for the gold standard.
RCT is not referred as "gold standard" by serious people, https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... that's marketing.