Lunchtime pandemic reading.
Standard disclaimer: this is a roundup of informative pieces I've read that interest me on the severity of the crisis and how to manage it. I am not a qualified medical expert in ANY sense; at best I am reasonably well-read laity. ALWAYS prioritize advice from qualified healthcare experts over some person on Facebook.
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One of the questions people have asked me is how we can explain Florida's relatively okay emergence from the pandemic despite its governor resisting every attempt to keep Floridians safe. The answer is twofold.
First, Florida's results were indeed only relatively okay. They still had substantial numbers of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths, in line with the statistics one would expect.
But more important, in looking at Google's COVID-19 Mobility Data, we see something else. Floridians generally took more precautions and had less mobility than other states that fared more poorly in the pandemic. Politically, they behaved more like a science-accepting state than a science-denying state.
Texas in particular had bad outbreaks because residents didn't take the pandemic as seriously there. So did Georgia, Florida's neighbor - we see in the mobility data that citizens there behaved with less caution than their neighbors. Even now, Florida's mobility data indicates that they're not nearly as "back to normal" as Texas or Georgia.
So, what saved Florida? Floridians taking the pandemic seriously - even when their state government did not.
Data is sourced from: https://www.google.com/covid19/mobility/
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Still no evidence of a lab leak. "It is my strong sense, based on my reporting over the last 18 months, that the majority of Australian experts believe the evidence is strongly slanted towards the virus having emerged naturally from animals – as most other pandemics have.
I double-checked this on Tuesday with leading virus scientists across Australia’s research institutes. With almost no exceptions, this was everyone’s view.
If this is the case, then the coverage the lab leak theory has received is way out of whack with the actual likelihood of it happening.
To be clear, we have not yet found a group of animals that unequivocally gave the virus to humans.
That means we cannot say with 100 per cent certainty it jumped from animals, and we cannot say with 100 per cent certainty it did not leak out of a lab – or arrive some other way. Meanwhile, Australian officials have put the chance of the accidental lab leak causing the pandemic at 40 per cent and natural origin at 60 per cent. US intelligence agencies have arrived at a similar figure.
But as far as I and other science journalists reporting on COVID-19 can tell, the majority of leading Australian virology experts are firmly of the view this virus had a natural origin.
The Australasian Virology Society, Australia’s leading experts on this question, tell me while they are yet to formulate an official position: “It is likely that SARS-CoV-2 originated from an animal reservoir like many other zoonoses such as SARS and MERS.” The Australian Academy of Science declined to comment.
Journalism fell into a trap with the climate crisis. By balancing the arguments of scientists and deniers early on, the media gave the public a distorted view of the expert consensus.
We now live with the outcome of that coverage: less than half of Americans surveyed in 2016 believed the climate crisis was caused by human action, compared to 97 per cent of climate scientists.
I worry much of the media is doing the same with the lab leak hypothesis. I worry the very scientists in Wuhan who tried to warn us, for years, about the threat posed by bat coronavirus pandemics are now being blamed."
Source: https://www.smh.com.au/national/are-we-ignoring-the-hard-truths-about-the-most-likely-cause-of-covid-19-20210601-p57x4r.html?btisc
Commentary: The last part is critical. "Fair and balanced" is insanity when media equates differing opinions with correctness. The "other side" does not deserve the microphone when it is factually wrong and promulgating points of view that are factually wrong AND harmful to others. Do we need fair coverage of the village idiot who insists that 2 + 2 = 5 and that his point of view deserves as much time as the teacher in the classroom teaching 2 + 2 = 4? I should hope not, lest we finish our descent as a species into idiocracy.
We have got to become more comfortable with "I don't know" as a valid answer, and accept that answer without trying to imagine answers in the absence of facts.
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Well, that's one way to stop crime. "The stay-at-home restrictions to control the spread of COVID-19 led to unparalleled sudden change in daily life, but it is unclear how they affected urban crime globally. We collected data on daily counts of crime in 27 cities across 23 countries in the Americas, Europe, the Middle East and Asia. We conducted interrupted time series analyses to assess the impact of stay-at-home restrictions on different types of crime in each city. Our findings show that the stay-at-home policies were associated with a considerable drop in urban crime, but with substantial variation across cities and types of crime. Meta-regression results showed that more stringent restrictions over movement in public space were predictive of larger declines in crime."
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01139-z
Commentary: Crime generally went down during lockdowns. While it's not a tool we can use for future crime prevention, we now have, as a civilization, the world's largest experiment and the data from it. We'll be analyzing this data for years, if not decades, to come to see what other public policy learnings we can gain from it.
This is critically important: while we have all suffered to some degree over the past 16 months, from loss of life and loved ones to changes in health and finances, we stand to gain much more from what we've learned, if we're open to learning. The hard work of understanding what happened is just beginning.
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A reminder of the simple daily habits we should all be taking.
1. Wear the best mask available to you when you'll be around other people, even after you've been vaccinated. Respirators are back in stock at online retailers, too. Wear an N95/FFP2/KN95 that's NIOSH-approved or better mask if you can obtain it. If you can't get an N95 mask, wear a surgical mask with a cloth mask over it.
2. Get vaccinated as soon as you're able to, and fulfill the full vaccine regimen. Remember that you are not vaccinated until everyone you live with is vaccinated.
3. Wash/sanitize your hands every time you are in or out of your home.
4. Stay home as much as practical. Minimize your contact with others and avoid indoor places as much as you can; indoor spaces spread the disease through aerosols and distance is less effective at mitigating your risks.
5. Get your personal finances in order now. Cut all unnecessary costs.
6. Replenish your supplies as you use them. Avoid reducing your stores to pre-pandemic levels in case an outbreak causes unexpected supply chain disruptions.
7. Ventilate your home as frequently as weather and circumstances permit, except when you share close airspaces with other residences (like a window less than a meter away from a neighboring window).
8. Masks must fit properly to work. Here's how to properly fit a mask:
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Common misinformation debunked!
There is no basis in fact that COVID-19 vaccines can shed or otherwise harm people around you.
Source: https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-covid19vaccine-reproductivepro-idUSL1N2MG256
There is no mercury or other heavy metals in the Pfizer mRNA vaccine.
Source: https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/09/1013538/what-are-the-ingredients-of-pfizers-covid-19-vaccine/
There is no basis in fact that COVID-19 vaccines pose additional risks to pregnant women.
Source: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2104983
There is no genomic evidence at all that COVID-19 arrived before 2020 in the United States and therefore no hidden herd immunity:
Source:
There is no evidence SARS-CoV-2 was engineered, nor that it escaped a lab somewhere.
Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2020/01/29/experts-debunk-fringe-theory-linking-chinas-coronavirus-weapons-research/
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9
Source: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/05/anthony-fauci-no-scientific-evidence-the-coronavirus-was-made-in-a-chinese-lab-cvd/
There is no evidence a flu shot increases your COVID-19 risk.
Source: https://www.factcheck.org/2020/04/no-evidence-that-flu-shot-increases-risk-of-covid-19/
Source: https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid/ciaa626/5842161
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Disclosures and Disclaimers
To be clear, I declare no competing interests on anything I share related to COVID-19. I am employed by and am a co-owner in TrustInsights.ai, an analytics and management consulting firm. I have no clients and no business interests in anything related to COVID-19, nor do I financially benefit in any way from sharing information about COVID-19.
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A common request I'm asked is who I follow. Here's a public Twitter list of many of the sources I read.
https://twitter.com/i/lists/1260956929205112834
This list is biased by design. It is limited to authors who predominantly post in the English language. It is heavily biased towards individual researchers and away from institutions. It is biased towards those who publish or share research, data, papers, etc. I have made an attempt to follow researchers from different countries, and also to make the list reasonably gender-balanced, because multiple, diverse perspectives on research data are essential.
This is also available as an email newsletter at https://lunchtimepandemic.substack.com if you prefer the update in your inbox.