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.
This is also available as an email newsletter at https://lunchtimepandemic.substack.com if you prefer the update in your inbox.
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By far, the most staggering piece of information, as it relates to this newsletter, from yesterday's election in America was this data point from the National Exit Polls.
The number of voters who believe America is doing somewhat well or very well at containing COVID-19 is a staggering 48% of voters.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/03/us/elections/exit-polls-president.html
Commentary: One explanation of this comes from Tom Webster of Edison Research (the firm that produces the National Exit Polls) - 48% of the country doesn't have COVID-19. When you zoom in on the case counts on the JHU dashboard, there are HUGE swaths of nearly-empty areas where the probability of finding a COVID-19 case is extremely low. Combine that with partisan news media, and you might well have a huge number of people who simply see no evidence of COVID-19 in their lives - and thus assume things are working properly.
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Smartwatches may help. "Examining data from the first six weeks of their landmark DETECT study, a team of scientists from the Scripps Research Translational Institute sees encouraging signs that wearable fitness devices can improve public health efforts to control COVID-19.
The DETECT study, launched on March 25, uses a mobile app to collect smartwatch and activity tracker data from consenting participants, and also gathers their self-reported symptoms and diagnostic test results. Any adult living in the United States is eligible to participate in the study by downloading the research app, MyDataHelps.
In a study published October 29 in Nature Medicine, the Scripps Research team reports that wearable devices like Fitbit are capable of identifying cases of COVID-19 by evaluating changes in heart rate, sleep and activity levels, along with self-reported symptom data—and can identify cases with greater success than looking at symptoms alone.
“What’s exciting here is that we now have a validated digital signal for COVID-19. The next step is to use this to prevent emerging outbreaks from spreading,” says Eric Topol, MD, director and founder of the Scripps Research Translational Institute and executive vice president of Scripps Research. “Roughly 100 million Americans already have a wearable tracker or smartwatch and can help us; all we need is a tiny fraction of them—just 1 percent or 2 percent—to use the app.”"
Source: https://www.scripps.edu/news-and-events/press-room/2020/20201029-topol-radin-quer-detect.html
Commentary: To be clear, this doesn't detect COVID-19 itself. It uses fitness and health data to look for associations that mathematically may correlate with COVID-19, and requires testing to verify. That said, with an 80% accuracy rate compared to people guessing what symptoms they have, it could be a substantial and helpful population-level tool to look for potential outbreaks in specific areas and get ahead of them.
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Another reason to look at things like wastewater. "The urgent calls from doctors to the county department of health began in mid-October, shortly after skyrocketing coronavirus cases had brought a state-imposed lockdown to the community north of New York City.
“Some patients are refusing testing because they do not want D.O.H. bothering them,” a doctor said in a message for the county health commissioner on Oct. 13.
A day later, a caller to a state complaint hotline said in a message, “I would also like to report that there is a widespread effort from the community’s leadership to discourage Covid testing.”
Two weeks after a flurry of similar messages, the positivity rate in Kiryas Joel, an ultra-Orthodox Jewish village in Orange County, plummeted from 34 percent — the highest in the state — to just 2 percent. Last week, citing “dramatic progress” on the rate, the governor eased restrictions in the zone.
The course of events in Orange County has raised deep suspicions among some health experts about the reliability of the data, reflecting broader concerns about whether top officials in New York and around the country are tracking the outbreak in ways that may not accurately capture how much the virus is spreading."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/02/nyregion/coronavirus-orange-county-new-york.html
Commentary: People are fallible and deceptive. We need more tools like wastewater surveillance to detect COVID-19 regardless of what the humans in an area want.
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A reminder of the simple daily habits we should all be taking.
1. Wash/sanitize your hands every time you are in or out of your home for any reason. Consider also spraying the bottoms of your shoes with a general disinfectant (alcohol/bleach/peroxide) when you return home. Remember that cleaners are NEVER to be ingested or injected.
2. Always wear a mask when out of your home and if going to a high risk area, wear goggles. Respirators are back in stock at online retailers, too.
3. Stay home as much as possible. Minimize your contact with others and maintain physical distance of at LEAST 6 feet / 2 meters, preferably more. Avoid indoor places as much as you can; indoor spaces spread the disease through aerosols and distance is less effective at mitigating your risks.
4. Get your personal finances in order now. Cut all unnecessary costs.
5. Replenish your supplies as you use them. Avoid reducing your stores to pre-pandemic levels in case an outbreak causes unexpected supply chain disruptions.
6. Participate in your local political process. For Americans, go to Vote.org and register/verify your vote.
7. Ventilate your home as frequently as weather and circumstances permit.
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Common misinformation debunked!
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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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.