[conspire] CABAL (in-person + Jitsi Meet), Sat. Aug. 14, 4pm - 12m
paulz at ieee.org
paulz at ieee.org
Fri Aug 13 19:43:20 PDT 2021
> The 469 infectees were essentially self-reported people, concerned enough to get PCR-tested.
It's also probable that people who were vaxed were more likely than un-vaxed to also get tested and report the results.
On Friday, August 13, 2021, 07:29:25 PM PDT, Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> wrote:
Forwarding a thread here because I had some fun with it. I cross-posted
my invite to the Bay Area Science Fiction Association mailing list,
where the somewhat infamous Jon del Arroz of Danville, notorious for
trolling behaviour that got him disinvited from the 2018 San Jose Worldcon
and _then_ suing the Worldcon claiming various sorts of alleged victimhood
saw my invitation, and...
From: Jonathan Del Arroz
To: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
Cc: basfa at lists.basfa.org
Subject: Re: [Basfa] BBQ party for the vaccinated, West Menlo, Saturday, Aug. 14, 4pm-12m
X-Mailer: iPhone Mail (18F72)
Would love to, but definitely not at the expense of getting an
experimental injection. I'll just host a party for the unvaccinated
instead, since studies are showing we spread the new variants less,
anyway. Mine should be safer! Feel free to join.
He probably had no actual intention of hosting anything, for lots of
reasons including unpopularity by his own hand -- and also Danville,
in August being like an oven. I looked up a couple of things, and fired back:
Date: Thu, 12 Aug 2021 03:05:31 -0700
From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
To: basfa at lists.basfa.org
Subject: Re: [Basfa] BBQ party for the vaccinated, West Menlo, Saturday, Aug. 14, 4pm-12m
Quoting Jonathan Del Arroz:
> I'll just host a party for the unvaccinated instead, since studies are
> showing we spread the new variants less, anyway. Mine should be
> safer!
Nope. Your knowledge of epidemiology needs repair, Jon, as you've
been misinformed.
There _aren't_ "studies" showing that unvaxed spread Delta and
successors less. That is wrong twice over: Unvaxed are massively more
likely to get infected at all, and also massively more likely to remain
infectious for longer periods, lengthening potential exposure.
What actually came out wasn't a study, but rather a brief item in the
Aug. 6 edition of CDC's _Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report_
(MMWR) covering a Delta outbreak at Provincetown, tip of Cape Cod, after
Independence Day. Social media glommed onto _one_ figure: Among 469
PCR-confirmed COVID-19 infections found among seaside party-goers, 346
(74%) occurred in vaccinated persons. Also, breakthrough (vaxed) infectees
during their period of infectiousness carried about the same viral load
as did the unvaxed infectees (the same "cycle threshold" aka Ct, during
operational cycles of the machine that does PCR testing to detect and
duplicate viral genetic material). So, whoa! Being vaxed means you
spread Delta _more_, right?
Nope. This falls haplessly into Base Rate Fallacy, where you flub
estimating probability by ignoring context.
To understand that, imagine a slightly inattentive researcher studying
alcoholism in Dad's hometown of Kristiansund, population ~25,000.
Say (not real numbers here, but credible ones) results note that out of
550 identified alcoholics, 542, were blond. Whoa, says he! If you're
blond and resident of Kristiansund, you've 97% chance of alcoholism.
We must search for genetic links.
Does this researcher get a Nobel? Nope, he gets indulgent chuckles,
as he forgot Kristiansund (north of Bergen) has wall-to-wall blonds,
about as many blonds as herrings. Call that, in round figures, 22,000.
So, more like a 542 / 22000 * 100 = 2% chance, not 97%.
Getting back to Provincetown: That 74% is just wildly devoid of base
rate context, in that the study of the outbreak made no estimate of how
many persons got exposed, nor even what percentage of those present
in total were vaxed. The 469 infectees were essentially self-reported
people, concerned enough to get PCR-tested. Nobody got told "We need to
test you if you were in any Provincetown bar between July 10th and 18th":
Thus, there's an automatic "detection bias". Second, as vaxed
population has increased, especially among people like Cape Cod
holidayers, you get the Kristiansund-blonds problem: Vaxed persons
necessarily will then constitute a rising portion of cases.
For all of the above reasons plus others I don't even get into, _MMWR_
warned the info was "insufficient to draw conclusions about the
effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines against SARS-CoV-2". But social
media ignored that, and stumbled straight into the Base Rate Fallacy
trap. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cdc-provincetown-covid-event/
https://www.snopes.com/ap/2021/07/30/study-vaccinated-people-can-carry-as-much-virus-as-others/
As a statistics guy and a Bayesian, that kind of thing makes me sad.
Also, with Delta as with prior variants, vaxed infectees clear virus faster.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/variants/delta-variant.html
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/08/09/1031292/questions-delta-variant-contagious-tranmission-vaccination/
--
Cheers, "Orthodoxy is my doxy. Heterodoxy is someone else's doxy."
Rick Moen -- William Warburton, Bishop of Gloucester (1698-1779)
rick at linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
From: Bryan Houser
Date: Thu Aug 12 13:22:53 PDT 2021
Subject: Re: [Basfa] BBQ party for the vaccinated, West Menlo, Saturday, Aug. 14, 4pm-12m
To: basfa at lists.basfa.org
…then Rick drops the mic :-)
Date: Thu, 12 Aug 2021 17:29:21 -0700
From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
To: basfa at lists.basfa.org
Subject: Re: [Basfa] BBQ party for the vaccinated, West Menlo, Saturday, Aug. 14, 4pm-12m
Quoting Bryan Houser:
> …then Rick drops the mic :-)
You've been a great audience. I'll be here all week.
But I learn from the best, e.g.,
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/category/vaccines/
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/category/epidemiology-2/
(Their "Ivermectin is the new hydroxychloroquine" series, under category
"Science and Medicine", is also enlightening reading. That's up to five
pieces, because the entertaining special-pleading never stops.)
And Jon, you may remember I'm never hostile to you, wish you well, and
enjoy chatting with you. Best wishes to you and your family, to keep
them safe. For their sake, if nothing else, I'm glad your notion of an
outdoor(?) party in August _in Danville_ was most likely imaginary. My
Uncle Joe and Aunt Bjorg lived for decades at the top of Clipper Hill Road,
near Eugene O'Neill's Taos House. Lovely place to visit and hang out at
the pool, but _never in August_, when as you know it's beastly outdoors.
--
Cheers, Grammarian's bar joke #22: The past, present,
Rick Moen and future walked into a bar. It was tense.
rick at linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
Date: Fri, 13 Aug 2021 10:43:20 -0700
From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
To: basfa at lists.basfa.org
Subject: Re: [Basfa] BBQ party for the vaccinated, West Menlo, Saturday, Aug. 14, 4pm-12m
Quoting Jonathan Del Arroz:
> Would love to but definitely not at the expense of getting an
> experimental injection. I'll just host a party for the unvaccinated
> instead since studies are showing we spread the new variants less
> anyway mine should be safer! Feel free to join.
Jon, despite the unfortunate science error in your thoughtful
invitation, I do appreciate it, but have a few simple questions that
are still bothering me.
1. When and where will your party for the unvaccinated be, then?
2. Can you explain why you would specifically invite a vaccinated
SF fan (me), given your premise that avoiding the vaccine is
safer, and your desire to gather only the unvaccinated?
3. By what method will you be verifing unvaccinated status of
arriving guests (other than me)?
Looking forward to those answers, with utmost anticipation -- but also
with well-trained adaptive immune system B cells, about which you can
read here:
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/07/anatomy-of-a-vaccine-breakthrough/619562/
--
Cheers, The Astley Paradox: If you ask Rick Astley for his copy
Rick Moen of the movie "Up", he cannot give it to you, as he will
rick at linuxmafia.com never give you up. However, in doing so, he lets you down.
McQ! (4x80)
[crickets]
Date: Thu, 12 Aug 2021 19:13:20 -0700
From: Deirdre Saoirse Moen <deirdre at deirdre.net>
To: basfa at lists.basfa.org
Subject: Re: [Basfa] BBQ party for the vaccinated, West Menlo, Saturday, Aug. 14, 4pm-12m
First, I want to acknowledge that you are genuinely trying to have your
family’s best interests at heart.
I was one of the “lucky” West Coast people who got COVID last year, but
a pre-pandemic strain (that came to the Bay Area directly from China in
January; The pandemic strain came to the US via Europe a bit later) from
an asymptomatic person who’d just returned from China. I’d just had a
tooth removed leaving a big gaping hole for COVID to have easy access.
By the end of May 2020, I had no antibodies even though I had the
“sequelae” of long COVID, i.e., the collateral damage it did. After six
solid months of being ill, I had to go to the ER as I greyed out. We
figured out what I had (postural orthostatic tachycardia), and got
treated for it, but it took months and months to feel better even then,
I’m still not back to where I was 19 months ago, and I probably never
will be.
During that time, I read more than 3,000 pages of science papers about
COVID (and also some about dengue, Ebola, MERS, and SARS) to try to
update my understanding of virology and how it had changed since I took
immunology. Some of them are just horrifying, e.g., the “just put the
Internet away for the rest of the day” paper about the poor guy (and not
the only person!) who got autoimmune encephalitis from COVID.
“Autoimmune Encephalitis Presenting With Malignant Catatonia in a
40-Year-Old Male Patient With Covid-19”
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.23.20160770v1 (Link is
to the preprint. It was later published. However, that text is not free.)
Personally, I’m glad for the vaccine. A vaccine, even an experimental
one, is like being snuck the answers to the test before the final. Sure,
there’s a chance the teacher will add a surprise question, but! You’ll
still almost certainly pass the test.
To put that into a chart, here’s one from Houston:
https://twitter.com/kavitapmd/status/1425265615468699652
The ICU and ventilators are needed for the unvaccinated, not the
vaccinated, and only a few vaccinated people are in the hospital (about
11% of the total COVID patients in those two hospitals; Houston’s
overall fully vaccinated rate is 47.2%:
https://data.citizen-times.com/covid-19-vaccine-tracker/texas/harris-county/48201/).
Make of that what you will.
I would not have an unvaccinated party at this point in time,
personally. If you wish to offer the best outcome for all attending, I’d
suggest reviewing the calculations at https://www.microcovid.org/ and
model possible scenarios to fit your risk comfort level. (They do show
the math; they have read many of the same papers as I have.)
Also, while I’m on the topic, a friend of mine is an intensivist (ICU
physician) in Guangzhou, so I got to hear about the ground preparation
and all the day-to-day upheavals there. Lots of people have suspected
they’re under-reporting, but, after the last conversation we had about it
(last week), I think their numbers aren’t fudged nearly as much as many
assume.
Here’s why:
WeChat is not only a chat app and a cash exchange app and a photos app
and Facebook. It also has a ton of other functions… one of which is
reaching out to contacts of people who’ve tested positive for COVID,
*whether you know them or not*. If you stood on the same room in the
same building at the same time, they’re notified.
Also, all tests are reported to the user directly on WeChat.
There’s a *huge* social stigma with testing positive, and therefore I
think people are just super careful.
My friend was being sent to help manage a small outbreak, and some of
the hospital staff got wind of it and resigned rather than risk testing
positive. So: Upside to authoritarianism for once?
Deirdre
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