Lunch at the Labs

Covid-19

Some recent links related to Covid-19.

• Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
  • Ivermectin doesn't reduce mortality in COVID a significant amount (let's say d > 0.3) in the absence of comorbid parasites: 85-90% confidence
  • Fraud and data processing errors are of similar magnitude to p-hacking and methodological problems in explaining bad studies (95% confidence interval for fraud: between >1% and 5% as important as methodological problems; 95% confidence interval for data processing errors: between 5% and 100% as important)
  • Probably "Trust Science" is not the right way to reach proponents of pseudoscientific medicine: ???% confidence
• Have we been thinking about the pandemic wrong? The effect of population structure on transmission

  I conclude that we should try to find data about the characteristics of the networks on which the virus is spreading and make sure that we have such data when the next pandemic hits so that modeling can properly take population structure into account.
  ...
  I have argued that, while there are solid theoretical reasons to think that ultimately the dynamic of the epidemic depended on people's behavior, there is also strong evidence that the effective reproduction number sometimes underwent large fluctuations that could not be explained by changes in people's behavior. The cyclical nature of the epidemic has often been noted, but except for the vague claim that respiratory infections are "seasonal" (which is true but doesn't actually explain much), nobody has really tried to explain it. In this post, I have proposed that population structure could be part of the explanation, because real populations are not homogeneous mixing.

• Fresh look at pandemic origins points straight to food market in Wuhan, scientist says

  "I co-signed that letter in Science suggesting that the lab leak needs to be investigated, which I still believe and that it should be," Worobey told CNN. "But in the meantime, holy smokes -- is there a lot of evidence against it and in favor of natural origin."

  For further details see the article in Science magazine Dissecting the early COVID-19 cases in Wuhan.

• Is COVID-19 here to stay?

  A team of biologists explains what it means for a virus to become endemic.

  The virus that causes COVID-19 is often associated with superspreading events, in which many people are infected all at once, typically by a single infected individual. In fact, our own work has shown that just 2% of the people infected with COVID-19 carry 90% of the virus that is circulating in a community. These important "supercarriers" have a disproportionately large impact on infecting others, and if they aren't tracked down before they spread the virus to the next person, they will continue to sustain the epidemic. We currently don't have a nationwide screening program geared toward identifying these individuals.

  Finally, asymptomatically infected people account for roughly half of all infections of COVID-19. This, when coupled with a broad range of time in which people can be infectious - two days before and 10 days after symptoms appear - affords many opportunities for virus transmission, since people who don't know they are sick generally take few measures to isolate from others.

• Here's Why Rapid COVID Tests Are So Expensive and Hard to Find

  The answer appears to be a confounding combination of overzealous regulation and anemic government support - issues that have characterized America's testing response from the beginning of the pandemic.

  Companies trying to get the Food and Drug Administration's approval for rapid COVID-19 tests describe an arbitrary, opaque process that meanders on, sometimes long after their products have been approved in other countries that prioritize accessibility and affordability over perfect accuracy.

• Singapore will stop covering the medical bills of unvaccinated COVID-19 patients

  "Currently, unvaccinated persons make up a sizeable majority of those who require intensive inpatient care, and disproportionately contribute to the strain on our healthcare resources," it said in a statement.