Did you catch it ?

[PeterNSteinmetz]

I wasn't talking about medical "experts," but they are also most certainly swayed by political influences.

I will comment a bit on this question having observed and been part of the biomedical community for most of my life now.

An unfortunate trend in science today is the need for people trying to establish their careers to come up with results that can be published in high impact factor journals. This is how one obtains grant funding and obtains tenure. That need is causing people to be in more of a hurry to publish a spectacular result, which leads to people often not paying as much attention to proper controls, etc.

With respect to Covid-19, given the nature of the emergency, I think most people are pretty focused on trying to come up with solutions and provide accurate information about this pandemic. However, given the nature of the emergency, a lot of things are having to move very quickly.

I do not think this means that scientists will bias the results to support one political leaning or the other. What these pressures do is bias scientists to try and report a spectacular result as quickly as possible. And of course, even without these pressures, one naturally wants one’s work and results to be exciting and important.

Since the Federal government now funds a vast majority of biomedical research, I think there is an implicit bias which is acquired by most researchers over the course of their careers.

They naturally think that big government spending, particularly on the NIH and biomedical research is a good thing. I mean the average working principal investigator probably spends 60% of more of their time on seeking grant funding (it is a constant complaint that there is no time to actually do science).

This also tends to produce professional scientists who think that government action is the solution to many problems - that is just naturally the way they think things work given the environment they are working in.

With respect to policy, most epidemiologists and medical professionals are narrowly focused on preventing a disease, and not necessarily well trained to consider collateral damage from their policies in terms of deaths due to other causes or economic impacts. I think economists have actually been doing a better job of considering those angles.

Overall, I think a big problem in the present circumstances is there is just a lot we frankly don’t know. And that is not a good or comfortable position from which to make policy.

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

I suspect he dropped a “not” - typo. I also wondered about that.

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

No empirical evidence for the efficacy of coercive lockdowns. This is exactly what I have been saying for some time. EDIT: I obtained the dataset and verified his results. Of the independent variables he explored, population and its density have a statistically significant effect on the cases and deaths, the adoption of a coercive lockdown has none, not even close.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/04/22/there-is-no-empirical-evidence-for-these-lockdowns/

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

So, all told, we have a rough idea of the infection fatality rate (IFR) in NY state, and if you do the math, it's around 0.57%.

Also note that estimates in other locations are lower, such as 0.3% in the Gangelt Germany study and 0.12-0.2% in the Santa Clara county study. There may well be other variables which determine whether people die from Covid-19 after being infected. If we can figure out what those are, another opportunity to decrease the fatality rate.

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

You just LOVE that word "coercive"!

It is an important distinction I think in all areas of political policy. If people want to do something, like stay at home, voluntarily, that is up to them. If you have to coerce them into doing something, that is a very different question.

What is important in this study is that there is no empirical evidence the lockdown orders for Covid-19 have slowed the spread of disease. That is really extremely important given the collateral damage in terms of other deaths and economic losses which are caused, at least in part, by these coercive orders.

I do think there would be some economic damage without coercive orders in any case as people socially distance voluntarily, however, it would likely be more tailored and limited.

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

If it didn't, then the disease spreads magically, or perhaps we aren't 'locked down' tightly enough. A true lockdown, with very limited group size, would have already killed this thing.
But think if it the other way: if you give the disease to someone, should you be able to be sued?

No question that extreme social isolation would work in the limit. But in the real world of the US, there may be a lot of reasons, nothing magical, why the coercive lockdowns would not have an effect.

Could be there is little compliance in areas where it matters. Or that voluntary compliance is sufficient. To study that one likely needs to correlate actual measures of social mobility and interaction with the spread of disease.

The question about lawsuits is an interesting one. Is it a tort if you know you have infectious Covid-19 and travel in public? Seems to me that will depend on the likelihood that by doing so you harm someone else. And that is some sort of product of the likelihood you infect someone else and then the chance of them being seriously injured or hurt by being infected. We know a little bit about the latter now and less about the former.

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

It didn't look to me like that "study" was published in a scientific journal, and its author is political scientist, not a member of the life sciences.

No, it is not published in a peer-reviewed journal so like a pre-print the normal cautions apply. One can argue endlessly about the credentials of a political scientist, social scientist, or epidemiologist to evaluate something like this and their potential biases. Sort of an ad hominem attack on the argument he is making.

What did you think of his argument and statistical analysis? I obtained his dataset and the basic statistical results from that data check out.

And please note, at this stage I am not aware of any empirical studies performed on Covid-19 in the US which suggest that coercive measures have had an impact on the spread of the illness -- are you aware of any? If so, please post the links.

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

His statistical analysis may or may not be valid, but I saw several errors and omissions in the data he based it on. His states without lockdown orders is far from complete, he doesn't allow for the wide variance even within a single state (there is a huge difference, for example, between New York City and the rural counties only a hundred miles north of the city), and the variable of time (NY got hit early while the more rural areas haven't been hit yet to any great extent).

His conclusions may or may not be correct, I don't have the data either, even a random guess may or may not be correct.

His statistical analysis is correct - I have verified it myself using his data. (Feel free to point out any errors in it you find. He will happily send you the dataset if you ask.)

The same conclusions hold when using the latest Covid-19 tracking project data available at https://github.com/COVID19Tracking/covid-tracking-data .

In terms of the list of states without lockdown orders, that is important as it is his main independent variable. He has 8 states in the dataset without a lockdown and just using voluntary social distancing, AK, IA, NE, ND, SC, SD, UT, WY. This agrees exactly with the dataset previously posted by ChemGeek. Do you see some other problem with that?

He acknowledges that a county by county study would likely be more accurate in terms of population density. And that trying to correlate with some type of variable for the start of lockdown would be an improvement (though he also looked internationally at other countries).

So I think a fair statement is that the one study to examine this question so far failed to find evidence that coercive lockdowns have any effect on the spread of Covid-19. Future studies might. Please link to them or develop them. The rest is speculation on what might be true.

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

I'm not aware of any studies that say that such mandatory measures don't work. "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."

Attempting to reverse the burden of proof. (And I think you must mean "any other studies".) In general the burden of proof is on he who asserts the existence of something, not the other way around (which leads to all sorts of contradictory outcomes). Those who assert that coercive lockdowns help with suppressing the spread of Covid-19 have the burden of proving that it in fact suppresses it.

The only reason to think they might work is that in the limit extreme social distancing has to work. But extreme social distancing and coercive lockdown orders as implemented in the US are very different things and there are plenty of reasons to think coercive lockdown orders might not work. There is also no available study, analysis or data to suggest coercive lockdowns have worked in the US for Covid-19.

It is of course strictly true that failing to disprove the null hypothesis (as in this study) does not prove the null hypothesis is absolutely true.

Nonetheless, I think it is fair to say that the balance of evidence presently is that coercive lockdowns are not achieving their intended effect.

I am however continuing to develop a more sophisticated test that would include time of implementation and the full time course of the cases and deaths to see if that might show some sort of effect of the coercive lockdowns.

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

Similar conclusions from a study in Israel about a lack of effect of lockdowns.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/the-e...wth-the-decline-in-the-spread-of-coronavirus/

I am beginning to wonder more seriously if something else is going on here with Covid-19 to explain this apparent decrease.

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

This is a pretty unconvincing argument. Doing a simple regression analysis of current case data is quite simplistic, as each state is not at the same point in their epidemic curve. ...

If you really want to understand how regions are doing without testing bias, one good way is to look at the growth rates of COVID deaths.

Reilly also studied deaths and this is one of the points he makes. Same result for total deaths. And yes, he also notes that a temporal analysis would be more informative.

It turns out that some of the non-lockdown states were infected earlier and are further along in the epidemic curves. It needs further quantitative study I think to be clearer.

But this is the best we have out in pre-print form presently.

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

True enough. So there are two ways to do that. You can assume the worst and clamp down with the possible worst case end result being you were completely wrong and now some people are poorer because of it. Or you assume the best and open up everything with the possible worst case end result being you were completely wrong and now some people are dead because of it.

This is really a false dichotomy. People die at higher rates when they are poor or when they are locked up and isolated.

But that is getting off on politics which is likely best avoided in a PoA thread.

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

Propose a mechanism. Without a cause-effect hypothesis, you got nothing. One thing we do know is many individuals are practicing isolation whether or not they are ordered to, and I would suspect that has had a significant impact.

Two points which may be intermixed here:

The main point is -- the coercive lockdowns don't seem to work. Maybe voluntary social isolation has had an effect, we don't really know for sure.

Second point -- the data are of course primary and are what they are, whether one has a successful theory to explain them or not.

But since the coercive lockdowns, the governments big hammer, is less finely tuned than individual voluntary actions, that can cause a lot more collateral damage than voluntary social distancing. Thus the coercive lockdowns should be ended.

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

Dr. Scott Atlas from Stanford. Five key facts that indicate the need to stop the lockdown now. https://thehill.com/opinion/healthc...in-stop-the-panic-and-end-the-total-isolation

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

There is no question that the 95% decrease in domestic travel and physical distancing has reduced spread.

And where is the data to back up that bold assertion? I have repeatedly asked for ANY empirical study that this has worked in the case of Covid 19 and yet nothing has been posted.

Just theories that it must work in the limit, that’s all. So far as I know, there is NO empirical evidence that the coercive lockdowns have worked or that social distancing has slowed the rate of spread - zero, none, nada!

I do have to wonder if there is an assumption here that this is going to behave like a chemistry experiment. The world of medicine and biology is not as theoretically predictable as chemistry and physics - too many unknown confounding variables.

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

Conversely, what is the mechanism for spread if people are apart?

Isolation has to work in the extreme limiting case, that is true based on theory.

But the point here is that is a different question from whether a social or government intervention works. The intervention may not work because it fails to achieve the sort of separation which reduces viral spread in the real world. No other mechanism of spread need to be present.

Thus the need for actual measurements and data to support the hypothesis that something like a coercive lockdown achieves it’s intended effect of reducing the spread of Covid-19. So far, the data do not support that hypothesis, they strongly suggest that coercive lockdowns have not slowed the spread.

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

Some data seems to have suggested otherwise, and now that politics is involved, it will be very difficult, if not impossible, to show one or the other hypothesis is correct.

What data do you think have suggested that coercive lockdowns have worked, other than the general theory that they must work in the limit?

I agree that it is more difficult to get to the bottom of things in controversial subjects - very true.

But I also believe that if one focuses on looking directly at data and analyses and making independent judgements, it is possible. Keep at it if it is an important subject for you. :emoji846:

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

I'm rooting for my fellow scientists in getting us through this, and leaving the magical thinking for others to contemplate. Disney's Law ("Wishing will make it so") still doesn't apply.

I generally try to avoid bringing the personal characteristics of the speaker into this type of discussion on public fora. However, you brought it up here by asserting authority by stating you are a scientist and attributing magical thinking to others.

Since you are writing here under a pseudonym, may I ask your real name so that other readers may assess your qualifications as a scientist?

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

Chemgeek's been here for years now. I don't recall an issue with his science.

Well he claims to be a scientist to bolster his argument from authority (that in itself is a fallacy). When asked to identify himself so that his credentials as a scientist can be checked, he refuses to do so.

In this thread he has made several assertions about analyses and the meaning of data and been unable to provide citations to back up same or provide the analyses he claims he made. I would call that a problem with the science, a fairly serious one.

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

Plenty of folks with advanced degrees have been known to latch on to a favorite idea, and not let go. Being a scientist takes a certain type of mind; a degree may or may not go with it.

In my experience people who are professionally trained as researchers are much more able to consider ideas objectively and weigh different pieces of evidence in uncertain situations. Harder for people without such training I think, but obviously there are individuals on all sides of that coin.

In any case, an argument from authority is a fallacy. But when people advance that fallacy to support their position, then I think it is appropriate to ask about the credentials being used as the basis of that alleged authority.