The CDC is currently saying that this virus has an R0 of 5.7. Couple that with the many cases of casual spread (e.g. people who have gotten it with people they have barely interacted with), and the contrarian claims by this German study seem farcical.
It's a two page summary. Note that this, and the accompanying press conference (with professional PR team) are it. That is the entirety of the details they have released.
I think it's absolutely crazy and irresponsible to do a press conference on a paper that you haven't even released a preprint of. I really hope that there aren't any issues with the actual publication, because if there are, they're going to cause a great amount of damage to scientific credibility, which so incredibly important right now.
Despite it opposing their previous stance on it? They're now mostly backpedalling, and discrediting the study. Or, at least, how it was presented - but can anyone blame them for that?
This study and its conclusions have seen close to universal dismissal. It can't even demonstrate that it is actually detecting SARS-CoV-2 immunity (it was claiming results before anyone had even demonstrated effective tests for relevant antibodies), and not any of the many variations of coronavirus that spread during the colder months (yet which offer no immunity to SARS-CoV-2).
The claims about shopping are...unsupported and go contrary to an enormous volume of evidence (namely the high R0).
It isn't a good example of anything except that junk science has a moment to shine in a crisis.
EDIT: LOL, -2. This is the moment I delete my account and find slightly less stupid venues to participate in. Cheers.
Streeck studied medicine at the Charite University, Berlin and obtained his PhD from the University of Bonn, which he performed part-time at the Partners AIDS Research Center, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School.
After his graduation Streeck started to work as a postdoctoral fellow at the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard. In 2009 he was promoted to Instructor in Medicine and in 2011 to Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School. In September 2012 he was recruited to the United States Military HIV Research Program, Bethesda, where he became the Chief of the Cellular Immunology Section as well as Assistant Professor at the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences and adjunct faculty of the Bloomberg School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University.[3] In 2015 he became the Chair for Medical Biology at the University Duisburg-Essen and founded the Institute for HIV Research in the same year,[4][5][6][7] though he still maintains the status of "visiting scientist" with the US Military HIV Research Program.
In 2018 Streeck was appointed to the advisory board of the German AIDS Foundation (Deutsche AIDS Stiftung).[8] In April 2020, he was appointed by Minister-President Armin Laschet of North Rhine-Westphalia to a 12-member expert group to advise on economic and social consequences of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic in Germany.[9]
Coronavirus research
In early April 2020, Streeck and his team reported that they had "carried out an intensive search of the home of a family infected with the coronavirus but found no trace of it on surfaces."[18]
“We did not find any live virus on any surface. Not on cellphones, not on taps, not on doorknobs.”
There are some red flags about this study though. German press is reporting that a PR firm founded by the notorious yellow-paper journalist Kai Diekmann is involved in publicizing the results. Diekmann was recently involved in a scandal where researchers in Heidelberg wrongly claimed to have developed a blood test for breast cancer. Streeck appears to be a personal friend of one of the other founders of the company. In any case, using a PR agency is pretty much unheard of for a German research institute.
I'm reminded of that time a Nobel prize winner used the "authority" he generated from winning the Noble prize to convince everyone that Vitamin C was a magical cure-all for all disease.
Being an amazing HIV researcher does not mean Streeck has an appropriate background in coronaviruses to be an authority in that field, especially given that his team has (a) found outlier results at odds with every other study thus far published and (b) is making a broad policy pronouncement based on studying a single family's household without considering confounding factors, like say the family cleaning the house before the researchers visited.
This is comforting, but I'd rather still be cautious. I wear gloves when I go shopping. I wash my hands frequently anyway, and now I wash them even more. Worst case, I've wasted some time.
Junk science can come from people not known for junk science. And in the end we rack it up to a technical fault (e.g. a test for coronavirus antibodies that cannot distinguish between many of the several other coronavirus infections that spread during the winter), the way participants were enrolled, etc. That's why there is a peer review process.
And this study bizarrely was released with a press conference and a press conference, yet perilously little actual methodology or useful information for the scientific community to critique. Oh and with a professional PR firm. And it uses this to promote significant changes in public policy! (e.g. relax the restrictions because our two page summary gives some conclusions that are entirely contrary to the entire world of experts)
It's all extraordinarily weird.
And again, it has only made waves online. Among the medical professionals, virologists, etc...crickets.
Just to be clear, HN would normally laugh nonsense like this off the site -- a PR "study" that has zero peer review, that goes against all conventional wisdom, that is not acknowledged or credited by any other expert in the field. Has this site gone absolutely stupid?
> The claims about shopping are...unsupported and go contrary to an enormous volume of evidence (namely the high R0).
Honestly? An R0 of 2-3 is frankly not that high.
If grocery shopping were a huge risk, and people spread the disease before being symptomatic, you’d expect a single sick individual to infect way more than just 2-3 people on average.
Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 is the causative agent of the 2019 novel coronavirus disease pandemic. Initial estimates of the early dynamics of the outbreak in Wuhan, China, suggested a doubling time of the number of infected persons of 6–7 days and a basic reproductive number (R0) of 2.2–2.7. We collected extensive individual case reports across China and estimated key epidemiologic parameters, including the incubation period. We then designed 2 mathematical modeling approaches to infer the outbreak dynamics in Wuhan by using high-resolution domestic travel and infection data. Results show that the doubling time early in the epidemic in Wuhan was 2.3–3.3 days. Assuming a serial interval of 6–9 days, we calculated a median R0 value of 5.7 (95% CI 3.8–8.9)
Calling it Junk science is a bit harsh. I would say that the sponsoring entity (one of the German states) did force an intermediate result. This might turn out to be a bad idea, but is needed to steer the political decision process (the German states and federal government want to convene to make decisions about the lock down on April 14th).
The study has been widely critiqued, but dismissal is too harsh. I don't think anybody really has said that the main finding is wrong. It just might not be as strong. Instead of 15% immune in the area, it might be just 12% or 10%. Fatality rate might be 0.5% rather than 0.37%.
The study goal itself is correct and it is a shame that not every epidemiologist is doing exactly the same study right now all over the world. That the German CDC did not think to run such a study themselves since Covid-19 turned bad is a scandal.
"with the added features of less control from the developers"
Given that this is an additional option for developers, this is pretty tenuous logic. You seem to be arguing against developers having this option by claiming that it restricts their options.
"and locked to just one platform"
I'm fairly sure making one of these apps doesn't suddenly restrict every other option. You can make Android and Web Apps and J2EE (if it still exists) to your hearts content!
This is actually a convenient conversation because I just spent thirty minutes thinking about how much of an absolute piece of shit the Steam app is, courtesy of all of the elements that are a thin wrapper around a web app. And this has pretty much always been the experience: we're all just waiting for the magic web app that's going to prove everyone wrong and light the path.
Still hasn't come.
But until then, I'd rather developers actually have options, including high performance, native, platform-suitable solutions. My only knee-jerk opposition to these Instant App style solutions (the Android version, not sure what the Apple one will be called) is the thought of a big, fat binary coming down just to view what you think is a web page...and then I remember how absolutely monstrous the overwhelming majority of web apps are now. Full native apps are absolute svelte in comparison.
How do you mean? This Apple design looks very different from any that I can find attributed to "Prusa" (not sure if that's a person or a company, but the company put out 3D print designs that are very different). And all of them, of course, copy shields that were out long before the current crisis.
A lot of people were prototyping shields to satisfy a sudden and overwhelming demand, and with 3D printers it seemed like dozens of variations appeared overnight. I don't think attribution is a big concern.
This is the sort of false equivalency that leads to claims that they all lie, so it's okay if Fox egregiously lies. We see this on HN all the time where someone stomps their feet and cries about a news headline that they think doesn't convey just the right slant that they want, ergo it's the same as the guy inventing bullshit conspiracy theories on his blog.
No, they weren't "chastising" Trump over the China travel ban because there was no China travel ban. There was a Wuhan restriction only applicable to foreigners. Thousands of Americans were going and coming with no restrictions whatsoever. Fly into Wuhan, lick the toilet seats, fly back home. Do it the next day.
There was zero screening. Zero containment. Zero listening to the pandemic experts.
No, they aren't the same. This revisionist "they were dismissing the virus" nonsense is utter horseshit of the worst kind. It is a lie of profound ignorance and gullibility, or an intentional lie, and both are just as obnoxious.
The equivalency being drawn by the parent may be wrong, but mainstream sources outside Fox News absolutely downplayed the seriousness of the virus and helped push the "it's not a big deal" perception that we are all now rowing against.
Completely disagree. The Fox news and related contingent and their response was drastically different than the other side. For example, SF declared an emergency in February and everyone was working from home since early March. While Florida had no such order till last week
> but mainstream sources outside Fox News absolutely downplayed the seriousness of the virus
That's true, I guess, if you consider OANN to have reached the status of “mainstream” with the boost they've gotten with their attachment to the current US administration.
You can look on Youtube yourself and see countless examples o MSNBC and CNN criticizing the travel ban on China because the virus wasn't any more dangerous than the flu.
I actually followed the coverage the first time, and where the ban was criticized it was almost entirely for being too late for that response to be useful, not unwarranted by the severity of the disease. Of course, if there really are “countless” examples supporting your characterization, it will be easy for you to cite some.
You claimed that there were countless videos of "MSNBC and CNN criticizing the travel ban on China because the virus wasn't any more dangerous than the flu." Which of course isn't accurate.
You seek your redemption in some guy[1] listing a tiny selection of articles, having nothing to do with the partial travel restriction, arguing about the social effects. He links either contrarian articles, or articles talking about the psychology/sociology.
That you think this proves the case is astonishing. I am going to say again that you are either so profoundly partisan that the truth doesn't matter, or you are logically broken.
It's the classic deflection, and it's absolutely amazing. Fox was literally at war with what they saw as the "mainstream media hoax" (in lockstep with Trump, of course, because they are his state media), claiming that they were fear-mongering about the virus. Oh but now, the mainstream media actually wasn't at all. They were understating it. The cognitive deficiency to seriously argue this...
[1] That guy whose post history is littered with claims that the response to SARS-CoV-2 is "fear-mongering", and who a month ago seriously said that the US response was and is the best, of anyone. Their single example being that Trump limited air travel from a single region...for non-Americans...long after the horse was out of the barn.
Then again, your history has continual COVID denial, such as your claim that no hospitals are over capacity. You guys are really trying to argue everything simultaneously and it must be exhausting.
Did the news about the death counts flattening and missing projections by a lot today bum you out? I can’t imagine having my identity so wrapped in Trump losing the election that I would be hoping for hundreds of thousand dead and the failure of the American health care system. Enjoy the next 4 years of the Trump administration.
"I can’t imagine having my identity so wrapped in Trump losing the election that I would be hoping for hundreds of thousand dead and the failure of the American health care system"
No one celebrates the extraordinary and unending failures of this administration. We protest it. We argue against it. We see a horrendous rise of idiocracy as people celebrate their own incredible ignorance and hate.
That it's bad for you doesn't make it "good" for us.
If a miracle cure was discovered today and not a single extra person died, that will never undo the raw criminality, and total, complete incompetence of the Trump administration.
That Jared Kushner has a role greater than mail room is a fucking travesty. Hey, but what about her emails, right?
"Did the news about the death counts flattening and missing projections by a lot today bum you out?"
Social distancing works. This surprises positively no one. Your orange buffoon, however, wants to stop social distancing. Maybe there's some miracle snake oil he can pitch and everything will be great again.
Go back to Twitter. Go back to your insular echo chamber. Your trolling, copy-paste noise just makes you look like a clown here.
If you would have actually read those articles, you would see that the WaPo opinion piece does not actually downplay the coronavirus threat at all; it discusses the psychology of social panic. The NYT piece discusses how fear of coronavirus spread faster than the virus itself without any comment on the seriousness of the disease.
The CNBC article does compare the flu to the coronavirus and does note the flu has already killed more across the US on an absolute basis, but also notes that the coronavirus is significantly deadlier than the flu on a relative basis. Lenny Bernstein, the opinionist behind the second WaPo opinion piece you linked, apologized for his cavalier dismissal of the coronavirus in a followup opinion piece.
To date, only one person in the entire Fox News organization has apologized for getting it wrong on coronavirus. Every single other talking head has doubled down on downplaying coranavirus, and Fox and Friends is still implying that it's all just a second impeachment effort.
I'm sure you read all the articles in 5 minutes but either way the mental gymnastics you are going through to get around the headlines reading "How our brains make coronavirus seem scarier than it is" etc is truly impressive.
> The CNBC article does compare the flu to the coronavirus and does note the flu has already killed more across the US on an absolute basis, but also notes that the coronavirus is significantly deadlier than the flu on a relative basis.
The flu has already killed 10,000 across US as world frets over coronavirus
The flu remains a higher threat to U.S. public health than the new coronavirus.
This very clearly downplaying. One example was asked for, at least one was provided. Now we have examples of the downplaying being downplayed, because the "right guys" did it.
Wait, wasn't your "but orange man bad" classic twitter response good enough? Why'd you edit it?
"When it was risky for him to do so."
Trump just got a get out of jail free card and absolute impunity and immunity to do anything he wanted. Since he's fired a number of people in the most brazen display of corruption in US history. Risky? There was zero risk.
Yes, orange man is bad. He's historically bad. He is a thin-skinned grifter who is positively the worst possible person to be in this position.
Oh but look he did an easy, lazy partial, regional restriction that accomplished positively nothing. What a savior.
What travel ban ? 400k people traveled from China after the ban. Trump said as of 2 weeks back that everything will be open by Easter. Everyday he downplays the virus and peddle misinformation. How anyone can define a completely unhinged and unethical person, whose direct actions is resulting in thousands of deaths is beyond me
We have already seen 13k deaths in 2 weeks, with unprecedented lockdowns. According to president genius we should have been at zero cases and shouldn't be shutting down the economy. If we treated this like a regular flu, I won't be surprised if we saw numbers at the high end of the projection. And lol, 48 states ? He won barely by 70k votes and lost by what 3mn in 2016 against the most hated candidate, with Russian help, and with FBI meddling 7 days before the election. Look how we lost what 400 seats in 2018. If indeed America elects this incompetent and malicious imbecile, who trades American lives based on which states have sucked up to him, thinks his ratings are more important than 1000s of people dying, then we truly are lost. But I will not be moving to Canada, but fighting everyday to keep our democracy which is threatened everyday by this man in office
"How far are we going to be under projected death counts for Covid? A factor of 1000?"
What do you think the projection was?
The US has tragically seen 12,242 deaths (which is an undercount, but it's the authoritative number right now). There are over a thousand deaths a day adding onto that.
Did someone predict 12 million deaths? No, they didn't.
The absolute worst-case projection was 2 million deaths if there were zero reduction steps taken. Maybe you haven't noticed, but society is basically shut down. The spread has dramatically slowed. With extreme social distancing the US is on target for 100,000-200,000 deaths. This is a good thing relative to much more dire outcomes possible. Note that this happened at the state level with zero federal leadership. Quite contrary, with constant federal pushback.
Not sure where your "factor of 1000" nonsense comes from. I assume from the echo chambers where you're fed your pablum.
I'm ideologically opposed to political conservativism, but I sympathize with you. Regarding ideological bias, CNN is worse than Fox, but in left leaning communities Fox is demonized while CNN gets a pass. Hivemind mentalities are frustrating regardless of which group engages in it.
> Regarding ideological bias, CNN is worse than Fox,
No, it's not, though it's pretty bad.
> in left leaning communities Fox is demonized while CNN gets a pass.
No, CNN’s (and most of the institutional media that isn't hard right) center-right pro-corporate bias is nearly as frequently pointed to by left-leaning folks as Fox’s hard-right bias.
You may be confusing the pro-corporate center-right wing of the Democratic Party with the left, though, which would make this statement understandable.
This isn't a peer reviewed paper. It's an extremely brief summary piece based upon a complete absence of evidence and then suppositions.
And to what the guy above said, the Lancet infamously published Wakefield's since debunked repeatedly claim that MMR vaccines cause autism. A paper that has literally led to many deaths.
That was a one-off that made international headlines because it was a rare event. You'd generally trust stuff published in the Lancet; it gets thoroughly checked.
This is work done by leading researchers in the field, in a top-class journal. I'm going to trust it over random allegations on HN.
It was an incredibly damaging one-off that has killed children. Clearly the vast majority of their work is worlds better than that, but I was replying to the appeal to authority that demands respect and belief for a work that itself purports to be nothing more than a very rough estimate.
Nonetheless, this piece isn't "thoroughly checked" because there is nothing to check. They took the deficient data from China and added suppositions to it. It's neat, I guess, but meaningless.
This paper is not being taken as authoritative anywhere. No one is making policy decisions on it. Zero ground-truth is changing because of it. Because it's a cursory, superficial guesstimate (that is literally the most accurate word) just to appease curiosity.
"They have no motive to supply false data, and lots of reasons to make it accurate."
They are working with garbage data. They know this. They admit it. Then they rationalize that they can invent real data out of it. And as an exercise that is okay -- they state exactly what they are doing with very limited, poor data. They haven't claimed it was more than it is.
This is not the canonical statement on death rates, and compared to actual emerging data is completely irrelevant.
"are also authors of the Imperial study that has significantly influenced the UK government response"
The catastrophic and flippant UK response? The one that thought they would obtain some "herd immunity" by doing nothing, and then realizing cases were skyrocketing mimicked what other countries were doing? That UK?
> The one that thought they would obtain some "herd immunity" by doing nothing, and then realizing cases were skyrocketing mimicked what other countries were doing?
Yes, that one. This was the study that convinced the UK government to change course from the original unrestrained herd immunity strategy.
