"This paper is head and shoulders above anything I found during my own literature review and just comes out and says everything (I?) painfully tried to piece together."
It feels kind of aggro to just come straight here and point out potential typos, sort of like coming into someone's house and pointing out a slightly askew picture frame. So: I also liked the article :)
Nicely put. But in this case, for me at least, the typo obscured a sensible understanding of the sentence so I mentally just shrugged, glossed over it, and moved on.
Regarding babies, I think there's also some inter-generational immunity that can be transferred from mom to baby either in-utero or through breastfeeding. So the population has some ongoing immunity that passes on and keeps the diseases in check. That's why new diseases that jump from animals to humans are specially devastating at first but eventually become more of a background issue as the population as a whole builds immunity and is able to pass it forward to its descendants.
Yes that makes sense. Breastfeeding until at least six months, and ideally a year, apparently confers a big immunological benefit. Around one year, babies switch from living on mostly milk calories to mostly solids calories. I wonder if that timing has to do with the yearly cycling of immunity to various diseases.
The immunity transferred as antibodies via the placenta or breast milk is called passive immunity. It can definitely help the baby avoid the illness while they're receiving it, and for a little while afterwards. But it doesn't train their own immune system, and on a timescale of weeks-to-months after they stop breastfeeding, the antibodies leave their system.
The adult digestive system would break down the antibodies before they could be absorbed.
OTOH injecting it would work. But it'd be easier to grow the antibodies using cells in a petri dish, at which point you've invented monoclonal antibody therapy (e.g. all the covid drugs that end in -mab)
I don't know the answer to the fire question but if i had to guess i'd say it's a combination of changing wind conditions and natural barriers. If the wind no longer goes south then the fire will more or less stop going south, and if there's a mountain or river along the way then you need pretty powerful wind to bypass it. Especially if the natural barrier is more wet than the original fire area.
That, and high humidity, and lack of drought, and especially rain/snow. There were large fires in the eastern US in the pre-firefighting past (cf. Peshtigo) but unlike much of the West, it rains year-round, and rain and a wind reversal are great for stopping a fire in its tracks. Meanwhile, pre-existing drought, low humidity, and high wind speed all drive up the Ro of fires.
This is pretty close to the right answer. The additional factors are moisture, humidity and rain.
A more complete answer is that fires don't spread very far or very fast on their own. Not all vegetation is equally easy to ignite, not all vegetation has an equal propensity to provide further sources of ignition and vegetation rarely forms chains that directly touch for very great distances.
Crown fires are so dangerous because they generate lots of embers that can spread very far very fast. Fires in undergrowth are less exposed to wind and so have greater difficulty spreading quickly or across terrain features without combustable material. Additionally little water collects in crowns so the it's less moist and more vegetation is promptly combustable.
Add to that, it takes a lot more fuel to ignite the big trees in old-growth forests. Ordinarily, small fires burn up the local deadfall and small trees, so fuel load is low. Managed forests, like in the American West, have lots of deadfall and small trees because fire fighters and the Forest Service prevent or suppress every fire as fast as possible. So when a fire does come along and get out of control, there is plenty of fuel to produce the higher temperatures needed to ignite the old trees, which in turn produce enough heat heat ignite other old trees.
I think the analogy of fire suppression in Western Forests is very apt, more than Scott realied.
Fire is natural in forests, and also grasslands. Every year for millennia, dry season comes and some fires burn, the natural cycle is for a fire to come througha given area about once every 20-25 years. In fact, some Western species (like redwooods), need forest fires to reproduce and spread their seeds.
As many have already said, the Federal govt and the western states started interfering with that 100 years ago, and they increasingly pursued a policy of stamping out every fire they could, and the dead wood and brush started to pile up everywhere while fire suppression efforts and spending increased. Dead wood (fuel) is exactly what frequent low-intensity fires clear out, leaving the healthy trees with more space etc. But high fuel loads make any fires much more intense, so hot that even the mature trees are burned, and high heat-driven winds spread it far and fast.
But as more and more towns started to build right up top the edge of the timber, there were a lot more people in "harm's way", burning buildings and crying families are really bad optics, so all the politicians want to be "doing something" and the cost of fighting these more and more intense, and larger, fires, now to protect people who never heard the story of the Three Little Pigs.
That is a long way of saying that fire fighting and forest management have become just like "Zero COVID" policies, where no price seems to be too high for futile efforts to eliminate all forest fires.
Another parallel: Anybody Remember "Smokey the Bear" and the saturation advertising campaigns warning that "Only -->>YOU!!<<-- can prevent forest fires.."? Anybody? Now, of course, lots of careless people starting forest fires all over is BAD THING, and reducing that is GOOD.
But then remember that all natural fires start with lightning anyway, and consider that Smokey The Bear was EVERYWHERE, omnipresent, for decades, pointing at you and warning kids that one tiny slip-up on a camping trip means Bambi's Mother Dies! -- It's a lot like our govt's monomaniacal pushing of vaccines and all the hectoring about masks and staying alone indoors for "safety"
____
Actually, re-reading this, I forgot that back then almost everybody smoked, a LOT, so there were billions of lit matches and cigarette butts flying around on a daily basis, so reminding smokers to not just toss those anywhere was a good idea. Largely futile, as well. But still, the tone is the same. In fact, maybe if Fauchi started wearing a bear suit with a 3' diameter head he could regain some credibility.
Wait, there's more! And one other big thing to consider.
I see the FDA role with Covid as beeng analogous to govennments, especially California, regulating the fire insurance market completely. Govts and politicians (In CA the Insurance Commissionar is an *elected* position with Godlike powers) are uniquely bad at judging risks, as Scott's experiences with the FDA illustrate. And they make decisions that are often politics, not safety.
The result is lots of houses are built where no rational insurer would cover, but the state forces them to underwrite, plus insane rules where houses that burn down get rebuilt in exactly the same place, and more pressure to suppress fires at all costs.
______
This is an aside, about an infuriating, deliberate weasel-word trick that is used in any and all reporting about disasters but especially fires:
"17 HOMES were destroyed as the Station fire continues to rage...." No. Seventeen HOUSES were destroyed, you cynical mendatious twits. But "HOUSE" is never, ever used. It's always HOME, for maximim emotional manipulation, and fear.
Fire burns down houses; it doesn't destroy homes.
ALCOHOLISM destroys homes.
________
The last big issue that I really need to get to finally, is there is a huge industry and infrastructure and an awful lot of people who are incentivized to make this problem worse. The fire suppression budget for Ca is over $1billion. Firefighters are widely admired, which gives them incredible clout and they have the strongest union in the state. Unions oppose any plan that would mean less work and overtime and $$$ for firefighters.
Property owners who built their houses out of sticks or straw with subsidized fire insurance expect to be protected. Politicians look effective when they are responding to crises, not so much when they quietly do the boring difficult things for years that will AVOID the crisis. That's useless to them, by their short term calculations.
So tis metaphor is crumbling, but I wanted to point out that just like the constellation of FDA, Federal government,pharma companies, health care insurers, Twitterati, and of course the 4 zillion Covid Testing companies in the COvid-Industrial complex, the Wildfires crisis has similar:
--Expensive and zealous and unrealistic goals like Zero COvid
--Regulatory agencies that have incredible powerover policy but perverse incentives and basic inability to evaluate risks, which is also their ONLY JOB (FDA, Insurance Commission, and all the CA Environmental agencies which block things like controlled burns because -- get this -- smoke from planned burns isunacceptable particulate emissions, forbidden.
--A huge $$$ industry dependent on that agency for everything they do
--A very visible group who gains lots of power and status and $$ from the crisis (firefighters)
--A whole secondary industry that is also making $$$ and wants to stay in business with the status quo.
Sorry this was so long. And I never even mentioned the obvious analogies of Covid "raging" like a "wildfire" and "burning through our population" unless we ACT RIGHT NOW but in bad and maybe counterproductive ways because there's a "fire alarm"
You don't really understand either forest fires or diseases, so your conclusions are entirely wrong.
Suppressing disease has a negative impact on its transmissibility, NOT a positive one. Prior to the modern era, epidemics happened all the time and were uncontrollable and awful. In the modern era, we've had far, far fewer epidemics than we did in the pre-modern era.
Smallpox, polio, measles, and the like only died out because of active human intervention. If diseases worked the way you want them to work, none of these epidemics would have lasted.
They did last - for thousands of years, in many cases!
The entire notion is completely wrong.
All of your beliefs are a desperate attempt to shore up your pre-existing belief (hatred of government and lockdowns).
This is transparently obvious if you spend five seconds thinking about it.
Indeed, as doctors have repeatedly noted, the more people get infected, the more chances there are of escape variants being created.
The reason for this is trivial - every infection has some chance of generating an escape variant, so the more people get infected, the more chances there are of reinfection.
Moreover, the primary driver of extremely powerful wildfires is actually desiccation and high winds. While fuel buildup is an issue, it doesn't matter how much fuel there is if it is all soaking wet. Conversely, when conditions are hot and dry and the wind is high, you have a lot of stoked flames.
Fuel buildup makes these things worse, but if you look at fire scars, we've actually seen areas in California that have reburned within just a few years, suggesting that the protective effects of previous fires is actually quite small. Indeed, wildfire prone areas in California are not random - many areas have fires on a pretty regular basis.
I think Imy comment got far too long and I lost the thread. Also, I was trying to be polite.
More clearly, I believe it would be far better if NOTHING was done. Letting fires and diseases take their natural course will end up with exactly the same amount of primary damage, without any of the staggering cost and secondary damage to eveerything else in the world. And it would be over quickly
Ever-increasing efforts to fight these things just leads to a perpetual state of crisis that enriches crisis-bureaucrats, firefighters, doctors and various wolf criers, at the expense of the whole society, and that's just the economic damage. The political fallout of letting Emergency Powers become entrenched are far worse and beyond the scope.
I would be fine with 2% of the whole population dying withing six months then it's over. As for fires, if two out of three Little Pigs lost their houses, that means a glut of bacon for the rest of us brick-dwelling wolves. We can spend our insurance rebates on pork chops.
Smallpox was around until we eradicated it with vaccines. Same goes for countless other diseases - measles, polio, chicken pox, whooping cough, etc.
Heck, we still don't have influenza under control.
Your beliefs are all false.
You just can't admit that to yourself, because the alternative is admitting that you were wrong about everything and are a baddie.
Everything you believe is a self-serving fanciful lie.
Sorry, kiddo. You aren't some freedom fighter fighting against The Evil Empire.
You just don't want to deal with that or admit that you're wrong, so you throw out literally all of science and history to throw a temper tantrum and show what a Real Man (TM) you are.
And, well, if you think it's okay to kill lots of people off...
Well, what's good for the goose is good for the gander.
> Assuming there is at least one continuous line of trees connecting (eg) Maine to Georgia, why didn’t every forest fire burn the entire East Coast to a crisp back before there were human firefighters?
uhhhhh, rain?
also having lived on the east coast, the climate is much wetter in general, to the point where live wood has enough water content to be incredibly difficult to light (even on purpose, as I can attest from my days as a Boy Scout), and any dead wood which builds up on the ground quickly becomes rotten and soggy
forest fires are rare on the East Coast, except in times/places going through truly exceptional droughts, and tend to be small localized affairs even then
Forest fires tend to be seasonally common in FL - inland, mostly - during the late spring when the area can get very very dry. Draining swampier areas for houses (and before that citrus, and before that cattle) increases the issue. It is true that the 1998 fires (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_Florida_wildfires) are the ones most closely resembling western fire events - OK smoke jumpers came down to help, and were amazed at the way dry palmettos burned. But there are still forest fires.
(Minor quibble - the Flagler county area is east-central FL, not northeast.)
there absolutely are wildfires! some friends of mine had to deal with one deep in the Virginia mountains this summer. but they don't tend to last nearly as long, or get nearly as far, as the big ones out West--the ones you linked, which are dramatic and unusual for East Coast fires, burned "only" 500,000 acres across several thousand separate fires--compare that to a single one of California's wildfires last year, which burned over a million:
I just want to point out that Oregon and Washington is also extremely wet and yet during summer forest fires can still rage. I think the rarity of fires on the East Coast is mostly due to most forests being smaller and privately managed. Huge amounts of land in western states are owned and managed by the government and in general the government is not very good at managing such land and thus it is easy for conditions to reach a critical mass where a fire is impossible to put out.
I'm in Georgia. We burn 1.4 million acres a year here, every year, on purpose. Preventing fuel accumulation (longleaf pines, which are native, need fire to live just as much as the giant sequoias do!) prevents small fires from becoming big fires.
Also, draw me a link from FL to ME that doesn't have rivers as natural fire breaks. Also, humidity, rain, etc. I actually just did my prescribed burn certification two weeks ago, so anyone can AMA on such in Georgia !
That is very good practice. Sadly it has mostly not done in the west overall. But I think my point (maybe I should call it a mitigating factor) about forest size and density still applies. Oregon is 1.6x the size of Georgia and yet has 0.4x the population of Georgia. So there are just a lot less people to go around and cultivate the land and properly manage it. Whenever these fires grow out of control, it is almost always in extremely remote areas of these western states.
But I do agree overall that these western states are now reaping the explicit policy to not do controlled burns and to prevent natural burning over the course of 40+ years. Just wanted to point out that even if these states did do controlled burns, it would be very expensive/difficult to really manage the forests well. Of course they could do what they did in the past and log a lot of it (which seems to also have helped with reducing fires, though I don't have any data to back that up), but that might result in loss of habitat for animals, so we can't do that.
>>>>>But I think my point (maybe I should call it a mitigating factor) about forest size and density still applies.
Size and ownership pattern would seem to be a likely culprit, but in the eastern US the primary controlling factors (as noted by others) are high humidity, relatively high rainfall well distributed throughout the year, and forest type (conifers are more prone to crown fire than deciduous forest due to oils/resins in the needles and growth habit).
My home county (located in Central Appalachia) is over 85% forested, with approximately 1/3 of the land base in federal ownership. Most of the counties that surround me have similar demographics, some with even higher level of forest cover and federal ownership.
We do, of course, have wildfires every year. However, outside of exceptional drought years, we typically only have a few weeks each spring and fall where weather conditions will support wildfire. In spite of our high proportion of federal land and largely contiguous forests, most of our fires can be measured in hundreds of acres, only very occasionally moving into the thousands of acres. It's completely unheard of for fires in this part of the world to reach the size of western mega fires - our weather and fuel type just won't support it. I agree that vegetation management (mismanagement?) on public lands plays a huge role in the destructive fires we're seeing in the drier western US, but it doesn't cause nearly so many problems in the east, largely due to climatic factors.
Note that everything above is predicated on the parts of the eastern US in deciduous forest. The southeastern pine ecosystems and the pyrogenic vegetation (like the Florida saw palmetto referenced above) are completely different beasts. There are some deciduous forest systems that are fire adapted, but many of the pine and pyrogenic systems are - at least to some degree - fire dependent. The reason that the local vegetation has evolved a degree of fire dependency is because the conditions and topography lend themselves to some level of recurring burning.
I didn't consider that deciduous vs coniferous trees might be a factor as well so thanks for bringing it up.
I do want to note that "except for drought years" is doing a lot of work. This is exactly what last year was in Oregon. A fire that was in an inaccessible location had been simmering for several months and in a normal year it wouldn't have caused issues. But that year was unusually dry AND a freak wind storm blew that fire and several others into epic proportions. So I do agree with another poster who basically said normally there would be small fires and then every once in a while (maybe even as rare as 1 every 100 years) conditions will be just right for a mega fire to occur.
I agree, drought certainly makes a big difference. 2016 was a historically dry year for our region, and we had a much worse fire season than normal. Even during these exceptional conditions, however, the biggest fires burned less than 30,000 acres, with about 90,000 acres being burned across 5 states. That's a really bad fire year for us, but nowhere near the scale faced in the western US.
The West also has a lot of conifers, which may be more susceptible to this sort of thing. Also worth noting that we have a strong wet/dry season; our fires are at their worst towards the end of the dry season, when things are maximally dessicated.
The really bad wildfires last year happened when the wind was blowing from inland as well, rather than off the ocean.
The south used to have more conifers, but they were logged; longleaf pine trees (adapted to need fire!) used to be the dominant southern tree, but only cover 2.5% of their historic range currently. But the southern ecosystems certainly used to be fire-centric in a way not a lot of folks recognize now.
What is with the hostility towards mask requirements? I take Rafal S. to be illustrative, though not necessarily typical. Anyway, the use of masks in public places was distinctive of a number of different east asian populations for quite a while before the current pandemic. It's not like this was an idea cooked up in an FDA boardroom or something.
In fact, the evidence that masks work has tended to overturn long-held orthodoxy vis-a-vis aerosol spread of respiratory illness; it's hardly a holdover of hidebound bureaucracy or pick your favorite dysfunction/conspiracy theory. And it makes total intuitive sense; covering your mouth when you cough has been a staple of western etiquette for much longer than I've been alive.
It's also, for what it's worth, a truly miniscule change in behavior that takes about a week to go from slightly strange to completely anodyne. And resistance is hardly universal among western countries; in Germany, there is plenty of kicking and screaming about Covid rules but as far as I can tell, comparatively little complaint about requirements to wear a mask in indoor public places.
So basically, what the heck is going on here? Why is "masking" being lumped in with lockdowns and vaccine requirements as if the two go hand in hand when in fact they're almost total opposites? Mask requirements are almost literally the least you could do, yet it's represented here as something approaching Soylent Green.
All of this can of course be said about automobiles. I think we do want to make sure we have a world where people can usually see each other, but it will make sense to have some places where people are behind glass and some places where they are behind masks. Driving is just as dystopian as wearing masks, though it's often less momentarily uncomfortable.
Driving cars inhibits facial recognition, expression, and interaction *far* more than wearing masks does. At least pedestrians wearing a mask can still see each other as human, unlike people in cars. Fortunately, cities are starting to go back to urban design that doesn't mandate the use of an automobile everywhere.
You should probably step away from this site for a few weeks if you're making posts like this. It's unkind and unnecessary to say such things even if you believe them to be 100% true.
Why is it better to get it sooner rather than later? If we're all going to get covid (whether vaccinated or not, whether previously infected or not) then the question isn't *whether* we will get covid but now how *often* we will get it. I think I'd rather live in a world where I get it on average once every five years rather than on average once every two years. Getting it sooner is usually a sign that I'm in the every two years equilibrium rather than the every five years equilibrium.
How do you feel about people who cover their nose and mouth when they cough or sneeze? Are they also doing us a disservice by lengthening our periods between infections?
I could very well believe that there's an optimal recurrence interval for infections with any given virus. I have a hard time believing that someone has figured out the right interval for each virus, or even is very confident that mask wearing brings us to too long of an interval rather than still being too short.
I don't know how effective nose covering is when coughing. Some studies say that even for TB aerosol spreading (not from coughing) may be more important than previously thought.
Evolution probably has optimized it for many things. Why the immunity against cold viruses is so short lived? Maybe because they mutate so quickly that creating full life immunity would be a waste of resources or would cause more autoimmune diseases than necessary.
It's not that it's better to get it sooner, it's that getting it sooner is a worthy tradeoff to not wear masks for the rest of our lives, given that we'll be getting it eventually anyway.
As for how often - the first case might be unpleasant, but if you're vaccinated and boosted it's nothing to be too worried about. And each subsequent case your body will be even better equipped to handle.
Would you want to wear masks for the rest of your life to prevent flu? Maybe you would, but I wouldn't.
And if you'd like to go on wearing a mask that's perfectly fine with me, but please stop forcing me to wear one.
What do you mean by "wear masks for the rest of our lives"?
If we have rules that say masks are mandatory in hospitals and airports always, and whenever flu or covid numbers get above some threshold they are mandatory in other places, and in practice that threshold is usually only crossed for a couple weeks in January, does this count as "for the rest of our lives"?
I would be perfectly happy with that. (Maybe not *perfectly* happy - there would surely be tweaks I'd prefer.)
That would be extremely different from how things were in the 2010s, but would also be extremely different from how things were in 2021 in many places. I wouldn't want the 2021-era rules that have masks being indefinitely mandatory regardless of conditions.
"Wear masks for the rest of our lives" was a bit of a dramatic statement, but let me clarify where I would draw the line.
Hospitals should be able to make their own decision on whether masks are required within their own establishment. (Presumably some places in the hospital would require them and some would not. Where they are required they ought to be provided free of charge.)
Airports (as in the buildings), being essentially public utilities, probably should not be able to require masks. On airplanes, since there's more choice, perhaps it's okay for an airline to require masks so long as they provide them for free. Although wearing masks on airplanes isn't very important anyways, since they have such good air filtration systems.
As for general mandates based on covid/flu thresholds, I'm strongly against that. People who are concerned about covid/flu can wear a mask for themself when they feel the need.
Generally the principle is no state requirements, only private or individual choice.
Wearing them for a few weeks in January during the flu peak has little benefit, since it just drags out that year's epidemic longer, but does little to reduce the total case count.
Given the spread of disease, COVID but also almost certainly other diseases, through breathing of people who may seem healthy but are in fact shedding disease, it's pretty clearly ALWAYS necessary.
I'm willing to accept that some cultures simply don't care about externalities: if you're dumping disease everywhere and getting everyone else sick, that's their problem and even the slightest inconvenience to you is an unacceptable tradeoff. But that's not how American society treats a lot of other public-health issues, such as drug abuse.
No part of this reasoning would not also apply to never going to a restaurant or a concert or a school. Other people simply do not have the extreme risk intolerance and dehumanization-through-eternal-masking tolerance that you have.
You can help me shed light on the question: What about wearing a mask is "dehumanizing"? We should keep in mind that millions of humans did it all the time, long before COVID-19 existed. Beyond commuters in Taipei we could also name surgeons, carpenters, and workers in auto body shops or semiconductor fabs. They all wear masks for most of their workdays, for EXACTLY the same reason people wear masks in grocery stores now.
Boy, I dunno. In my metro area ICUs are at capacity so they are recommending staying away from hospitals if at all possible. Don’t have a serious accident. Don’t have a heart attack. Don’t get a case of Covid that requires an ICU bed. Masks could help with the last one.
The more infections there are, the more people will get COVID, the more frequently they will get COVID, and the more people will die of COVID.
The reality is that your belief is a thin rationalization for an underlying disturbance which has resulted in you developing antisocial beliefs and personality traits.
Your beliefs are obviously false, which even five seconds of thought would demonstrate, as would even a casual familiarity with disease evolution - or heck, simply looking at present disease variants, and noting how they are originating in places which are highly susceptible to disease.
It appears that all people are getting covid in the UK regardless. And it is clear that death rates are going down considerably since the start of the pandemic. Mostly due to vaccinations and previous infections. It would help if you explained how these parts are wrong instead of just hand waving that they are wrong.
I think there's a range of feelings about masks. For a non-social thing like grocery shopping, I think most people don't particularly mind them. But for things like school and offices, they do a lot to interfere with both speaking and the kinds of social interaction through facial gestures that people tend to have. When there's a *requirement* to wear the masks in *all* indoor public spaces, people who dislike those few cases enough will then react against the use of masks in any context.
I hope we end up with a norm of masks being around, but usually not required, with local officials giving specific recommendations when respiratory virus cases get higher, and possibly even requirements but only at very high spikes.
That's facially reasonable but doesn't explain why so many other cultures adopted mask wearing well before the current predicament as something approaching a social norm, since those other cultures also rely on facial cues and so on. I'm not confused by the theory here, I'm confused by the observations we have.
Thank you for pointing that out. My understanding is that people would wear masks when they were sick as a courtesy to others. But there was never a norm for everyone to wear a mask in all indoor locations.
I'm interested in how *much* of a social norm it has been. In 2015, in Hong Kong or Tokyo, what fraction of people in a grocery store, or in a school, would have been wearing a mask on a random day, or at the height of flu season?
It would not shock me that people could easily get used to an organically grown social norm of wearing a mask 10-30% of relevant circumstances, but would react against a legal mandate of wearing one 100% of relevant circumstances.
Joshua M above seems to think the objection is only to *always* wearing a mask. And I'm not sure if it's charitable or uncharitable to read someone who is objecting to anyone ever being expected to wear a mask in ordinary public spaces as just having an overreaction in the opposite direction. It seems to me that a natural emotional reaction to being asked to do something in many circumstances where it's clearly unnecessary will end up with the person refusing to do it in any circumstance where they have a choice, even if it would be very reasonable to do it then.
Not to jump to conclusions, but I think most of this family of points of view boils down to some flavor of "COVID isn't that bad, don't be such a pussy".
I would not object to long term voluntary masking in 30% of environments. I do however object strongly to my toddler being required to mask all day. And since we have proven as a society that the only settings we can accommodate are ‘all’ or ‘nothing,’ I choose nothing
At daycare. County regulations for ages two and up. Also on flights, per federal regulations. My having to wear a mask is annoying. My two year old having to, is infuriating.
I expect to be a single issue voter opposed to all covid restrictions for the foreseeable future. I would in fact favor sensible restrictions. But those are not on the table.
> we have proven as a society that the only settings we can accommodate are ‘all’ or ‘nothing,’
citation needed
We don't choose all or nothing for speed limits, we don't choose all or nothing for wearing heavy jackets, we don't choose all or nothing for wearing seatbelts (you'll notice that there are seatbelts in personal cars but not in public buses). In the first year of a new behavior, some people find it impossible to choose anything other than all or nothing for masks, but people in East Asia proved that yes, it's actually very easy for society to adapt to an equilibrium where masks are nowhere near all or nothing.
Yes but on this topic and in our society those seem to be the only options. If the rule makers show they can be trusted to make sensible rules I will shift my position. So far they have not.
I think the GP was talking about settings for mandates, not settings for behavior. Speed limits are a good counterexample to that, jackets not at all (I don't know of anyplace mandating people wear winter jackets), and seatbelts are borderline (the distinctions we have seem to be grandfathered and not indicative of us being able to create such a ruleset from scratch, or even to keep such a ruleset updated when gains or costs change).
In 2017 in Seoul, off flu season, I'd estimate 1%. However, black masks were a fashion item for kids because kpop, so for them, maybe cloth masks with designs were 5, maybe as high as 10%.
Definitely SARS primed things, and people were ready to adopt them again. But also more random events like masked celebrities can drive regional differences.
I used to think Asia was different because of SARS, and we'd look the same after a year. But more and more it's clear I was wrong. The experience of "beating" SARS with masks in the toolkit probably was more galvanizing than "facing waves and waves of covid" with masks in the toolkit, which is much more demoralizing, even if they reduce spread by some amount.
Nah, I just find masks uncomfortable. They make it harder to breathe. Whenever I take off the mask, it feels like... well, a breath of fresh air. Perhaps some people mind them less and others more, but it's not just about seeing people's faces.
- mildly to moderately annoying to a lot of people, even if it isn't to you personally--I don't enjoy having to always remember another thing in my pockets if I want to get into buildings, nor do I enjoy wearing cloth over my face for any length of time, nor do I enjoy missing out on facial cues from the people I'm trying to communicate with, especially when the mask makes it harder to hear them in the first place
- mostly observed as a symbolic ritual--everywhere I've been with a mask mandate requires them on entering buildings, but then people are free to pull them down to eat, or drink, or blow their noses, or fix their makeup.... and I've not been to a single place that enforces proper wearing or fitting of masks, or even promotes N95 type masks (which probably provide some protection to the wearer when worn correctly) over cloth/paper (which likely provide little protection to anyone)
- clearly never going to last forever-- who in 2031, or 2041, or 2051 is going to be wearing masks in buildings to protect themselves against the 2019 Covid?
it doesn't baffle me at all why some people are so vehemently pro-mask, but surely it shouldn't be that much of a surprise that other people don't like them
To the symbolic ritual point, that would suggest you'd be in favor of stricter enforcement, not that you'd be against them entirely.
And to be clear about my own point of view, I think "moderately annoying" would be a good description of my own feelings: slightly more of a pain than taking out the trash, vastly less than sitting in rush hour traffic. Neither of those count as intolerable tyranny.
I have been to a lot of places that tried the "stricter enforcement", and every one of them descended to the "symbolic ritual" level within months--it turns out that you can't just stop people from eating, drinking, or blowing their noses, and once you allow those exemptions, you don't have much else to stand on. I do agree that if we "have" to have mandates anyway, we might as well have them for masks that might work, but I know of nowhere that is doing that.
I agree that it's not some kind of horrible, intolerable tyranny for most people (except perhaps kids in school, for whom it is far from the first) but well, you asked why people don't like masks, and you've been given a bunch of reasons, and I'm sorry that none of them meets your personal standard for "good reasons", but clearly they meet other people's.
I didn't ask why people don't like masks. I asked why a person like Rafal would lump in mask requirements with lockdowns and pose the two as alternative to mass vaccination, and why others might view that perspective as logical as opposed to deeply weird.
N95 masks are legitimately hard to wear correctly, and if worn incorrectly they are not especially useful. Enforcement of proper use of N95s is a non-starter.
"who in 2031, or 2041, or 2051 is going to be wearing masks in buildings to protect themselves against the 2019 Covid?"
Presumably the same people who in 2015 or 2018 or whatever were wearing masks to protect themselves against the 2003 SARS (and then realized that it was good for colds and flus too). That is, something like 10-20% of the population, and perhaps more people for smaller fractions of time.
I'm not at all clear who or where this portion of the population is--if you're talking about East Asian nations, yes there absolutely is/was a norm of people wearing masks voluntarily as a precaution against seasonal illness, and I know of nobody anywhere who has any problem with that.
And yet, you just said something that indicated that you think *no one* would be wearing masks in 2031. Some people in this thread (like NoPie) are definitely arguing that people *shouldn't* wear masks, because they make us go too long between infections.
1. if we're being pedantic, im sure the amount of people wearing masks decades from now will be greater than zero--I'm also sure it will be far less than now, that few to none of them will be wearing them to defend against Covid19 (whatever it has evolved to by then) in specific, and that perhaps outside of weird legacy rules in airports or courthouses or whatever, they will not be wearing those masks because it's mandatory
2. that's a bizarre and nonsensical take which is why i did not make or defend it
I think I agree on all of these points. The biggest question is just how much "far less than now" is (and presumably that will fluctuate from season to season, year to year, and place to place).
"who in 2031, or 2041, or 2051 is going to be wearing masks in buildings to protect themselves against the 2019 Covid?"
Who in 2021 is going to be taking off his shoes when going through airport security?
The answer to both is a lot different when you are talking about what free people do in response to the threats of the day and what bureaucracies impose. Yes, the latter *sometimes* goes away, but that's not the way to bet. (And yes, bureaucracies have imposed masking and shutdowns and then relaxed them -- but they have also then reimposed them, and every time it's easier.)
i fully expect that (again, possibly outside of some weird holdouts like airports) all this will go away, because we're already at the point where almost nobody is willing to even consider mass shutdowns (good!), where many places have either relaxed mask requirements or quietly dropped them, and the rest are entirely and openly symbolic, and where it's becoming increasingly clear to everyone that Covid will be around for the rest of our lives, and our various overreactions will be around for as long as we're willing to put up with them
with every new wave and mutation that shows up, the efficacy of the last round of precautions gets a little harder to believe, and the promises of "this will only last a short time" get less plausible, and there's simply no way to gain back the inertia for those who would have us return to Zoom school or handing meals outside the restaurant through improvised hatches or locking away the elderly for their own good
Might be true for variants of Covid-19. But the precedent has been set. You don’t have to look hard to find someone talking about it as practice for dealing with climate change.
That's fair, but A) the misanthropic fantasies of a handful of internet weirdos are not necessarily the best predictors of future reality, and B) the fact that these dramatic measures have so publicly and clearly failed will make it harder to get people to go along with them in the future. Afghanistan and Iraq had huge support at the time, but since they turned into endless disasters, how many small, strategically located nations have American forces invaded?
No way to prove that they have “clearly failed”; believers can always claim it would have been much worse without them. If they have “clearly failed” how come they’re cranking them up again now?
I heard an interesting NPR piece a few weeks back about the difficulties of a teacher in Chicago high school class for English language learners- the masks and the noise of the air filtration unit make it much harder for her and her students to understand each other.
In my experience, conversations between people one of whom speaks English as a second language, or has an accent which is unfamiliar to the other person, are noticeably harder if they're wearing masks. I don't consciously lip-read, so I don't know whether it's the loss of unconscious visual cues or the mask muffling speech.
I’m getting on in years and for me it’s both. Don’t know about school kids, I suppose, but I would bet it’s true there as well. And so much about learning life depends on facial expressions.
Do mask mandates reduce R0 of covid below 1? If not, then won't covid spread throughout the most of the population eventually?
So, maybe I'm wrong about this, but it seems that the only purpose mask mandates serve is to slow the spread of the disease and reduce acute burden on hospitals.
So the question is whether the tradeoff of negative utility due to unpleasantness of wearing masks or negative utility due to increased hospital burden during spikes of spread is greater.
Although I am convinced that masks have some efficacy, I am not convinced that the mandates are worth the tradeoff. For one thing, even without a mandate many people will still wear masks and they will still confer some benefit to society.
Ultimately though this is going to come down to what are right now subjective takes on how unpleasant masks are. Personally I strongly dislike them, they interfere with conversation, reading people's faces, working out at the gym, etc.
Side point, why can't you just wear a more effective mask for protecting yourself, like an N95 or N100? Most of the people I know in favor of mask mandates still wear marginally effective cloth masks or surgical masks.
As far as mandates go, you have to keep in mind the game theory. Smoking ban in restaurants, for example, have to be imposed on everyone; if each restaurant is free to choose for themselves, none of them can afford to impose a marginal inconvenience on their customers, but if all of them are required to do it, it has zero cost on anyone but the smokers, who are only slightly inconvenienced anyway. Similar logic applies here.
This isn't actually true about smoking bans, though. In my hometown by the time the ban came in there was only one restaurant that allowed smoking. The taboo was already strong by that point. The ban merely served to enforce what the majority of people wanted on everyone.
I think you've misunderstood my point. I don't believe that in the absence of government mask mandates there should be mask mandates by private establishments (e.g. restaurants). I agree with your conclusion on how the game theory works out here. I don't want private establishments to require people to require masks.
I would prefer that masking be an individual choice.
As for whether the game theory works out on the individual level - I have spent a lot of time in a place where there are no mask mandates at a government or private level. Many people still choose to wear masks, though most don't. That's fine with me.
*Masking* in restaurants seem somewhat meaningless since you remove them to eat, but I can say that I would happily patronize whichever coffee shop in my area decided to mandate vaccines (and even pay a couple dollars extra), and would at least favor restaurants that did that , though they're usually less fungible. Alas, none do because our governor banned it here in Texas.
The "pay extra" camp might be small, but I know *a lot* of people would prefer the "vaccine required" option if available. It might not outweigh the % unvaccinated yet, but depends on your clientele.
Agreed on letting the market figure things out. I on the other hand, would pay a little extra to not have to do the silly mask dance, and to not have to pull up the vaccine card on my phone for the millionth time to do a daily activity.
Maybe I should move to Texas and you should move to the west coast :D
Allowing smokers is an inconvenience for many non-smokers (who dislike smoke), just like banning smoking is an inconvenience for smokers. If there is a significant portion of the population with either preference, the equilibrium outcome should be that some restaurants cater to one preference, and some to the other one. If every other restaurant allows smoking, then a restaurant that bans it gains more from the non-smokers who will prefer it than it loses from losing the smokers.
I personally get the intuitive argument and multiplicative effect of even imperfect masks reducing transmission when most people wear them indoors. Fine. But I am friends with "anti-maskers" and understand where they come from.
I think there are a few things.
Part of it is a symbolic/aesthetic thing, a reaction to the forceful pushing and the other refusing to submit. It may be necessary, but the messaging around is ugh. They might be necessary, but why put them on every statue, every illustration? The NYC subway ads for masks, if you've seen them, are particularly repugnant..
Part of it is, who and when and where and how much. Should i glue it to my 2-yead-old's ears when in public? Outside too? At the playground? For 8 hours in school/daycare? People will talk about the issues of rebreathing, impeding verbal development via facial expression, etc. I can't speak to those.... But I don't relish having my kids masked everywhere, all the time.
A final part is, it is aesthetically, viscerally displeasing. Someone close to me calls them "muzzles". I know many very very pro mask people who still have a hard time keeping them on in social settings, because in our culture its unnatural and weird (and hard to understand what people say).
1) The evidence that the typical fabric masks worn by the public are effective in the real world is basically non-existent. Actual experiments have not shown a statistically significant effect.
I will freely admit that being forced to wear a mask makes me extremely angry, to the point of becoming an obstreperous and loudly arguing lout, which is not my usual manner.
Once while on call at the hospital I heard a young child loudly screaming as his parents were physically forcing a mask on his face, while also loudly screaming at him "You will wear a mask!!!". At that time there was no requirement for small children to be masked, so maybe I could have intervened, but then, it's not my job. I felt sorrow at the suffering and anger. I got angry. I walked away.
They said they will have me marked down on the no-fly-list if I don't immediately obey and put the piece of trash they gave me on my face. I was angry but couldn't walk away. I obeyed.
I saw pictures of Fauci wearing a mask while pitching a baseball, in the middle of the field where no viral transmission takes place but immediately taking it off while hanging out with friends. I read his leaked email where he wrote masks were useless but then I kept hearing about my duty to "save others" by wearing them. Did I mention I get angry a lot when masks are mentioned?
A tiny harm to self looms larger than large harms to others. I was never locked down. I worked 359 nights last year. The loss and suffering that lockdowns inflicted on others never affected me. I signed up for the vaccine on the first date it was offered at the hospital, so a vaccine mandate never affected me either. But every time I see a patient, I feel like a clown because I am wearing a mask, and that hurts me, every day, many times. The anger builds.
I am not into BDSM. If I were bound and masked, I would feel anger, because being bound and masked is dehumanizing and humiliating. So, no, I am not into BDSM.
Last week I stormed out of a restaurant, angry, when they demanded I put on a mask while walking away from my table, because they had to "protect other people" (who were busily expelling millions of aerosol droplets while masticating and talking), from my filthy, unmasked presence.
"I’m having trouble figuring out how to analyze this point. After thinking about it, maybe the problem is I don’t have a good sense of why fires ever stop. Assuming there is at least one continuous line of trees connecting (eg) Maine to Georgia, why didn’t every forest fire burn the entire East Coast to a crisp back before there were human firefighters?"
Having grown up on the west coast in a heavily wooded region, I remember learning about this in school. So I might have the details wrong, but this is what I remember.
Namely, fires keep on spreading until they
a) run across a natural roadblock they can't cross like a wide river or very tall mountain, an area that already burned fairly recently and had no fuel, or the ocean
b) the weather changes (rain, cool temperatures, etc) and it puts the fire out
c) it runs out of fuel.
This means that in many regions you'd have smaller fires fairly regularly that would burn slow but steady until the weather turned, and occasionally you'd have super fires that would spread thousands of miles and burn huge tracts of land before running into natural barriers and burning themselves out. The super fires tended to occur rarely, when there was enough fuel on the ground that hadn't burned and you got the perfect conditions for a huge burn (hot, dry, and high winds).
So that natural state of things for large, heavily forested regions in nature is for there to be some slow burning ground fires pretty much every summer that last until it rains, and the occasional really big fire. See for example the "Big Burn" of 1910 where three million acres of forest were burned to ashes in less than two days. The cause was a drought and unusually long dry spell. This led to many small slow burning fires like normal, but then one day hurricane force winds hit the region and whipped all the small fires into one huge inferno. It didn't really stop until a cold front moved in with lots of snow.
This is normal. Many times I've visited "The Grove of the Patriarchs" at Mt. Rainier National Park where some of the oldest trees in the region grow (some over 1,000 years old and 40 feet in diameter). The reason given for why they've survived so long is that they're on an island in the middle of the Ohanapacosh river, and apparently are situated just right to have survived all the megafires over the last 1,000 years.
This is all correct for much of the western US, where, in general: humidity is lower, rainfall amounts are lower and often seasonally distributed, vegetation type is more prone to crown fires. In the eastern US, however, we have enough wet weather that we don't end up with huge fuel buildups, and in general the precipitation is distributed throughout the year. It's just a very different ecological system that behaves very differently.
Endemic diseases, avalanches, earthquakes, forest fires, and probably a million other things exhibit "self-organized criticality". You've got some thing that, if it happens, wants to spread to nearby units, but is more likely to spread to nearby units that haven't had it in a while. (An infection is more likely in a person with waning immunity than fresh immunity; the snow on a square inch of mountain slope is more likely to slide if there's several days of fresh snowfall on top than if it just slid; a bit of rock is more likely to slip if it's got more built up tension than if it's just been released; a square mile of forest is more likely to burn if it's got several years of unburnt underbrush than if it just burnt.) When you have lots of buildup and no immunity, so that R>1 everywhere in the network, then a spark anywhere burns/pandemics/avalanches everything. When you've got lots of immunity and no buildup, and the system is everywhere near some particular R<1, then your average outbreak infects 1/(1-R) total people before dying out. But when the average R in the system is close to 1, a lot will depend on the detailed network structure, and outbreaks/avalanches/earthquakes/forest fires can end up of any size, with a power law distribution of sizes, but on average they still leave most of the system right near that margin of 1 (unlike pandemics or global conflagrations).
I guess respiratory diseases and forest fires in temperate zones have lots of seasonality, so if they spend a lot of time far enough from 1 in either direction, then the fire season/flu season will end up having a characteristic size each year (proportional to the amount of immunity that is lost in the summer/winter while seasonality suppresses flu/fire). But earthquakes don't get this periodic forcing, so they stay near the critical edge.
Except that your thinking and everyone else's thinking on seasonality is wrong. Or rather it is fine but likely irrelevant, since this is a bioengineered lab-created virus. If this were Your virus, would you have made it seasonal? Maybe somewhat just to fool people. Let's remember that bioweapons do their best damage when they tie up resources and demoralize everyone and the more the better. Nevertheless, there will be some seasonality due to humidity, which is the primary cause of all seasonality. This virus was also engineered to accept add-on modules to be released down the road. People call it a "coronavirus" but it is much more. We need to adjust our thinking.
How would you go about designing a respiratory virus to *prevent* seasonal influences on its spread? Or am I wrong in thinking that it's a respiratory virus too?
You'd design it to be less susceptible to desiccation/humidity mitigated spread. Virion size would be one simple way. Aerosols can loft for many days, even cross over oceans.
Because 60% of covid is aerosolized, masks do not work at any significant level and there are many physical and psychological and societal harms as noted in the German study:
-Increase in breathing resistance
-Increase in blood carbon dioxide
-Decrease in blood oxygen saturation
-Increase in heart rate
-Decrease in cardiopulmonary capacity
-Feeling of exhaustion
-Increase in respiratory rate
-Difficulty breathing and shortness of breath
-Headache
-Dizziness
-Feeling of dampness and heat
-Drowsiness
-Decrease in empathy perception
-Impaired skin barrier function with acne, itching and skin lesions
PLUS the additional control and coercion slave mentality effect:
-Leads to oxygen deprivation, promoting a state of physical and mental weakness
-Are symbols of submission used as part of master-slave dynamics
-Enforces the creation of a incarceration culture
-Erases personhood and homogenizes the masses — “The collectivized wearing of masks results in an enforced uniformity in which the individual cedes way to the nameless collectivity as the neo-meta citizen.”
-Are theatrical and act to conceal identities, rendering us alien to others and ourselves
-Deletes facial expressions and inhibit nonverbal communication, including that necessary for social organization that can lead to revolution
-Reduces verbal output
-Are visible displays of allegiance to the “system of medicalizing technocratic control”
-Are part of preparing individuals for new societal roles — “However transitory the current regime of face masking might be, the population must face that we are being forced to undergo a rite of passage, a process of re-socialization into the new normal.”
-Promote a culture of fear - which makes you obey without asking questions.
-Act as deterrents of solidarity by making your neighbor into a “nameless pathogenic vector instead of your ally”
The minimum infective dose comes in the sides, tops and bottom (18% of mask airflow). A bit more goes right through the filter medium like a football through goalposts.
We all need to just get the virus and get on with it. Do the well-known by now 100% effective multi-treatment protocols and forget about it.
Once you get it, it's over. There is no known case of re-infection although there can be plenty of still positive PCR tests. That statement on the impossibility of reinfection is based on 135 studies, according to Dr. Peter McCullough who has published over 40 peer-reviewed covid studies, more than anyone else.
Remember the IFR is only 0.14% compared to the Flu at 0.1%, so we can ignore it, unless you are fat, the number one comorbidity because fat cells have the IL-6 cytokine which is what this engineered coronavirus leads with (unlike any other of the coronaviruses) to kill you dead. More fat is more IL-6, so you don't have to be obese to be at serious risk, just fat.
People should break out of their covid hypnosis and focus instead on the steroidal march of global tyranny, which those who have experienced it say it's far worse than death so "Live Free or Die" should be your motto. We need to be prepared to sacrifice everything as those before us have done in their turn.
Note that 90 countries are developing a Central Bank Digital Currency. When this is hooked to your Vaccine Passport ("Papers please.") it is all over. If your file is not in order then no access allowed to your government held bank account. No compliance, no food. Whereas in the past we reserved our rights and could do anything that was not specifically against the law, now we can do nothing unless it is allowed.
Yes, quite sure of no 2nd infection, as much as anyone can be sure of anything in this post-truth reality.
I've heard of cases but they were wrong, due to false positive PCR tests and mistaking it for the flu, which the PCR test cannot differentiate from covid.
Also those who had SARS-Cov-1 in 2003 are now immune to SARS-Cov-2 even though the genomes are 30% different. The most variable of the previous SARS-COV-2 variants (but possibly not including the newer Omicron variant) were all only about 0.3% variable.
Natural immunity accounts for all five viral proteins whereas the so-called vaccines only remember the S1 toxic spike protein, which is easily mutated around.
Dr. Peter McCullough stated so in no uncertain terms during his recent Joe Rogan interview - one of the best wide-ranging covid interviews yet. Hard to find if no Spotify, but here it is anyway:
That interview is 2 hours and 45 minutes of gold and Joe, who is highly intelligent, asks perfectly relevant questions. Make some popcorn and settle in. According to Dr. McCullough the S1 spike protein stays in your system (doing damage) for 15 months and the vaccine produces far more toxic S1 proteins than you'd get from the virus.
The vaccine is more toxic than the virus and a rational person would prefer the virus over the vaccine - regardless of risk group. Elsewhere I've read the vaccine:virus kill rate is 2:1 for under 20 year-olds and 6:1 for 80 year-olds. This is using a 4.5 underreporting factor for the VAERS data.
If the conspiracy you're alleging could coordinate as well as you are accusing them of, they wouldn't need to release a virus, bio-engineered or no, to form their NWO. They'd just do it.
Stalin, Hitler, and the Inquisition all did that by force, and lynch mobs just use Force, too. But those are messy; it's much easier if you induce acquiescence with the big lie, especially when going global. 9/11 set us up for the militarized police surveillance State, and covid is cover for totalitarianism.
As Chomsky said in 1988, the mainstream media is the propaganda arm of the Rich and Powerful - so you won't hear anything in the media about concentration camps for the unvaxxed or non mask wearers, or about any vaccine deaths: https://openvaers.com/
You miss the point. There would be no need for force. What you are describing isn't "an evil scheme to take absolute control over the world", you are describing a group that ALREADY HAS absolute control over the world, leaves no traces of its existence, and can coordinate on a level that resembles eusociality instead of human behavior. To put it politely, this stains credibility.
I'm certain you believe that there are concentration camps being formed to kill all the people who refuse to wear masks, and I feel very sorry for you for believing that. Your life must be nightmarish.
It was not that long ago that the Nazis put people into concentration camps for far less than not wearing a mask.
You have taken the blue pill and are experiencing cognitive dissonance. But remember it is the red pill that is the true reality, and the blue pill is the delusion.
They do not have absolute control just yet. In 2017, according to Oxfam data, the top 1% took 82% of global income. That leaves 18% still on the table.
The problem is the massive concentration of both income and power inequality. We talk about income inequality and forget about the power inequality. A Swiss complexity scientist determined that 0.12% of Corporations control 80% of transnational corporations. Specifically, these controllers at the top of the Pyramid and astride the world are Vanguard Fund, Black Rock, and State Street. They have ownership interest in just about everything, for example, they own 90% of the Legacy Media and they also own Pharma. Ownership means control and that's how they manage their portfolio. Their Media is not allowed to criticize their Pharma. The New York Times lies to your face constantly.
The world has undergone what social psychologists call a mass formation, or a mass psychosis, as seen in Stalinism, 1930s Germany, the Inquisition and their witch trials, and on a local level, with lynch mobs. This is very definitely happening now and it's really quite amazing that only about 10% of the population sees it, because it is right in front of them.
The unholy concentration of global wealth and power has been accruing for some time, but it has now reached a Tipping Point. There are four requirements for totalitarianism and we currently have them all. We have also experienced all 10 historical phases leading to totalitarianism according to Naomi Wolf.
You of the blue pill tribe are being played. That is why what should be an obvious truth strains your credulity. Because you've been programmed to keep yourself inside your box. Did you watch those videos that prove that governments are creating isolation camps? No you did not, why? Are you afraid to examine your unexamined assumptions?
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so. “ – Mark Twain
We are continually being dosed by exterior programming from our self-selected media, and that is coordinated with the prior programs that have created our unexamined assumptions. We are being led around by the nose from both directions.
The best way I know to do an end-run around both programs are to do your own research, read the studies, look at the actual data, and listen to interviews with the smart people. All that is not easy for the average person who prefers to believe their media and leave it at that. The average in-denial person, who has a below-average IQ, is ruled by availability and confirmation biases.
What you first need to do to get back to reality is to realize that you are in a mass psychosis. For that you need to view this excellent interview with Professor Desmet.
A lot of the things you cite are real problems, but I think connecting them into a grand conspiracy is not indicated by the evidence and in particular "SARS-CoV-2 was released on purpose" doesn't really add up.
We know from the genetic sequence and also Dr. Steven Quay's Senate testimony and his 193-page Bayesian analysis that this virus was lab-created (99.8% probability). We know gain-of-function is funded by psychopaths in the Chinese military and the US Military because they love bio-weapons. We know there’s no vector for disease transmission, the disease presents with unusual symptoms, China does not want anyone in there investigating the outbreak, and that bioweapons are loved because their release has plausible deniability.
Why would anyone intentionally create a bio-weapon if they were not going to intentionally release it?
Have you heard interviews with Dr. Li-Meng Yan, a Chinese corona virologist?
She asserts: that China seeks to develop a race-based bio-weapon that targets and eliminates some human races while leaving other human races unharmed, that COVID-19 is a part of a larger, more comprehensive unrestricted bioweapons program, that the People’s Liberation Army’s official bioweapons textbook asserts World War III would be fought with biological weapons, that modifications to the virus are designed to appear as if they occur in nature, that gaslighting with unrelenting misinformation, obfuscation and denial should follow a release, that the world is living the intentional modification, release and contrived narrative around what ultimately is an attack by the Communist Chinese Party, and that CCP money and threats to withhold funding coerced the international academic world into spreading a false narrative (corroborated by Professor Emeritus Muller's Senate testimony after Stephen Quay's Senate testimony https://tinyurl.com/428559x5), and that the coronavirus has been engineered to accept add-on modules for future deployment that will keep the ball rolling.
Chinese military strategy is all about deception and sneak attack. If you believe that World War 3 will be fought with bioweapons, wouldn't you start that war at a strategically propitious time rather than wait for your adversaries to start it at a time of their choosing?
Dr. David Martin (who has examined 100s of Coronavirus & Covid Vaccine patents), reveals that many patents had been taken before this pandemic;
The CCP is heavily invested in big Pharma and the primary movement of Chinese-style totalitarianism has occurred in the Western countries. The fact of the matter is that an intelligent intentional release has greatly benefited China in many ways.
Note that the CCP and the global deep state of the Rich and Famous are hand-in-hand. Both seek to control you and do not care about you whatsoever. You'd certainly serve them best by being a Slave.
Let's all pull our heads out of the sand and realize that we have entered the Era of Bioterrorism. - and that totalitarianism will follow "to keep us safe," just as the militarized police surveillance State followed 911 to keep us safe.
Each accelerated the transfer of wealth and control from the People to the globalized rich and powerful astride the world, including those of the CCP. Was that a coincidence? If so, that transfer of wealth has been coincidentally happening for decades. What we are seeing is not random; global inequality and governmental control of the People only goes in One Direction, it always gets worse, which means that it is planned.
The global rich and Powerful, the elite, are comprised of many Psychopaths, which means they have no empathy. When they do wrong and kill people, they do not care and do not feel stress, unlike you and I. So don't judge them by the standards of average people. Psychopaths know that conspiracies are real because they create them.
Note that believing the release was Not intentional is also a "conspiracy theory," a term developed to gaslight you by the CIA to quash speculation about the JFK assassination. There most definitely is a global conspiracy rolling out, and part of that conspiracy is to program you to disbelieve in conspiracies.
The intentional release of this bioweapon - and not the unintentional release - by China should be considered the null hypothesis. Although neither can yet be proven, the intentional release seems to have the greater preponderance of the evidence (greater than a 50% probability.
Once you consider it the null hypothesis, things make a bit more sense and you can see farther.
And by the way, I never did actually state that "SARS-CoV-2 was released on purpose," but whatever.
Little bit of tension between masks being so impermeable they cause suffocation while simultaneously allowing virus particles three orders of magnitude larger than oxygen to pass unimpeded.
Not suffocation, just decreased oxygen. Imagine many thousands of oldsters driving around with masks and not getting their required amount of oxygen.
Further distress is caused by sky-high CO2 (2150 ± 192 to 2875 ± 323 ppm, about 5 times higher than normal) causing fatigue, headache, and loss of concentration.
(As an aside, note that ambient CO2 has increased from 385 PPM to 415 ppm over the past 60 years. At the current rate of CO2 increase it will take 195 years to get up to 800 PPM, which humans would not notice at all and plants would love as greenhouses are often at kept at 1000 ppm. CO2 scrubbers in submarines turn on at 8000 ppm. Therefore CO2 caused climate change is yet another non-scientific media hoax designed to transfer wealth from the poor to the rich and powerful. Everyone should be trying to increase their carbon footprint to benefit plants and food production. Doubling CO2 to 800 PPM will double plant growth.)
For a mask to work properly as an antiviral you need to superglue it down, but you'd quite possibly suffocate. But why do that for a virus with an IFR of 0.14% compared to the Flu at 0.1%?
If I were inclined to seriously debate this fellow more, I'd also point out that on-call surgeons have worn surgical masks for very long periods of time before COVID without these apocalyptic side-effects they want to claim- unless they also want to assert that "They" covered this up for nearly a century to prep for this very moment.
Surgeons wear surgical masks for two reasons: to stop surgical spatter from hitting their face and to keep spittle away from the surgical incision, and not in an attempt to mitigate viral transmission. That's why BSL4 virologists do not wear surgical masks. Surgeons absolutely do get headaches from wearing these masks as multiple studies have found.
"Continuous use of face masks and respirators has resulted in a variety of symptoms of which headache forms a major part by all healthcare professionals as well as the patients." They call it a silent epidemic.
(Be sure to check the entertaining video of two PhDs loudly arguing about mask efficacy - one of them makes a fool out of himself with his handwaving, like Essex.)
I will yield on headaches, but what you've claimed is much more severe than "some headaches". And you still haven't unraveled the mystery of the masks preventing oxygen from getting through while letting something much larger than oxygen through completely unhindered. But what am I saying? You don't seem to have much of an obligation to the truth when it doesn't fit your eccentric bias.
It strikes me as interesting that immunity tends to wane on the order of a year, and that lines up with the seasonal variation in R0. Any idea why the evolutionary equilibrium would find this timeline for immunity wane as optimal?
It's much more obvious when they line up and you get an epidemic every winter like clockwork. Much less so when it's way off and you get a chaotic system where spikes might happen at any time of year.
If the immunity wanes over any period longer than 1 year you see this, assuming that the waning is a gradual process rather than some unnatural binary - you only fail to see seasonality if the immunity wanes much faster, within a few months. I assume the evolutionary equilibrium for immunity varies with a lot of factors, but the difference between immunity lasting 2 years and lasting 20 won't show up in seasonality
Can someone give intuition for why it must be that way? This seems like the crucial bit.
EDIT: ok, it makes sense that conditioned on the fact that the disease stays around, its R_t must be 1 on average. But doesn't that require careful tuning of R_0, how quickly immunity wanes and the length of the infection cycle?
If it is greater than 1 on average it takes over, everyone gets it and it never goes away (if it did the average would drop). If it is less than 1 on average then it trends towards extinction.
rather like the way the population of turtles in a specific pond, say, will tend to average out over the same number over a long enough period of time, at least as long as the rest of the ecosystem is reasonably stable
I think the key here is that any tuning that occurs happens in equilibrium. The speed at which immunity wanes and the length of the infection cycle are (conditional on variant) probably fixed (and exogenous). Then human behavior and medicine and regulatory intervention step in and respond endogenously to "tune" the average rt to 0 (extinction) to 1 (endemic, with waves as shorter run rt vacillates around 1) or to some number above 1 (where we all always have it and I have no idea how to define rt in that setting as "infection" isn't a discrete event anymore).
There is a negative feedback. If more people get it, there is more immunity in the population, so r decreases. If few people catch it for a while, immunity wanes, so r increases.
So the properties of the disease and of the human immune system need not be perfectly calibrated for r to stay at 1 on average on the long run; the feedback system does it.
As far as forests and population immunity, Taleb address this in Anti-Fragile. An anti-fragile system is one that gains from disorder. Small, frequent fires burn off fuel whereas modern forest management interrupts the natural order and allows huge amounts to accumulate.
The same thing happens in an economy. Lots of small bankruptcies over time strengthen the overall economy, but a prolonged period of constant growth and/or a lot of institutions that don't have skin-in-the-game (aka Too Big To Fail) lead to big blowups and deeper recessions.
It's more than just an explanatory analogy for the immune system as it relates to the Hygiene Theory of increased allergies in children and populations being exposed to non-fatal infections, either thru natural means or vaccinations.
And as others have said, forest fires don't burn everything because of natural breaks (rivers, etc). In California the Pacific Ocean is often referred to as "The Big Blue Break"
Have you been waiting until this this is all over before trying to be smart about it. Smart per se (if looking smart is what everything is always about)
> Let’s say at some particular time that’s 90%, and maybe that implies an R of 0.5. As time goes on, immunity declines - 85%, 80%, etc - and r creeps up - 0.6, 0.7, etc.
<pedantry level="extreme">Ahem, R = 0.5 with 90% immunity means R0 = 5, meaning with 85% immunity R = 0.75 and with 80% immunity R = 1.0.</pedantry>
I always thought the "why does it stop?" question even more interesting and most people just ignore it. People will lecture about R and exponential growth but have little to say about an outbreak just dying out without any particular identifiable and repeatable reason.
Just like forest fires, they don't just burn everything. Experts have shown very little skill in predicting the end of an outbreak so I get pretty dismissive of the modeling effort in general. I'm sure this is complicated but I have come out of this convinced we just don't understand virus dynamics very well and I am pretty disappointed relative to what I thought about the field prior to this pandemic. Some of the lecturing on "trust the science" has been insufferable given this lack of actionable intelligence. This was a heaping spoonful of humility for the field and the CDC IMO.
"In South East Asia, we have two flu seasons ... in the summer, people coop themselves up at home with the air-conditioning on full blast.
....In South East Asia, the muggy air retains heat, requiring air-conditioning and reduced airflow."
Yep - why Louisiana got wrecked by Delta in August when we all retreated inside. Also why (largely GOP) hot southern states look like COVID geniuses after the winter, when the north was couped up and wrecked and we've been outside.
Yes, being inside without ventilation is the best way to get covid. People bring it in from the outside and it lingers in the air, particularly if anyone has been in a public restroom, which are usually poorly ventilated.
Regarding fire: I am a (country) firefighter, though my particular insight comes mostly just from having a fireplace. I think the thing you're missing is that wood is actually pretty hard to burn.
Put a big log in a fireplace and try to light it with a match. It won't burn. Try a phone book. Also won't burn. A match can light small sticks and grass, and those can burn hot enough to light bigger sticks, which in turn can burn hot enough to light solid logs.
Another experiment: Get a roaring fire started with a few big logs in the fireplace, nice and hot. Then separate out the logs so they aren't heating each other. There's a good chance they'll go out. Big solid pieces of wood need a *lot* of heat to keep burning. And this is with seasoned wood!
There's an "R0" for a forest fire that depends on the local environment. The biggest factors are fuel (type and quantity), weather, and terrain. Surprisingly, on a typical day in a typical forest, the R0 is <1, and even in crazy fires you might get a sudden drop in the R0 due to wind direction change, topography, or natural barriers (including low fuel load areas due to previous fires).
In summary: Forest fires stop naturally because forests are less flammable than you imagine, and the "R0" of even a big fire can be mercurial.
forests in most places that aren't Western America are pretty hard to ignite! that was a weird take to see there, but I guess if you've never spent much time in forests out of the American West, you might just assume that they're all constant fire risks
I mean… I’m from Israel, and it experiences large fires every few years. So do Greece and Italy. Russia has its megafires - in fact, one of the largest ones ever recorded initiated recently as far north as Yakutia. I’d say that the opposite of your take is equally convincing, and the places with large forests that are not tropical and yet don’t experience large fires might be the exceptions.
There are plenty of times in plenty of forests in the Western US where you're basically just standing there dumping burn mix on the unit or the pile or whatever and it goes out as soon as you turn your back.
Although I'm not a firefighter, I am a one-match fireplace guy and a fire can start very easily if the conditions are right. Without rain for some time you get dry tinder in the form of pine needles and leaves, then kindling, then dry smaller twigs with the undergrowth, then small branches, and then larger branches, and then you get to the actual trees. It's like a perfectly made fire in a fireplace if all is dry due to a lack of rain.
If you properly set up your fireplace it only takes one match.
Yes, with a "perfect" set of conditions you can get an explosive fire - but most of the time, even in California, it's not like that. And even when it is, weather is fickle. Forests just don't burn to the last contiguous tree. Sometimes they don't even burn the trees; my whole district burned in last year's LNU fire, but most of the trees survived (sadly, not all of the homes).
My point is that Scott's question "Why don't entire forests burn every time?" exposes an assumption that forests are more flammable than they are. There's probably some reasonable amount of analogy that can be made to viral diseases here.
It's a partial analogy. All fires, like all viruses, and every other natural phenomena, expand exponentially, hit the carrying capacity of the environment, and fall back down to equilibrium; the S-curve.
Fires burn until the forest becomes too wet while a virus infects until the target population develops immunity. The fire is stopped by an unrelated external event, so by chance, whereas a virus is stopped by a dependent reaction, acquired immunity, against it's action. So the analogy works for the growth phase but not for the mitigation transition or stop condition.
Two possibly better analogies are a tractor pull or a boxing match. They both start out fast and easy but the going gets harder as they get further into it due to increasing feedback. At the end of a boxing match both fighters are more beat and more tired than at the beginning as they directly experience the law of diminishing marginal returns.
Re: seasonality of polio - yes, swimming pools, but also summer fruits and vegetables. Think strawberries, lettuce, anything that would be hand-picked and not cooked.
I don't have the source, but it used to be A Thing in Victorian times to not feed kids fresh greens in the summer 'because it upset their systems' - in other words, because they would pick up a food-borne illness.
Our current era is *amazing* and I like it quite a lot.
This model feels satisfying for endemic viruses which have reached an equilibrium state, but now I feel a bit confused again about COVID. In Hungary (where I am; and I think this applies to most of Europe, but haven't double-checked), in both 2020 and 2021, it essentially died out over the summer, started ticking back up more-or-less literally the day the calendar turned over to September, and raged during the winter. Since this hasn't been around long enough to have been entrained into a yearly cycle around an R=1 equilibrium, it *must* be the physical factors themselves -- heat, humidity, UV, indoors, whatever -- causing that directly?
Interestingly, our local Covid wave crested (with a fairly high daily count of new infections) in the last week of November and is now clearly falling in Czechia, even though the weather corresponds to our usual December standards. It caught the experts a bit off-guard, many of them predicted a steady worsening of the situation, but the virus obviously did not read their opinions.
Last winter, in very similar weather, the wave wasn't falling at all. It was growing fast.
That argument from the forest fire analogy is really fundamentally wrong. For one thing, forests start in a minimally vulnerable state (new forests have zero deadfall) so if you let nature run its course, they will stay in that state with minimal fire damage. Human populations on the other hand start out in a maximally vulnerable state against a new virus; if you let nature run its course, you get maximum damage (health care system overload, etc.)
For another, in a forest-fire-prone area, deadfall will burn eventually; there isn't really any other process that would make it go away. So by doing large-scale fire supression you are only delaying the inevitable. Immunity, on the other hand, can be gained both by infection and vaccination; suppressing an epidemic while vaccines are being researched and rolled out makes perfect sense.
See, I'd say your latter point is why prescribed fire is a thing (I just finished my certification for it here in GA two weeks ago, actually!). A controlled fire / vaccine will remove fuel / improve immunity so that fire / covid has less detrimental impacts?
"forests start in a minimally vulnerable state (new forests have zero deadfall) "
I dunno about this one, fam, I've worked in a lot of country where the first things to come back after a big stand-replacing burn are light flashy fuels like manzanita and chamise and blackberry. You show up to a new start in a spot that nuked out a season or two ago and it's just ripping through that brush layer while black snags from the old stand are tipping over every ninety seconds.
forthe404 is right, too, and let's not forget about mechanical fuels treatments. Basically, too high a level of abstraction.
What's different is that the virus that causes chickenpox, human alphaherpesvirus 3, is never fully cleared from the system - you have it for life, it just doesn't cause chickenpox again (it sometimes flares up, though with different symptoms; this is shingles). This is the usual pattern of herpesviruses, although some of their flareups have more similar symptoms to the initial infection.
Essentially, your immune system never forgets about it because it never left.
I'm not sure why, but no one yet seems to have mentioned the concept of an *excitable medium*, a standard concept in dynamical systems that's used in understanding wildfires, disease, heart and brain tissue, and some fancy cyclical chemical reactions.
This isn't an answer by itself, but seems like an important term to be throwing around in these conversations. :-)
Regarding warmer regions possibly having somewhat less flu overall:
Let's say r=(50-t)(d/2)/180, where t is the temperature in °C and d is the average interval between two incidences of the flu in years (so at any given time, d/2 is approximately the time since the average person had the flu for the last time). Let's say the year-round average temperature is 5°C in Alaska, 20°C in Florida, and 26°C in Panama. The year-round average r should be 1, which gives d=8 in Alaska, d=12 in Florida and d=15 in Panama.
Though the long-term average r may actually be different from 1 in locations with high seasonal differences. In the summer, the flu may go locally extinct, then restart from imported cases in the fall. Or even if it doesn't go extinct, imported cases may make up a significant fraction of all cases in the summer and the fall. These cause deviations from the simple model. In the simple model, the derivative of the logarithm of the case count is proportional to r, however this fails to be a good approximation when the case count is very low. When the case count drops from 1 to 0, the log of the case count drops to -∞. And when the case count is low, imported cases increase the case count significantly above what r would predict. Assuming that there is a steady stream of imported cases, so the case count never actually drops to 0, this implies that the long-term average r is somewhere below 1, with the imported cases keeping the disease from going extinct. With a year-round average r below 1, the formula above gives a lower d: e.g. if the average r in Alaska is 0.75, Alaskans get the flu every 6 years instead of 8, increasing the difference compared to Panama. None of this changes that during the Alaskan summer, case counts are negligible compared to any time in Panama.
The average time between infections (or rather, the average time since the last infection, which should be half of the former) tells how much your immunity has waned.
"(something like this might also be why the Native Americans had such a hard time with European diseases)"
Yes and no. Any explanation for why the American Indians were nearly wiped out by European diseases (estimates range from 95-98%) has to explain why the same thing didn't happen in the other direction. In grad school, the explanation we learned about was the limited HLA (human leukocyte antigen) diversity in the American populations because they came from a small founder population.
In order to form antibodies, your immune system has to 'present' the antigen it collects. It does this using antigen presenting cells, which grab ahold of short peptide sequences and display them on their cell surface for T- and B-cells to sample. HLA is like the 'hands' that grab onto these peptide strands. But unlike human hands they can only grab certain sequence shapes. A few of these is enough to cover most shapes, but not all.
Not everyone has the same set of HLA. The ones you have are hereditary, and they dictate the kind of thing you can mount an immune response to. This is one reason why certain populations are more susceptible to some infections and more resistant to others.
There's a lot of intermixing that has happened these past few millennia from Africa to Asia, so no sub-population has only one set of HLA. Except in pre-Columbian America. Mostly isolated, and derived from a small founder population, the limited HLA in the Americas meant any disease that didn't have strong HLA binding (and hence was difficult for the immune system to 'see') would propogate particularly well through the population, since everyone's HLA were the same.
Children are "weirdly resilient" in large part because of Original Antigenic Sin. The name sounds kooky and religious but it's actually a well-observed phenomenon in epidemiology:
Children have no previous immune experience with a given virus, so their entire immune system can figure out the best way to fight it and follow that plan. T-cells, B-cells, macrophages, etc are all involved in the most effective ways possible.
Once that "plan" is established it can only change to a certain extent when later infections are encountered. When an immune system first familiarized with the Wuhan strain of SARS-COV-2 encounters the omicron strain, it follows the relatively ineffective Wuhan-strain plan and then, very importantly, can only partially update that plan on contact with omicron. This effect is at least semi-permanent, and it explains much of why our original 2019-era vaccines are so useless against 2022-era COVID.
You write: This paper [ Projecting The Transmission Dynamics Of SARS-CoV2 ] is head and shoulders above anything I found during my own literature review...
Sorry to disillusion you, but this is actually a rather poor paper. The apparent sophistication of regression analysis and simulation is all flawed. To the extent that the conclusions are reasonable at all, they are simply the result of intuition, with a false veneer of mathematics lending them more apparent credibility.
I comment in detail on this paper in a series of four blog posts, starting at
These posts actually only cover the first part of the paper. I never got around to the posts on the second part. But it too is deeply flawed. As far as I can tell, their procedure to find optimal parameter values does not do anything sensible.
I corresponded a bit with Marc Lipsitch about this paper, and he pointed me to some further code. But in the end I was not able to pin down what exactly they do in the second part of the paper. Here is an excerpt from my last email to him (to which I haven't gotten a reply):
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After looking at this code, I'm just as puzzled as I was before about what you did, but in a different way.
First of all, I should mention that the fitted parameter values for the SEIRS model in the figuremaker.R file (rounded versions of which are in your Table S8) seem odd to me. 1/sigma1 is 44.948, 1/sigma2 is 44.961, 1/nu is 2.99975, 1/gamma is 5.04 - all quite close to integer values. Before looking at the code, my guess had been that you used some version of LHS that looked only at values on some coarse grid, obtaining an estimate with integer values for these parameters, which you then used as initial values for Nelder-Mead optimization, and that this optimization procedure did not do much, leaving these values very close to integers.
I see now that the LHS procedure does not use a coarse grid, so there would be no reason for it to produce an optimum at or near integers. Also, it appears that you do not specify initial values for the Nelder-Mead optimization, so that isn't how information was transferred from the LHS part to the N-M part.
My current guess is that you used the results of LHS merely to narrow down the parameter ranges for the N-M optimization somewhat - the ranges for parameters in the "Do a maximization" code from the notebook are narrower than those in Table S8. That the results of N-M optimization give values for 1/nu and 1/gamma that are near integers could then be explained if the Mathematica N-M procedure itself searches for initial values on some coarse grid, and then fails to move much from these initial values. In the case of 1/sigma1 and 1/sigma2, the upper bound in the "Do a maximization" code is 45 (Table S8 has an upper bound of 100), so it appears that the N-M optimization may have simply been prevented from moving beyond this constraint.
But perhaps this guess isn't correct. I'd appreciate further clarification.
I note that the LHS procedure optimizes the sum of squared errors between the actual incidence and the predicted incidence, but the N-M procedure optimizes the sum of squared errors between the log of the actual incidence and the log of the predicted incidence (ignoring weeks when the actual incidence is zero). Is this difference deliberate?
To be frank, the whole concept of fitting the SEIRS model in this way does not make much sense to me. The model is deterministic, but as you
note, its results can change drastically with small parameter changes, due to "bifurcations". The model is also much simpler than reality, so one would not expect particularly close matches to the data. The real process also has aspects that can only reasonably be modelled as random. If randomness were added to the model, one would fit it by maximimizing the probability of the observed data, which would change smoothly with parameter values.
The best way to fool anyone is with mathematics, when they see a number they automatically believe it. Unless they're an OCD accountant, they never look deeper. So-called science is now being used to gaslight people, yet if you tell people that science is not science, few will understand what you mean. These are the people who love to say they "believe in" science.
"'In this model, warmer regions should have less flu overall, since a longer interval between incidences corresponds to a long-term average r of 1. Maybe Alaskans get a flu, say, once in 8 years on average, Floridians every 12 years (still seasonally) and Panamans every 15 years (without seasonality).'
That last paragraph sounds fascinating but I’m not sure I understand why it’s true; can someone explain?"
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I think I see the argument, but if so I think the argument's wrong? (Sources would have helped; was 10240 citing a known result or thinking on their own?) Here's what I think it was going for:
"For a disease at equilibrium, long-run average R=1. You can think of R=(transmission rate while infected)×(length of infection). So if transmission-rate-while-infected is lower in warmer climates, length-of-infection has to be longer, for the product to still be 1."
The fallacy would be in switching out "time infected" (per infection) for "time between infections"; those would only be equal if everyone always got re-infected right after clearing the last one.
I no longer think 10240 committed a fallacy; I think the argument had an extra step. Again cross-posting my response comment from there:
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Oh ok. So would it be something like
R = (transmission rate while infected) × (length of infection),
where (length of infection) is a constant, so (transmission rate while infected) also has to be a constant if R=1; and e.g.
(transmission rate while infected) = (sneeze rate) × (transmission prob. per sneeze)
where transmission prob per sneeze depends on how immune everyone else is; so e.g. in cold climates, infecteds sneeze more, but immunes are immune for longer, so in cold climates, infecteds' sneeze rate is higher but their transmission prob. per sneeze is lower*, such that (transmission rate while infected) is a constant, such that R=1?
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*for whatever mechanistic reason, but if it wasn't true, then the pathogen either would have disappeared (R<1) or gone epidemic (R>1). (I wonder how equilibrium changes if there's migration; e.g. warm climates could be sources with local R>1, and cold climates could be sinks with local R<1, so that *global* average R=1.)
"I think I see the argument, but if so I think the argument's wrong? (Sources would have helped; was 10240 citing a known result or thinking on their own?) Here's what I think it was going for:"
He's just using model intuition.
Disclaimer: I agree with 10240.
I think what you miss is the fact that a model of R doesn't have to depend on infection length. 1 person infecting a single other person with only 1 infected in the system at a time still gives R=1 given that would be the equilibrium. You get infections less frequently in Panaman due to the worse conditions for the virus, sustaining a lower infected average population, therefore giving us the lower infection frequency for a given person with R still being equal to 1. I gloss over a lot of small details here, but this might still make it click for you, cheers
I used to think that the legend of King Canute was apocryphal, but the last couple of years have convinced me that it was probably true.
"This paper is head and shoulders above anything I found during my own literature review and just comes out and says everything (I?) painfully tried to piece together."
It feels kind of aggro to just come straight here and point out potential typos, sort of like coming into someone's house and pointing out a slightly askew picture frame. So: I also liked the article :)
Nicely put. But in this case, for me at least, the typo obscured a sensible understanding of the sentence so I mentally just shrugged, glossed over it, and moved on.
So: thanks :)
Hey what's your newsletter going to be about!
Oh, just some stuff about how WW3 can be avoided if only people would minimize their typos...
Or actually... nothing at all unless I get around to writing it :)
Well I'm gonna subscribe just in case.
That feels like a helpful nudge. Thanks again..
Regarding babies, I think there's also some inter-generational immunity that can be transferred from mom to baby either in-utero or through breastfeeding. So the population has some ongoing immunity that passes on and keeps the diseases in check. That's why new diseases that jump from animals to humans are specially devastating at first but eventually become more of a background issue as the population as a whole builds immunity and is able to pass it forward to its descendants.
Yes that makes sense. Breastfeeding until at least six months, and ideally a year, apparently confers a big immunological benefit. Around one year, babies switch from living on mostly milk calories to mostly solids calories. I wonder if that timing has to do with the yearly cycling of immunity to various diseases.
Models that account for this are called MSIR or similar. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compartmental_models_in_epidemiology#The_MSIR_model
The M presumably stands for maternal or milky or something.
I really hope it stands for “milky.”
The immunity transferred as antibodies via the placenta or breast milk is called passive immunity. It can definitely help the baby avoid the illness while they're receiving it, and for a little while afterwards. But it doesn't train their own immune system, and on a timescale of weeks-to-months after they stop breastfeeding, the antibodies leave their system.
Good explanation. Thanks!
Would those same antibodies help people older than babies too?
Not that I am planning to set up a mail order breastmilk company or anything.
The adult digestive system would break down the antibodies before they could be absorbed.
OTOH injecting it would work. But it'd be easier to grow the antibodies using cells in a petri dish, at which point you've invented monoclonal antibody therapy (e.g. all the covid drugs that end in -mab)
I don't know the answer to the fire question but if i had to guess i'd say it's a combination of changing wind conditions and natural barriers. If the wind no longer goes south then the fire will more or less stop going south, and if there's a mountain or river along the way then you need pretty powerful wind to bypass it. Especially if the natural barrier is more wet than the original fire area.
That, and high humidity, and lack of drought, and especially rain/snow. There were large fires in the eastern US in the pre-firefighting past (cf. Peshtigo) but unlike much of the West, it rains year-round, and rain and a wind reversal are great for stopping a fire in its tracks. Meanwhile, pre-existing drought, low humidity, and high wind speed all drive up the Ro of fires.
Also, if the wind *was* going south, and then it reverses and goes north, then the fire runs straight into already-burned areas and instead goes out.
This is pretty close to the right answer. The additional factors are moisture, humidity and rain.
A more complete answer is that fires don't spread very far or very fast on their own. Not all vegetation is equally easy to ignite, not all vegetation has an equal propensity to provide further sources of ignition and vegetation rarely forms chains that directly touch for very great distances.
Crown fires are so dangerous because they generate lots of embers that can spread very far very fast. Fires in undergrowth are less exposed to wind and so have greater difficulty spreading quickly or across terrain features without combustable material. Additionally little water collects in crowns so the it's less moist and more vegetation is promptly combustable.
Add to that, it takes a lot more fuel to ignite the big trees in old-growth forests. Ordinarily, small fires burn up the local deadfall and small trees, so fuel load is low. Managed forests, like in the American West, have lots of deadfall and small trees because fire fighters and the Forest Service prevent or suppress every fire as fast as possible. So when a fire does come along and get out of control, there is plenty of fuel to produce the higher temperatures needed to ignite the old trees, which in turn produce enough heat heat ignite other old trees.
I think the analogy of fire suppression in Western Forests is very apt, more than Scott realied.
Fire is natural in forests, and also grasslands. Every year for millennia, dry season comes and some fires burn, the natural cycle is for a fire to come througha given area about once every 20-25 years. In fact, some Western species (like redwooods), need forest fires to reproduce and spread their seeds.
As many have already said, the Federal govt and the western states started interfering with that 100 years ago, and they increasingly pursued a policy of stamping out every fire they could, and the dead wood and brush started to pile up everywhere while fire suppression efforts and spending increased. Dead wood (fuel) is exactly what frequent low-intensity fires clear out, leaving the healthy trees with more space etc. But high fuel loads make any fires much more intense, so hot that even the mature trees are burned, and high heat-driven winds spread it far and fast.
But as more and more towns started to build right up top the edge of the timber, there were a lot more people in "harm's way", burning buildings and crying families are really bad optics, so all the politicians want to be "doing something" and the cost of fighting these more and more intense, and larger, fires, now to protect people who never heard the story of the Three Little Pigs.
That is a long way of saying that fire fighting and forest management have become just like "Zero COVID" policies, where no price seems to be too high for futile efforts to eliminate all forest fires.
Another parallel: Anybody Remember "Smokey the Bear" and the saturation advertising campaigns warning that "Only -->>YOU!!<<-- can prevent forest fires.."? Anybody? Now, of course, lots of careless people starting forest fires all over is BAD THING, and reducing that is GOOD.
But then remember that all natural fires start with lightning anyway, and consider that Smokey The Bear was EVERYWHERE, omnipresent, for decades, pointing at you and warning kids that one tiny slip-up on a camping trip means Bambi's Mother Dies! -- It's a lot like our govt's monomaniacal pushing of vaccines and all the hectoring about masks and staying alone indoors for "safety"
____
Actually, re-reading this, I forgot that back then almost everybody smoked, a LOT, so there were billions of lit matches and cigarette butts flying around on a daily basis, so reminding smokers to not just toss those anywhere was a good idea. Largely futile, as well. But still, the tone is the same. In fact, maybe if Fauchi started wearing a bear suit with a 3' diameter head he could regain some credibility.
Wait, there's more! And one other big thing to consider.
I see the FDA role with Covid as beeng analogous to govennments, especially California, regulating the fire insurance market completely. Govts and politicians (In CA the Insurance Commissionar is an *elected* position with Godlike powers) are uniquely bad at judging risks, as Scott's experiences with the FDA illustrate. And they make decisions that are often politics, not safety.
The result is lots of houses are built where no rational insurer would cover, but the state forces them to underwrite, plus insane rules where houses that burn down get rebuilt in exactly the same place, and more pressure to suppress fires at all costs.
______
This is an aside, about an infuriating, deliberate weasel-word trick that is used in any and all reporting about disasters but especially fires:
"17 HOMES were destroyed as the Station fire continues to rage...." No. Seventeen HOUSES were destroyed, you cynical mendatious twits. But "HOUSE" is never, ever used. It's always HOME, for maximim emotional manipulation, and fear.
Fire burns down houses; it doesn't destroy homes.
ALCOHOLISM destroys homes.
________
The last big issue that I really need to get to finally, is there is a huge industry and infrastructure and an awful lot of people who are incentivized to make this problem worse. The fire suppression budget for Ca is over $1billion. Firefighters are widely admired, which gives them incredible clout and they have the strongest union in the state. Unions oppose any plan that would mean less work and overtime and $$$ for firefighters.
Property owners who built their houses out of sticks or straw with subsidized fire insurance expect to be protected. Politicians look effective when they are responding to crises, not so much when they quietly do the boring difficult things for years that will AVOID the crisis. That's useless to them, by their short term calculations.
So tis metaphor is crumbling, but I wanted to point out that just like the constellation of FDA, Federal government,pharma companies, health care insurers, Twitterati, and of course the 4 zillion Covid Testing companies in the COvid-Industrial complex, the Wildfires crisis has similar:
--Expensive and zealous and unrealistic goals like Zero COvid
--Regulatory agencies that have incredible powerover policy but perverse incentives and basic inability to evaluate risks, which is also their ONLY JOB (FDA, Insurance Commission, and all the CA Environmental agencies which block things like controlled burns because -- get this -- smoke from planned burns isunacceptable particulate emissions, forbidden.
--A huge $$$ industry dependent on that agency for everything they do
--A very visible group who gains lots of power and status and $$ from the crisis (firefighters)
--A whole secondary industry that is also making $$$ and wants to stay in business with the status quo.
Sorry this was so long. And I never even mentioned the obvious analogies of Covid "raging" like a "wildfire" and "burning through our population" unless we ACT RIGHT NOW but in bad and maybe counterproductive ways because there's a "fire alarm"
You don't really understand either forest fires or diseases, so your conclusions are entirely wrong.
Suppressing disease has a negative impact on its transmissibility, NOT a positive one. Prior to the modern era, epidemics happened all the time and were uncontrollable and awful. In the modern era, we've had far, far fewer epidemics than we did in the pre-modern era.
Smallpox, polio, measles, and the like only died out because of active human intervention. If diseases worked the way you want them to work, none of these epidemics would have lasted.
They did last - for thousands of years, in many cases!
The entire notion is completely wrong.
All of your beliefs are a desperate attempt to shore up your pre-existing belief (hatred of government and lockdowns).
This is transparently obvious if you spend five seconds thinking about it.
Indeed, as doctors have repeatedly noted, the more people get infected, the more chances there are of escape variants being created.
The reason for this is trivial - every infection has some chance of generating an escape variant, so the more people get infected, the more chances there are of reinfection.
Moreover, the primary driver of extremely powerful wildfires is actually desiccation and high winds. While fuel buildup is an issue, it doesn't matter how much fuel there is if it is all soaking wet. Conversely, when conditions are hot and dry and the wind is high, you have a lot of stoked flames.
Fuel buildup makes these things worse, but if you look at fire scars, we've actually seen areas in California that have reburned within just a few years, suggesting that the protective effects of previous fires is actually quite small. Indeed, wildfire prone areas in California are not random - many areas have fires on a pretty regular basis.
I think Imy comment got far too long and I lost the thread. Also, I was trying to be polite.
More clearly, I believe it would be far better if NOTHING was done. Letting fires and diseases take their natural course will end up with exactly the same amount of primary damage, without any of the staggering cost and secondary damage to eveerything else in the world. And it would be over quickly
Ever-increasing efforts to fight these things just leads to a perpetual state of crisis that enriches crisis-bureaucrats, firefighters, doctors and various wolf criers, at the expense of the whole society, and that's just the economic damage. The political fallout of letting Emergency Powers become entrenched are far worse and beyond the scope.
I would be fine with 2% of the whole population dying withing six months then it's over. As for fires, if two out of three Little Pigs lost their houses, that means a glut of bacon for the rest of us brick-dwelling wolves. We can spend our insurance rebates on pork chops.
Smallpox was around until we eradicated it with vaccines. Same goes for countless other diseases - measles, polio, chicken pox, whooping cough, etc.
Heck, we still don't have influenza under control.
Your beliefs are all false.
You just can't admit that to yourself, because the alternative is admitting that you were wrong about everything and are a baddie.
Everything you believe is a self-serving fanciful lie.
Sorry, kiddo. You aren't some freedom fighter fighting against The Evil Empire.
You just don't want to deal with that or admit that you're wrong, so you throw out literally all of science and history to throw a temper tantrum and show what a Real Man (TM) you are.
And, well, if you think it's okay to kill lots of people off...
Well, what's good for the goose is good for the gander.
He's talking about Covid specifically which has introduced a number of novel public policies, so you're demolishing a strawman.
Lot's of words yet you haven't harmed a single hair of his metaphor.
Incidentally, the Amish provide an interesting, if imperfect control for what happens when pandemic management isn't practiced.
> Assuming there is at least one continuous line of trees connecting (eg) Maine to Georgia, why didn’t every forest fire burn the entire East Coast to a crisp back before there were human firefighters?
uhhhhh, rain?
also having lived on the east coast, the climate is much wetter in general, to the point where live wood has enough water content to be incredibly difficult to light (even on purpose, as I can attest from my days as a Boy Scout), and any dead wood which builds up on the ground quickly becomes rotten and soggy
forest fires are rare on the East Coast, except in times/places going through truly exceptional droughts, and tend to be small localized affairs even then
Forest fires tend to be seasonally common in FL - inland, mostly - during the late spring when the area can get very very dry. Draining swampier areas for houses (and before that citrus, and before that cattle) increases the issue. It is true that the 1998 fires (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_Florida_wildfires) are the ones most closely resembling western fire events - OK smoke jumpers came down to help, and were amazed at the way dry palmettos burned. But there are still forest fires.
(Minor quibble - the Flagler county area is east-central FL, not northeast.)
there absolutely are wildfires! some friends of mine had to deal with one deep in the Virginia mountains this summer. but they don't tend to last nearly as long, or get nearly as far, as the big ones out West--the ones you linked, which are dramatic and unusual for East Coast fires, burned "only" 500,000 acres across several thousand separate fires--compare that to a single one of California's wildfires last year, which burned over a million:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Complex_fire
I just want to point out that Oregon and Washington is also extremely wet and yet during summer forest fires can still rage. I think the rarity of fires on the East Coast is mostly due to most forests being smaller and privately managed. Huge amounts of land in western states are owned and managed by the government and in general the government is not very good at managing such land and thus it is easy for conditions to reach a critical mass where a fire is impossible to put out.
I'm in Georgia. We burn 1.4 million acres a year here, every year, on purpose. Preventing fuel accumulation (longleaf pines, which are native, need fire to live just as much as the giant sequoias do!) prevents small fires from becoming big fires.
Also, draw me a link from FL to ME that doesn't have rivers as natural fire breaks. Also, humidity, rain, etc. I actually just did my prescribed burn certification two weeks ago, so anyone can AMA on such in Georgia !
That is very good practice. Sadly it has mostly not done in the west overall. But I think my point (maybe I should call it a mitigating factor) about forest size and density still applies. Oregon is 1.6x the size of Georgia and yet has 0.4x the population of Georgia. So there are just a lot less people to go around and cultivate the land and properly manage it. Whenever these fires grow out of control, it is almost always in extremely remote areas of these western states.
But I do agree overall that these western states are now reaping the explicit policy to not do controlled burns and to prevent natural burning over the course of 40+ years. Just wanted to point out that even if these states did do controlled burns, it would be very expensive/difficult to really manage the forests well. Of course they could do what they did in the past and log a lot of it (which seems to also have helped with reducing fires, though I don't have any data to back that up), but that might result in loss of habitat for animals, so we can't do that.
>>>>>But I think my point (maybe I should call it a mitigating factor) about forest size and density still applies.
Size and ownership pattern would seem to be a likely culprit, but in the eastern US the primary controlling factors (as noted by others) are high humidity, relatively high rainfall well distributed throughout the year, and forest type (conifers are more prone to crown fire than deciduous forest due to oils/resins in the needles and growth habit).
My home county (located in Central Appalachia) is over 85% forested, with approximately 1/3 of the land base in federal ownership. Most of the counties that surround me have similar demographics, some with even higher level of forest cover and federal ownership.
We do, of course, have wildfires every year. However, outside of exceptional drought years, we typically only have a few weeks each spring and fall where weather conditions will support wildfire. In spite of our high proportion of federal land and largely contiguous forests, most of our fires can be measured in hundreds of acres, only very occasionally moving into the thousands of acres. It's completely unheard of for fires in this part of the world to reach the size of western mega fires - our weather and fuel type just won't support it. I agree that vegetation management (mismanagement?) on public lands plays a huge role in the destructive fires we're seeing in the drier western US, but it doesn't cause nearly so many problems in the east, largely due to climatic factors.
Note that everything above is predicated on the parts of the eastern US in deciduous forest. The southeastern pine ecosystems and the pyrogenic vegetation (like the Florida saw palmetto referenced above) are completely different beasts. There are some deciduous forest systems that are fire adapted, but many of the pine and pyrogenic systems are - at least to some degree - fire dependent. The reason that the local vegetation has evolved a degree of fire dependency is because the conditions and topography lend themselves to some level of recurring burning.
I didn't consider that deciduous vs coniferous trees might be a factor as well so thanks for bringing it up.
I do want to note that "except for drought years" is doing a lot of work. This is exactly what last year was in Oregon. A fire that was in an inaccessible location had been simmering for several months and in a normal year it wouldn't have caused issues. But that year was unusually dry AND a freak wind storm blew that fire and several others into epic proportions. So I do agree with another poster who basically said normally there would be small fires and then every once in a while (maybe even as rare as 1 every 100 years) conditions will be just right for a mega fire to occur.
I agree, drought certainly makes a big difference. 2016 was a historically dry year for our region, and we had a much worse fire season than normal. Even during these exceptional conditions, however, the biggest fires burned less than 30,000 acres, with about 90,000 acres being burned across 5 states. That's a really bad fire year for us, but nowhere near the scale faced in the western US.
The West also has a lot of conifers, which may be more susceptible to this sort of thing. Also worth noting that we have a strong wet/dry season; our fires are at their worst towards the end of the dry season, when things are maximally dessicated.
The really bad wildfires last year happened when the wind was blowing from inland as well, rather than off the ocean.
The south used to have more conifers, but they were logged; longleaf pine trees (adapted to need fire!) used to be the dominant southern tree, but only cover 2.5% of their historic range currently. But the southern ecosystems certainly used to be fire-centric in a way not a lot of folks recognize now.
What is with the hostility towards mask requirements? I take Rafal S. to be illustrative, though not necessarily typical. Anyway, the use of masks in public places was distinctive of a number of different east asian populations for quite a while before the current pandemic. It's not like this was an idea cooked up in an FDA boardroom or something.
In fact, the evidence that masks work has tended to overturn long-held orthodoxy vis-a-vis aerosol spread of respiratory illness; it's hardly a holdover of hidebound bureaucracy or pick your favorite dysfunction/conspiracy theory. And it makes total intuitive sense; covering your mouth when you cough has been a staple of western etiquette for much longer than I've been alive.
It's also, for what it's worth, a truly miniscule change in behavior that takes about a week to go from slightly strange to completely anodyne. And resistance is hardly universal among western countries; in Germany, there is plenty of kicking and screaming about Covid rules but as far as I can tell, comparatively little complaint about requirements to wear a mask in indoor public places.
So basically, what the heck is going on here? Why is "masking" being lumped in with lockdowns and vaccine requirements as if the two go hand in hand when in fact they're almost total opposites? Mask requirements are almost literally the least you could do, yet it's represented here as something approaching Soylent Green.
All of this can of course be said about automobiles. I think we do want to make sure we have a world where people can usually see each other, but it will make sense to have some places where people are behind glass and some places where they are behind masks. Driving is just as dystopian as wearing masks, though it's often less momentarily uncomfortable.
My point is just that if it's dystopian to be surrounded by people whose faces you can't see, then driving is absolutely dystopian.
Sometimes dystopian things are worth it for their other benefits, and the fact that it's dystopian isn't sufficient reason to stop doing it.
Driving cars inhibits facial recognition, expression, and interaction *far* more than wearing masks does. At least pedestrians wearing a mask can still see each other as human, unlike people in cars. Fortunately, cities are starting to go back to urban design that doesn't mandate the use of an automobile everywhere.
You should probably step away from this site for a few weeks if you're making posts like this. It's unkind and unnecessary to say such things even if you believe them to be 100% true.
Because it is not necessary. We all will get covid sooner or later, so once we are vaccinated it is better to get it sooner than later.
Also it is a slippery slope. Spain has reintroduced wearing masks on streets. Why?
Why is it better to get it sooner rather than later? If we're all going to get covid (whether vaccinated or not, whether previously infected or not) then the question isn't *whether* we will get covid but now how *often* we will get it. I think I'd rather live in a world where I get it on average once every five years rather than on average once every two years. Getting it sooner is usually a sign that I'm in the every two years equilibrium rather than the every five years equilibrium.
Doesn't 15% reduction mean 15% longer periods between illnesses?
Because vaccine effectiveness wanes very quickly and you can get more severe disease if you manage to protect yourself for too long.
How do you feel about people who cover their nose and mouth when they cough or sneeze? Are they also doing us a disservice by lengthening our periods between infections?
I could very well believe that there's an optimal recurrence interval for infections with any given virus. I have a hard time believing that someone has figured out the right interval for each virus, or even is very confident that mask wearing brings us to too long of an interval rather than still being too short.
I don't know how effective nose covering is when coughing. Some studies say that even for TB aerosol spreading (not from coughing) may be more important than previously thought.
Evolution probably has optimized it for many things. Why the immunity against cold viruses is so short lived? Maybe because they mutate so quickly that creating full life immunity would be a waste of resources or would cause more autoimmune diseases than necessary.
"I don't know how effective nose covering is when coughing."
And yet I'd bet that not only do you do it, but if someone around you DOESN'T, you either get annoyed or actually tell them off.
Natural immunity is worse than vaccine immunity and wanes faster.
The Israel study shows the opposite, it is 13 times better than vaccine immunity.
It's not that it's better to get it sooner, it's that getting it sooner is a worthy tradeoff to not wear masks for the rest of our lives, given that we'll be getting it eventually anyway.
As for how often - the first case might be unpleasant, but if you're vaccinated and boosted it's nothing to be too worried about. And each subsequent case your body will be even better equipped to handle.
Would you want to wear masks for the rest of your life to prevent flu? Maybe you would, but I wouldn't.
And if you'd like to go on wearing a mask that's perfectly fine with me, but please stop forcing me to wear one.
What do you mean by "wear masks for the rest of our lives"?
If we have rules that say masks are mandatory in hospitals and airports always, and whenever flu or covid numbers get above some threshold they are mandatory in other places, and in practice that threshold is usually only crossed for a couple weeks in January, does this count as "for the rest of our lives"?
I would be perfectly happy with that. (Maybe not *perfectly* happy - there would surely be tweaks I'd prefer.)
That would be extremely different from how things were in the 2010s, but would also be extremely different from how things were in 2021 in many places. I wouldn't want the 2021-era rules that have masks being indefinitely mandatory regardless of conditions.
"Wear masks for the rest of our lives" was a bit of a dramatic statement, but let me clarify where I would draw the line.
Hospitals should be able to make their own decision on whether masks are required within their own establishment. (Presumably some places in the hospital would require them and some would not. Where they are required they ought to be provided free of charge.)
Airports (as in the buildings), being essentially public utilities, probably should not be able to require masks. On airplanes, since there's more choice, perhaps it's okay for an airline to require masks so long as they provide them for free. Although wearing masks on airplanes isn't very important anyways, since they have such good air filtration systems.
As for general mandates based on covid/flu thresholds, I'm strongly against that. People who are concerned about covid/flu can wear a mask for themself when they feel the need.
Generally the principle is no state requirements, only private or individual choice.
Wearing them for a few weeks in January during the flu peak has little benefit, since it just drags out that year's epidemic longer, but does little to reduce the total case count.
Why is this different than covering your mouth when you cough?
Why is it different to always cover yourself than cover yourself occasionally when necessary? Res ipsa loquitur I would think.
Given the spread of disease, COVID but also almost certainly other diseases, through breathing of people who may seem healthy but are in fact shedding disease, it's pretty clearly ALWAYS necessary.
I'm willing to accept that some cultures simply don't care about externalities: if you're dumping disease everywhere and getting everyone else sick, that's their problem and even the slightest inconvenience to you is an unacceptable tradeoff. But that's not how American society treats a lot of other public-health issues, such as drug abuse.
No part of this reasoning would not also apply to never going to a restaurant or a concert or a school. Other people simply do not have the extreme risk intolerance and dehumanization-through-eternal-masking tolerance that you have.
You can help me shed light on the question: What about wearing a mask is "dehumanizing"? We should keep in mind that millions of humans did it all the time, long before COVID-19 existed. Beyond commuters in Taipei we could also name surgeons, carpenters, and workers in auto body shops or semiconductor fabs. They all wear masks for most of their workdays, for EXACTLY the same reason people wear masks in grocery stores now.
Maybe here's a good place to dig in. Which would you find more objectionable: mask requirements or vaccine requirements?
This assumes that the two are substitutes. What if the choice is ‘both’ or ‘neither?’
Boy, I dunno. In my metro area ICUs are at capacity so they are recommending staying away from hospitals if at all possible. Don’t have a serious accident. Don’t have a heart attack. Don’t get a case of Covid that requires an ICU bed. Masks could help with the last one.
Every part of this is wrong.
The more infections there are, the more people will get COVID, the more frequently they will get COVID, and the more people will die of COVID.
The reality is that your belief is a thin rationalization for an underlying disturbance which has resulted in you developing antisocial beliefs and personality traits.
Your beliefs are obviously false, which even five seconds of thought would demonstrate, as would even a casual familiarity with disease evolution - or heck, simply looking at present disease variants, and noting how they are originating in places which are highly susceptible to disease.
It appears that all people are getting covid in the UK regardless. And it is clear that death rates are going down considerably since the start of the pandemic. Mostly due to vaccinations and previous infections. It would help if you explained how these parts are wrong instead of just hand waving that they are wrong.
I think there's a range of feelings about masks. For a non-social thing like grocery shopping, I think most people don't particularly mind them. But for things like school and offices, they do a lot to interfere with both speaking and the kinds of social interaction through facial gestures that people tend to have. When there's a *requirement* to wear the masks in *all* indoor public spaces, people who dislike those few cases enough will then react against the use of masks in any context.
I hope we end up with a norm of masks being around, but usually not required, with local officials giving specific recommendations when respiratory virus cases get higher, and possibly even requirements but only at very high spikes.
That's facially reasonable but doesn't explain why so many other cultures adopted mask wearing well before the current predicament as something approaching a social norm, since those other cultures also rely on facial cues and so on. I'm not confused by the theory here, I'm confused by the observations we have.
Thank you for pointing that out. My understanding is that people would wear masks when they were sick as a courtesy to others. But there was never a norm for everyone to wear a mask in all indoor locations.
Correct. See this video recorded in Osaka in Sep 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yfh-EO4rKUw
I see around less than 1-2% wearing masks. Earlier that year, Japan had its worst flu outbreak.
I'm interested in how *much* of a social norm it has been. In 2015, in Hong Kong or Tokyo, what fraction of people in a grocery store, or in a school, would have been wearing a mask on a random day, or at the height of flu season?
It would not shock me that people could easily get used to an organically grown social norm of wearing a mask 10-30% of relevant circumstances, but would react against a legal mandate of wearing one 100% of relevant circumstances.
Reasonable, but taking Rafal S at his word, the objection seems to be to ANYONE being expected to EVER wear a mask AT ALL.
Joshua M above seems to think the objection is only to *always* wearing a mask. And I'm not sure if it's charitable or uncharitable to read someone who is objecting to anyone ever being expected to wear a mask in ordinary public spaces as just having an overreaction in the opposite direction. It seems to me that a natural emotional reaction to being asked to do something in many circumstances where it's clearly unnecessary will end up with the person refusing to do it in any circumstance where they have a choice, even if it would be very reasonable to do it then.
Not to jump to conclusions, but I think most of this family of points of view boils down to some flavor of "COVID isn't that bad, don't be such a pussy".
I would not object to long term voluntary masking in 30% of environments. I do however object strongly to my toddler being required to mask all day. And since we have proven as a society that the only settings we can accommodate are ‘all’ or ‘nothing,’ I choose nothing
"I do however object strongly to my toddler being required to mask all day."
Why?
At daycare. County regulations for ages two and up. Also on flights, per federal regulations. My having to wear a mask is annoying. My two year old having to, is infuriating.
I expect to be a single issue voter opposed to all covid restrictions for the foreseeable future. I would in fact favor sensible restrictions. But those are not on the table.
> we have proven as a society that the only settings we can accommodate are ‘all’ or ‘nothing,’
citation needed
We don't choose all or nothing for speed limits, we don't choose all or nothing for wearing heavy jackets, we don't choose all or nothing for wearing seatbelts (you'll notice that there are seatbelts in personal cars but not in public buses). In the first year of a new behavior, some people find it impossible to choose anything other than all or nothing for masks, but people in East Asia proved that yes, it's actually very easy for society to adapt to an equilibrium where masks are nowhere near all or nothing.
Yes but on this topic and in our society those seem to be the only options. If the rule makers show they can be trusted to make sensible rules I will shift my position. So far they have not.
I think the GP was talking about settings for mandates, not settings for behavior. Speed limits are a good counterexample to that, jackets not at all (I don't know of anyplace mandating people wear winter jackets), and seatbelts are borderline (the distinctions we have seem to be grandfathered and not indicative of us being able to create such a ruleset from scratch, or even to keep such a ruleset updated when gains or costs change).
In 2017 in Seoul, off flu season, I'd estimate 1%. However, black masks were a fashion item for kids because kpop, so for them, maybe cloth masks with designs were 5, maybe as high as 10%.
Definitely SARS primed things, and people were ready to adopt them again. But also more random events like masked celebrities can drive regional differences.
I used to think Asia was different because of SARS, and we'd look the same after a year. But more and more it's clear I was wrong. The experience of "beating" SARS with masks in the toolkit probably was more galvanizing than "facing waves and waves of covid" with masks in the toolkit, which is much more demoralizing, even if they reduce spread by some amount.
Nah, I just find masks uncomfortable. They make it harder to breathe. Whenever I take off the mask, it feels like... well, a breath of fresh air. Perhaps some people mind them less and others more, but it's not just about seeing people's faces.
we're talking about something that is
- mildly to moderately annoying to a lot of people, even if it isn't to you personally--I don't enjoy having to always remember another thing in my pockets if I want to get into buildings, nor do I enjoy wearing cloth over my face for any length of time, nor do I enjoy missing out on facial cues from the people I'm trying to communicate with, especially when the mask makes it harder to hear them in the first place
- mostly observed as a symbolic ritual--everywhere I've been with a mask mandate requires them on entering buildings, but then people are free to pull them down to eat, or drink, or blow their noses, or fix their makeup.... and I've not been to a single place that enforces proper wearing or fitting of masks, or even promotes N95 type masks (which probably provide some protection to the wearer when worn correctly) over cloth/paper (which likely provide little protection to anyone)
- clearly never going to last forever-- who in 2031, or 2041, or 2051 is going to be wearing masks in buildings to protect themselves against the 2019 Covid?
it doesn't baffle me at all why some people are so vehemently pro-mask, but surely it shouldn't be that much of a surprise that other people don't like them
To the symbolic ritual point, that would suggest you'd be in favor of stricter enforcement, not that you'd be against them entirely.
And to be clear about my own point of view, I think "moderately annoying" would be a good description of my own feelings: slightly more of a pain than taking out the trash, vastly less than sitting in rush hour traffic. Neither of those count as intolerable tyranny.
I have been to a lot of places that tried the "stricter enforcement", and every one of them descended to the "symbolic ritual" level within months--it turns out that you can't just stop people from eating, drinking, or blowing their noses, and once you allow those exemptions, you don't have much else to stand on. I do agree that if we "have" to have mandates anyway, we might as well have them for masks that might work, but I know of nowhere that is doing that.
I agree that it's not some kind of horrible, intolerable tyranny for most people (except perhaps kids in school, for whom it is far from the first) but well, you asked why people don't like masks, and you've been given a bunch of reasons, and I'm sorry that none of them meets your personal standard for "good reasons", but clearly they meet other people's.
I didn't ask why people don't like masks. I asked why a person like Rafal would lump in mask requirements with lockdowns and pose the two as alternative to mass vaccination, and why others might view that perspective as logical as opposed to deeply weird.
it sounds like the only person qualified to answer that question to your satisfaction is Rafal, then
Or anyone that agrees with them.
N95 masks are legitimately hard to wear correctly, and if worn incorrectly they are not especially useful. Enforcement of proper use of N95s is a non-starter.
"who in 2031, or 2041, or 2051 is going to be wearing masks in buildings to protect themselves against the 2019 Covid?"
Presumably the same people who in 2015 or 2018 or whatever were wearing masks to protect themselves against the 2003 SARS (and then realized that it was good for colds and flus too). That is, something like 10-20% of the population, and perhaps more people for smaller fractions of time.
I'm not at all clear who or where this portion of the population is--if you're talking about East Asian nations, yes there absolutely is/was a norm of people wearing masks voluntarily as a precaution against seasonal illness, and I know of nobody anywhere who has any problem with that.
And yet, you just said something that indicated that you think *no one* would be wearing masks in 2031. Some people in this thread (like NoPie) are definitely arguing that people *shouldn't* wear masks, because they make us go too long between infections.
1. if we're being pedantic, im sure the amount of people wearing masks decades from now will be greater than zero--I'm also sure it will be far less than now, that few to none of them will be wearing them to defend against Covid19 (whatever it has evolved to by then) in specific, and that perhaps outside of weird legacy rules in airports or courthouses or whatever, they will not be wearing those masks because it's mandatory
2. that's a bizarre and nonsensical take which is why i did not make or defend it
I think I agree on all of these points. The biggest question is just how much "far less than now" is (and presumably that will fluctuate from season to season, year to year, and place to place).
"who in 2031, or 2041, or 2051 is going to be wearing masks in buildings to protect themselves against the 2019 Covid?"
Who in 2021 is going to be taking off his shoes when going through airport security?
The answer to both is a lot different when you are talking about what free people do in response to the threats of the day and what bureaucracies impose. Yes, the latter *sometimes* goes away, but that's not the way to bet. (And yes, bureaucracies have imposed masking and shutdowns and then relaxed them -- but they have also then reimposed them, and every time it's easier.)
i fully expect that (again, possibly outside of some weird holdouts like airports) all this will go away, because we're already at the point where almost nobody is willing to even consider mass shutdowns (good!), where many places have either relaxed mask requirements or quietly dropped them, and the rest are entirely and openly symbolic, and where it's becoming increasingly clear to everyone that Covid will be around for the rest of our lives, and our various overreactions will be around for as long as we're willing to put up with them
with every new wave and mutation that shows up, the efficacy of the last round of precautions gets a little harder to believe, and the promises of "this will only last a short time" get less plausible, and there's simply no way to gain back the inertia for those who would have us return to Zoom school or handing meals outside the restaurant through improvised hatches or locking away the elderly for their own good
Might be true for variants of Covid-19. But the precedent has been set. You don’t have to look hard to find someone talking about it as practice for dealing with climate change.
That's fair, but A) the misanthropic fantasies of a handful of internet weirdos are not necessarily the best predictors of future reality, and B) the fact that these dramatic measures have so publicly and clearly failed will make it harder to get people to go along with them in the future. Afghanistan and Iraq had huge support at the time, but since they turned into endless disasters, how many small, strategically located nations have American forces invaded?
No way to prove that they have “clearly failed”; believers can always claim it would have been much worse without them. If they have “clearly failed” how come they’re cranking them up again now?
Interesting analogy, given that they turned into quagmires within about a year but it still took 20 years before the US pulled out of Afghanistan....
I heard an interesting NPR piece a few weeks back about the difficulties of a teacher in Chicago high school class for English language learners- the masks and the noise of the air filtration unit make it much harder for her and her students to understand each other.
In my experience, conversations between people one of whom speaks English as a second language, or has an accent which is unfamiliar to the other person, are noticeably harder if they're wearing masks. I don't consciously lip-read, so I don't know whether it's the loss of unconscious visual cues or the mask muffling speech.
I’m getting on in years and for me it’s both. Don’t know about school kids, I suppose, but I would bet it’s true there as well. And so much about learning life depends on facial expressions.
Speech recognition for humans is as much visual as it is auditory. See https://youtu.be/2k8fHR9jKVM for the classic demonstration.
I only hear "ba" throughout and can't make myself hear anything else.
I hear ba and fa respectively. Very strange indeed.
Do mask mandates reduce R0 of covid below 1? If not, then won't covid spread throughout the most of the population eventually?
So, maybe I'm wrong about this, but it seems that the only purpose mask mandates serve is to slow the spread of the disease and reduce acute burden on hospitals.
So the question is whether the tradeoff of negative utility due to unpleasantness of wearing masks or negative utility due to increased hospital burden during spikes of spread is greater.
Although I am convinced that masks have some efficacy, I am not convinced that the mandates are worth the tradeoff. For one thing, even without a mandate many people will still wear masks and they will still confer some benefit to society.
Ultimately though this is going to come down to what are right now subjective takes on how unpleasant masks are. Personally I strongly dislike them, they interfere with conversation, reading people's faces, working out at the gym, etc.
Side point, why can't you just wear a more effective mask for protecting yourself, like an N95 or N100? Most of the people I know in favor of mask mandates still wear marginally effective cloth masks or surgical masks.
As far as mandates go, you have to keep in mind the game theory. Smoking ban in restaurants, for example, have to be imposed on everyone; if each restaurant is free to choose for themselves, none of them can afford to impose a marginal inconvenience on their customers, but if all of them are required to do it, it has zero cost on anyone but the smokers, who are only slightly inconvenienced anyway. Similar logic applies here.
This isn't actually true about smoking bans, though. In my hometown by the time the ban came in there was only one restaurant that allowed smoking. The taboo was already strong by that point. The ban merely served to enforce what the majority of people wanted on everyone.
I think you've misunderstood my point. I don't believe that in the absence of government mask mandates there should be mask mandates by private establishments (e.g. restaurants). I agree with your conclusion on how the game theory works out here. I don't want private establishments to require people to require masks.
I would prefer that masking be an individual choice.
As for whether the game theory works out on the individual level - I have spent a lot of time in a place where there are no mask mandates at a government or private level. Many people still choose to wear masks, though most don't. That's fine with me.
*Masking* in restaurants seem somewhat meaningless since you remove them to eat, but I can say that I would happily patronize whichever coffee shop in my area decided to mandate vaccines (and even pay a couple dollars extra), and would at least favor restaurants that did that , though they're usually less fungible. Alas, none do because our governor banned it here in Texas.
The "pay extra" camp might be small, but I know *a lot* of people would prefer the "vaccine required" option if available. It might not outweigh the % unvaccinated yet, but depends on your clientele.
Agreed on letting the market figure things out. I on the other hand, would pay a little extra to not have to do the silly mask dance, and to not have to pull up the vaccine card on my phone for the millionth time to do a daily activity.
Maybe I should move to Texas and you should move to the west coast :D
Allowing smokers is an inconvenience for many non-smokers (who dislike smoke), just like banning smoking is an inconvenience for smokers. If there is a significant portion of the population with either preference, the equilibrium outcome should be that some restaurants cater to one preference, and some to the other one. If every other restaurant allows smoking, then a restaurant that bans it gains more from the non-smokers who will prefer it than it loses from losing the smokers.
I personally get the intuitive argument and multiplicative effect of even imperfect masks reducing transmission when most people wear them indoors. Fine. But I am friends with "anti-maskers" and understand where they come from.
I think there are a few things.
Part of it is a symbolic/aesthetic thing, a reaction to the forceful pushing and the other refusing to submit. It may be necessary, but the messaging around is ugh. They might be necessary, but why put them on every statue, every illustration? The NYC subway ads for masks, if you've seen them, are particularly repugnant..
Part of it is, who and when and where and how much. Should i glue it to my 2-yead-old's ears when in public? Outside too? At the playground? For 8 hours in school/daycare? People will talk about the issues of rebreathing, impeding verbal development via facial expression, etc. I can't speak to those.... But I don't relish having my kids masked everywhere, all the time.
A final part is, it is aesthetically, viscerally displeasing. Someone close to me calls them "muzzles". I know many very very pro mask people who still have a hard time keeping them on in social settings, because in our culture its unnatural and weird (and hard to understand what people say).
1) The evidence that the typical fabric masks worn by the public are effective in the real world is basically non-existent. Actual experiments have not shown a statistically significant effect.
2) People don't like being forced to wear a veil.
I will freely admit that being forced to wear a mask makes me extremely angry, to the point of becoming an obstreperous and loudly arguing lout, which is not my usual manner.
Once while on call at the hospital I heard a young child loudly screaming as his parents were physically forcing a mask on his face, while also loudly screaming at him "You will wear a mask!!!". At that time there was no requirement for small children to be masked, so maybe I could have intervened, but then, it's not my job. I felt sorrow at the suffering and anger. I got angry. I walked away.
They said they will have me marked down on the no-fly-list if I don't immediately obey and put the piece of trash they gave me on my face. I was angry but couldn't walk away. I obeyed.
I saw pictures of Fauci wearing a mask while pitching a baseball, in the middle of the field where no viral transmission takes place but immediately taking it off while hanging out with friends. I read his leaked email where he wrote masks were useless but then I kept hearing about my duty to "save others" by wearing them. Did I mention I get angry a lot when masks are mentioned?
A tiny harm to self looms larger than large harms to others. I was never locked down. I worked 359 nights last year. The loss and suffering that lockdowns inflicted on others never affected me. I signed up for the vaccine on the first date it was offered at the hospital, so a vaccine mandate never affected me either. But every time I see a patient, I feel like a clown because I am wearing a mask, and that hurts me, every day, many times. The anger builds.
I am not into BDSM. If I were bound and masked, I would feel anger, because being bound and masked is dehumanizing and humiliating. So, no, I am not into BDSM.
Last week I stormed out of a restaurant, angry, when they demanded I put on a mask while walking away from my table, because they had to "protect other people" (who were busily expelling millions of aerosol droplets while masticating and talking), from my filthy, unmasked presence.
Yeah, I do get angry about masks.
"I’m having trouble figuring out how to analyze this point. After thinking about it, maybe the problem is I don’t have a good sense of why fires ever stop. Assuming there is at least one continuous line of trees connecting (eg) Maine to Georgia, why didn’t every forest fire burn the entire East Coast to a crisp back before there were human firefighters?"
Having grown up on the west coast in a heavily wooded region, I remember learning about this in school. So I might have the details wrong, but this is what I remember.
Namely, fires keep on spreading until they
a) run across a natural roadblock they can't cross like a wide river or very tall mountain, an area that already burned fairly recently and had no fuel, or the ocean
b) the weather changes (rain, cool temperatures, etc) and it puts the fire out
c) it runs out of fuel.
This means that in many regions you'd have smaller fires fairly regularly that would burn slow but steady until the weather turned, and occasionally you'd have super fires that would spread thousands of miles and burn huge tracts of land before running into natural barriers and burning themselves out. The super fires tended to occur rarely, when there was enough fuel on the ground that hadn't burned and you got the perfect conditions for a huge burn (hot, dry, and high winds).
So that natural state of things for large, heavily forested regions in nature is for there to be some slow burning ground fires pretty much every summer that last until it rains, and the occasional really big fire. See for example the "Big Burn" of 1910 where three million acres of forest were burned to ashes in less than two days. The cause was a drought and unusually long dry spell. This led to many small slow burning fires like normal, but then one day hurricane force winds hit the region and whipped all the small fires into one huge inferno. It didn't really stop until a cold front moved in with lots of snow.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Fire_of_1910#Origin
This is normal. Many times I've visited "The Grove of the Patriarchs" at Mt. Rainier National Park where some of the oldest trees in the region grow (some over 1,000 years old and 40 feet in diameter). The reason given for why they've survived so long is that they're on an island in the middle of the Ohanapacosh river, and apparently are situated just right to have survived all the megafires over the last 1,000 years.
This is all correct for much of the western US, where, in general: humidity is lower, rainfall amounts are lower and often seasonally distributed, vegetation type is more prone to crown fires. In the eastern US, however, we have enough wet weather that we don't end up with huge fuel buildups, and in general the precipitation is distributed throughout the year. It's just a very different ecological system that behaves very differently.
Endemic diseases, avalanches, earthquakes, forest fires, and probably a million other things exhibit "self-organized criticality". You've got some thing that, if it happens, wants to spread to nearby units, but is more likely to spread to nearby units that haven't had it in a while. (An infection is more likely in a person with waning immunity than fresh immunity; the snow on a square inch of mountain slope is more likely to slide if there's several days of fresh snowfall on top than if it just slid; a bit of rock is more likely to slip if it's got more built up tension than if it's just been released; a square mile of forest is more likely to burn if it's got several years of unburnt underbrush than if it just burnt.) When you have lots of buildup and no immunity, so that R>1 everywhere in the network, then a spark anywhere burns/pandemics/avalanches everything. When you've got lots of immunity and no buildup, and the system is everywhere near some particular R<1, then your average outbreak infects 1/(1-R) total people before dying out. But when the average R in the system is close to 1, a lot will depend on the detailed network structure, and outbreaks/avalanches/earthquakes/forest fires can end up of any size, with a power law distribution of sizes, but on average they still leave most of the system right near that margin of 1 (unlike pandemics or global conflagrations).
I guess respiratory diseases and forest fires in temperate zones have lots of seasonality, so if they spend a lot of time far enough from 1 in either direction, then the fire season/flu season will end up having a characteristic size each year (proportional to the amount of immunity that is lost in the summer/winter while seasonality suppresses flu/fire). But earthquakes don't get this periodic forcing, so they stay near the critical edge.
Except that your thinking and everyone else's thinking on seasonality is wrong. Or rather it is fine but likely irrelevant, since this is a bioengineered lab-created virus. If this were Your virus, would you have made it seasonal? Maybe somewhat just to fool people. Let's remember that bioweapons do their best damage when they tie up resources and demoralize everyone and the more the better. Nevertheless, there will be some seasonality due to humidity, which is the primary cause of all seasonality. This virus was also engineered to accept add-on modules to be released down the road. People call it a "coronavirus" but it is much more. We need to adjust our thinking.
How would you go about designing a respiratory virus to *prevent* seasonal influences on its spread? Or am I wrong in thinking that it's a respiratory virus too?
You'd design it to be less susceptible to desiccation/humidity mitigated spread. Virion size would be one simple way. Aerosols can loft for many days, even cross over oceans.
Because 60% of covid is aerosolized, masks do not work at any significant level and there are many physical and psychological and societal harms as noted in the German study:
-Increase in breathing resistance
-Increase in blood carbon dioxide
-Decrease in blood oxygen saturation
-Increase in heart rate
-Decrease in cardiopulmonary capacity
-Feeling of exhaustion
-Increase in respiratory rate
-Difficulty breathing and shortness of breath
-Headache
-Dizziness
-Feeling of dampness and heat
-Drowsiness
-Decrease in empathy perception
-Impaired skin barrier function with acne, itching and skin lesions
PLUS the additional control and coercion slave mentality effect:
-Leads to oxygen deprivation, promoting a state of physical and mental weakness
-Are symbols of submission used as part of master-slave dynamics
-Enforces the creation of a incarceration culture
-Erases personhood and homogenizes the masses — “The collectivized wearing of masks results in an enforced uniformity in which the individual cedes way to the nameless collectivity as the neo-meta citizen.”
-Are theatrical and act to conceal identities, rendering us alien to others and ourselves
-Deletes facial expressions and inhibit nonverbal communication, including that necessary for social organization that can lead to revolution
-Reduces verbal output
-Are visible displays of allegiance to the “system of medicalizing technocratic control”
-Are part of preparing individuals for new societal roles — “However transitory the current regime of face masking might be, the population must face that we are being forced to undergo a rite of passage, a process of re-socialization into the new normal.”
-Promote a culture of fear - which makes you obey without asking questions.
-Act as deterrents of solidarity by making your neighbor into a “nameless pathogenic vector instead of your ally”
The minimum infective dose comes in the sides, tops and bottom (18% of mask airflow). A bit more goes right through the filter medium like a football through goalposts.
We all need to just get the virus and get on with it. Do the well-known by now 100% effective multi-treatment protocols and forget about it.
Once you get it, it's over. There is no known case of re-infection although there can be plenty of still positive PCR tests. That statement on the impossibility of reinfection is based on 135 studies, according to Dr. Peter McCullough who has published over 40 peer-reviewed covid studies, more than anyone else.
Remember the IFR is only 0.14% compared to the Flu at 0.1%, so we can ignore it, unless you are fat, the number one comorbidity because fat cells have the IL-6 cytokine which is what this engineered coronavirus leads with (unlike any other of the coronaviruses) to kill you dead. More fat is more IL-6, so you don't have to be obese to be at serious risk, just fat.
People should break out of their covid hypnosis and focus instead on the steroidal march of global tyranny, which those who have experienced it say it's far worse than death so "Live Free or Die" should be your motto. We need to be prepared to sacrifice everything as those before us have done in their turn.
Note that 90 countries are developing a Central Bank Digital Currency. When this is hooked to your Vaccine Passport ("Papers please.") it is all over. If your file is not in order then no access allowed to your government held bank account. No compliance, no food. Whereas in the past we reserved our rights and could do anything that was not specifically against the law, now we can do nothing unless it is allowed.
Picking just one random part: are you sure that
> There is no known case of re-infection
applies to COVID19?
Yes, quite sure of no 2nd infection, as much as anyone can be sure of anything in this post-truth reality.
I've heard of cases but they were wrong, due to false positive PCR tests and mistaking it for the flu, which the PCR test cannot differentiate from covid.
Also those who had SARS-Cov-1 in 2003 are now immune to SARS-Cov-2 even though the genomes are 30% different. The most variable of the previous SARS-COV-2 variants (but possibly not including the newer Omicron variant) were all only about 0.3% variable.
Natural immunity accounts for all five viral proteins whereas the so-called vaccines only remember the S1 toxic spike protein, which is easily mutated around.
Dr. Peter McCullough stated so in no uncertain terms during his recent Joe Rogan interview - one of the best wide-ranging covid interviews yet. Hard to find if no Spotify, but here it is anyway:
https://bnt-cdn.b-cdn.net/upload/videos/2021/12/bZuyRa3H5FUYi3DSpAep_15_e05d4d490ae44a33cacf34f748396d4b_video_480p_converted.mp4
So if you've had Covid, you are good to go.
That interview is 2 hours and 45 minutes of gold and Joe, who is highly intelligent, asks perfectly relevant questions. Make some popcorn and settle in. According to Dr. McCullough the S1 spike protein stays in your system (doing damage) for 15 months and the vaccine produces far more toxic S1 proteins than you'd get from the virus.
The vaccine is more toxic than the virus and a rational person would prefer the virus over the vaccine - regardless of risk group. Elsewhere I've read the vaccine:virus kill rate is 2:1 for under 20 year-olds and 6:1 for 80 year-olds. This is using a 4.5 underreporting factor for the VAERS data.
If the conspiracy you're alleging could coordinate as well as you are accusing them of, they wouldn't need to release a virus, bio-engineered or no, to form their NWO. They'd just do it.
Stalin, Hitler, and the Inquisition all did that by force, and lynch mobs just use Force, too. But those are messy; it's much easier if you induce acquiescence with the big lie, especially when going global. 9/11 set us up for the militarized police surveillance State, and covid is cover for totalitarianism.
Want to learn about the concentration camps now in operation in Australia? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjvUzgIbcco
How about Canada?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EhgfFLfn8g
As Chomsky said in 1988, the mainstream media is the propaganda arm of the Rich and Powerful - so you won't hear anything in the media about concentration camps for the unvaxxed or non mask wearers, or about any vaccine deaths: https://openvaers.com/
Why?
You miss the point. There would be no need for force. What you are describing isn't "an evil scheme to take absolute control over the world", you are describing a group that ALREADY HAS absolute control over the world, leaves no traces of its existence, and can coordinate on a level that resembles eusociality instead of human behavior. To put it politely, this stains credibility.
I'm certain you believe that there are concentration camps being formed to kill all the people who refuse to wear masks, and I feel very sorry for you for believing that. Your life must be nightmarish.
It was not that long ago that the Nazis put people into concentration camps for far less than not wearing a mask.
You have taken the blue pill and are experiencing cognitive dissonance. But remember it is the red pill that is the true reality, and the blue pill is the delusion.
They do not have absolute control just yet. In 2017, according to Oxfam data, the top 1% took 82% of global income. That leaves 18% still on the table.
The problem is the massive concentration of both income and power inequality. We talk about income inequality and forget about the power inequality. A Swiss complexity scientist determined that 0.12% of Corporations control 80% of transnational corporations. Specifically, these controllers at the top of the Pyramid and astride the world are Vanguard Fund, Black Rock, and State Street. They have ownership interest in just about everything, for example, they own 90% of the Legacy Media and they also own Pharma. Ownership means control and that's how they manage their portfolio. Their Media is not allowed to criticize their Pharma. The New York Times lies to your face constantly.
The world has undergone what social psychologists call a mass formation, or a mass psychosis, as seen in Stalinism, 1930s Germany, the Inquisition and their witch trials, and on a local level, with lynch mobs. This is very definitely happening now and it's really quite amazing that only about 10% of the population sees it, because it is right in front of them.
The unholy concentration of global wealth and power has been accruing for some time, but it has now reached a Tipping Point. There are four requirements for totalitarianism and we currently have them all. We have also experienced all 10 historical phases leading to totalitarianism according to Naomi Wolf.
You of the blue pill tribe are being played. That is why what should be an obvious truth strains your credulity. Because you've been programmed to keep yourself inside your box. Did you watch those videos that prove that governments are creating isolation camps? No you did not, why? Are you afraid to examine your unexamined assumptions?
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so. “ – Mark Twain
We are continually being dosed by exterior programming from our self-selected media, and that is coordinated with the prior programs that have created our unexamined assumptions. We are being led around by the nose from both directions.
The best way I know to do an end-run around both programs are to do your own research, read the studies, look at the actual data, and listen to interviews with the smart people. All that is not easy for the average person who prefers to believe their media and leave it at that. The average in-denial person, who has a below-average IQ, is ruled by availability and confirmation biases.
What you first need to do to get back to reality is to realize that you are in a mass psychosis. For that you need to view this excellent interview with Professor Desmet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRo-ieBEw-8
A lot of the things you cite are real problems, but I think connecting them into a grand conspiracy is not indicated by the evidence and in particular "SARS-CoV-2 was released on purpose" doesn't really add up.
We know from the genetic sequence and also Dr. Steven Quay's Senate testimony and his 193-page Bayesian analysis that this virus was lab-created (99.8% probability). We know gain-of-function is funded by psychopaths in the Chinese military and the US Military because they love bio-weapons. We know there’s no vector for disease transmission, the disease presents with unusual symptoms, China does not want anyone in there investigating the outbreak, and that bioweapons are loved because their release has plausible deniability.
Why would anyone intentionally create a bio-weapon if they were not going to intentionally release it?
Have you heard interviews with Dr. Li-Meng Yan, a Chinese corona virologist?
She asserts: that China seeks to develop a race-based bio-weapon that targets and eliminates some human races while leaving other human races unharmed, that COVID-19 is a part of a larger, more comprehensive unrestricted bioweapons program, that the People’s Liberation Army’s official bioweapons textbook asserts World War III would be fought with biological weapons, that modifications to the virus are designed to appear as if they occur in nature, that gaslighting with unrelenting misinformation, obfuscation and denial should follow a release, that the world is living the intentional modification, release and contrived narrative around what ultimately is an attack by the Communist Chinese Party, and that CCP money and threats to withhold funding coerced the international academic world into spreading a false narrative (corroborated by Professor Emeritus Muller's Senate testimony after Stephen Quay's Senate testimony https://tinyurl.com/428559x5), and that the coronavirus has been engineered to accept add-on modules for future deployment that will keep the ball rolling.
Chinese military strategy is all about deception and sneak attack. If you believe that World War 3 will be fought with bioweapons, wouldn't you start that war at a strategically propitious time rather than wait for your adversaries to start it at a time of their choosing?
Dr. David Martin (who has examined 100s of Coronavirus & Covid Vaccine patents), reveals that many patents had been taken before this pandemic;
https://www.bitchute.com/video/KtLzQi7fsMYD/
The CCP is heavily invested in big Pharma and the primary movement of Chinese-style totalitarianism has occurred in the Western countries. The fact of the matter is that an intelligent intentional release has greatly benefited China in many ways.
Note that the CCP and the global deep state of the Rich and Famous are hand-in-hand. Both seek to control you and do not care about you whatsoever. You'd certainly serve them best by being a Slave.
Let's all pull our heads out of the sand and realize that we have entered the Era of Bioterrorism. - and that totalitarianism will follow "to keep us safe," just as the militarized police surveillance State followed 911 to keep us safe.
Each accelerated the transfer of wealth and control from the People to the globalized rich and powerful astride the world, including those of the CCP. Was that a coincidence? If so, that transfer of wealth has been coincidentally happening for decades. What we are seeing is not random; global inequality and governmental control of the People only goes in One Direction, it always gets worse, which means that it is planned.
The global rich and Powerful, the elite, are comprised of many Psychopaths, which means they have no empathy. When they do wrong and kill people, they do not care and do not feel stress, unlike you and I. So don't judge them by the standards of average people. Psychopaths know that conspiracies are real because they create them.
Note that believing the release was Not intentional is also a "conspiracy theory," a term developed to gaslight you by the CIA to quash speculation about the JFK assassination. There most definitely is a global conspiracy rolling out, and part of that conspiracy is to program you to disbelieve in conspiracies.
The intentional release of this bioweapon - and not the unintentional release - by China should be considered the null hypothesis. Although neither can yet be proven, the intentional release seems to have the greater preponderance of the evidence (greater than a 50% probability.
Once you consider it the null hypothesis, things make a bit more sense and you can see farther.
And by the way, I never did actually state that "SARS-CoV-2 was released on purpose," but whatever.
Little bit of tension between masks being so impermeable they cause suffocation while simultaneously allowing virus particles three orders of magnitude larger than oxygen to pass unimpeded.
Not suffocation, just decreased oxygen. Imagine many thousands of oldsters driving around with masks and not getting their required amount of oxygen.
Further distress is caused by sky-high CO2 (2150 ± 192 to 2875 ± 323 ppm, about 5 times higher than normal) causing fatigue, headache, and loss of concentration.
(As an aside, note that ambient CO2 has increased from 385 PPM to 415 ppm over the past 60 years. At the current rate of CO2 increase it will take 195 years to get up to 800 PPM, which humans would not notice at all and plants would love as greenhouses are often at kept at 1000 ppm. CO2 scrubbers in submarines turn on at 8000 ppm. Therefore CO2 caused climate change is yet another non-scientific media hoax designed to transfer wealth from the poor to the rich and powerful. Everyone should be trying to increase their carbon footprint to benefit plants and food production. Doubling CO2 to 800 PPM will double plant growth.)
For a mask to work properly as an antiviral you need to superglue it down, but you'd quite possibly suffocate. But why do that for a virus with an IFR of 0.14% compared to the Flu at 0.1%?
If I were inclined to seriously debate this fellow more, I'd also point out that on-call surgeons have worn surgical masks for very long periods of time before COVID without these apocalyptic side-effects they want to claim- unless they also want to assert that "They" covered this up for nearly a century to prep for this very moment.
Surgeons wear surgical masks for two reasons: to stop surgical spatter from hitting their face and to keep spittle away from the surgical incision, and not in an attempt to mitigate viral transmission. That's why BSL4 virologists do not wear surgical masks. Surgeons absolutely do get headaches from wearing these masks as multiple studies have found.
"Continuous use of face masks and respirators has resulted in a variety of symptoms of which headache forms a major part by all healthcare professionals as well as the patients." They call it a silent epidemic.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8136115/
Also here: "Most healthcare workers develop de novo PPE-associated headaches or exacerbation of their pre-existing headache disorders."
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32232837/
And what does a famous neurosurgeon say?
https://tinyurl.com/4ujnd675
For my favorite deep dive into the data:
https://tinyurl.com/2p9bv88v
(Be sure to check the entertaining video of two PhDs loudly arguing about mask efficacy - one of them makes a fool out of himself with his handwaving, like Essex.)
I will yield on headaches, but what you've claimed is much more severe than "some headaches". And you still haven't unraveled the mystery of the masks preventing oxygen from getting through while letting something much larger than oxygen through completely unhindered. But what am I saying? You don't seem to have much of an obligation to the truth when it doesn't fit your eccentric bias.
>If this were Your virus, would you have made it seasonal?
If I had kids, I'd make them be able to take care of themselves from birth.
It strikes me as interesting that immunity tends to wane on the order of a year, and that lines up with the seasonal variation in R0. Any idea why the evolutionary equilibrium would find this timeline for immunity wane as optimal?
It's much more obvious when they line up and you get an epidemic every winter like clockwork. Much less so when it's way off and you get a chaotic system where spikes might happen at any time of year.
If the immunity wanes over any period longer than 1 year you see this, assuming that the waning is a gradual process rather than some unnatural binary - you only fail to see seasonality if the immunity wanes much faster, within a few months. I assume the evolutionary equilibrium for immunity varies with a lot of factors, but the difference between immunity lasting 2 years and lasting 20 won't show up in seasonality
> rt should be 1 on average in the long run
Can someone give intuition for why it must be that way? This seems like the crucial bit.
EDIT: ok, it makes sense that conditioned on the fact that the disease stays around, its R_t must be 1 on average. But doesn't that require careful tuning of R_0, how quickly immunity wanes and the length of the infection cycle?
If it is greater than 1 on average it takes over, everyone gets it and it never goes away (if it did the average would drop). If it is less than 1 on average then it trends towards extinction.
that's why it's "average"
rather like the way the population of turtles in a specific pond, say, will tend to average out over the same number over a long enough period of time, at least as long as the rest of the ecosystem is reasonably stable
I think the key here is that any tuning that occurs happens in equilibrium. The speed at which immunity wanes and the length of the infection cycle are (conditional on variant) probably fixed (and exogenous). Then human behavior and medicine and regulatory intervention step in and respond endogenously to "tune" the average rt to 0 (extinction) to 1 (endemic, with waves as shorter run rt vacillates around 1) or to some number above 1 (where we all always have it and I have no idea how to define rt in that setting as "infection" isn't a discrete event anymore).
I suppose the candidate for infections where r stayed >> 1 are the ones that managed to write themselves into our genome permanently?
There is a negative feedback. If more people get it, there is more immunity in the population, so r decreases. If few people catch it for a while, immunity wanes, so r increases.
So the properties of the disease and of the human immune system need not be perfectly calibrated for r to stay at 1 on average on the long run; the feedback system does it.
As far as forests and population immunity, Taleb address this in Anti-Fragile. An anti-fragile system is one that gains from disorder. Small, frequent fires burn off fuel whereas modern forest management interrupts the natural order and allows huge amounts to accumulate.
The same thing happens in an economy. Lots of small bankruptcies over time strengthen the overall economy, but a prolonged period of constant growth and/or a lot of institutions that don't have skin-in-the-game (aka Too Big To Fail) lead to big blowups and deeper recessions.
It's more than just an explanatory analogy for the immune system as it relates to the Hygiene Theory of increased allergies in children and populations being exposed to non-fatal infections, either thru natural means or vaccinations.
And as others have said, forest fires don't burn everything because of natural breaks (rivers, etc). In California the Pacific Ocean is often referred to as "The Big Blue Break"
From the Alisal IAP this year:
"Control objectives: keep the fire North of Pacific Ocean"
Have you been waiting until this this is all over before trying to be smart about it. Smart per se (if looking smart is what everything is always about)
> Let’s say at some particular time that’s 90%, and maybe that implies an R of 0.5. As time goes on, immunity declines - 85%, 80%, etc - and r creeps up - 0.6, 0.7, etc.
<pedantry level="extreme">Ahem, R = 0.5 with 90% immunity means R0 = 5, meaning with 85% immunity R = 0.75 and with 80% immunity R = 1.0.</pedantry>
I always thought the "why does it stop?" question even more interesting and most people just ignore it. People will lecture about R and exponential growth but have little to say about an outbreak just dying out without any particular identifiable and repeatable reason.
Just like forest fires, they don't just burn everything. Experts have shown very little skill in predicting the end of an outbreak so I get pretty dismissive of the modeling effort in general. I'm sure this is complicated but I have come out of this convinced we just don't understand virus dynamics very well and I am pretty disappointed relative to what I thought about the field prior to this pandemic. Some of the lecturing on "trust the science" has been insufferable given this lack of actionable intelligence. This was a heaping spoonful of humility for the field and the CDC IMO.
"In South East Asia, we have two flu seasons ... in the summer, people coop themselves up at home with the air-conditioning on full blast.
....In South East Asia, the muggy air retains heat, requiring air-conditioning and reduced airflow."
Yep - why Louisiana got wrecked by Delta in August when we all retreated inside. Also why (largely GOP) hot southern states look like COVID geniuses after the winter, when the north was couped up and wrecked and we've been outside.
Yes, being inside without ventilation is the best way to get covid. People bring it in from the outside and it lingers in the air, particularly if anyone has been in a public restroom, which are usually poorly ventilated.
Regarding fire: I am a (country) firefighter, though my particular insight comes mostly just from having a fireplace. I think the thing you're missing is that wood is actually pretty hard to burn.
Put a big log in a fireplace and try to light it with a match. It won't burn. Try a phone book. Also won't burn. A match can light small sticks and grass, and those can burn hot enough to light bigger sticks, which in turn can burn hot enough to light solid logs.
Another experiment: Get a roaring fire started with a few big logs in the fireplace, nice and hot. Then separate out the logs so they aren't heating each other. There's a good chance they'll go out. Big solid pieces of wood need a *lot* of heat to keep burning. And this is with seasoned wood!
There's an "R0" for a forest fire that depends on the local environment. The biggest factors are fuel (type and quantity), weather, and terrain. Surprisingly, on a typical day in a typical forest, the R0 is <1, and even in crazy fires you might get a sudden drop in the R0 due to wind direction change, topography, or natural barriers (including low fuel load areas due to previous fires).
In summary: Forest fires stop naturally because forests are less flammable than you imagine, and the "R0" of even a big fire can be mercurial.
forests in most places that aren't Western America are pretty hard to ignite! that was a weird take to see there, but I guess if you've never spent much time in forests out of the American West, you might just assume that they're all constant fire risks
I mean… I’m from Israel, and it experiences large fires every few years. So do Greece and Italy. Russia has its megafires - in fact, one of the largest ones ever recorded initiated recently as far north as Yakutia. I’d say that the opposite of your take is equally convincing, and the places with large forests that are not tropical and yet don’t experience large fires might be the exceptions.
There are plenty of times in plenty of forests in the Western US where you're basically just standing there dumping burn mix on the unit or the pile or whatever and it goes out as soon as you turn your back.
Although I'm not a firefighter, I am a one-match fireplace guy and a fire can start very easily if the conditions are right. Without rain for some time you get dry tinder in the form of pine needles and leaves, then kindling, then dry smaller twigs with the undergrowth, then small branches, and then larger branches, and then you get to the actual trees. It's like a perfectly made fire in a fireplace if all is dry due to a lack of rain.
If you properly set up your fireplace it only takes one match.
Yes, with a "perfect" set of conditions you can get an explosive fire - but most of the time, even in California, it's not like that. And even when it is, weather is fickle. Forests just don't burn to the last contiguous tree. Sometimes they don't even burn the trees; my whole district burned in last year's LNU fire, but most of the trees survived (sadly, not all of the homes).
My point is that Scott's question "Why don't entire forests burn every time?" exposes an assumption that forests are more flammable than they are. There's probably some reasonable amount of analogy that can be made to viral diseases here.
It's a partial analogy. All fires, like all viruses, and every other natural phenomena, expand exponentially, hit the carrying capacity of the environment, and fall back down to equilibrium; the S-curve.
Fires burn until the forest becomes too wet while a virus infects until the target population develops immunity. The fire is stopped by an unrelated external event, so by chance, whereas a virus is stopped by a dependent reaction, acquired immunity, against it's action. So the analogy works for the growth phase but not for the mitigation transition or stop condition.
Two possibly better analogies are a tractor pull or a boxing match. They both start out fast and easy but the going gets harder as they get further into it due to increasing feedback. At the end of a boxing match both fighters are more beat and more tired than at the beginning as they directly experience the law of diminishing marginal returns.
Re: seasonality of polio - yes, swimming pools, but also summer fruits and vegetables. Think strawberries, lettuce, anything that would be hand-picked and not cooked.
I don't have the source, but it used to be A Thing in Victorian times to not feed kids fresh greens in the summer 'because it upset their systems' - in other words, because they would pick up a food-borne illness.
Our current era is *amazing* and I like it quite a lot.
I expect that depends on what was used to fertilise the land. Human waste would seem to be the problem there, chemical fertiliser not so much.
This predated most of the chemical fertilizer use. The mechanism was contamination during harvesting by farmers and farm hands.
What about Original Antigenetic Sin?
This model feels satisfying for endemic viruses which have reached an equilibrium state, but now I feel a bit confused again about COVID. In Hungary (where I am; and I think this applies to most of Europe, but haven't double-checked), in both 2020 and 2021, it essentially died out over the summer, started ticking back up more-or-less literally the day the calendar turned over to September, and raged during the winter. Since this hasn't been around long enough to have been entrained into a yearly cycle around an R=1 equilibrium, it *must* be the physical factors themselves -- heat, humidity, UV, indoors, whatever -- causing that directly?
Interestingly, our local Covid wave crested (with a fairly high daily count of new infections) in the last week of November and is now clearly falling in Czechia, even though the weather corresponds to our usual December standards. It caught the experts a bit off-guard, many of them predicted a steady worsening of the situation, but the virus obviously did not read their opinions.
Last winter, in very similar weather, the wave wasn't falling at all. It was growing fast.
Covid dynamic is complicated.
That argument from the forest fire analogy is really fundamentally wrong. For one thing, forests start in a minimally vulnerable state (new forests have zero deadfall) so if you let nature run its course, they will stay in that state with minimal fire damage. Human populations on the other hand start out in a maximally vulnerable state against a new virus; if you let nature run its course, you get maximum damage (health care system overload, etc.)
For another, in a forest-fire-prone area, deadfall will burn eventually; there isn't really any other process that would make it go away. So by doing large-scale fire supression you are only delaying the inevitable. Immunity, on the other hand, can be gained both by infection and vaccination; suppressing an epidemic while vaccines are being researched and rolled out makes perfect sense.
See, I'd say your latter point is why prescribed fire is a thing (I just finished my certification for it here in GA two weeks ago, actually!). A controlled fire / vaccine will remove fuel / improve immunity so that fire / covid has less detrimental impacts?
"forests start in a minimally vulnerable state (new forests have zero deadfall) "
I dunno about this one, fam, I've worked in a lot of country where the first things to come back after a big stand-replacing burn are light flashy fuels like manzanita and chamise and blackberry. You show up to a new start in a spot that nuked out a season or two ago and it's just ripping through that brush layer while black snags from the old stand are tipping over every ninety seconds.
forthe404 is right, too, and let's not forget about mechanical fuels treatments. Basically, too high a level of abstraction.
So why does immunity to chickenpox last a lifetime, but immunity to some other diseases only last a year? What's different about chickenpox?
What's different is that the virus that causes chickenpox, human alphaherpesvirus 3, is never fully cleared from the system - you have it for life, it just doesn't cause chickenpox again (it sometimes flares up, though with different symptoms; this is shingles). This is the usual pattern of herpesviruses, although some of their flareups have more similar symptoms to the initial infection.
Essentially, your immune system never forgets about it because it never left.
I'm not sure why, but no one yet seems to have mentioned the concept of an *excitable medium*, a standard concept in dynamical systems that's used in understanding wildfires, disease, heart and brain tissue, and some fancy cyclical chemical reactions.
This isn't an answer by itself, but seems like an important term to be throwing around in these conversations. :-)
You make a very good point.
If polio is spread through swimming pools, perhaps we should be playing “Marco-Polio” instead?
Regarding warmer regions possibly having somewhat less flu overall:
Let's say r=(50-t)(d/2)/180, where t is the temperature in °C and d is the average interval between two incidences of the flu in years (so at any given time, d/2 is approximately the time since the average person had the flu for the last time). Let's say the year-round average temperature is 5°C in Alaska, 20°C in Florida, and 26°C in Panama. The year-round average r should be 1, which gives d=8 in Alaska, d=12 in Florida and d=15 in Panama.
Though the long-term average r may actually be different from 1 in locations with high seasonal differences. In the summer, the flu may go locally extinct, then restart from imported cases in the fall. Or even if it doesn't go extinct, imported cases may make up a significant fraction of all cases in the summer and the fall. These cause deviations from the simple model. In the simple model, the derivative of the logarithm of the case count is proportional to r, however this fails to be a good approximation when the case count is very low. When the case count drops from 1 to 0, the log of the case count drops to -∞. And when the case count is low, imported cases increase the case count significantly above what r would predict. Assuming that there is a steady stream of imported cases, so the case count never actually drops to 0, this implies that the long-term average r is somewhere below 1, with the imported cases keeping the disease from going extinct. With a year-round average r below 1, the formula above gives a lower d: e.g. if the average r in Alaska is 0.75, Alaskans get the flu every 6 years instead of 8, increasing the difference compared to Panama. None of this changes that during the Alaskan summer, case counts are negligible compared to any time in Panama.
Why does your formula for R contain the average duration between infections? Shouldn't it be the average *duration of* an infection?
The average time between infections (or rather, the average time since the last infection, which should be half of the former) tells how much your immunity has waned.
"(something like this might also be why the Native Americans had such a hard time with European diseases)"
Yes and no. Any explanation for why the American Indians were nearly wiped out by European diseases (estimates range from 95-98%) has to explain why the same thing didn't happen in the other direction. In grad school, the explanation we learned about was the limited HLA (human leukocyte antigen) diversity in the American populations because they came from a small founder population.
In order to form antibodies, your immune system has to 'present' the antigen it collects. It does this using antigen presenting cells, which grab ahold of short peptide sequences and display them on their cell surface for T- and B-cells to sample. HLA is like the 'hands' that grab onto these peptide strands. But unlike human hands they can only grab certain sequence shapes. A few of these is enough to cover most shapes, but not all.
Not everyone has the same set of HLA. The ones you have are hereditary, and they dictate the kind of thing you can mount an immune response to. This is one reason why certain populations are more susceptible to some infections and more resistant to others.
There's a lot of intermixing that has happened these past few millennia from Africa to Asia, so no sub-population has only one set of HLA. Except in pre-Columbian America. Mostly isolated, and derived from a small founder population, the limited HLA in the Americas meant any disease that didn't have strong HLA binding (and hence was difficult for the immune system to 'see') would propogate particularly well through the population, since everyone's HLA were the same.
Children are "weirdly resilient" in large part because of Original Antigenic Sin. The name sounds kooky and religious but it's actually a well-observed phenomenon in epidemiology:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/985534
Children have no previous immune experience with a given virus, so their entire immune system can figure out the best way to fight it and follow that plan. T-cells, B-cells, macrophages, etc are all involved in the most effective ways possible.
Once that "plan" is established it can only change to a certain extent when later infections are encountered. When an immune system first familiarized with the Wuhan strain of SARS-COV-2 encounters the omicron strain, it follows the relatively ineffective Wuhan-strain plan and then, very importantly, can only partially update that plan on contact with omicron. This effect is at least semi-permanent, and it explains much of why our original 2019-era vaccines are so useless against 2022-era COVID.
You write: This paper [ Projecting The Transmission Dynamics Of SARS-CoV2 ] is head and shoulders above anything I found during my own literature review...
Sorry to disillusion you, but this is actually a rather poor paper. The apparent sophistication of regression analysis and simulation is all flawed. To the extent that the conclusions are reasonable at all, they are simply the result of intuition, with a false veneer of mathematics lending them more apparent credibility.
I comment in detail on this paper in a series of four blog posts, starting at
https://radfordneal.wordpress.com/2020/05/27/critique-of-projecting-the-transmission-dynamics-of-sars-cov-2-through-the-postpandemic-period-part-1-reproducing-the-results/
These posts actually only cover the first part of the paper. I never got around to the posts on the second part. But it too is deeply flawed. As far as I can tell, their procedure to find optimal parameter values does not do anything sensible.
I corresponded a bit with Marc Lipsitch about this paper, and he pointed me to some further code. But in the end I was not able to pin down what exactly they do in the second part of the paper. Here is an excerpt from my last email to him (to which I haven't gotten a reply):
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After looking at this code, I'm just as puzzled as I was before about what you did, but in a different way.
First of all, I should mention that the fitted parameter values for the SEIRS model in the figuremaker.R file (rounded versions of which are in your Table S8) seem odd to me. 1/sigma1 is 44.948, 1/sigma2 is 44.961, 1/nu is 2.99975, 1/gamma is 5.04 - all quite close to integer values. Before looking at the code, my guess had been that you used some version of LHS that looked only at values on some coarse grid, obtaining an estimate with integer values for these parameters, which you then used as initial values for Nelder-Mead optimization, and that this optimization procedure did not do much, leaving these values very close to integers.
I see now that the LHS procedure does not use a coarse grid, so there would be no reason for it to produce an optimum at or near integers. Also, it appears that you do not specify initial values for the Nelder-Mead optimization, so that isn't how information was transferred from the LHS part to the N-M part.
My current guess is that you used the results of LHS merely to narrow down the parameter ranges for the N-M optimization somewhat - the ranges for parameters in the "Do a maximization" code from the notebook are narrower than those in Table S8. That the results of N-M optimization give values for 1/nu and 1/gamma that are near integers could then be explained if the Mathematica N-M procedure itself searches for initial values on some coarse grid, and then fails to move much from these initial values. In the case of 1/sigma1 and 1/sigma2, the upper bound in the "Do a maximization" code is 45 (Table S8 has an upper bound of 100), so it appears that the N-M optimization may have simply been prevented from moving beyond this constraint.
But perhaps this guess isn't correct. I'd appreciate further clarification.
I note that the LHS procedure optimizes the sum of squared errors between the actual incidence and the predicted incidence, but the N-M procedure optimizes the sum of squared errors between the log of the actual incidence and the log of the predicted incidence (ignoring weeks when the actual incidence is zero). Is this difference deliberate?
To be frank, the whole concept of fitting the SEIRS model in this way does not make much sense to me. The model is deterministic, but as you
note, its results can change drastically with small parameter changes, due to "bifurcations". The model is also much simpler than reality, so one would not expect particularly close matches to the data. The real process also has aspects that can only reasonably be modelled as random. If randomness were added to the model, one would fit it by maximimizing the probability of the observed data, which would change smoothly with parameter values.
The best way to fool anyone is with mathematics, when they see a number they automatically believe it. Unless they're an OCD accountant, they never look deeper. So-called science is now being used to gaslight people, yet if you tell people that science is not science, few will understand what you mean. These are the people who love to say they "believe in" science.
"'In this model, warmer regions should have less flu overall, since a longer interval between incidences corresponds to a long-term average r of 1. Maybe Alaskans get a flu, say, once in 8 years on average, Floridians every 12 years (still seasonally) and Panamans every 15 years (without seasonality).'
That last paragraph sounds fascinating but I’m not sure I understand why it’s true; can someone explain?"
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I think I see the argument, but if so I think the argument's wrong? (Sources would have helped; was 10240 citing a known result or thinking on their own?) Here's what I think it was going for:
"For a disease at equilibrium, long-run average R=1. You can think of R=(transmission rate while infected)×(length of infection). So if transmission-rate-while-infected is lower in warmer climates, length-of-infection has to be longer, for the product to still be 1."
The fallacy would be in switching out "time infected" (per infection) for "time between infections"; those would only be equal if everyone always got re-infected right after clearing the last one.
Cross-posting this on 10240's original comment, so they can get the notif and maybe respond.
I no longer think 10240 committed a fallacy; I think the argument had an extra step. Again cross-posting my response comment from there:
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Oh ok. So would it be something like
R = (transmission rate while infected) × (length of infection),
where (length of infection) is a constant, so (transmission rate while infected) also has to be a constant if R=1; and e.g.
(transmission rate while infected) = (sneeze rate) × (transmission prob. per sneeze)
where transmission prob per sneeze depends on how immune everyone else is; so e.g. in cold climates, infecteds sneeze more, but immunes are immune for longer, so in cold climates, infecteds' sneeze rate is higher but their transmission prob. per sneeze is lower*, such that (transmission rate while infected) is a constant, such that R=1?
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*for whatever mechanistic reason, but if it wasn't true, then the pathogen either would have disappeared (R<1) or gone epidemic (R>1). (I wonder how equilibrium changes if there's migration; e.g. warm climates could be sources with local R>1, and cold climates could be sinks with local R<1, so that *global* average R=1.)
"I think I see the argument, but if so I think the argument's wrong? (Sources would have helped; was 10240 citing a known result or thinking on their own?) Here's what I think it was going for:"
He's just using model intuition.
Disclaimer: I agree with 10240.
I think what you miss is the fact that a model of R doesn't have to depend on infection length. 1 person infecting a single other person with only 1 infected in the system at a time still gives R=1 given that would be the equilibrium. You get infections less frequently in Panaman due to the worse conditions for the virus, sustaining a lower infected average population, therefore giving us the lower infection frequency for a given person with R still being equal to 1. I gloss over a lot of small details here, but this might still make it click for you, cheers
So does this analysis imply that dressing up warm does not protect you against the flu? How about "the common cold"?
Relatedly, why does my nose start running as soon as I'm exposed to low temperature and wind, while also being a symptom of the common cold?