testing anecdata, for those interested: I post my vaccine trial tests on Friday; I usually get a result by Sunday. My most recent was sent on Friday but I only got my result today.
(Possible confounder: I forgot to put one barcode on this time so maybe that slowed it down?)
and to be clear: the Oxford vaccine trial (which I'm in: unherd.com/thepost/the-pa…) uses normal PHE testing; if my test comes back positive, I have to inform the trial, and self-isolate as normal. I'm not in some special testing regime, it all goes through the usual system
ANECDATA: I've been submitting a test every Friday for three months. I've now looked back through them, and until late August they all came back by Sunday or Monday. Now it's Tuesday or Wednesday every time.
We can't really base any conclusions on this but I found it interesting
oh yeah I should have said: no it's PHE - I have to inform the trial if I get a positive result, there's no communication between the testers and the trial
Aspartame does not cause cancer at normal doses in humans. Genuinely ridiculous headlines off a stupid, badly designed concept from an organisation that's been screwing up health-science communications for years now
The IARC has four categories: "carcinogenic" "probably carcinogenic" "possibly carcinogenic" and "probably not carcinogenic." Aspartame will end up in "possibly", meaning "we can't rule it out". But *even if it does increase risk* it gives no sense of the magnitude of that risk
gah, I haven't got time to do this properly. Read the comments in here the US FDA which is usually wildly overcautious says it's not carcinogenic and loads of studies find no correlation. It's just ridiculous and annoyingsciencemediacentre.org/expert-reactio…
on the continued obsession - including in official government advice! - with cleaning surfaces and washing hands to combat Covid, despite a near-total absence of evidence that it spreads that way unherd.com/thepost/repeat…
(since I wrote this I think the Liverpool FC training ground had a "deep clean" to interrupt the outbreak there, which almost certainly will not have helped)
A fair number of people are responding saying things like "hygiene is good", which is obviously true: but if you think that we weren't hygienic enough pre-pandemic, then say so! Don't try to wrap it up with anti-Covid measures, because it won't help much against Covid.
Doing a thread about LFTs, PCRs and Bayes' theorem, so apologies in advance. But I feel like there's a lot of "if I get a positive LFT but then a negative PCR, do I have Covid or not?" going around, and people need to stop thinking about yes or no and think about risk levels.
Imagine that 1.5% of people have Covid (likely an underestimate). That's your prior probability.
You test 1,000,000 people. Given the prevalence, 15,000 of them ACTUALLY HAVE Covid. Your LFT is 99.9% specific and 70% sensitive (reasonable best guesses)
Of the 15,000 infected, it will correctly detect 10,500.
Of the 985,000 uninfected, it will incorrectly say 985 have Covid.
(It will also tell 4,500 infected people that they are not infected.)
In which I say that, while there were many errors in the UK’s response to covid, the ur-mistake was gigantic overconfidence in uncertain science unherd.com/2021/10/the-me…
Via @graham8digits, a reminder that at least someone was making the same criticisms *at the time*. The UK response was based around incredibly precise manipulation of a chaotically uncertain reality
@Graham8digits this is something I was confused by. They were surprised by the Imperial 16 model showing that hospitals would be overwhelmed. But the flu plan expected 2.5% of infected to die, but *at most* 4% to go to hospital. So I think they expected most people to simply suffocate at home?
in which I try to impart just how urgent it is that the West gets its spare vaccines to India (and starts making more vaccines to get ready for wherever the next India is) unherd.com/2021/04/india-…
Note: I use the IHME estimates for daily new cases in India in this piece. Someone's pointed out to me that those estimates are based on an implausibly low infection fatality rate, ≈0.05%, which would change the numbers: healthdata.org/sites/default/…
A plausible lower bound might be the Imperial model, which is around 1m new infections a day, rather than 10m ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-…