@apoorva_nyc This reminds me of the short story that I sometimes wonder about writing up... It would absolutely be panned for over-use of foreshadowing.
My wife, daughter and I live in Melbourne . I was talking to my Mom who lived in Texas. I had commented on it being windy...
@apoorva_nyc then I mentioned we were going hiking. My mother responded that I should be careful of falling trees because she knew of a person who had been killed by one.
Sure Mom... will do.
@apoorva_nyc On the drive to where we were going hiking, we noticed a fair number of fallen trees alongside the road.
@apoorva_nyc Then there was a landrover coming the other direction, with a big dent in front of it. Driver pulled over, looked a little shaken.
@apoorva_nyc We came to a tree across the road. A bunch of people got out and moved the tree. There was a piece of landrover under it.
@apoorva_nyc Finally we got to where we were hiking. Luckily, not many trees around there.
@apoorva_nyc While getting ready to hike, we heard an enormous crash on the other side of the road where there were trees. Glad we weren't going to be hiking around them.
All was good. We finished. The wind had died down.
@apoorva_nyc Then we decided to go look at the trees that we had heard fall. They were massive - 6 foot diameter beasts. 2 had fallen with their roots tangled and taken down 4 others with them.
@apoorva_nyc After spending a while watching them, we started to go back to the road. Gust of wind.
craaa-aaack
@apoorva_nyc Up we look - there's a tree falling, and it looks like it's heading right for us. We take off running.
@apoorva_nyc My wife was 8 months pregnant. We had a 4 year old daughter with us.
@apoorva_nyc We took shelter behind another tree. Turns out the falling tree wasn't heading for where we had been. It was heading directly for that tree.
It hit the tree we were hiding behind. Branches fell on all sides of us.
@apoorva_nyc You can see the remains of the tree that fell - it broke off about halfway up, and it's on the right of this image goo.gl/maps/cTaAg3qiM…. The tree we hid behind was the tall tree close to the middle.
@apoorva_nyc Once we felt safe, we walked back to the road. My wife noticed her glasses were gone. I went back to find them. Another tree broke, this one farther away. But we left.
@apoorva_nyc Never had so much adrenalyne in my life. The -1 month old was doing somersaults for hours.
@apoorva_nyc I went back a few days later for the glasses. No luck finding them. I nailed a note to the tree we hid behind. Someone found them and returned them.
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I'm not going to try to rebut the whole thing (I don't have relevant expertise on most of it), but let me address the final point made because it's close to my area of expertise. This is a bit technical, but please bear with me.
Here's the claim I want to address:
This seems to be suggesting that if COVID-19 came directly from animals,
- there should have been many small outbreaks in humans,
- these dead-end outbreaks would trigger evolution resulting in better spread in humans,
- and we should have detected some of those outbreaks.
A comment on whether the "Doherty Model" is appropriate if case counts are high when threshold of 70% or 80% is met:
[note - this is my personal opinion without consulting collaborators, should not be taken as official statement of any group I'm affiliated with]
These thresholds provide valuable guidance to policy makers and the public to help them develop plans, and to see that vaccine is the best tool to get us out of our current predicament.
Modelling always involves assumptions, and there is always a risk that an assumption is wrong in a way that materially affects the outcome.
In this case a key question has been raised: might the case count be so high that contact tracing and similar interventions can't keep up?
Why do lockdowns become more important just before or in the midst of a vaccine rollout?
1/n
First, let me both dispel and validate one criticism of lockdowns: "you're just delaying the infections - they will happen later"
2/n
If lockdowns or any other intervention happen but at the same time some immunity builds up, then the epidemic peak will be lower and the total number infected will be smaller.
(seasonal effects may complicate this claim).
Flattening the curve does reduce total infections
3/n
In the thread below, the claim is made that COVID-19 is only hypothetically worse than common cold and that the deaths are a result of lockdown and fear rather than COVID-19.
When one makes a hypothesis, one should look for other, simpler hypotheses which could also explain the data.
In this case, perhaps one might think that the interventions done to control COVID-19 might also control influenza. Since flu has a lower R0, this might be enough.
Another thing a scientist should do is to look for other data that might refute or support the hypothesis.
In this case, perhaps one might look at countries that didn't have a large COVID-19 epidemic. For example Australia and New Zealand.