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7 Nov, 4 tweets, 1 min read
Ah yes, the strong Confucian ethic of Australia, Uruguay, New Zealand, and Uganda 🙄

This is just ridiculous - many countries with many cultures have done well, by:

a) sticking to the science
b) acting early and often
Honestly, it feels quite patronising for someone who is not from one of the Asian countries to say it was their culture, rather than the enormous effort and clear govt action, that saved the day
It's also ridiculously fatalistic for people to say that if their culture isn't like that of South Korea there's no way this could've been avoided. I promise you, Sydney is not much like Seoul, but we're both doing well
Seoul is one of the best cities in the world FYI, I cannot wait until travel restarts so I can go back!

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More from @GidMK

Health Nerd Profile picture
9 Nov
Sigh. An interesting study, but such a ridiculous prediction. The authors estimated the relative risk of wearing a mask to not based on studies mostly conducted in healthcare workers during SARS/MERS, and then extrapolated this directly to the US
In fact, the reduction in deaths that's cited here as the main outcome is a direct result of the relative risk (0.65) that the authors found for mask-use compared to no mask-use when aggregating together studies on masks Image
So, they predict 500k deaths in the US by Feb 2021, but if 95% of people wear masks in public, this goes down by just under 35%
Read 7 tweets
Health Nerd Profile picture
8 Nov
For all the absurd noise about "academic silencing" throughout the year, it's interesting to note that it hasn't appeared to have stopped anyone getting papers accepted, published, and cited hundreds of times
The Santa Clara serology study, whose authors claim at length and publicly that they have been silenced horribly, has been cited nearly 300 times!

If they're being silenced, it's not evident in the citation count. That's >1 citation a day Image
I mean, most of the academics who talk about silencing have done so on massive media platforms and have carried that through to enormous academic acclaim

We're all scientists here. By what possible metrics have they been silenced?
Read 4 tweets
Health Nerd Profile picture
4 Nov
Thoughts on the American election:

- it is a shame the meteor didn't run again
- too many states start with M, not enough with E or Y, this strikes me as unfair
- red and blue remain boring colours, why not try a nice fuschia?
- if you were to combine the Midwest into one state you could call it Megahio. This is very ridiculous, but quite a good name
- New York is similarly a silly name. Presumably it came into being at roughly the same time as Old York when the Earth's crust was formed, and so it should be renamed Also York

- counting votes is meant to take time, unless we reimagine time as non-linear
Read 12 tweets
Health Nerd Profile picture
3 Nov
There is, I think, an ongoing and pervasive misunderstanding about hospital 'capacity' during COVID-19

Capacity is NOT the TOTAL NUMBER of beds

It is the number of FREE beds

This is a very important point
So, for example, England had around 4,000 ICU beds at the start of the year

But they were operating at 85% capacity! So in fact they had more like 600 FREE ICU beds to treat COVID-19
What I mean by this is that, on any given day, 85% of the critical care beds were occupied by people - heart attacks, car crashes, urgent surgeries and the like
Read 8 tweets
Health Nerd Profile picture
3 Nov
At least once a month in 2020:

"CASES ARE RISING BUT DEATHS AREN'T. PANDEMIC OVER"

"But there's a death lag - often of 6-8 weeks! It'll happen soon"

"NAH BUDDY PANDEMIC OVER"

*6-8 weeks later*

"FUCK"
Partly, this is because cases don't have a big reporting lag but deaths do - because certifying an infection takes very little effort but certifying a death takes quite a lot more
Add to this the fact that the MEDIAN time from infection to death for COVID-19 is 3 weeks, and you get a 5+ week lag from when cases first start to rise to when deaths do (in many cases, not all)
Read 4 tweets
Health Nerd Profile picture
3 Nov
Ugh this is an irresponsible headline and a pretty dubious study. Compared NHANES to an internet survey conducted in April that used a 13-point rating of depression *symptoms*, not depression diagnoses 🙄
One big issue with this is that transient depression symptoms do not meet the criteria for a diagnosis of depression in most cases, and a single survey done at the start of the pandemic may not be sufficient to describe the true situation
I think all you could reasonably say from this is that people in this particular survey were experiencing a high burden of worry in April in the U.S., but what this means for mental health issues long term is quite hard to discern
Read 4 tweets

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