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11 Nov, 5 tweets, 2 min read
Excellent new study on seroprevalence in Sydney using convenience samples estimates 0.09% (0.04-0.32%) infected

"our study provides robust evidence that there was limited community transmission...of COVID-19"

mja.com.au/journal/2020/s…
Also, massive hats off to the authors for acknowledging that the data were not sufficient to make calculations and then JUST NOT DOING IT
I agree wholeheartedly with their assessment FYI, I don't think you can reasonably calculate the IFR of COVID-19 in Australia from either of the seroprevalence studies released thus far
Apologies, I should say in the original tweet that depending on the prior used they either estimated 0.15% or 0.09% (which would correspond to between ~4-7,000 cases in Sydney)
And while we can't apply these numbers to the community directly, I think it's still interesting to note that it implies that the vast majority of COVID-19 cases have been captured in NSW by testing/contact tracing (at least 60%!)

Impressive @NSWHealth

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More from @GidMK

Health Nerd Profile picture
9 Nov
A lot of people are asking the question, so I think it's useful to point out that a vaccine that prevents 90% of infections would be sufficient for herd immunity in most cases
There are, of course, HUGE caveats here:

- protection must be long-lasting
- must protect against infection, not just symptoms
- vaccination rate has to be quite high
Nevertheless, if a vaccine does stop 90% of infections, and we can vaccinate 90%+ of the population, then you'd have about 80% of people immune to the disease which is well above any herd immunity threshold for COVID-19
Read 4 tweets
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
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
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
7 Nov
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
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

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