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Federico Andres Lois Profile picture
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6 Feb, 13 tweets, 3 min read
1/ I went for ice cream. The cashier asked me to put my face mask on. I said: "Fine. I evaluated the evidence myself and it's bad. If you want the safety theater, let's do it (taking my facemask out of my dirty pocket), BUT, first I have to insist for you to use yours properly".
2/ This is what people don't get. You are in the shop, you take it out when no other people are around. If they were infected, BANG, there are virions everywhere floating around anyways. Safety, yeah right.
3/ So if an actual vulnerable (who thinks his nifty masks would protect him) arrives, he will inhale all those virions AND also some of them go straight to the outer layer. If it is a cloth one, then he is undoubtedly gonna inhale aerosolized virus over time.
4/ One interesting tidbit I didn't know but THE @Kevin_McKernan (worked at the project that designed the SOLID sequencer fame) pointed out. If the protein of the virus is compact aerosolized virus tends to be MORE infective while flatter (in 3D) becomes LESS infective.
5/ Have you seen a 3D representation of the Coronavirus protein? Looks pretty compact and round. Yeah, you guess it right. Guess what happens when our vulnerable has been using is cloth mask without cleaning for a few hours?
6/ But let's not stop there... Our poor grandpa comes home and picks up his cloth face mask (after cleaning his hands in good ol' gel alcohol) to put it in the wash-machine. Good thing he is methodological to deal with this bug.
7/ Did I mention virions on the outer layer of the mask? Yeah, I know you also wash your hands when you put your mask in the washing machine AND your jacket's pocket where you put it when you were in your car.
8/ Come on, don't tell me you didn't see that one coming!!! So let's come back to everything we did wrong to put our poor grandpa in peril. One by one.
9/ We told him. Yeah, YOU, me, the TV, bring me EVERYONE to the stand. That he could move freely without risk because between the social distancing and the mask everything is fine.
10/ What we did is exactly the opposite. Instead of encouraging the at-risk population to do the right thing (isolating FOR REALS) we told them that the world is nice and dandy, full of butterflies and colors with their rose colored masks.
11/ So, the next time you look at me judging because that poor guy is doing his job and you shouldn't be mean. Remember! Nothing is what it seems.
12/ Come on... with that level of retweets you are never gonna cause a good thread to go viral... Where are the retweets of the first post?
13/ Let's add another one.

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More from @federicolois

Federico Andres Lois Profile picture
7 Feb
1/ Let's look at this paper: "Influenza Virus Aerosols in the Air and Their Infectiousness" from 2014 (we cannot claim this was unknown). We know now that we have a new kid on the block now, ready to challenge Influenza for supremacy in the transmissibility metric. Image
2/ So there were these guys that actually infected people with Influenza to measure how infectious it was. That is a 'challenge study', this is no 'model' this is actual humans. And they found, that with as much as 3000 copies you get it. Image
3/ Another study actually measured how many particles an adult would inhale in 1 hour given the concentrations found on a health center, a day-care center, and airplanes. Image
Read 19 tweets
Federico Andres Lois Profile picture
6 Feb
1/ I was sent this paper. You know I have disregard it before because the filtering mechanic was really not significative for the type of airflow conditions imposed by masks. How wrong I was on not looking deeper.
2/ I have been told by @Kevin_McKernan that you always have to look for "Where is Waldo?" in this type of studies. The first interesting fact comes from Table 1. Each experiment has different experimental setups, that is good enough to disqualify in my book.
3/ But then I skipped to Table 4. Mind you, almost none were statistically significative. But remember Table 1. So you see a correlation there?
Read 5 tweets
Federico Andres Lois Profile picture
4 Feb
1/ This is what many forget, if you say something is wrong you have the higher ground. Find a counterexample, it's the easiest thing to do. Though many fail in such an easy endevour and claim misinformation. Don't be like that, provide evidence (counterexample) for your claims.
2/ I am not saying this lightly. I have received many: "that claim is absurd" from epidemiologists, MDs and health professionals about the claims on our papers. But when we asked for the evidence.
3/ come on its easy, find a counterexample. I tend to do that a lot on discussions, after claim X my response is always explain to me Y contradicts that claim. A working theory to claim evidence status must explain the corner cases. You start there, not on the easy stuff.
Read 6 tweets
Federico Andres Lois Profile picture
31 Jan
1/ Very good thread about all the things that most modelers fail at, which is predicting outcome. As shown your assumptions are everything. For example, our model only estimate immunity through simplified cohort dynamics. Its good for that, it just happen it is also very useful.
2/ Language is a model that is useful to communicate ideas. In the same way as language, models shape reality. If your model simplifies an specific aspect, your reality also becomes less rich. You always have to be careful what model you accept as correct and why.
3/ but the most important realization you have to develop is that models are useful, until they arent. The more disconnected from reality, the more effects you are explaining without fully understanding them.
Read 10 tweets
Federico Andres Lois Profile picture
31 Jan
Yes they should. Dexamethasone, Bromhexine, Melatonine and a few others like Colchine had in-silico interesting results as early as 1st of March. With the exception of dexa still waiting for the large scale RCTs.
Haven't said this publicly before but early on with a group of MDs, biotech and others researchers we built a protocol coupling statistical exploration techniques from AI with low toxicity drugs for profilaxis use. Apparently it was too innovative and rejected by our government.
With the exception of dexamethasone, all the others were already identified to be used in the early treatment of at risk with high probability contract protocol. Probably ivermectin that appeared later would have made the cut too, given the profile.
Read 9 tweets
Federico Andres Lois Profile picture
18 Jan
1/n Language is powerful, because it gives hints on what is going on. I am in my home town, a 150k inhabitants city that has been isolated by government for a long time. Given my parents live here I have been tracking COVID here from early on.
2/n I even know the city infectious disease public official here and we exchanged notes on the early outbreak when there was just 2 deaths. Our estimation back then was between 120 to 150 deaths by the end of it.
3/n Fast forward to today, if we use the conservative method used by the WHO and CDC for correcting detected and actual infections it gives that 120k were infected. Remember 3rd world testing infrastructure.
Read 6 tweets

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