Tweet

https://twitter.com/galinash/status/1367052448381210628?s=21

@lonnibesancon

@lonnibesancon

More from @DrZoeHyde

Dr Zoë Hyde

@DrZoeHyde

4 Mar

🧵 New work from me: I rebut scientific criticism & re-analyse school data from Victoria, Australia.

What did I find? Primary school children were a bit less likely to cause outbreaks than high school children, but this wasn't statistically significant.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.5694/mj…

The proportion of events resulting in an outbreak was as follows:

Child, primary school (6-12 years): 31%
Adolescent, high school (13-15 years): 41%
Adolescent, high school (16-18 years): 40%
Adult (primary and high school): 39%

But note large, overlapping confidence intervals.

These data also have some important limitations.

First, not all contacts were tested, and so transmission may be underestimated.

This may particularly affect the data for primary school children, who might have been tested least.

Read 12 tweets

Dr Zoë Hyde

@DrZoeHyde

26 Feb

(1/22) Here's a new paper from me about some of the biases affecting research on children and COVID-19, and more importantly, some solutions.

It hasn't been typeset yet (the PDF might be hard for non-English speakers to read?), so I'll do a quick summary.
academic.oup.com/cid/advance-ar…

(2/22) First, "bias" has a different meaning in epidemiology compared to everyday life.

It doesn't mean someone's done something wrong. It just means there's a methodological issue that affects the results.

This article explains some of the common types.
jech.bmj.com/content/58/8/6…

(3/22) Now, on to the paper. It's been argued that children are less susceptible to infection with SARS-CoV-2 than adults and play only a minor role in transmission.

This conclusion is likely premature, because it's often difficult to detect infections in children.

Read 22 tweets

Dr Zoë Hyde

@DrZoeHyde

23 Feb

@mugecevik

I don't like to dwell on negatives, but something important happened recently that I'd like to make public.

Shortly before Christmas, @mugecevik made a complaint to my university about me. When asked for details, she didn't provide any. My employer took a dim view of the matter.

I thought that was pretty strange, but laughed the matter off. After all, the complaint didn't go anywhere and I was supported by my university.

But last week, she made a complaint to a publisher about an article I recently wrote. It was this article:
theconversation.com/herd-immunity-…

She listed an astonishing 12 complaints (yes, 12!), said the article was grossly inaccurate, and asked for the article to be retracted.

However, no errors of fact were identified, so the article has not been retracted.

Read 8 tweets

Dr Zoë Hyde

@DrZoeHyde

22 Feb

Historically, I’ve not been a big user of social media. It never really appealed to me.

But in early 2020, I was pretty sure we were facing a pandemic and so started this account to share my thoughts with friends and family.

It got a bit bigger than I expected.

But as this account has grown, it’s taken up more of my time than it did in the beginning.

I don’t plan to stop tweeting any time soon, but I’m going to have to spend a bit less time on here. For one thing, it’s grant-writing season now, and that’s going to occupy me for a bit.

I’ve also begun to see how social media can be quite an addictive medium and I don’t want to get sucked into that. So I’m going to pull back a little in terms of the amount of time I spend on here.

Read 4 tweets

Dr Zoë Hyde

@DrZoeHyde

15 Feb

Here’s some good news. In this study of 514 people who received their first Pfizer vaccine dose, those who’d previously been infected showed a superior immune response compared to uninfected people, even if initial antibodies were no longer detectable.
eurosurveillance.org/content/10.280…

Research has already shown that the vaccine acts like a super-booster in people who’ve been infected with SARS-CoV-2, suggesting that one dose may be enough for them.

However, it wasn’t clear if this would still apply if the antibodies from infection were no longer detectable.

This study shows that everyone got a boost, even if they no longer tested positive for antibodies.

A limitation is that the study only had 17 people with a previous infection (6 with detectable antibodies, 11 without), but the results are still reassuring.

Read 5 tweets

Dr Zoë Hyde

@DrZoeHyde

8 Feb

Thread summarising an important presentation on the AstraZeneca trial results for South Africa.

Key points:

➡️ Efficacy initially seemed to be ~75%, but dropped to 22% against SA 🇿🇦 variant.
➡️ Past COVID-19 (original) doesn't protect against reinfection by the SA 🇿🇦 variant.

This was a relatively small trial with only 1,749 mostly young, healthy participants.

People were given two doses of the vaccine about 28 days apart.

The relatively small number of people in the trial makes it suitable for exploring the efficacy of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine against mild-to-moderate disease only.

The trial lacks statistical power to tell us the efficacy of the vaccine against severe disease.

Read 19 tweets

Share this page!

Dr Zoë Hyde

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

More from @DrZoeHyde

Dr Zoë Hyde

Dr Zoë Hyde

Dr Zoë Hyde

Dr Zoë Hyde

Dr Zoë Hyde

Dr Zoë Hyde

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Like this author's thread?