The situation in the UK right now is complicated, with increasing cases while vaccines keep the very worst consequences at bay. However that makes no difference to the status of this as a contender for the most stupid statement of the pandemic bbc.com/news/uk-politi…
I wear masks at work unless alone in my office. Compliance is pretty good though not universal all the time. These are people I know. There have been no outbreaks there as yet. And we would know as we are all tested weekly
While I am at work I see people I know. Their ability to infect me is not altered by my knowing them. Most infections will be by someone you know
But enough. I should accept that the original statement has nothing to do with public health and everything to do with posturing. If we try to assess it in terms of science or reality, we are not grading on the same curve
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A short 🧵 about the value of rapid tests. As long time followers will know, a runny nose is not very informative for me because I have allergies, and they have been playing up recently. I had three -ve PCR tests, but a worsening of symptoms over the weekend had me anxious... 1/?
even worse, I was visiting (vaccinated) friends and hanging out indoors and unmasked. You might think that epidemiologists are safer than most to hang with, and I could think of no known exposures, but I couldn't escape the (irrational) sense that fate has a sense of irony 2/?
After all, the prevalence is not super high here but I have been riding city buses, going to work etc and while it's not like I've been attending illegal raves (those days are past) I have been venturing indoors. So my persistently runny nose had me a bit 😬 3/?
This fascinating article from @dylanlscott clearly draws out how those who sought to belittle the risk early in the pandemic have wound up embracing ineffectual and dangerous alternatives to vaccines, even as the virus keeps killing vox.com/coronavirus-co…
Key line: "people have still proven quite capable of shaping and reshaping a narrative that doesn’t require them to admit they might have been wrong." And sadly this includes a small but vocal minority of scientists you'd hope would know better
The protection of vaccination should be extended to all those who want it, and that *includes* giving people accurate information, from a trusted and trustworthy source, that helps them make the right choice
When I see statements like this, especially now, I wonder what people mean by "the overwhelming of [healthcare]"
We shouldn't talk about healthcare being overwhelmed, we should talk about it being compromised or otherwise damaged, in a way that could have been avoided 1/?
Healthcare is compromised when elective surgeries are canceled, when screening is canceled. It is compromised when we run low on ICU nurses because they are needed in too many places or because they are sick with a virus 2/?
It is compromised when campaigns against scourges like malaria, TB or polio are damaged because of an uncontrolled pandemic 3/?
Some more thoughts prompted by this article - the notion of an 'end' to the pandemic is itself faulty in my opinion. But that emphatically does *not* mean interventions forever. It means that the transition to endemic disease can and should be managed 1/?
The reason 'end' is dangerous is that it suggests a date when everything changes overnight and we return to 'normal'. That takes no account of variants, waning immunity or the fact that most of the world is struggling to access vaccines, among many other things 2/?
However in vaccinated places it is true things are *much* better than they easily could be, but that doesn't mean the pandemic is 'over'. This is Oregon and Idaho *now*. 3/? nytimes.com/2021/09/06/us/…
I follow twitter less than you might think, but I have noticed a trend for people calling themselves "covid centrists". I find this difficult because it suggests a spectrum between extremes. I'm not a covid anythingist, I am just a scientist
This means I think about claims based on the evidence for them as I understand it. If you ask me what I think will happen if we take a particular action, I can tell you that.
That means I also need to admit when things don't go as I expected. For eg, while I expected (and publicly predicted) a dent in the rate of increase in the UK as the schools closed, before transmission resumed. But I was surprised by the scale of the drop. Now about that...
Trying to write a couple talks for next week based on this new preprint from us on how we expect vaccines to perform against variants with enhanced transmissibility, some immune evasion, or both. A🧵may follow as I sort my thoughts out medrxiv.org/content/10.110… 1/?
One important thing - it is always important to compare impacts of vaccination against the alternative, so we've estimated infections averted for a simple model, and varied stuff like time and pace of vaccine introduction and the point at which variants emerge 2/?
I called it a simple model, but it has quite a lot of compartments. The arrows are the possible ways people move from S (susceptible) through being I (infected) or V (vaxxed). Resistant (thanks to immunity from infection R) and various breakthroughs 3/?