Ah, I see it’s time for broken clock Scott Adams to be right about something for once.
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Ha, it’s funny because the squirrel Is dead!
Wait, no… 
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I’d say that what’s happening in UK is a result of mismanagement at the beginning of crisis, not Chinese students. Remember when UK government wanted to go herd immunity route?
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The reason people get the virus is that they come in contact with other people with the virus. Good public policy is designed to minimize that, but doesn’t cause the virus. I don’t know whether the bulk of the UK infection was due to visitors from China (there were at least 2000 from Wuhan alone in the UK in January) or to vacationers returning from places like Italy, but England being a busy international hub is certainly a factor in the spread, and the Ghanese in the UK have much more contact with people from all over the world, including infection hotspots, than do people in Ghana.
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Something else may be also happening here. There are reports of disproportionately large numbers of Black people dying in US, and this is probably caused by the specifics of their jobs which can’t be done from home (like bus/taxi drivers, security, store workers, etc.). There may be similar disparity concerning jobs of people from Ghana who live in UK.
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And yet genetic analysis of strains in the UK shows that most UK infections, unsurprisingly, came from Spain and Italy. Posh people skiing (as the first Irish cases) and Brits abroad (retirees and just in general) for which I refer you to the video of the conga line of drunken English being told to go home by Spanish police while they were singing “we’ve all got the virus, we’ve all got the virus, na na na nah”.
I know plenty of people from Wuhan province and people with family there. I have had no indication that the Chinese population in Ireland are significantly more infected and we are pretty sure where the virus predominantly came from to Ireland and, despite the large Chinese population in Dublin, it wasn’t there. We have quite large French, Spanish, and Italian populations too. Wasn’t them either.
Horsey set going to Cheltenham is pretty likely though.
EDIT Hubei. My face is red. I do know people actually in Wuhan though
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As I suggested in my last post (“vacationers returning from places like Italy”); had I made my prediction months later I would probably have mentioned them too or instead, but then it wouldn’t have been a very interesting prediction.
Those jobs exist in Ghana as well.
For community transmission you first of all need the virus distributed in the community. Wherever it came from, I think it is pretty clear that it was in the UK community earlier and at a higher level than in Ghana.
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Has this been posted here?
The actual fuck. What?
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I am not so sure about the numbers, though. Ghana is one of West African countries which is rather rich, but if testing for the majority was possible, available, and implemented, I would be surprised. From what I personally experienced in hospitals in the neighbouring countries, I do believe that both cases and deaths from the whole region, including Ghana, are vastly underreported.
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Came here to post this, was distracted.
One caveat: even though this is highly dubious indeed, I would still bet a bottle of whisky that hydroxchloroquine isn’t likely to help, and is of high risk for many patients with preexisting conditions. (My bet being informed by info I gathered from several sources, amongst them comments from the Drosten podcast regarding chloroquine when the french study kicked this thing off.
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Oh hell yeah. The studies I’ve seen seem to imply it’s not an effective treatment. This is some kind of fictional meta analysis which is totally not unknown in other fields of science but something which I had hoped we were working to stamp out. This looks… Crazy. Like fraudulent predatory journals and fake conferences. But much worse.
Not going to take that bet!
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Hell, yeah. And the fallout will be yuge. As this piece put it, in the bottom line:
“Here we are in the middle of a pandemic with hundreds of thousands of deaths, and the two most prestigious medical journals have failed us,” [Carlos Chaccour of the Institute for Global Health in Barcelona] says.
Also, some details of the reporting around this case are horrible.
city government aimed to hand out more than 350,000 free doses of ivermectin
Oh glob. Based on one apparently bad actor.
police confiscated 20,000 bottles of veterinary ivermectin intended to be sold for human treatments
Oh glob. What a nightmare. Fuck yeah early stage pandemic capitalism.
“With data like this, do we even need a randomized controlled trial?”
Why, the answer seems to be yes, with an added “do not overstate your power of analysis without showing the complete data, you imbecile”, don’t you agree?
I am arguing in this topic (or the old one), way up, that fucking journos should do their fucking jobs and don’t fling around half-baked half-truths from sub-par scientific studies, that they must provide their source material (i.e., the papers) and that they should not overstate the results.
I am not taking back any of this, and I do have add that it is a deep disappointment that The Lancet seems to have failed us by publishing this piece, without the data. Theses things happen in peer review, but it is hard to see it happen now without the burning desire to kick the asses of those responsible.
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How many people think that the high death tolls in Sweden’s care homes is being considered a feature, not a bug, by Tegnell, et al?
For most industrialized nations, care of the elderly is considered a highly problematic financial onus*. And in most, minority and immigrant citizens are despised by a significant (invariably wealthy and powerful) segment of the society. Now we have a disease that disproportionately kills both, and certain countries appear to be doing everything in their power to prevent it from being restrained. Maybe there are other reasons! But anyone reading the literature open-mindedly wouldn’t conclude that “saving the economy” was one of them.
* Interestingly, less so in Norway than other countries.
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I try not to speculate in this direction, because this way lies insanity.
Sadly, many. I heard this stance already from people who volunteered their opinion on the matter without even knowing more than my name.
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The safest approach to sexual activity, according to the researchers, is not having any.
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To be clear, there is nothing wrong with meta-analysis in general, it just needs to be done correctly and coupled with an evaluation of the quality of the journals being included in the analysis.
Speaking as a journal editor, scientific publication is premised on the assumption that submissions are made in good faith. This still works in low-stakes fields like mine, and worked generally back in the era when academic science was not viewed as a stepping stone to fame and fortune, but the assumption no longer holds true in medicine and cognate fields. Today there is too much to be gained, from money to fancy academic postings, by publishing cooked results. (This is not just a problem in science, the “replication crisis” in the social sciences includes stories about now-suspect research where grad students behind the research rode it to named positions in prestigious universities.)
Obviously something needs to be done about this problem, and of course there are many conversations taking place about it, but right now it isn’t obvious how journals can best cope with the changes in publication culture. At the very least there should be disincentives for bad-faith journal submissions commensurate with the rewards, not just losing the research position you would never have obtained or kept anyway without the dodgy publication. However, that is not within the power of the journals.
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