november 2020 (Covid1984)

This in itself is useful because for example, like diets, it shows mask wearing isn’t effective if people don’t like it and therefore “cheat”.

However, because it’s inconclusive, everyone takes what they want from it. It couldn’t conclude there was a benefit of 50% reduction, so apparently masks don’t work.

There is the whole debate around who is infectious, whether they have symptoms or not, or whether they have yet to have symptoms etc. X just yesterday had a covid antibody test back to show she’s had the disease. So did the rest of her household. That have concluded that they had it way back in February where they had an “odd week”. That’s their symptoms. And someone infected everyone else or they all infected each other. It’s not what I could describe as definitive enough to declare anything one way or another. After that “odd week” (Newcastle was one of the very early hotspots in the U.K – before tests and before symptoms like taste and smell were recognised) they look back and say “yeah – did we lose our sense of smell? It was so weird!”. So we know what we know at given any time and what we do or don’t know directly impacts on our interpretation, understanding and actions. Hindsight…

The danish report also couldn’t conclude how covid is transmitted and even at this stage there is a lot of uncertainty, so in line with that “we know what we know, and know some of what we don’t know” a lot of the measures people have taken whether through compulsion or choice have been informed by guesswork, older studies (masks mainly relating to SARS studies which concluded a benefit), experience, deduction, incomplete understandings etc. [Just to point out that infection may well be spread more by touch, of people and of things, than by anything coming out of the nose or mouth. Anyway, that’s what some doctors are saying. – SF]

As I have said before, I oppose coercion. That in itself is a position against compulsion. I am all for enquiry, and people having good quality information so they can make their own choices. An argument against being forced to wear seatbelts is not an argument against seatbelts themselves or whether wearing them is a good idea. The same goes for masks, social distancing, hand washing, etc. The overwhelming tendency has been for centralising power, decision making and authoritarianism. I can’t be happy with any of that. As for whether I wear a mask… I REALLY HATE wearing them for all the reasons you do – I have never felt so severed from that broader sense of a social connectedness I took for granted – it was like breathing or sunlight and truly resent the compulsion, and I will follow the debate about their effectiveness as it unfolds.”

“If there were only this study, indeed, your friend would be right.

A French friend writes about the above:

“This refers to this interview: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/07/world/asia/Li-Wenliang-china-coronavirus.html

The doctor was infected in the phase immediately preceding the onset of symptoms of the disease: he was therefore not one of those “asymptomatic infected persons [who] usually have a low amount of viral loads and a short duration of viral shedding. “, according to the “Nature” study, but one of the “symptomatic patients ” or, more precisely, pre-symptomatic patients. What the interview shows, moreover, is that contamination takes place mainly in a closed environment, in other words in a “confined” environment, in particular in the family circle and that carers are among the most exposed people. If there are lessons to be learned, they relate to the use of masks in hospitals and not to the use of the mask outside and for the general public.

I don’t know how long is the phase when people are pre-symptomatic today, that is, when they have a high viral load but no symptoms. What I do know, however, is that this disease is not very contagious compared to others. What I also know is that people who test positive form a minority of the population and symptomatic people form a minority of that minority, and that the presymptomatic phase of the latter is probably quite short. A small portion of these symptomatic people will develop severe forms, some of which will be fatal.

Is it necessary on this basis to mask the whole population, starting with children, who almost only develop asymptomatic forms of the disease? In this case we find ourselves in a scenario like “Minority Report”: just as the power described by P.K.Dick claims to punish criminals even before they have acted, so here we are going to impose measures on people who are susceptible, to present a non-symptomatic form of a disease which will be symptomatic only in a very small number of cases and fatal in only a very few of the latter cases! In fact it is even worse than in Minority Report since here it is the entire population which is the target and not simply a minority of potential patients.

If we absolutely want to treat people who are virtually (to a very small extent) sick and to apply a principle of absolute precaution, if we absolutely want to treat the problem upstream and cut off at the source any possibility of disease among human beings , the best is still to avoid being born because to be born is to take the risk of being sick and it is, inevitably, to end up dying: you might as well not live at all! As the Silenus of Greek mythology said: “It is best for man not to be born and if this misfortune happens to him the best is to die as soon as possible.”

Coming back to the Chinese doctor, he was infected during a period when the virus was still relatively unknown. As you indicate the study in “Nature” relates to another period and to a disease no longer having the same characteristics (contagiousness, infectivity, etc.) as at the time. Another thing that is surprising is the age of death of Dr. Li: 33 years for a person who apparently did not present (this remains to be verified) any comorbidities. I can’t help but think (probably my conspiratorial mood) that this doctor died as much from the lack of care (they wantedhim to die) as from the disease itself. The situation of people in their youth and without comorbidities who die of the disease hardly exists today. Apparently, according to this study (I haven’t fully read it) even the possibility of a pre-symptomatic transmission of the virus given the stage we’ve reached today would be highly improbable.

What we are witnessing today it is the equivalent of Bush’s “Preventive war”, but applied to the sanitary field. There are the same special effects here, same lies, the same fake figures (for example Macron’s “400,000 deaths if confinement hadn’t beeen imposed”), the same game of shock and awe
of a potential threat. If we hadn’t done the confinement we would have had many more deaths; without war we would eventually have had weapons of mass destruction that would have been unleashed against us and killed tens of millions

In fact I have the impression that the utopia of pure health and zero disease complements the doctrine of zero tolerance and zero crime at the police level; in short of this perfect society without crime that P.K. Dick describes to us, because we knew how to act preventively before the crime happens or the disease starts. Welcome to a a safe world, without crime and freedom, without disease and without harm, where rulers claim to detect everything in advance, all for our benefit. Don’t move! – Big Brother is protecting you!“

“I read the Danish study (Bundgaard et al., 2020) and Nature study (Cao et al., 2020) to understand the context. Of course, the knowledge surrounding COVID-19 is very nebulous, so there are many conflicting studies flying around. This is why I endeavored to read as much studies regarding HCQ (and azithromycin) to understand the wholest possible context of the research, as well as the results they give (it’s obvious that you can’t read literally all studies, but it’s possible to read high-impact and high-quality studies to, again, understand the context).

First, Bundgaard et al., 2020 is a randomized clinical trial (yay!) that tests whether surgical masks are effective, which they return with an odds ratio of 0.82 (with a very high p-value). What I would like to note is that the participants in the masked group didn’t have the best adherence to the protocols, so that could be a confounding factor. Plus, this trial was done with surgical masks, which are already known to be less effective than cotton masks, to my knowledge (this may have been updated somewhere). So what this study says is that wearing surgical masks with social distancing doesn’t change COVID-19 positivity rates. Which does suggest surgical masks are not as effective as we would like it to be, but it does not and cannot say about other types of facial coverings.

Second, Cao et al., 2020 is a cross-sectional observational study that basically tests a lot of people in Wuhan 5 weeks after a lockdown, and found out that not a lot of people were infected (…duh). Sure, when this was tested, people in close contact with asymptomatic people (anybody who contacted asymptomatic people within 2 days) didn’t test positive. But these people could have tested before this screening. And where did the asymptomatic people get their infection from? Of course, this is all speculation. Including the “conclusion” that asymptomatic people don’t transmit the disease.

Of course, what you are claiming may be true to a certain extent, but these studies don’t fully prove that “masks don’t work” or “asymptomatic transmissions don’t happen”. It’s much more nuanced, which I understand is frustrating, but that’s how research works. You just have to figure out one by one. And many of these studies can be pretty bad (though Bundgaard et al., 2020 is not a bad study, so points for that).”

X then wrote:

“A wonderful piece of doublethink, Sam. A patient not showing symptoms – in the observation of the reviewing physician – is not asymptomatic. You do have a way with individual ‘captive words,’ just as your fellow French tinfoil hat has a way with the legalistic use of medical terminology. Unfortunately you lack such a facility with reading, inasmuch as what you have asserted in your e-mail is contradicted by the very article you cite (20/20, Eyes/Optics, August 2020, second paragraph, second sentence).

When you get excited about these things, you rather readily lose the thread. Stick to politics, where you are quite gifted, not science and medicine, where you are 20,000 leagues out of your depth.”

My (SamFanto’s) answer to the above:

It’s not my words. Nor are they even the words of the guy he describes as my “fellow French tinfoil hat”, an insult devoid of the slightest explanation, let alone a valid one, an arrogant dismissal that just sounds like classic dominant ideology. The words are those of the report. Moreover, it’s not at all clear what he means when he says “ A patient not showing symptoms – in the observation of the reviewing physician – is not asymptomatic.”, since the article my French friend quoted never says the patient was asymptomatic. Is X confused or is he just confusing? Does he think asymptomatic is the same as having no symptoms or does he think I or my French friend think that? Whilst for some it may be hard to understand, asymptomatic is not the same as pre-symptomatic, though they’re not mutually exclusive. As almost everybody knows some people never have symptoms, but all the others who start to have Covid only develop symptoms later, just as there are lots, possibly the majority, of illnesses that don’t show symptoms in the first hours. The second paragraph, second sentence of the article mentioned in the above put-down from the American reads “he treated a patient for glaucoma, not knowing that the patient was asymptomatic for coronavirus.”, but the 3rd sentence reads ” A day later, the patient began to show symptoms, and two days later, so did Dr. Li. “. Of course, without testing all the time, say every hour, one cannot know whether one (or someone) is going to get Covid or not and even then whether there’ll be symptoms or not is not predictable at the moment, and is unlikely ever to be predictable. However, if you were to be tested every hour, you could obviously see if you had Covid, and then take precautions, even if such precautions turn out to be possibly unnecessary because one is asymptomatic (experts differ over whether you can infect others if you’re asymptomatic, but it’s very possible you can’t) . But who wants to test themselves every hour other than someone with time on their hands and for whom the cost of a test is not a problem (in the UK people have to pay up to £200 per test)?