The way PCR tests have been used in this pandemic should have question marks attached:
1. What should threshold cycle be?
2. What does PCR test really tell you? Presence of live virus / disease? Or just mere
genetic material for the virus and we infer (correctly or not) that genetic material
is equal to live virus that then leads to disease.
But let's leave that aside for the moment. PCR test seems the best tool we have
at the moment. Although, I don't know why traditional approach (symptoms of some disease -> check for what disease / virus you have) was abandoned.
The questions you raise in this post are pretty much what I have been wondering for a while now:
1. "Natural immunity": we can start speculating whether infection from the old Wuhan strain or alpha/delta variants protect from omicron infection. You've analyzed this data in this post. But we have no idea whether infection from Omicron confers any long term immunity from Omicron itself or future variants. We know that for many coronaviruses immunity doesn't last very long. We repeatedly get colds all the time and immunity lasts only 6-8 weeks.
2. Is Omicron variant still SARS-Cov2 or is it really a different virus and it should be called SARS-Cov3? If it evades prior infection immunity (from OG Wuhan and alpha/delta) then it's really a different virus.
But as one of the other commenters pointed out, the data collection has been very disappointing. Whether this is done on purpose or because we are just simply incompetent is a separate question.
I am finding it rather frustrating that we are still splitting hair whether vaccines work or not, whether masks and other measures work, etc. The fact that it's not obvious
(whether they do or to what extent) pretty much answers the question. In any other circumstance or endeavor you pretty much know right away whether you are better off or not. Two years into "two weeks to flatten the curve" we
a) still haven't flattened the curve
b) we have no f**king idea where we are in this pandemic
Are we in a better place than in march 2020 (ie, it's over, Omicron will infect everybody and we have gained herd immunity), is this as good as it will get
(it's endemic, we will be getting seasonal waves just like with flu and this virus will compete with flu, but at least severity and mortality will be much much lower) or
is this just calm before the storm and we are all f**ked in a year or two (as per Vanden Bossche's hypothesis)?
I have a few questions for all the number specialists, table designers and statistics interpreters:
After two years of data accumulation in the context of the ''pandemic'', does it make any sense at all to extract any statement from this mountain of data? Does the result of a data evaluation still serve any truth at all?
Why do I ask? Well, in the meantime there are so many overlaps in the definition of unvaccinated and vaccinated, of recovered and diseased, to which constantly changing definitions differing from country to country are added, that there are no longer any possibilities for comparison with which any trends or conspicuous features can be uncovered. All of the data only creates a nebulous, ever-changing picture that, in its constant succession of snapshots, creates more confusion than clarity.
Does it still somehow make sense to put so much energy into data evaluation day after day, if no one is able to produce ONE clear picture from all the different evaluations that could really help us? I don't want to diminish in any way the efforts and expertise of many people who make their evaluation skills available to the general public on a daily basis, I just wonder what drives you? Do you feel that your efforts are really bearing fruit, that something good is coming out of your work for the community? Something that will expose all those who have been lying to us and leading us around by the nose for months now. Something that many would like to see happen, of course, but is always unlikely to happen - at least that's how I feel.
It seems to me that this is exactly the intention behind all the constantly changing definitions using non-standardized tests with ever questionable interpretations on their part. As if the aim is to generate as much confusion as possible in the data jungle so that the general public completely loses its orientation and at some point stops asking questions altogether.
I would be very interested in your opinion on this and I would like to thank all of you who are always putting so much energy into bringing light into the darkness, even if the darkness never really seems to go away.
Brian, much respect for your work, but this particular analysis has a fatal flaw, which is testing bias. The vaccinated/boosted are *far* less likely to be tested for coronavirus infection (at least in Israel). That became even worse with the reinstatement of the green pass regulations during the summer/fall wave (where unvaccinated or unboostered were getting tested like twice a week to keep working or studying at uni, not to mention if they wanted to go to a restaurant, movie, etc), intensified when the green pass regulations started applying to the unboostered in October (and the number of people without a green pass increased by like a million), and it has only gotten worse now with all kinds of testing double standards in the face of Omicron.
So let's imagine a scenario where nobody has coronavirus but there is a certain chance the test will return a false-positive. With the non-vaccinated/unboostered testing at a much (!) higher rate than the unvaccinated/unboostered, all of the results you found could easily be driven just by that difference. It's impossible to know how much is due to that and how much is due to any "real" difference between vaxxed and unvaxxed. So clearly the conclusions you reach here far exceed any reasonable inferences one can draw on from the data.
It should be pointed out that ALL of the research coming out of Israel (and most other places) suffers from this bias. There was a recent paper that used data on test results from airport arrivals, which did not suffer from this bias because nearly 100% of people arriving are required to take a PCR test regardless of their vaccination status. They found a much lower efficacy for the booster than the official Israeli studies.
Now get this: the day after the authors first circulated their results, the Ministry of Health radically changed the vaxxed/unvaxxed numbers on airport PCR results on the dashboard to try to fit the narrative, and made more changes a couple of days later. Within a day or two of the paper finally going up on the SSRN pre-print site, the MoH just removed the relevant data from the dashboard and stopped reporting it.
Moral of the story: the data coming out of Israel are totally unreliable and actively manipulated to support the narrative.
Infections are uninteresting. Seems to be just a metric of how many tests they run, and how much they crank up pcr reps. Sickness is interesting. Any clues how many are sick? How sick are they? Rumors say the currently prevalent strains aren't very virulent. Seems like they'd be touting hospital overflows, and morgues, if that was happening. I'm guessing it's not really much of a problem any more.
We should avoid playing the "cases" game. It's a rigged game.
The way PCR tests have been used in this pandemic should have question marks attached:
1. What should threshold cycle be?
2. What does PCR test really tell you? Presence of live virus / disease? Or just mere
genetic material for the virus and we infer (correctly or not) that genetic material
is equal to live virus that then leads to disease.
But let's leave that aside for the moment. PCR test seems the best tool we have
at the moment. Although, I don't know why traditional approach (symptoms of some disease -> check for what disease / virus you have) was abandoned.
The questions you raise in this post are pretty much what I have been wondering for a while now:
1. "Natural immunity": we can start speculating whether infection from the old Wuhan strain or alpha/delta variants protect from omicron infection. You've analyzed this data in this post. But we have no idea whether infection from Omicron confers any long term immunity from Omicron itself or future variants. We know that for many coronaviruses immunity doesn't last very long. We repeatedly get colds all the time and immunity lasts only 6-8 weeks.
2. Is Omicron variant still SARS-Cov2 or is it really a different virus and it should be called SARS-Cov3? If it evades prior infection immunity (from OG Wuhan and alpha/delta) then it's really a different virus.
But as one of the other commenters pointed out, the data collection has been very disappointing. Whether this is done on purpose or because we are just simply incompetent is a separate question.
I am finding it rather frustrating that we are still splitting hair whether vaccines work or not, whether masks and other measures work, etc. The fact that it's not obvious
(whether they do or to what extent) pretty much answers the question. In any other circumstance or endeavor you pretty much know right away whether you are better off or not. Two years into "two weeks to flatten the curve" we
a) still haven't flattened the curve
b) we have no f**king idea where we are in this pandemic
Are we in a better place than in march 2020 (ie, it's over, Omicron will infect everybody and we have gained herd immunity), is this as good as it will get
(it's endemic, we will be getting seasonal waves just like with flu and this virus will compete with flu, but at least severity and mortality will be much much lower) or
is this just calm before the storm and we are all f**ked in a year or two (as per Vanden Bossche's hypothesis)?
I have a few questions for all the number specialists, table designers and statistics interpreters:
After two years of data accumulation in the context of the ''pandemic'', does it make any sense at all to extract any statement from this mountain of data? Does the result of a data evaluation still serve any truth at all?
Why do I ask? Well, in the meantime there are so many overlaps in the definition of unvaccinated and vaccinated, of recovered and diseased, to which constantly changing definitions differing from country to country are added, that there are no longer any possibilities for comparison with which any trends or conspicuous features can be uncovered. All of the data only creates a nebulous, ever-changing picture that, in its constant succession of snapshots, creates more confusion than clarity.
Does it still somehow make sense to put so much energy into data evaluation day after day, if no one is able to produce ONE clear picture from all the different evaluations that could really help us? I don't want to diminish in any way the efforts and expertise of many people who make their evaluation skills available to the general public on a daily basis, I just wonder what drives you? Do you feel that your efforts are really bearing fruit, that something good is coming out of your work for the community? Something that will expose all those who have been lying to us and leading us around by the nose for months now. Something that many would like to see happen, of course, but is always unlikely to happen - at least that's how I feel.
It seems to me that this is exactly the intention behind all the constantly changing definitions using non-standardized tests with ever questionable interpretations on their part. As if the aim is to generate as much confusion as possible in the data jungle so that the general public completely loses its orientation and at some point stops asking questions altogether.
I would be very interested in your opinion on this and I would like to thank all of you who are always putting so much energy into bringing light into the darkness, even if the darkness never really seems to go away.
Brian, much respect for your work, but this particular analysis has a fatal flaw, which is testing bias. The vaccinated/boosted are *far* less likely to be tested for coronavirus infection (at least in Israel). That became even worse with the reinstatement of the green pass regulations during the summer/fall wave (where unvaccinated or unboostered were getting tested like twice a week to keep working or studying at uni, not to mention if they wanted to go to a restaurant, movie, etc), intensified when the green pass regulations started applying to the unboostered in October (and the number of people without a green pass increased by like a million), and it has only gotten worse now with all kinds of testing double standards in the face of Omicron.
So let's imagine a scenario where nobody has coronavirus but there is a certain chance the test will return a false-positive. With the non-vaccinated/unboostered testing at a much (!) higher rate than the unvaccinated/unboostered, all of the results you found could easily be driven just by that difference. It's impossible to know how much is due to that and how much is due to any "real" difference between vaxxed and unvaxxed. So clearly the conclusions you reach here far exceed any reasonable inferences one can draw on from the data.
It should be pointed out that ALL of the research coming out of Israel (and most other places) suffers from this bias. There was a recent paper that used data on test results from airport arrivals, which did not suffer from this bias because nearly 100% of people arriving are required to take a PCR test regardless of their vaccination status. They found a much lower efficacy for the booster than the official Israeli studies.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3963606
Now get this: the day after the authors first circulated their results, the Ministry of Health radically changed the vaxxed/unvaxxed numbers on airport PCR results on the dashboard to try to fit the narrative, and made more changes a couple of days later. Within a day or two of the paper finally going up on the SSRN pre-print site, the MoH just removed the relevant data from the dashboard and stopped reporting it.
Moral of the story: the data coming out of Israel are totally unreliable and actively manipulated to support the narrative.
"If you believe a deceased family member or coworker has been re-exposed to the virus, please have them tested immediately." - LOL
Take the Israeli data with three doses of sea salt. There is no point in doing any granular analysis of unreliable data.
Infections are uninteresting. Seems to be just a metric of how many tests they run, and how much they crank up pcr reps. Sickness is interesting. Any clues how many are sick? How sick are they? Rumors say the currently prevalent strains aren't very virulent. Seems like they'd be touting hospital overflows, and morgues, if that was happening. I'm guessing it's not really much of a problem any more.
We should avoid playing the "cases" game. It's a rigged game.
This whole PCR nose vs. throat testing, if true, throws into doubt all PCR and antigen tests over the past 6 months. And it's going "viral" lol: https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/rapid-nose-swab-tests-covid-may-not-detect-omicron-quickly-enough-expert-says-2022-01-07/ The goal posts change from day to day. I am taking my shirt off and walking off the field! BTW love the teen-eggers and meth-heads comparison. It is a perfect analogy of the current absurd situation.
Well done. The Rapid Antigen test can be positive due to HKU-1 (common cold). So - false positives are driving the numbers, again. https://popularrationalism.substack.com/p/a-pediatrician-called-me-and-asked