Our Covid Response

TheMysteriousGX

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Don't worry, the USA has already pre-scheduled the end of this emergency. Soon the autoimmune deficient people will be safe from covid
 

Phoenixmgs

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So: in August, after they've had at least 5 months' prep time?

You're pointing to the US's failure to get a working contact tracing system in place. But nobody here is arguing that they were doing it right. They didn't invest the time, training, or money; they fucked the logistics and mishandled damn near every other aspect of the public health response.



The difference between "0%" and >5,000 diagnosed cases a day is not a "technicality". It's a gaping wide void between what you said and the reality.

NY failed to respond for weeks and weeks. Then they finally responded... without having done any of the necessary investment in training or procurement. And you want to take this as evidence that it was impossible to deal with?



Absolute complete cuckoobollocks. If you think >5,000 a day is "one day everything was fine", no action required, you're deluded.



They didn't take "x amount of people that had long covid", though. They took X amount of people who self-reported symptoms associated with long covid.

You've consistently failed to appreciate the difference.
I always said, in theory, contact tracing works. I said in the US it wasn't feasible for many reasons. You couldn't get the workers, tons of business couldn't get workers either, every place was understaffed. Then, you have the testing problem, the results take too long to get back (as I mentioned as well as the article I linked). Even with rapid tests being plentiful, it's still a problem because the massive false negative issue with testing early in infections. You can get more bang for you buck in other places than contact tracing and testing. The time it would take to get contact tracing in a good spot in the US, you wouldn't even need it anymore because the vaccines would be out or right around the corner.

Where/when are these 5,000 cases per day happening? On March 3rd, NYC had 2 confirmed cases. On March 10th, the STATE of New York had 174 confirmed cases. If you round to the nearest whole number, that gets you to 0% of the population had covid that we knew of (obviously it was much more in actuality). Then, on March 15th, the US started shutting down. Why are you trying to gaslight what I know happened?

How the fuck do you think we know someone has long covid? THEY TELL US THAT THEY DO. There is no test for long covid (nor do I think there's even an agreed upon definition).
 

Asita

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Nope, that's literally what the study said. They took X amount of people that had long covid and then tested them for covid antibodies and found that many never had covid.
Those people did not have long covid. The study's sample criteria was that its participants had to believe they had contracted covid - but never have actually been tested for it or had an official diagnosis - and consequentially they had to be merely presuming that their lingering symptoms meant that they had long covid apropos of nothing else.

The study was not tracking long covid vs. covid, it was tracking the uninformed and self-diagnosed belief that they had contracted covid against test results. Which is to say that they were looking for a smoking gun symptom that even a layman could reliably recognize. Not to mince words, they did not have a 'long covid sample', they had a hypochondriac sample. The results did not say "long covid is not associated with covid". They said "not only do you not have long covid, you never caught covid at all". That is entirely within expectations when you're using uncorroborated self-diagnosis as a criteria because self-diagnosis is infamously prone to false positives even before accounting for this selection method practically being tailor-made to oversample people prone to those false positives.

Simply put, a layman producing a false positive based on their individual uninformed criteria means precious little. They aren't experts on this subject. They aren't expected to perform as well as an expert would, much less as an expert would with the benefit of stringent and accurate testing.
 
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Silvanus

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I always said, in theory, contact tracing works. I said in the US it wasn't feasible for many reasons. You couldn't get the workers, tons of business couldn't get workers either, every place was understaffed. Then, you have the testing problem, the results take too long to get back (as I mentioned as well as the article I linked). Even with rapid tests being plentiful, it's still a problem because the massive false negative issue with testing early in infections. You can get more bang for you buck in other places than contact tracing and testing. The time it would take to get contact tracing in a good spot in the US, you wouldn't even need it anymore because the vaccines would be out or right around the corner.
So you're saying it couldn't work because of other things that the US fumbled.

As I've said time and time again: it works as part of a functional multifaceted approach. That assumes that you don't fuck everything else up at the same time.

Where/when are these 5,000 cases per day happening? On March 3rd, NYC had 2 confirmed cases. On March 10th, the STATE of New York had 174 confirmed cases. If you round to the nearest whole number, that gets you to 0% of the population had covid that we knew of (obviously it was much more in actuality). Then, on March 15th, the US started shutting down. Why are you trying to gaslight what I know happened?
"Gaslighting" because I gave a figure you don't like. I wonder why that term has lost its impact online?

The source was the CDC. >5,000 mean daily cases in New York by the last week of March.

CDC said:
Case counts increased rapidly from a weekly mean of 274 diagnosed cases per day during the week of March 8 to a peak weekly mean of 5,132 cases per day by the week of March 29

1675883129947.png

Look. You get over 2,000 per day halfway through March. You get citywide school closure on March 16th. And you're still insisting it was "0%" until April, then BAM overnight? They were already in the middle of a prolonged peak at the very start of April.

How the fuck do you think we know someone has long covid? THEY TELL US THAT THEY DO. There is no test for long covid (nor do I think there's even an agreed upon definition).
They cannot "tell us that they do". They can tell us they have symptoms that correspond. Then, if it's matched with positive serology for covid, and at a much higher rate than baseline-- which was exactly what happened-- then its likely to be what is termed "long covid".

You cannot just term any long term respiratory symptoms "long covid" regardless of whether they had covid.
 
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Phoenixmgs

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Those people did not have long covid. The study's sample criteria was that its participants had to believe they had contracted covid - but never have actually been tested for it or had an official diagnosis - and consequentially they had to be merely presuming that their lingering symptoms meant that they had long covid apropos of nothing else.

The study was not tracking long covid vs. covid, it was tracking the uninformed and self-diagnosed belief that they had contracted covid against test results. Which is to say that they were looking for a smoking gun symptom that even a layman could reliably recognize. Not to mince words, they did not have a 'long covid sample', they had a hypochondriac sample. The results did not say "long covid is not associated with covid". They said "not only do you not have long covid, you never caught covid at all". That is entirely within expectations when you're using uncorroborated self-diagnosis as a criteria because self-diagnosis is infamously prone to false positives even before accounting for this selection method practically being tailor-made to oversample people prone to those false positives.

Simply put, a layman producing a false positive based on their individual uninformed criteria means precious little. They aren't experts on this subject. They aren't expected to perform as well as an expert would, much less as an expert would with the benefit of stringent and accurate testing.
I know all of that. I was using long covid as defined by the study, you obviously can't have long covid if you never had covid. Many viral infections cause the same long-term symptoms, in essence, it doesn't really matter if it was the flu or covid. What matters is the rate long symptoms happen from each viral infection and covid has not been shown to cause long covid any more often than the flu causes long flu. Long covid is not some new phenomenon to be concerned with any more than you were previously concerned with long [insert whatever name you want] before covid.


So you're saying it couldn't work because of other things that the US fumbled.

As I've said time and time again: it works as part of a functional multifaceted approach. That assumes that you don't fuck everything else up at the same time.



"Gaslighting" because I gave a figure you don't like. I wonder why that term has lost its impact online?

The source was the CDC. >5,000 mean daily cases in New York by the last week of March.




View attachment 7884

Look. You get over 2,000 per day halfway through March. You get citywide school closure on March 16th. And you're still insisting it was "0%" until April, then BAM overnight? They were already in the middle of a prolonged peak at the very start of April.



They cannot "tell us that they do". They can tell us they have symptoms that correspond. Then, if it's matched with positive serology for covid, and at a much higher rate than baseline-- which was exactly what happened-- then its likely to be what is termed "long covid".

You cannot just term any long term respiratory symptoms "long covid" regardless of whether they had covid.
It would not have worked as a multifaceted approach in the US. You know who did great and horribly fumbled both testing and contact tracing? Japan.

New York had 5,000 cases a day BEFORE the shutdown? That was the time frame I was talking about going from 0 to shutdown the country, which literally happened. Even if I give you 2,000 cases everyday from March 1st - 15th (which is way over what happened), that still equals 0% of the population infected when you round to the nearest whole number. 30,000 infected in NYC isn't even half of 1% of the NYC population.

What long-term symptoms are exclusive to covid? Loss of taste/smell? If that's what you make your definition, then hardly anyone had long covid then. Just about all long-term covid symptoms are shared with other long [whatevers]. When you're at 90+% of the population having covid at some point, then you can say literally any long-term symptoms is long covid. There's no way to tell if a person's symptoms were trigger by covid at this point or something else. One of the studies we do have is that people who do have long covid, many probably don't get it from covid as you have an initial group in the study that has longer symptoms and they eventually go away, then you have another group who was fine for months after testing positive get symptoms months later and considered to have long covid. But who knows if covid had anything to do with those symptoms as they were perfectly fine for months after their covid infection. In essence you basically have 1,000 people with long symptoms right after covid infection (so probably legit long symptoms caused by covid), they get better months later, then you have another 1,000 people in the study that start getting symptoms months after their covid infection. That leads to think you have 2,000 people from that group when that's not true.
 

Asita

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I know all of that. I was using long covid as defined by the study, you obviously can't have long covid if you never had covid. Many viral infections cause the same long-term symptoms, in essence, it doesn't really matter if it was the flu or covid. What matters is the rate long symptoms happen from each viral infection and covid has not been shown to cause long covid any more often than the flu causes long flu. Long covid is not some new phenomenon to be concerned with any more than you were previously concerned with long [insert whatever name you want] before covid.
One problem with that: THAT IS NOT REMOTELY HOW THE STUDY DEFINED IT. For fuck's sake, the conclusion was specifically as follows:

The findings of this cross-sectional analysis of a large, population-based French cohort suggest that persistent physical symptoms after COVID-19 infection may be associated more with the belief in having been infected with SARS-CoV-2 than with having laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 infection. Further research in this area should consider underlying mechanisms that may not be specific to the SARS-CoV-2 virus. A medical evaluation of these patients may be needed to prevent symptoms due to another disease being erroneously attributed to "long COVID."
It does not define long covid as a catch all for long term symptoms, nor does it take it for granted that the participants had actually contracted the disease on the basis of their belief or symptoms. It quite overtly points out that the participants belief was in error and that such presumptions should not be taken at their word.

Remember what I said about how your level of understanding was appreciably lower than you perceived it to be, and how you've very obviously been skimming, cherry picking and otherwise bastardizing studies to claim they match your preconceptions? This is exactly what I'm talking about.
 
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Silvanus

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It would not have worked as a multifaceted approach in the US. You know who did great and horribly fumbled both testing and contact tracing? Japan.
So? What do you imagine that proves?

New York had 5,000 cases a day BEFORE the shutdown? That was the time frame I was talking about going from 0 to shutdown the country, which literally happened. Even if I give you 2,000 cases everyday from March 1st - 15th (which is way over what happened), that still equals 0% of the population infected when you round to the nearest whole number. 30,000 infected in NYC isn't even half of 1% of the NYC population.
Goalposts have shifted for the hundredth time, because you didn't say "before the lockdown", you said April. But moving on.

We have 2,000 per day by mid March, and over 5,000 per day by the start of April-- The very start of your own given timeframe. Meaning that just confirmed cases (recalling that undiagnosed cases will make tens of thousands more) would be exceeding 1% total population by the end of March or early April.

And here you are, saying that they couldn't have possibly known or done anything in April... after they already knew it was spreading at breakneck speed, and had already implemented several measures.

What long-term symptoms are exclusive to covid?
Completely irrelevant, which also renders the rest of the passage irrelevant. An illness does not need to confer unique or exclusive symptoms in order to be significant. There's zero reason it would.

Long covid is not defined by just looking at a bunch of common symptoms shared with a dozen other respiratory illnesses.
 

Phoenixmgs

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One problem with that: THAT IS NOT REMOTELY HOW THE STUDY DEFINED IT. For fuck's sake, the conclusion was specifically as follows:



It does not define long covid as a catch all for long term symptoms, nor does it take it for granted that the participants had actually contracted the disease on the basis of their belief or symptoms. It quite overtly points out that the participants belief was in error and that such presumptions should not be taken at their word.

Remember what I said about how your level of understanding was appreciably lower than you perceived it to be, and how you've very obviously been skimming, cherry picking and otherwise bastardizing studies to claim they match your preconceptions? This is exactly what I'm talking about.
My fault as I did post the study months ago at this point. It was more so the fact that everyone that claims long covid (aka catch all version) may not have long covid; however, all those that claim long covid are assumed to have long covid. It's not to say anyone is lying or anything but a person saying they are having said symptoms is the main way to know they are having said symptoms as Silvanus is acting like self-reporting is a bad way to do a long covid study, it's basically the only way to do such a study, there is no test for long covid or long anything. There's really no way to prove long covid one way or the other. That study was able to accomplish that aspect because of when it was done (during the 1st wave) when it was easy to test of someone had covid or didn't. Now, everyone has had covid at some point, who knows if it was covid that triggered the long-term symptoms or not.

My point has always been show me legit data long covid is some new thing and/or show me data saying it happens more than with other similar viral infections. Stop using long covid as some scare tactic until you have proof.


So? What do you imagine that proves?



Goalposts have shifted for the hundredth time, because you didn't say "before the lockdown", you said April. But moving on.

We have 2,000 per day by mid March, and over 5,000 per day by the start of April-- The very start of your own given timeframe. Meaning that just confirmed cases (recalling that undiagnosed cases will make tens of thousands more) would be exceeding 1% total population by the end of March or early April.

And here you are, saying that they couldn't have possibly known or done anything in April... after they already knew it was spreading at breakneck speed, and had already implemented several measures.



Completely irrelevant, which also renders the rest of the passage irrelevant. An illness does not need to confer unique or exclusive symptoms in order to be significant. There's zero reason it would.

Long covid is not defined by just looking at a bunch of common symptoms shared with a dozen other respiratory illnesses.
That testing and tracing is not some required method to control covid. It's also a method that takes tons of resources that can be better applied elsewhere.

Even going out of context of my claim, which was we basically went from 0% to 20% because the 20% was the first snapshot we got. The NY survey started April 19th (it takes time to do the survey and get the results and publish it). So even if you calculate all known cases before that point, you're effectively arguing that NYC didn't have 0% infected and jumped to 20%, but they had under 2% infected and then jumped to 20%. How is that some massive difference in what I said or in any way defeating the point I made? How are you gonna contact trace a disease that has spread that much already?

I also said this before...
The covid crisis in NYC in March did just spring up basically overnight.
The fact is everything was basically fine, then it was everyone stay home in a matter of days. It didn't go something like "well, we got low numbers now so it's not a big problem" over a couple weeks, then maybe something like "we're seeing the numbers keep increasing and higher than we'd like" the next couple weeks, and then like "the numbers have reached the point that they're too high and we're having all nonessential workers stay home". That didn't happen. I don't know why you care about exact numbers. It was literally as I said, one day everything was fine, then maybe 2-3 days later, it's a crisis and everyone stay home. That's how it happened.
Your response to that was...
Absolute complete cuckoobollocks. If you think >5,000 a day is "one day everything was fine", no action required, you're deluded.


When did I say anything you just claimed I said? Where did I say long covid is irrelevant because it doesn't confer unique symptoms? I said it's currently as relevant as any other long [whatever] because there's no data it happens any more than other long [whatevers]. Thus, why would long covid be any more relevant than long flu?
 

Silvanus

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however, all those that claim long covid are assumed to have long covid.
By you! You're literally the only one here using "long covid" to describe people who never had covid at all, going purely on their own self-selection! You've taken the exact opposite intended message from the conclusion of that study!

My point has always been show me legit data long covid is some new thing and/or show me data saying it happens more than with other similar viral infections. Stop using long covid as some scare tactic until you have proof.
That wasn't always your point; originally you started out just insisting long covid was "nothing to do with" covid and that it was all just bullshit. You then gradually shifted what you were arguing without ever acknowledging what utter bollocks that original position was.

That testing and tracing is not some required method to control covid. It's also a method that takes tons of resources that can be better applied elsewhere.
No approach is "required", but I've already provided several analyses showing that a greater number of lives are saved when contact tracing is implemented alongside other functional mechanisms. Medical researchers pretty uniformly agree.

The "resources could be used elsewhere" thing is a non-argument. We live in exceptionally wealthy countries which could do both if they wanted.

Even going out of context of my claim, which was we basically went from 0% to 20% because the 20% was the first snapshot we got. The NY survey started April 19th (it takes time to do the survey and get the results and publish it). So even if you calculate all known cases before that point, you're effectively arguing that NYC didn't have 0% infected and jumped to 20%, but they had under 2% infected and then jumped to 20%. How is that some massive difference in what I said or in any way defeating the point I made? How are you gonna contact trace a disease that has spread that much already?
Firstly: you said "overnight". Whereas according to the CDC stats, from 0% to 20% was actually a growth lasting more than a month and a half. When you first start recording 2,000 a day, just a week after it was in the hundreds, that's your warning. They then had over a month after that to do something.

Secondly: diagnosed cases, remember. Undiagnosed is going to be much, much higher.

Thirdly: 2% of an entire goddamn population in less than 2 months is colossal. That's why NYC is termed an early epicentre. It seems small precisely because we've become so used to much, much higher numbers. Which we wouldn't have had to be, if authorities had reacted with more caution when the numbers were lower.
 
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Asita

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My fault as I did post the study months ago at this point.
Yes, I am aware that you posted the study months ago. I saw back when you posted it and have been stewing over this critique for just as long. Let me be perfectly clear here: You made the same mistake even when you first posted it, so this is not the case of some recent lapse in memory as you're now trying to imply (and even that would have only been marginally better, as it would still show that you weren't checking your work). You've been making that mistake from the beginning. That's precisely why I'm so fucking frustrated with you. You've been trying to use this study as evidence for that claim for months, and by all accounts you have not so much as skimmed it even once in that period, despite continuously crowing about what you mistakenly believed that it said. Never mind that the sheer bizarreness of your claim begs the question of whether you'd ever even bothered to read it all.

It was more so the fact that everyone that claims long covid (aka catch all version) may not have long covid; however, all those that claim long covid are assumed to have long covid. It's not to say anyone is lying or anything but a person saying they are having said symptoms is the main way to know they are having said symptoms as Silvanus is acting like self-reporting is a bad way to do a long covid study, it's basically the only way to do such a study, there is no test for long covid or long anything.
Ok, first of all: the "catch all version" is a fiction of your own creation, not something the study either uses, implies. It is a strawman you set up by misrepresenting the data.
Second, that is again you projecting your extant opinions onto the study without first doing the legwork to ensure that it is an informed opinion. Here's a hint: The study was testing the presumption that they had long covid against positive serology results. And they stated that the lab results showed that a good chunk of that population of hypochondriacs had never actually contracted covid. Food for thought: How exactly would they have arrived at those results if such a test was as impossible as you claim? Answer: You were mistaken in assuming that premise.

Never mind that your wan pretense of a conclusion that you're claiming to base on this study is wholly reliant on your misinterpretation of that exact result. You cannot both claim that lab results are unable to accurately test for covid infection and then turn around and claim that their accurate test results proves that - because of your misinterpretation of the population as having necessarily long covid as a matter of course - a lack of prior covid infection means that there is no relation between long covid and covid. All other considerations notwithstanding, those are mutually exclusive positions that require contradictory premises on whether or not the lab results are valid. The former is predicated on it not being possible for lab results to reliably support or rule out the patient having recently contracted covid. The latter instead requires that it is possible to do exactly that and rule out a recent covid infection.

Third, Long Covid is a condition that can be suffered during recovery from a covid infection, much like how post-Ebola syndrome can be suffered during recovery from Ebola. While the exact specifics of why this occurs is a bit hazy due to it having a variety of causes (many of which boil down to lingering damage caused when the virus was active in their body), as a matter of definition, one cannot have long covid without first contracting covid. As such, a lack of covid antibodies handily rules out a diagnosis of long covid. As such, any case in which someone is presumed to have long covid but lab results demonstrate that they had never caught covid at all would be a false positive.

And before you start: THAT IS NOT FUCKING UNUSUAL! For fuck's sake, that's why you get a formal diagnosis from the doctor before you get a prescription! You do so to rule out false positives and make sure that you're actually treating the right problem in an effective manner. Never mind the numerous "great imitator" diseases that are so named because their symptoms can frequently be mistook for those of other diseases. Hell, I had a roommate who had Lupus, and their doctor didn't figure it out for nearly a year of those symptoms flaring up because the it's so hard to nail down outside of fairly niche tests that aren't typically employed unless the doctors specifically suspect Lupus.

You are making a classic mistake of confusing your lack of familiarity with the topic with a lack of answers for it. To use an unflattering analogy, it's like when Bill O'Reilly tried to argue that science could not explain the tides or the origin of the moon. You being ignorant of the answer does not mean that the answer doesn't exist, or even that it's especially difficult to find. Case in point:


There's really no way to prove long covid one way or the other. That study was able to accomplish that aspect because of when it was done (during the 1st wave) when it was easy to test of someone had covid or didn't. Now, everyone has had covid at some point, who knows if it was covid that triggered the long-term symptoms or not.
To start with, that's not the claim you have been making. You argued - and claimed that the study agreed with you - that there was no relation between long covid and covid. Furthermore, that's yet another of your own assumptions that you're simply taking for granted rather than something demonstrated. Here, top result for the string "Can antibodies show how recently infected":


Antibody tests with very high sensitivity and specificity are preferred since they are more likely to exhibit high positive (probability that the person testing positive actually has antibodies) and negative predictive values (probability that the person testing negative actually does not have antibodies) when administered at least 3 weeks after the onset of illness.


Additional considerations when selecting an antibody test include:


  • IgG levels appear to decrease more slowly over time than levels of other classes of antibody. Therefore, assays that measure total antibody or IgG could have higher sensitivity than IgM assays as more time passes since a person’s last infection.
  • IgM antibody can persist for weeks to months following infection, though its persistence appears to be shorter than IgG’s; therefore, detection of IgM could suggest relatively recent infection.
  • Detection of persistent antibodies varies by the test used.
And just a little lower, we see a little table that lays out that experts can make an educated guess about a person's vaccination and infection status based on whether or not relevant Anti-S and Anti-N antibodies are present. Short version: If they have Anti-S antibodies, they've been vaccinated and/or have caught the disease. However, they will only have Anti-N antibodies if they were exposed to a wild strain. If they don't have IgM antibodies, then that infection happened a long time ago. You know, the kind of information that would let the labwork figure out exactly what you said it would be unable to figure out.

And that's just a perfunctory cliff-notes explanation for general audiences rather than subject matter experts. It's not the technical play by play that the lab workers go by. It took me all of 10 seconds to find and maybe 3 minutes to read.

You are not an expert for this topic, you are a layman. And despite your pretenses to the contrary, you are not deferring to those experts, you are brazenly putting your words in their mouths and then trying to use their perceived prestige as a smokescreen. You being unaware of something does not mean that the experts for this field are incapable of it. Take a step back from your stubborn pride and stop assuming that you simply know better than everyone else, those experts included.
 

Phoenixmgs

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By you! You're literally the only one here using "long covid" to describe people who never had covid at all, going purely on their own self-selection! You've taken the exact opposite intended message from the conclusion of that study!



That wasn't always your point; originally you started out just insisting long covid was "nothing to do with" covid and that it was all just bullshit. You then gradually shifted what you were arguing without ever acknowledging what utter bollocks that original position was.



No approach is "required", but I've already provided several analyses showing that a greater number of lives are saved when contact tracing is implemented alongside other functional mechanisms. Medical researchers pretty uniformly agree.

The "resources could be used elsewhere" thing is a non-argument. We live in exceptionally wealthy countries which could do both if they wanted.



Firstly: you said "overnight". Whereas according to the CDC stats, from 0% to 20% was actually a growth lasting more than a month and a half. When you first start recording 2,000 a day, just a week after it was in the hundreds, that's your warning. They then had over a month after that to do something.

Secondly: diagnosed cases, remember. Undiagnosed is going to be much, much higher.

Thirdly: 2% of an entire goddamn population in less than 2 months is colossal. That's why NYC is termed an early epicentre. It seems small precisely because we've become so used to much, much higher numbers. Which we wouldn't have had to be, if authorities had reacted with more caution when the numbers were lower.
What are you talking about? All the people claiming things on places like Twitter about long covid or referencing long hauler groups and whatnot include anyone that says they have long covid. For example:

Referencing this BS study that if you have any common sense, you know it's wrong.

Yeah, it was my point before that because I was always saying that before the study as well. Belief in having had long covid is not associated with covid, that was what the study said.

And what analysis shows most places would actually benefit from contact tracing and testing? A lot of places it's rather impossible to do like just about any place in Europe because of how much movement there is between countries and how easy it is (once you get in Europe, you can go basically anywhere). The US would be an obvious other one. A place like China or India or Japan, you can't do it either. You can't compare apples to oranges. This scientific consensus thing you kept claiming isn't nearly as important as you think it is to actually proving something. We literally just went over all the issues the US was still having with contact tracing in August of 2020, you just can't throw money at stuff and it magically happens.

Overnight is for the NYC covid crisis happening, not that it was at 20% when everything got shut down. I literally quoted myself and my statement in the last post... So you're saying you can contact trace nearly 2 million infections over a period of a month and a half? That's just ONE city obviously. Exactly with regards to undiagnosed being higher. The Santa Clara study found that there was 50x more covid infections than the official cases. How are you gonna contact trace all those cases? Thirdly, it wasn't 2%, it was 20% so that's 10x more colossal than what was already colossal. Any chance to contact trace covid was dead in the water before we even started, Japan didn't even try for example nor did they care about testing.


August 28, 2020
As the world tries to get a handle on the coronavirus and emerge from paralyzing lockdowns, public health officials have repeated a mantra: “test, test, test.”

But Japan went its own way, limiting tests to only the most severe cases as other countries raced to screen as many people as possible. Medical experts worried that the approach would blind the country to the spread of infection, allowing cases to explode and swamping hospitals.

It hasn’t happened. Japan — the grayest country in the world and a popular tourist destination with large, crowded cities — has one of the lowest mortality rates from Covid-19 among major nations. The medical system has not been overwhelmed. And the government never forced businesses to close, although many chose to.


Just because there is a consensus doesn't mean squat most of time until the data actually says it means something.


Yes, I am aware that you posted the study months ago. I saw back when you posted it and have been stewing over this critique for just as long. Let me be perfectly clear here: You made the same mistake even when you first posted it, so this is not the case of some recent lapse in memory as you're now trying to imply (and even that would have only been marginally better, as it would still show that you weren't checking your work). You've been making that mistake from the beginning. That's precisely why I'm so fucking frustrated with you. You've been trying to use this study as evidence for that claim for months, and by all accounts you have not so much as skimmed it even once in that period, despite continuously crowing about what you mistakenly believed that it said. Never mind that the sheer bizarreness of your claim begs the question of whether you'd ever even bothered to read it all.



Ok, first of all: the "catch all version" is a fiction of your own creation, not something the study either uses, implies. It is a strawman you set up by misrepresenting the data.
Second, that is again you projecting your extant opinions onto the study without first doing the legwork to ensure that it is an informed opinion. Here's a hint: The study was testing the presumption that they had long covid against positive serology results. And they stated that the lab results showed that a good chunk of that population of hypochondriacs had never actually contracted covid. Food for thought: How exactly would they have arrived at those results if such a test was as impossible as you claim? Answer: You were mistaken in assuming that premise.

Never mind that your wan pretense of a conclusion that you're claiming to base on this study is wholly reliant on your misinterpretation of that exact result. You cannot both claim that lab results are unable to accurately test for covid infection and then turn around and claim that their accurate test results proves that - because of your misinterpretation of the population as having necessarily long covid as a matter of course - a lack of prior covid infection means that there is no relation between long covid and covid. All other considerations notwithstanding, those are mutually exclusive positions that require contradictory premises on whether or not the lab results are valid. The former is predicated on it not being possible for lab results to reliably support or rule out the patient having recently contracted covid. The latter instead requires that it is possible to do exactly that and rule out a recent covid infection.

Third, Long Covid is a condition that can be suffered during recovery from a covid infection, much like how post-Ebola syndrome can be suffered during recovery from Ebola. While the exact specifics of why this occurs is a bit hazy due to it having a variety of causes (many of which boil down to lingering damage caused when the virus was active in their body), as a matter of definition, one cannot have long covid without first contracting covid. As such, a lack of covid antibodies handily rules out a diagnosis of long covid. As such, any case in which someone is presumed to have long covid but lab results demonstrate that they had never caught covid at all would be a false positive.

And before you start: THAT IS NOT FUCKING UNUSUAL! For fuck's sake, that's why you get a formal diagnosis from the doctor before you get a prescription! You do so to rule out false positives and make sure that you're actually treating the right problem in an effective manner. Never mind the numerous "great imitator" diseases that are so named because their symptoms can frequently be mistook for those of other diseases. Hell, I had a roommate who had Lupus, and their doctor didn't figure it out for nearly a year of those symptoms flaring up because the it's so hard to nail down outside of fairly niche tests that aren't typically employed unless the doctors specifically suspect Lupus.

You are making a classic mistake of confusing your lack of familiarity with the topic with a lack of answers for it. To use an unflattering analogy, it's like when Bill O'Reilly tried to argue that science could not explain the tides or the origin of the moon. You being ignorant of the answer does not mean that the answer doesn't exist, or even that it's especially difficult to find. Case in point:




To start with, that's not the claim you have been making. You argued - and claimed that the study agreed with you - that there was no relation between long covid and covid. Furthermore, that's yet another of your own assumptions that you're simply taking for granted rather than something demonstrated. Here, top result for the string "Can antibodies show how recently infected":



And just a little lower, we see a little table that lays out that experts can make an educated guess about a person's vaccination and infection status based on whether or not relevant Anti-S and Anti-N antibodies are present. Short version: If they have Anti-S antibodies, they've been vaccinated and/or have caught the disease. However, they will only have Anti-N antibodies if they were exposed to a wild strain. If they don't have IgM antibodies, then that infection happened a long time ago. You know, the kind of information that would let the labwork figure out exactly what you said it would be unable to figure out.

And that's just a perfunctory cliff-notes explanation for general audiences rather than subject matter experts. It's not the technical play by play that the lab workers go by. It took me all of 10 seconds to find and maybe 3 minutes to read.

You are not an expert for this topic, you are a layman. And despite your pretenses to the contrary, you are not deferring to those experts, you are brazenly putting your words in their mouths and then trying to use their perceived prestige as a smokescreen. You being unaware of something does not mean that the experts for this field are incapable of it. Take a step back from your stubborn pride and stop assuming that you simply know better than everyone else, those experts included.
I'm thinking what I meant is that the overall long covid claims are basically the catch-all version. As the study found belief in having long covid is not associated with covid. For example, people claiming such things as the Twitter post (and study linked in said post) I linked to up above that all those people have long covid are not true because that is indeed the catch-all version.

If they don't have IgM antibodies, then is it not long covid for sure? Because I very much doubt the people getting long symptoms in the following study have those antibodies anymore. Months later after confirmed infection, there's new people in the study that get these symptoms long after their covid infection (and months after doing fine). The study also shows almost nobody gets these long symptoms for a prolonged period, they get better. The study shows long covid is not a "mass disabling event" as claimed by some.

The following study shows that the people with covid end up doing better faster than those with other viruses.
After adjustment, improvements in well-being were statistically and clinically greater for participants in the COVID-19–positive group vs the COVID-19–negative group only for social participation

I keep saying this base argument that if long covid is something to actually be concerned about (more than long flu or long whatever), then where's the data showing covid causes this any more often than any other viral infection? Long covid was used (probably is in some places still) as a scare tactic to keep asinine covid restrictions in place.
 

Silvanus

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What are you talking about? All the people claiming things on places like Twitter about long covid or referencing long hauler groups and whatnot include anyone that says they have long covid. For example:
Why would I give a solitary shit what some randos on Twitter say?

Yeah, it was my point before that because I was always saying that before the study as well. Belief in having had long covid is not associated with covid, that was what the study said.
No, it didn't say that.

What it showed was that quite a lot of people who self-reported long covid symptoms had not had positive serology for covid. Some of them had other respiratory illnesses which can give similar long-term symptoms. And some of them didn't have positive serology for anything.

But those who had positive serology for covid were more likely than those who didn't to report those symptoms. That is literally a positive relationship. That's what the term means.

And what analysis shows most places would actually benefit from contact tracing and testing?
You've now already been presented with numerous links to contact tracing having a positive impact on transmission, and statements from medical experts and researchers that it would be beneficial here.

If you will never accept the evidence that's presented to you, there's not much else I can do.

Overnight is for the NYC covid crisis happening, not that it was at 20% when everything got shut down. I literally quoted myself and my statement in the last post...
So "overnight", "0 to 20% in April" actually means "over longer than a month, beginning several weeks before April". Got it. Just gotta keep track of wherever those restless goalposts are going next.

The fact is, you gave that wildly inaccurate "0 to 20 overnight" nonsense statement to try to argue that it was so quick, a comprehensive response was impossible. Yet now we know they had much longer-- and had in fact already implemented most restrictions before we even get to April.

Is acknowledgement of an error that painstakingly difficult for you to give?
 

Phoenixmgs

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Why would I give a solitary shit what some randos on Twitter say?



No, it didn't say that.

What it showed was that quite a lot of people who self-reported long covid symptoms had not had positive serology for covid. Some of them had other respiratory illnesses which can give similar long-term symptoms. And some of them didn't have positive serology for anything.

But those who had positive serology for covid were more likely than those who didn't to report those symptoms. That is literally a positive relationship. That's what the term means.



You've now already been presented with numerous links to contact tracing having a positive impact on transmission, and statements from medical experts and researchers that it would be beneficial here.

If you will never accept the evidence that's presented to you, there's not much else I can do.



So "overnight", "0 to 20% in April" actually means "over longer than a month, beginning several weeks before April". Got it. Just gotta keep track of wherever those restless goalposts are going next.

The fact is, you gave that wildly inaccurate "0 to 20 overnight" nonsense statement to try to argue that it was so quick, a comprehensive response was impossible. Yet now we know they had much longer-- and had in fact already implemented most restrictions before we even get to April.

Is acknowledgement of an error that painstakingly difficult for you to give?
Responding to you was not the reason I posted about long covid. The reason was because of the narrative surrounding long covid.

---

Word for word from the study...
Conclusions

The results of this cross-sectional analysis of a large, population-based French cohort suggest that physical symptoms persisting 10 to 12 months after the COVID-19 pandemic first wave may be associated more with the belief in having experienced COVID-19 infection than with actually being infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus.


---

I provided evidence that you totally don't need to do any of that and you can still do very well.

How is this even something that could ever realistically happen?
The goal of contact tracing for Covid-19 is to reach people who have spent more than 15 minutes within six feet of an infected person and ask them to quarantine at home voluntarily for two weeks even if they test negative, monitoring themselves for symptoms during that time.

Tracking those exposed is so far behind the virus raging in most places that many public health officials believe the money and personnel involved would be better spent on other resources

Some public health experts now believe that, at the very least, testing and contact tracing need to be scaled back in places with major outbreaks. In some places, they say the effort may never succeed.

“Contact tracing is the wrong tool for the wrong job at the wrong time,” said Dr. David Lakey

“Back when you had 10 cases here in Texas, it might have been useful,” said Dr. Lakey, who is now the chief medical officer for the University of Texas System. “But if you don’t have rapid testing, it is going to be very difficult in a disease with 40 percent of people asymptomatic. It is hard to see the benefit of it right now.”

Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, a former director of the C.D.C. who is a strong advocate for robust contact tracing programs, largely agreed that it is impossible to do meaningful or substantial contact tracing with huge numbers of cases. He noted that when testing results lag as much as they have, it becomes almost impossible to keep up with the high volume of infected individuals and those who have been in contact with them.

Contact tracing generally works best, public health experts say, when a disease is easily detected from its onset. That is often impossible with the coronavirus because a large percentage of those infected have no symptoms.

In Seattle, tracers found 80 percent of the people they reached were not in quarantine, even if they had symptoms. And there is little appetite in the United States for intrusive technology, such as electronic bracelets or obligatory phone GPS signals, that has worked well for contact tracing in parts of Asia.


How is contact tracing something you think the US could have actually done and been successful with? Sure, you can say if the US buckled down in January or December

---

I didn't move any goalposts when I said it went from 0 to 20, that was obviously FIGURATIVELY because the 20% was the 1st snapshot (thus, you had 0 before that). Why would anyone argue that 0 people had covid, then nearly 2 million had it the next day? Whether covid spread to 2 million in a month and a half (or 2 months or 3 months), you think you can contact trace that? Mind you, that's just ONE city. Sure, you can say the US could've started earlier, which one of the guys I like (Marty Makary) said that in January stuff needed to be done yet Fauci said on Feb 29th that everything is fine and people should carry on like normal. However, at the point the US was before covid was even a perceived major issue, contact tracing was already out the door as something that could be done, it was out the door Feb 29th when Fauci made that statement already. Why waste resources on contact tracing? You don't realize I was far testing and contact tracing early on and have admitted that was wrong.
 

Silvanus

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Responding to you was not the reason I posted about long covid. The reason was because of the narrative surrounding long covid.
And your window into "the narrative" was Twitter randos?

Word for word from the study...
Conclusions

The results of this cross-sectional analysis of a large, population-based French cohort suggest that physical symptoms persisting 10 to 12 months after the COVID-19 pandemic first wave may be associated more with the belief in having experienced COVID-19 infection than with actually being infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
Cool. Still literally a positive relationship shown.

I provided evidence that you totally don't need to do any of that and you can still do very well.
? Would be irrelevant, because whether or not its possible to do well without contact tracing is not what we're discussing.

How is contact tracing something you think the US could have actually done and been successful with? Sure, you can say if the US buckled down in January or December
The idea is to plan in advance, so as to have disaster contingencies in place, rather than scrabbling in a couple of months. Scientists had been warning about the inevitability of a pandemic for years.

I didn't move any goalposts when I said it went from 0 to 20, that was obviously FIGURATIVELY because the 20% was the 1st snapshot (thus, you had 0 before that).
It wasn't the "first snapshot", whatever the fuck that means. We had the data from long before: It's been posted in this thread. They already had stats, showing thousands per day and quickly ramping up.
 

Phoenixmgs

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And your window into "the narrative" was Twitter randos?



Cool. Still literally a positive relationship shown.



? Would be irrelevant, because whether or not its possible to do well without contact tracing is not what we're discussing.



The idea is to plan in advance, so as to have disaster contingencies in place, rather than scrabbling in a couple of months. Scientists had been warning about the inevitability of a pandemic for years.



It wasn't the "first snapshot", whatever the fuck that means. We had the data from long before: It's been posted in this thread. They already had stats, showing thousands per day and quickly ramping up.
Nope, the general Covidian narrative pushed on most of mainstream media. Twitter was just used as proof of it being a thing.

That's not what that said, the world "may" was in there meaning the confidence interval stretched from could be to could not be. If you wanna say that shows a positive relationship, then you gotta admit ivermectin works because the confidence interval stretches across the same stuff.

Yeah, it is. Why waste resources on X when Y yields the same results and uses much less resources? Also, just because something works in one country does not mean it can work in another. Japanese are different than Americans that are different than Australians and so on and so on. Americans are not gonna use a covid tracking app and/or answer unknown phone numbers for example. Huge differences in geography and initial covid penetration as well. America couldn't have done what South Korea did and also be successful with the same strategy for example.

Outside of say South Korea, what country actually performed well with covid did so because of some pre-made plans? Sweden was initially mocked and ended up with the lowest all-cause mortality during the pandemic in Europe and did not have some fancy pre-made pandemic plans they initiated. Most countries that did well did well because they were able to implement basic things before covid was too penetrated and had the great natural geographic characteristic of being an island.

I said first snapshot in the sense it was the first that was actually accurate. Also, you left out my basic question of why would anyone argue that there were 0 cases and then the next day there was 2 million cases? Again even with my 0 to 20 not being completely accurate, which was obvious; you proved that I was off by less than 2 percentage points, it was like 1.5% (of completely inaccurate official cases) to 20% in actuality vs 0 to 20. What does it matter? My main point stands, that's not possible to contact trace.
 

Silvanus

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Nope, the general Covidian narrative pushed on most of mainstream media. Twitter was just used as proof of it being a thing.
"The general Covidian narrative" said long covid included symptoms in people that didn't have covid? No, that didn't happen.

You yourself were the most vocal person I saw conflating the two things. And now you're here complaining that... they got conflated.

That's not what that said, the world "may" was in there meaning the confidence interval stretched from could be to could not be. If you wanna say that shows a positive relationship, then you gotta admit ivermectin works because the confidence interval stretches across the same stuff.
I'm not talking about the written statement. I'm talking about the numbers. A positive relationship is shown in the numbers.

And no, there was no meaningful positive relationship with ivermectin. This is just back to the old bullshit alt remedy stuff again.

Yeah, it is. Why waste resources on X when Y yields the same results and uses much less resources?
It's not either-or. This is about the third time you've framed it as a false choice between different measures, rather than acknowledging that the resources exist to do both. Measures work best in tandem.

Also, just because something works in one country does not mean it can work in another. Japanese are different than Americans that are different than Australians and so on and so on. Americans are not gonna use a covid tracking app and/or answer unknown phone numbers for example. Huge differences in geography and initial covid penetration as well. America couldn't have done what South Korea did and also be successful with the same strategy for example.
Blah blah blah, presumptuous bullshit. Contact tracing has worked in the US specifically before.

Outside of say South Korea, what country actually performed well with covid did so because of some pre-made plans?
Another irrelevant deflection question. Focus on what we're actually discussing.

I said first snapshot in the sense it was the first that was actually accurate.
Oh, so you have reason to assume the official stats from March were significantly wrong, do you?

Go ahead, let's see the evidence.
 

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I'm thinking what I meant is that the overall long covid claims are basically the catch-all version. As the study found belief in having long covid is not associated with covid. For example, people claiming such things as the Twitter post (and study linked in said post) I linked to up above that all those people have long covid are not true because that is indeed the catch-all version.
...Ok, I want you to listen to me very carefully here: The study finding no relationship between a belief in having covid and actually having covid does not in any way imply the use of a "catch-all" definition. Again: "belief in having covid" is referring to the selection criteria of the participants needing to have self-diagnosed themselves with covid without actually getting tested or a proper diagnosis. That is why I call it the hypochondriac sample; they're the people who have convinced themselves that they must have <disease> based off of their own specious criteria rather than proper diagnosis, testing, or rigorous methodology.

Them being wrong does not mean that a "catch all" definition was employed, it just means that they were mistaken. That's what we call a Type 1 Error, a false positive, with the classic illustrative example being a wrongful conviction of an innocent. That the innocent was convicted does not mean that they were in fact guilty under a broader "catch-all" interpretation of the law. A Type 1 Error is just that: An error. More specifically, it represents a failure in the rigor of the employed methodology that led to a negative result being incorrectly interpreted as a positive one.

That you're even trying to make this argument at all strains credulity because it's so damn bizarre. Do you not have any familiarity at all with data analysis? Because that right there is a very basic error that you should have been warned away from in any introductory course on the subject.

If they don't have IgM antibodies, then is it not long covid for sure? Because I very much doubt the people getting long symptoms in the following study have those antibodies anymore. Months later after confirmed infection, there's new people in the study that get these symptoms long after their covid infection (and months after doing fine). The study also shows almost nobody gets these long symptoms for a prolonged period, they get better. The study shows long covid is not a "mass disabling event" as claimed by some.


...No. It's closer to the opposite. Remember, Long Covid - aka "Post Covid Conditions" - is a recovery period issue. Long Covid consists of long term health complications during and after the typical recovery period for Covid. A Covid infection will typically run its course in about two weeks. Long Covid isn't even on the table until around 3 months after infection.

IgM antibodies don't stick around for terribly long after an infection. They usually degrade within a span of weeks. As such, the presence of IgM antibodies indicate a very recent or current infection. The presence of the longer-lasting IgG antibodies and lack of shorter-lasting IgM antibodies would corroborate rather than rule out the idea of Long Covid as it means that your infection was neither terribly recent nor - depending on relative IgG levels - so long ago that Covid can be dismissed as unrelated to the symptoms.

Never mind the fact that this tangent is nothing more than you trying to pivot from acknowledging your error in assuming that medical professionals couldn't meaningfully test for a recent covid infection!

Again, it is quite apparent that not only are you unfamiliar with the subject and are instead arguing based off of your uninformed presumptions, but that - in light of the fact that you've had more than a year to rectify your ignorance - you simply have no interest in learning about the subject. For fuck's sake, you just demonstrated once again that you're more than willing to quote mine your sources and fail to understand the relevant context, and even gave us a perfect example of how your whole argument boils down to reflexive obstinacy without any regard for what the things you're citing even say, much less internal consistency in your positions. Observe:

Word for word from the study...
Conclusions

The results of this cross-sectional analysis of a large, population-based French cohort suggest that physical symptoms persisting 10 to 12 months after the COVID-19 pandemic first wave may be associated more with the belief in having experienced COVID-19 infection than with actually being infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
The full quote:

The results of this cross-sectional analysis of a large, population-based French cohort suggest that physical symptoms persisting 10 to 12 months after the COVID-19 pandemic first wave may be associated more with the belief in having experienced COVID-19 infection than with actually being infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Although our study cannot determine the direction of the association between belief and symptoms, our results suggest that further research regarding persistent physical symptoms after COVID-19 infection should also consider mechanisms that may not be specific to the SARS-CoV-2 virus. From a clinical perspective, patients in this situation should be offered a medical evaluation to prevent their symptoms being erroneously attributed to COVID-19 infection and to identify cognitive and behavioral mechanisms that may be targeted to relieve the symptoms
Or, to put it more briefly, we can also look towards the start of the study where it lays out the actual takeaway in a single sentence:

Meaning Findings suggest that persistent physical symptoms after COVID-19 infection should not be automatically ascribed to SARS-CoV-2; a complete medical evaluation may be needed to prevent erroneously attributing symptoms to the virus.
And yet here you are still trying to argue that 1) the study was using a 'catch-all' definition and therefore 2) their findings should be instead be interpreted as meaning that there is that there is no relationship between Long Covid and Covid! In actuality the study is quite clear that these cases were erroneously presumed to be Long Covid and that their findings showed how important it was to get properly tested rather than simply assuming you had the bug. Your takeaway is almost the exact opposite of what it actually claims, and you worked backwards from that faulty conclusion to make a further series of outlandish and unsupported claims that you fail to realize would have invalidated the study you're misrepresenting if they were true!

And concurrently with this you're trying to argue that we can't meaningfully test for a recent Covid infection (which you evidently didn't take the time to understand would make the results - even as misrepresented by you - of the aforementioned study impossible, as the logic you champion in that argument is that the lab results should be positive for everyone), and then when you're shown evidence to the contrary you don't even spare so much as a beat before taking a gross misunderstanding of that data and trying to use it as evidence against Long Covid! That is not a data driven approach, that's a transparently ideologically driven one.

And this is not the first time you've done that, not by a long shot! And the fact that you made that mistake yet again in this context tips your hand far more than you realize. It shows that while you might have skimmed the paper, you certainly didn't take the time to understand it. Rather, you only see it as containing a line that - bereft of necessary context - you find useful as a retort against someone telling you that you're wrong...and you haven't even given that quote enough consideration to even think about how that reflects on your other arguments.

For fuck's sake, do you even understand how damning it is that you actually tried to defend yourself as misremembering the contents of a paper you were actively arguing about (and had been doing so for months) on the grounds that it had been months since you posted it? In one sentence you all but spelled out that you didn't actually care enough about the contents of the paper to even refer to it while making your point, instead simply presuming that you knew what it said and what its meaning was based on that soundbite you pulled. It made it quite clear that rather than reading the sources and drawing the facts and figures from them, you instead were just assuming its contents and using it as little more than a big name to add credibility to your position.

Again: YOU OBVIOUSLY DO NOT UNDERSTAND THIS TOPIC. That does not mean that you are incapable of understanding it. That just means that there is currently a gap in your knowledge that you can address if you simply have the humility to accept that the gap is there and make an honest effort to learn about the subject. Put your ego aside and stop trying to prove to yourself that you were 'right all along' and that you just know better than your detractors. Grab a slice of humble pie, take a step back and away from trying to 'win' an argument, stop looking at the data as means to prove an ideological point, and actually try to learn about the subject.
 
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Phoenixmgs

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"The general Covidian narrative" said long covid included symptoms in people that didn't have covid? No, that didn't happen.

You yourself were the most vocal person I saw conflating the two things. And now you're here complaining that... they got conflated.



I'm not talking about the written statement. I'm talking about the numbers. A positive relationship is shown in the numbers.

And no, there was no meaningful positive relationship with ivermectin. This is just back to the old bullshit alt remedy stuff again.



It's not either-or. This is about the third time you've framed it as a false choice between different measures, rather than acknowledging that the resources exist to do both. Measures work best in tandem.



Blah blah blah, presumptuous bullshit. Contact tracing has worked in the US specifically before.


Another irrelevant deflection question. Focus on what we're actually discussing.



Oh, so you have reason to assume the official stats from March were significantly wrong, do you?

Go ahead, let's see the evidence.
The Covidian narrative did exactly that. 20% of people that had asymptomatic covid (not just covid mind you, ASYMPTOMATIC covid) got long covid is total fucking bullshit.

Yes, there was no MEANINGFUL positive relationship with ivermectin same as there was no MEANINGFUL positive relationship in the those numbers for long covid either. See how you're purposefully comparing 2 different standards? You're making ivermectin have a meaningful positive relationship while just requiring the long covid study to have a positive relationship (minus the meaningful).

The US was already proven to not have the resources to do contact tracing... I don't have an issue with anyone thinking in say March 2020 that contact tracing could be something to help, but today with hindsight, we know it wasn't possible.

Contact tracing has worked in the US against a virus similar to covid (that spreads as fast, as easily and before a person is symptomatic)?

You brought up planning in advance, not me. The US didn't plan in advance and thus couldn't do things that require said advanced planning.

Uhh... yeah, that's literally what we've been talking about for several posts now. Add up all the known cases in NYC until say April 20th (I forget if the survey started April 15th or 19th), you posted the graph. I did just some ballpark math (5,000 cases x 30 days = 150,000 cases) which is probably an overestimate if you manually count each day. That doesn't even get you to 2% of the city infected when the survey done mid-late April says 20% of the city was infected. How are the official stats anywhere near close to accurate?


...Ok, I want you to listen to me very carefully here: The study finding no relationship between a belief in having covid and actually having covid does not in any way imply the use of a "catch-all" definition.

That you're even trying to make this argument at all strains credulity because it's so damn bizarre. Do you not have any familiarity at all with data analysis? Because that right there is a very basic error that you should have been warned away from in any introductory course on the subject.
I stopped trying to make the argument already as I admitted to being mistaken... I SAID THAT THE PEOPLE CLAIMING LONG COVID IS SOME KIND OF THING TO BE CONCERNED ABOUT (anymore than long flu or whatever) ARE USING THE CATCH ALL VERSION AND CLAIMING COVID IS CAUSING ALL THESE LONG TERM SYMPTOMS IN ALL THESE PEOPLE.

...No. It's closer to the opposite. Remember, Long Covid - aka "Post Covid Conditions" - is a recovery period issue. Long Covid consists of long term health complications during and after the typical recovery period for Covid. A Covid infection will typically run its course in about two weeks. Long Covid isn't even on the table until around 3 months after infection.

IgM antibodies don't stick around for terribly long after an infection. They usually degrade within a span of weeks. As such, the presence of IgM antibodies indicate a very recent or current infection. The presence of the longer-lasting IgG antibodies and lack of shorter-lasting IgM antibodies would corroborate rather than rule out the idea of Long Covid as it means that your infection was neither terribly recent nor - depending on relative IgG levels - so long ago that Covid can be dismissed as unrelated to the symptoms.

Never mind the fact that this tangent is nothing more than you trying to pivot from acknowledging your error in assuming that medical professionals couldn't meaningfully test for a recent covid infection!

Again, it is quite apparent that not only are you unfamiliar with the subject and are instead arguing based off of your uninformed presumptions, but that - in light of the fact that you've had more than a year to rectify your ignorance - you simply have no interest in learning about the subject. For fuck's sake, you just demonstrated once again that you're more than willing to quote mine your sources and fail to understand the relevant context, and even gave us a perfect example of how your whole argument boils down to reflexive obstinacy without any regard for what the things you're citing even say, much less internal consistency in your positions. Observe:
I was just asking a the question to try to figure out a way to actually conclude when covid actually causes said long-term symptoms in a world where everyone's had covid already (probably multiple times at this point). That what's you literally quoted from the study, which was to do a complete evaulation to prevent erroneous long covid attributions. How do you actually do that in a world where everyone has had covid? The great thing about the French study was that it was done early so you know if each person had covid before or didn't, now that is out the window for doing any studies.

I know long covid is not long covid until a certain time frame obviously (which every study seems to use different time frames). Where is there data that long covid triggers in people with no symptoms months later after infection or in people that get better for a prolonged period (at least of month) after initial symptoms? I'm pretty sure this data does not exist. Long covid seems to be your immune system continuing to stay active weeks/months after covid is long gone so why would you be perfectly fine for months and then your immune system starts going haywire and this is somehow, for sure, all because of covid? Again, where is this proof?

Also the following study basically flies in the face that covid is triggering long-term symptoms any more than similar viruses.

Meaning Findings suggest that persistent physical symptoms after COVID-19 infection should not be automatically ascribed to SARS-CoV-2; a complete medical evaluation may be needed to prevent erroneously attributing symptoms to the virus.
Where is this actually being done?