Corona, False Alarm? Questions about a Book

Faith & Science Conversation
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Thank you. It’s hitting lots of places hard. I can’t speak for the UK, but I know that our politics here in the US are heavily intertwined with our COVID-19 response. Of course, people also tend to intertwine science and religion with US politics, too. Hurray for culture wars.

That is wonderful to hear! :slight_smile:

We haven’t been to church since the quarantine originally got serious (it has been lifted for some months, though). I miss it. We are able to see the church services live via social media, but it’s simply not the same. I miss being around people. Hugging them. Laughing with them. Crying with them. Sharing stories. It’s really not the same. And I say this as a strongly introverted individual.

Our church has something called Missional Communities. It’s basically small groups. We go out and serve at various places, or we share a meal and have Bible study. Can’t do any of that, either. :frowning:

Thank you! :slight_smile:

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Ah the “good old days” when we drove carts of bodies to dump in mass graves. Why can’t we just do that again? So what if there are too many sick people for doctors to even look at let alone treat. If they are going to die, then they had better do so and decrease the surplus population. Who do these government and media people think they are, trying to stop this age old tradition. Why in the world should we listen to the scientists? The leadership of game show hosts contradicting themselves in every other tweet is far more entertaining. Why watch horror movies when we can live in one?"

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Some have said that many of the deaths that occurred during the Spanish Flu were caused by bacterial pneumonia, a side effect of wearing masks and being exposed to bacteria and unclean air. How valid is that?

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Hi Liam,

Hope all is going well “across the pond” for you and those you love.

I did a few searches on the SPIKE-COVID19 database hosted by Allen Institute for AI to address the key points. BTW, I highly recommend that site, although it does occasionally (like all machine learning models) make mistakes.

Some key misses in the book’s analysis are:

Efficacy of masks

I did a search on and found 3 papers that support the efficacy of widespread use of masks in reducing transmission:

The key point here is that an individual mask may or may not protect an individual wearer, but widespread use does protect the public at large.

I haven’t read the book by Reiss and Bhakdi, but it’s possible that the studies they cite address the claim of mask-wearing to protect the individual mask wearer. That is a different question altogether from the public health question.

Reporting of Cases

The authors seem to argue that a swab test is insufficient as a diagnosis in the absence of symptoms. This is grossly irresponsible, as it ignores the importance of identifying asymptomatic and presymptomatic carriers.

Transmissibility has been shown to begin 2 to 3 days before the appearance of the first symptoms [5], peaks at 0.7 days before symptom onset [5] and may last for as long as 21 days in asymptomatic individuals [6]

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/6247/a8d60511ca5d63f58887370e67532fbc647c.pdf

Causality of deaths attributed to COVID-19

The authors seem to argue that the presence of co-morbidities indicates that mortality due to COVID-19 is being exaggerated.

The best way to analyze the authors’ claim IMO is to assess whether excess mortality above expectation has been occurring since February 2020. Of course some people would be expected to die of diabetes complications, hypertension complications, etc., regardless of COVID. But the expected number of those deaths during the period since 2/2020 can be estimated with good accuracy. Have there been excess deaths above that expectation?

In the USA, the answer is an unequivocal “unfortunately, yes.”

image
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Source: CDC Dashboard

Note that the number of excess deaths very closely matches the number of deaths in which COVID-19 is listed as a cause of death on certificates of death.

Peace,
Chris

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Secondary bacterial infections are common in flu cases, and always have been. It has nothing to do with wearing a mask.

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A little more than halfway down under the heading of “ Cases at nursing homes and long-term care facilities”

“Coronavirus cases have been reported in more than 23,000 nursing homes and other long-term care facilities, according to data collected by The New York Times from states, counties, the federal government and facilities themselves. More than 581,000 residents and employees of those homes have been infected, and more than 87,000 have died. That means more than 35 percent of deaths from the virus in the United States have been tied to nursing homes and other long-term care facilities.”

and here too.

87,000

Other news media and blogs are saying “at least” and then adding various lower figures at around 50,000 to 60,000. Some are quoting much higher figures. I put down what I thought was the most reliable with a number.

This was totally unnecessary. I don’t believe that the richest country in the world couldn’t find other ways to accommodate these people.

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Their qualifications are irrelevant. I don’t care who does the science, they didn’t. And the millions who died from ‘Spanish’ flu lived all over the planet breathing every kind of air, at least half clean, non-industrial, even in the western front trenches where it started, and the vast majority not wearing masks.

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That is true. Secondary pneumonia is a common cause of death in flu, and has nothing to do with masks. I am not aware of any valid studies that link acquiring pneumonia to wearing masks. The only germs you would be getting from a mask are the ones you breathe out, except for perhaps from touching the mask with your hands, but that should be about the same as the amount people touch their faces without masks.
Some people with flu also die of the same sort of cytokine storm that Covid causes, but mostly the young healthy ones. As I recall, pregnant ladies had a rough time with H1N1, and it was also associated with thrombotic events. None of which are caused by masks.

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When we got the flu in 2019, my son and I recovered without incident. My wife needed an antibiotic because she developed pneumonia. No masks worn.

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Agreed it is shameful. But then so is the failure to put in place a national plan. Strategic periods of universal mask wearing could have greatly reduced the carnage.

@LM77, count me among the number who have missed your participation even though I appreciate that you are doing good work and prioritizing appropriately.

Here in the states it will be hard to initiate a national plan now after all this time when the plan has been to keep declaring its end is just around the corner and that there is only the binary choice of restarting the economy or winning the war against COVID. I’m sure most business owners want to open with some assurance of not immediately having to shut down again. But that will require a unifed, cooperative effort. Hope you’re getting that on your side.

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We may also be interning a different phase of benefit from masks. Earlier, it was all about flattening the curve so as to not overwhelm medical resources, whereas with the eminent release of what looks like an effective vaccine, delaying infection with masks will directly save lives.

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What scientific biomedical evidence is there that the virus causes the cytokine storms?

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There is decades of evidence that viruses cause the release of cytokines and can induce cytokine storms. People are getting infected with SARS-CoV-2. Some are suffering from cytokine storms. Connect the dots.

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I appreciate @T_aquaticus’ excellent answer. Also, the steroid treatments that have helped reduce COVID-19 mortality are administered with the express purpose of suppressing cytokine storms.

Peace,
Chris

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Thanks @MarkD. You’re very kind.

Whilst I don’t disagree, I am concerned about the impact of an effective vaccine of people’s willingness to social distance/wear masks. We are in our second Lockdown here in England and people are not only fatigued but also less afraid and so more willing to break the rules. If/when a vaccine hits the shelves, I fear people will more readily break the rules because they will think ‘Oh well if I get it, they’ll just give me the vaccine and I’ll be fine.’

Sure, I realise a vaccine is not the same as a cure. But given that the British press’ science journalists couldn’t distinguish between ‘efficacy’ and ‘effectiveness’ in their reporting on Pfizer Biontech trail, I don’t think it unreasonable for people to confuse vaccine and cure.

AMAZING! Thank you so much. I certainly be bookmarking that page.

Thanks also to @T_aquaticus and others for helpful replies. And thanks to all for the warm wishes :).

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Very much so here also. We have more disease now than ever, but people are less careful. I agree that education is paramount so that people know it is too late once infected to get a vaccine.

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And now a justice of the supreme court has publicly criticized states for taking ‘extreme measures’ to contain this extreme virus.

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito gave alarmingly political remarks on Thursday, criticizing many states’ science-based COVID-19 restrictions …

You wouldn’t think commenting on a what a supreme court justice had to say could violate our “no politics” policy, but there is no denying that politics has been used extensively to make it more difficult to carry out medically sound policies.

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Can you imagine if when people were huddling in the tubes to survive the air raids of WWII, there had been a large and loud contingent agitating for living their lives above ground and not in fear down here? I guess explosives you can hear and wreckage you can see helps impact public perception in a way a virus which merely kills hundreds of thousands cannot.

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What kind of swivel eyed libertarian is Alito?

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Actually I think they would take that as a confirmation that Covid-19 is not so important, and they would compare these face mask restrictions with those on cigarettes and warnings against things supposed to cause heart disease – things that a lot of people feel perfectly free to ignore. so… I don’t think that comparison helps so much…

Far more important is that Covid-19 is NOT a result of bad diet or bad habits but is a rapidly spreading highly infectious virus which can not only can easily overwhelm our health care system but has been doing so already in different places.

I am reminded of the fundamental problems with prophecy. If people listen to the prophecy, then it doesn’t happen and you have a false prophet. If people don’t listen, then what good did the prophet do? Whether self-fulfilling or self-preventing, the prophet loses either way. We listened and slowed down the spread of the virus and so the morons are crying “FALSE! See, not so many people are dying from this thing after all.” The evidence is very clear in the graph of the statistics – an exponential curve interrupted and then resumed.

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