People will often cite how economic forecastors are "irrationally" certain about their forecasts. Gerd Gigerenzer points out that overstating forecast accuracy is actually rational. If you want to be successful in the forecasting game you have to pretend you can actually do it. This is a plague in science and medical communication. They think it hurts their credibility to honestly describe the uncertainty. Thus it's masks don't work to masks always work and never, the empirical evidence for masks working is weak, but on balance suggests it could be beneficial in many circumstances.
When they change policy they'll say "the science changed, so we changed our approach." They imply that the approach was correct before, but a new approach is needed now, but what they are actually saying, without realizing it, is that they were wrong before and now we have scientific proof of it.
The problem with the masks is that we still don't have good evidence that they work. By most measures it now appears the mask mandates were useless and the UK has now taken them off even in hospitals.
People who said that we should use them even in the absence of evidence because “they could be useful" are being proved wrong. It only cements the position that it is safer to suggest only those things that have evidence that they work.
See, in Florida the more people got vaccinated, the higher death rate from covid. By your reasoning it just means that vaccine caused those deaths and vaccine is deadly. We clearly know that that is not the case but that's how anti-vax people reason. Your reasoning is exactly the same except you are targeting on something else.
Some people will use poor statistics to show that vaccines are dangerous and don't work.
Other people will use poor statistics to show that ivermectin is a wonder drug.
And other people will use poor statistics to show that masks work.
Sorry, but I am not convinced.
I am convinced that vaccines work because RTCs showed high efficacy that got worse with time but still reduced deaths even after many months.
I am not convinced about ivermectin because some RTCs were positive, some negative – so, the final conclusion is either weak or no effect.
And masks also had some controlled studies that showed either weak or no effect. Maybe had some effect in very specific circumstances but mostly not good enough to bother at all. Rabid fans of either ivermectin or masks is a count against.
In fact, vaccine mandates are also a count against vaccines. Why do we need mandates for a thing that works?
4.1. Decrying "no evidence" was wrong. The masks turned out not very useful and the government mandates to wear them by small children at schools and sometimes even outside were wrong and useless.
4.2. Agreed. First, we need to follow common sense and then the science. If we do it in reverse, it will be nonsense.
4.3. It wasn't critical. We already suggested risk population to isolate. The fact that they didn't need to wash groceries with detergent before eating them was not the most important part.
4.4. Surprisingly so. On the other hand, such calculations were impossible to make as too many unknown variables.
4.6.
#1 Agreed, human challenge trials would have been good.
#2 Predication markets are useless.
#3 Disagree. If there is no evidence for, let's say, ivermectin, we should say it. Otherwise, we will start using a lot of snake oil treatments.
#4 For a small country it indeed makes sense to piggy-back on larger institutions. But Ireland is already accepting EMA authority.
#5 Not possible if those doctors don't even speak English.
#6 Maybe, but that's not really related to pandemics.
#7 Come on, these sources are not experts, merely different narratives which cannot really compete with real knowledge sources in medicine. If you really think so, you are suggesting for charlatans to take over.
#8 Expert teams definitely would be better than single experts.
#9 Sometimes you have to ban things that are harmful. Should we continued to allow doctors to prescribe hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin when we learned that they are not effective?
#10 Sometimes free market is fine but not always. When at the start of vaccination campaign Pfizer vaccine was in short supply, one could buy it in Ukraine for $3000. But it is doubtful that such pricing helped in any way.
#11/#12 I think we kind of did this. A lot of money was poured in vaccine development. The EU did worse but the UK and the US did not spare expense.
#13 Maybe not. We used to clap for healthcare workers but disregarded them in real life. Don't celebrate them but support them with money, better systems etc.
------------------------
The biggest problem in covid pandemic was that the narrative went out of control and people became scared and that lead to many useless and even harmful measures. The story is basically that there was a new virus that inevitably was going to cause 10-15% extra mortality for the next 1-2 years without good measures to stop this. The most rational course of action was to implement only those measures that we know are most effective: reducing big crowds, invest in vaccine development etc. We knew from previous studies that border closures are not effective, masks are not effective, lockdowns are not effective, so those measures were ruled out. Sweden followed this path and controlled their narrative very well.
Other countries soon lost their narratives and people panicked. To stay in power the government had to destroy their economies to show that “something is being done”. Their results were not much better but the damage was much worse. Even Australia which had a special position of being an island and thus border closure having some chance of working, is having quite a lot of extra mortality from covid right now.
The control of narrative is the most important thing for every pandemic. When the WHO is trying to rename monkeypox, it may seem silly, but they are onto something. It is an indirect way of controlling the narrative that people should not panic because the panic will be much worse than actual pandemic.
No clear evidence that Florida has done much better or worse than other places. In fact, these attempts of data massaging is the evidence against the usefulness of mask mandates.
I don't know what data you have but it is not supported by other sources. Florida death statistics from covid are statistically unimpressive. According to worldometers.info: NY has 3601 covid deaths/million, FL – 3519 deaths/million and the US average is 3145 deaths/million, the difference is not clinically significant.
Also important to remember that COVID mortality numbers should be age-adjusted when comparing states or countries.. (Perhaps also, where possible, adjusted for some other measures of health like rates of severity obesity or other COVID risk factors. But age is the big one).
21.3% of Florida's population is 65+, the 2nd-highest percentage of any state. (Source: https://www.prb.org/resources/which-us-states-are-the-oldest/ ) So we'd expect, other things being equal, Florida to have relatively high COVID mortality by raw measures such as deaths / million (not adjusted for age), simply due to the age of its population.
Florida has about the same number of deaths on average than New York. It has about the same death rate than the US on average. The slightly higher rate in FL or slightly lower rate in CA is not clinically significant in view of much greater variance among states. There could be many factors, even statistics who gets counted as covid death or yearly variants that influence year-to-year excess mortality that reading something from these differences is close to divination.
More people died in Florida after vaccines were available than in New York maybe because they had lower vaccination rates among elderly. Or maybe because in NY the most vulnerable had already died in the first wave. Who knows which explanation is the right one? Does it even matter?
The frase "the science" should be banned. It presents science as static and unchanging.
People will often cite how economic forecastors are "irrationally" certain about their forecasts. Gerd Gigerenzer points out that overstating forecast accuracy is actually rational. If you want to be successful in the forecasting game you have to pretend you can actually do it. This is a plague in science and medical communication. They think it hurts their credibility to honestly describe the uncertainty. Thus it's masks don't work to masks always work and never, the empirical evidence for masks working is weak, but on balance suggests it could be beneficial in many circumstances.
When they change policy they'll say "the science changed, so we changed our approach." They imply that the approach was correct before, but a new approach is needed now, but what they are actually saying, without realizing it, is that they were wrong before and now we have scientific proof of it.
The problem with the masks is that we still don't have good evidence that they work. By most measures it now appears the mask mandates were useless and the UK has now taken them off even in hospitals.
People who said that we should use them even in the absence of evidence because “they could be useful" are being proved wrong. It only cements the position that it is safer to suggest only those things that have evidence that they work.
No, we don't know that ivermectin does not work based on data that ivermectin scripts peaked during delta death surge. That doesn't even make sense.
See, in Florida the more people got vaccinated, the higher death rate from covid. By your reasoning it just means that vaccine caused those deaths and vaccine is deadly. We clearly know that that is not the case but that's how anti-vax people reason. Your reasoning is exactly the same except you are targeting on something else.
Some people will use poor statistics to show that vaccines are dangerous and don't work.
Other people will use poor statistics to show that ivermectin is a wonder drug.
And other people will use poor statistics to show that masks work.
Sorry, but I am not convinced.
I am convinced that vaccines work because RTCs showed high efficacy that got worse with time but still reduced deaths even after many months.
I am not convinced about ivermectin because some RTCs were positive, some negative – so, the final conclusion is either weak or no effect.
And masks also had some controlled studies that showed either weak or no effect. Maybe had some effect in very specific circumstances but mostly not good enough to bother at all. Rabid fans of either ivermectin or masks is a count against.
In fact, vaccine mandates are also a count against vaccines. Why do we need mandates for a thing that works?
4.1. Decrying "no evidence" was wrong. The masks turned out not very useful and the government mandates to wear them by small children at schools and sometimes even outside were wrong and useless.
4.2. Agreed. First, we need to follow common sense and then the science. If we do it in reverse, it will be nonsense.
4.3. It wasn't critical. We already suggested risk population to isolate. The fact that they didn't need to wash groceries with detergent before eating them was not the most important part.
4.4. Surprisingly so. On the other hand, such calculations were impossible to make as too many unknown variables.
4.6.
#1 Agreed, human challenge trials would have been good.
#2 Predication markets are useless.
#3 Disagree. If there is no evidence for, let's say, ivermectin, we should say it. Otherwise, we will start using a lot of snake oil treatments.
#4 For a small country it indeed makes sense to piggy-back on larger institutions. But Ireland is already accepting EMA authority.
#5 Not possible if those doctors don't even speak English.
#6 Maybe, but that's not really related to pandemics.
#7 Come on, these sources are not experts, merely different narratives which cannot really compete with real knowledge sources in medicine. If you really think so, you are suggesting for charlatans to take over.
#8 Expert teams definitely would be better than single experts.
#9 Sometimes you have to ban things that are harmful. Should we continued to allow doctors to prescribe hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin when we learned that they are not effective?
#10 Sometimes free market is fine but not always. When at the start of vaccination campaign Pfizer vaccine was in short supply, one could buy it in Ukraine for $3000. But it is doubtful that such pricing helped in any way.
#11/#12 I think we kind of did this. A lot of money was poured in vaccine development. The EU did worse but the UK and the US did not spare expense.
#13 Maybe not. We used to clap for healthcare workers but disregarded them in real life. Don't celebrate them but support them with money, better systems etc.
------------------------
The biggest problem in covid pandemic was that the narrative went out of control and people became scared and that lead to many useless and even harmful measures. The story is basically that there was a new virus that inevitably was going to cause 10-15% extra mortality for the next 1-2 years without good measures to stop this. The most rational course of action was to implement only those measures that we know are most effective: reducing big crowds, invest in vaccine development etc. We knew from previous studies that border closures are not effective, masks are not effective, lockdowns are not effective, so those measures were ruled out. Sweden followed this path and controlled their narrative very well.
Other countries soon lost their narratives and people panicked. To stay in power the government had to destroy their economies to show that “something is being done”. Their results were not much better but the damage was much worse. Even Australia which had a special position of being an island and thus border closure having some chance of working, is having quite a lot of extra mortality from covid right now.
The control of narrative is the most important thing for every pandemic. When the WHO is trying to rename monkeypox, it may seem silly, but they are onto something. It is an indirect way of controlling the narrative that people should not panic because the panic will be much worse than actual pandemic.
No clear evidence that Florida has done much better or worse than other places. In fact, these attempts of data massaging is the evidence against the usefulness of mask mandates.
I don't know what data you have but it is not supported by other sources. Florida death statistics from covid are statistically unimpressive. According to worldometers.info: NY has 3601 covid deaths/million, FL – 3519 deaths/million and the US average is 3145 deaths/million, the difference is not clinically significant.
Also important to remember that COVID mortality numbers should be age-adjusted when comparing states or countries.. (Perhaps also, where possible, adjusted for some other measures of health like rates of severity obesity or other COVID risk factors. But age is the big one).
21.3% of Florida's population is 65+, the 2nd-highest percentage of any state. (Source: https://www.prb.org/resources/which-us-states-are-the-oldest/ ) So we'd expect, other things being equal, Florida to have relatively high COVID mortality by raw measures such as deaths / million (not adjusted for age), simply due to the age of its population.
Florida has about the same number of deaths on average than New York. It has about the same death rate than the US on average. The slightly higher rate in FL or slightly lower rate in CA is not clinically significant in view of much greater variance among states. There could be many factors, even statistics who gets counted as covid death or yearly variants that influence year-to-year excess mortality that reading something from these differences is close to divination.
More people died in Florida after vaccines were available than in New York maybe because they had lower vaccination rates among elderly. Or maybe because in NY the most vulnerable had already died in the first wave. Who knows which explanation is the right one? Does it even matter?