I'm struggling to understand why we are not allowed to believe the South African GP story. As a source on how many people are how ill in the country I'd put a practising GP pretty fcuking high on the credibility list.
Yes, I’m struggling with that too. My comment above related to the reporting of her testimony on some niche site for cranks called Zero Hedge. I have no problem with her making the testimony nor it being widely used: she is at the frontline.
She's not at the fucking frontline. She is one GP albeit with an honorary position. What's more, she is being serially misquoted by the chronically fearful and nervous, who want to believe everything is AOK
Here's the source article for "everything is mild and fine"
"She said, in total, about two dozen of her patients have tested positive for Covid-19 with symptoms of the new variant. They were mostly healthy men who turned up “feeling so tired”. About half of them were unvaccinated."
Two Dozen
TWO DOZEN
And then:
"Dr Coetzee, who was briefing other African medical associations on Saturday, made clear her patients were all healthy and she was worried the new variant could still hit older people – with co-morbidities such as diabetes or heart disease – much harder.
“What we have to worry about now is that when older, unvaccinated people are infected with the new variant, and if they are not vaccinated, we are going to see many people with a severe [form of the] disease,” she said."
Sure, so what exactly is wrong with carrying that interview? Are you suggesting it shouldn’t be used? I simply don’t understand your way of thinking here.
There is nothing wrong with the interview - it is just that it is a single point of view, with a serious risk of survivor-bias in her experiences.
Not pointing that out creates fake information. In fact the use of such stories out of context is exactly how false information is created.
For example, what does the fact that no white man was convicted of murdering a black man between 1865 and 1965 in Missouri, USA, tell us about race relations?
Just wrong about survivor bias, because if people were dying of this and therefore not coming to her attention, they'd be disproportionately likely to be the friends and relations of people she *is* seeing, who would quite likely be mentioning it to her.
This omicron thing is either devastatingly lethal or it isn't, and you don't need a sodding clinical trial to tell the difference. Clinical trials detect small differences, between treatments which help a bit vs treatments which don't help at all. When they bombed Hiroshima, did they detonate a placebo bomb over a similar Japanese city so they could see whether Little Boy worked or not? If not, why not?
Ah - making ass-umptions about the lack of biases in the sample.
One of the handy things about not burning Kyoto to the ground was that, after the war, the scientists got to measure the exact properties of Japanese civil and domestic structures.
And discovered that while strangely resistant to thermal pulse & shock waves*, they were very transparent to gamma, neutrinos and x-rays.
Which explained why people had died from prompt radiation from the bomb - the previous calculations had suggested that if you were close enough to get a fatal radiation dose, you would be incinerated a millisecond later anyway.....
*They burned and fell down, but acted as sacrificial shields.
Finding they weren’t transparent to neutrinos would have been surprising.
Comments
This is quite good on what you need for a lethal dose of neutrinos: https://what-if.xkcd.com/73/