How do we know a pandemic's over?

[jt512]

But you are the one who claims that official representatives of the U.S. CDC, WHO and ECDC have stated "that Covid-19 is now endemic rather than pandemic."
Am I right in assuming that you post a link to The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill because you are well aware that official representatives of the U.S. CDC, WHO and ECDC never said what you claimed they did?

I am not going to respond to accusations of lying.

 

[jt512]

No, because there's no criteria to determine "normal"

Of course there are such criteria. Qualitatively, it is a spike in the epi curve. Quantitatively, you can establish a percentile cut point in an empirical or parametric model.

So you define "normal" as, in effect, any level of incidence that's not close to eradicated?

No one does that. The normal level depends on the disease and the geographic region. You, yourself, just the other day posted data on the normal level of influenza (in the US, IIRC), which is a range of some millions of cases. The normal level of polio or Ebola Zaire in the US, in contrast is zero.

 

[icerat]

Of course there are such criteria. Qualitatively, it is a spike in the epi curve. Quantitatively, you can establish a percentile cut point in an empirical or parametric model.

Ok, what is it then?

 

[jt512]

Of course there are such criteria. Qualitatively, it is a spike in the epi curve. Quantitatively, you can establish a percentile cut point in an empirical or parametric model.

Ok, what is it then?

What is what? The very thing I defined that you just quoted?

 

[icerat]

What is what? The very thing I defined that you just quoted?

What's the criteria? You said it exists. What is it? Not how you (might) calculate it. You said it exists. What is it?

 

[jt512]

What's the criteria? You said it exists. What is it? Not how you (might) calculate it. You said it exists. What is it?

I literally just answered that.

 

[dann]

I am not going to respond to accusations of lying.

At this point, everybody knows what you did and still do.

When I confronted you about your claims the first time, you could simply have said that you thought you had heard the U.S. CDC, WHO and ECDC say that the pandemic was over. That would have been an honest mistake, very common, and not exactly at the level of the Mandela effect.
But instead, you doubled down and came up with "official representatives."

For a couple of weeks, you then ignored my posts asking you for documentation.

And now, you have added a new lie: "I haven't looked"

However, when you triumphantly link (twice!) to "Dr. David J. Weber, who is the associate chief medical officer and medical director of infection prevention at UNC Medical Center, the Charles Addison and Elizabeth Ann Sanders Distinguished Professor of Medicine and Pediatrics in the School of Medicine, and a professor of epidemiology in the Gillings School of Global Public Health," it only serves to make it obvious that you have indeed looked for links that would confirm your first claim about the U.S. CDC, WHO and ECDC, which I actually do think was nothing but an honest mistake until you made a Basil Fawlty scene out of it.

Don't make the same mistake again.

 

[jt512]

F
A "high quality RCT" for HEPA - or masks - would require isolating participants from all other potential sources of infection for an extended period - months I would suggest.

No, It wouldn't. Such a trial would only require that apart from the experimental and control manipulation, conditions would be equivalent for experimental and control subjects.

 

[Chanakya]

I am not going to respond to accusations of lying.

No dog in the race, and absolutely no offense intended --- to my memory, the one time we posted together for any length was when we both got yellows thanks to our responding to our thesaurus-wielding compatriot, so if anything that makes us comrades, of a kind --- but it seems a fair question, and your continued evasion of it, first by ignoring it, and then by talking of something else, and now by taking offense, it's ...not a good look.

Did representatives of those three organizations actually say that? Shouldn't be difficult for you to recall, even if approximately, where you heard them say thay. (And shouldn't be too difficult to find links either, but okay, maybe you don't want to put in that time, fine; but the approximate recollectlon eluding you, whats with that?)


...Enjoying reading the ongoing debate about this specific between you and dann and icerat, by the way. Regardless of which side "wins" finally, reading your exchanges throws light on lots of things we didn't know, which is cool, and thanks to all three for these substantive posts.

 

[icerat]

I literally just answered that.

You literally did not. You gave an opinion on how such criteria might be determined.

 

[icerat]

No, It wouldn't. Such a trial would only require that apart from the experimental and control manipulation, conditions would be equivalent for experimental and control subjects.

So if I got 100 people in a building during a storm, all of them were dry.

I then asked them to walk a 1km course outside.

Half of them, I gave an umbrella for the first 50m, the half I did not.

At the end, I asked all participants if they were wet or not.

Equal conditions except for the umbrella for 50m.

Is that enough to know whether umbrellas "work" or not?

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

Just who the **** do you think you are around here, clown?

WTF?

 

[jt512]

Did representatives of those three organizations actually say that? Shouldn't be difficult for you to recall, even if approximately, where you heard them say thay. (And shouldn't be too difficult to find links either, but okay, maybe you don't want to put in that time, fine; but the approximate recollectlon eluding you, whats with that?)

Yes, they actually said that. It's privately what just about any epidemiologist who knows the definition of pandemic and endemic, which is to say just about every epidemiologist, understands. And, yes, those statements are difficult to find. In one case, and I don't remember if it was a WHO guy or an ECDC guy, my source was an interview on a German news broadcast. It is probably not archived, and since I can't remember exactly who said it or on what program I saw it, I would be hard-pressed to find it even if it were archived.

The other problem is that, now, googling overwhelmingly turns up statements that we are still in a pandemic because that is the narrative that the official public health organizations for whatever reason (despite the definition of pandemic, which they all undoubtedly know) have chosen to pursue (while simultaneously all saying that we are no longer in a public health emergency), and therefore the narrative that just about every media source has quoted. So the statements that I was was referring to, which were made by public health epidemiologists based on data and the definition of pandemic were officially overturned by their superiors, and therefore, I suspect, will not soon be repeated, since, ignoring the definition of pandemic, there is no way that this pandemic can end (unless, perhaps, a sterilizing vaccine is developed and is widely accepted).

On the other hand, one can find statements by university-affiliated epidemiologists, whose hands are not tied by governmental or UN public health agencies, who are free to explain that we are in a new normal—that is, an endemic phase—with Covid. We need to accept that so that we can learn to deal with this new reality.

 

[jt512]

So if I got 100 people in a building during a storm, all of them were dry.

I then asked them to walk a 1km course outside.

Half of them, I gave an umbrella for the first 50m, the half I did not.

At the end, I asked all participants if they were wet or not.

Equal conditions except for the umbrella for 50m.

Is that enough to know whether umbrellas "work" or not?

No, because the risk of getting wet would be 100% either way. But the risk of getting Covid, say, within 3 months, is much less than 100%, so if masks are effective, you should see a difference in infection rates between the masked and unmasked groups. If you were to perform such a trial with workers in an environment, such as the covid ward of a hospital, where the majority of their risk is while they are in the ward, you should definitely see a difference between the groups.

As an aside, a trial along those lines was conducted in Great Britain and found that switching from surgical masks, which were essentially useless, to FFP3 masks reduced Covid risk in this high-risk environment to the (much lower) community level, or in other words that FFP3 were virtually 100% effective in preventing Covid transmission to workers in the Covid ward.

As another aside, I personally switched from using N95 masks to FFP3 masks the moment I read that study—or at least as soon as I could get them shipped to the US from Europe.

 

[jt512]

You literally did not. You gave an opinion on how such criteria might be determined.

I actually explained how such criteria are determined. If that doesn't answer your question, perhaps you could be clearer about what you are asking.

 

[icerat]

I actually explained how such criteria are determined. If that doesn't answer your question, perhaps you could be clearer about what you are asking.

Ok, so if it's *are* then - according to you - they exist, so you should be able to tell me them.

To be clearer -

I don't want to how how such criteria are determined, I want to know what such criteria are.

 

[icerat]

No, because the risk of getting wet would be 100% either way. But the risk of getting Covid, say, within 3 months, is much less than 100%, so if masks are effective, you should see a difference in infection rates between the masked and unmasked groups.

Ok, show me the math. Let's say your risk of getting covid in a 4 week period is say, 50%.

You split 100 people in to two groups.

There's 168 hours in a week.

One group masks for 10 hours a week.

The other group doesn't mask at all.

What effectiveness would the masks need to be to show a significant difference between the groups?

If you were to perform such a trial with workers in an environment, such as the covid ward of a hospital, where the majority of their risk is while they are in the ward, you should definitely see a difference between the groups.

The problem is that "the majority of their risk is while they are in the ward" is rarely the case in "mask studies"

And note - many masks studies like this have not had that as the criteria. It's been, for example, masking within 2 metres of a covid patient - few places have "covid wards" any more. And there's been no tracking of adherence. So they were merely *asked* to wear a mask within 2 metres of a covid patient. The non-masking control group was also not stopped from masking.

As an aside, a trial along those lines was conducted in Great Britain and found that switching from surgical masks, which were essentially useless, to FFP3 masks reduced Covid risk in this high-risk environment to the (much lower) community level, or in other words that FFP3 were virtually 100% effective in preventing Covid transmission to workers in the Covid ward.

Yes, that's this study - Efficacy of FFP3 respirators for prevention of SARS-CoV-2 infection in healthcare workers

They also used a mathematical model to adjust for community cases, which were very low for the first part of the study and remained relatively low throughout. Masks work. QED. What are debating again?

As another aside, I personally switched from using N95 masks to FFP3 masks the moment I read that study—or at least as soon as I could get them shipped to the US from Europe.

N95 are the roughly the same as FFP2. Difference between FFP2 and FFP3, at least in community settings, is likely to be insignificant. The study you referenced compared FFP3 to surgical masks, which essentially nobody who is knowledgeable in the field recommends.

 

[dann]

I haven't looked

And yet, without having looked, jt512 somehow knows that "those statements are difficult to find":

Yes, they actually said that. It's privately what just about any epidemiologist who knows the definition of pandemic and endemic, which is to say just about every epidemiologist, understands. And, yes, those statements are difficult to find. In one case, and I don't remember if it was a WHO guy or an ECDC guy, my source was an interview on a German news broadcast. It is probably not archived, and since I can't remember exactly who said it or on what program I saw it, I would be hard-pressed to find it even if it were archived.

The other problem is that, now, googling overwhelmingly turns up statements that we are still in a pandemic because that is the narrative that the official public health organizations for whatever reason (despite the definition of pandemic, which they all undoubtedly know) have chosen to pursue (while simultaneously all saying that we are no longer in a public health emergency), and therefore the narrative that just about every media source has quoted. So the statements that I was was referring to, which were made by public health epidemiologists based on data and the definition of pandemic were officially overturned by their superiors, and therefore, I suspect, will not soon be repeated, since, ignoring the definition of pandemic, there is no way that this pandemic can end (unless, perhaps, a sterilizing vaccine is developed and is widely accepted).

On the other hand, one can find statements by university-affiliated epidemiologists, whose hands are not tied by governmental or UN public health agencies, who are free to explain that we are in a new normal—that is, an endemic phase—with Covid. We need to accept that so that we can learn to deal with this new reality.

It sounds more and more like a conspiracy theory with statements that "were officially overturned by their superiors." I assume those superiors also got the alleged statements removed from all over the internet. Was Bill Gates involved?

As for the idea that there is "no way that this pandemic can end" other than by the invention of a "sterilizing vaccine":

"#COVID is still a global health threat, and it's causing far too much burden when we can prevent it.
Five, ten, years from now, what are we going to see in terms of cardiac impairment, of pulmonary impairment of neurologic impairment? We don't know."
-
@mvankerkhove of @who

Short video (1:03 min.):
So the virus is circulating. And what's difficult right now is that the virus continues to evolve. So we are two years into Omicron, and we have a virus that will continue to change as we let it circulate rapidly. The numbers of deaths have reduced drastically since its peak a couple of years ago, but we still have around 10,000 deaths per month, and that's only data from 50 countries. COVID is still a global health threat, and it's causing far too much burden when we can prevent it. We don't necessarily know how often we're getting infected, and our concern is, in five years from now, ten years from now, twenty years from now: What are we going to see in terms of cardiac impairment? Of pulmonary impairment, of neurologic impairment? We don't know. We don't know everything about this virus.
It's year five of the pandemic. And I know it feels a lot longer, but there's still a lot we don't know about it.
United Nations Geneva
(X, Jan 12, 2024)

(The antivaxxers and other covidiots are already busy in the X thread!)

"When we can prevent it," may not mean eradicate COVID-19, even though at least one of the minimizers replying to the U.S. tweet seems to think so. It is possible (and likely) that Maria Van Kerkhove is talking about preventing the "far too much burden" that SARS-CoV-2 is causing, which obviously can be done. There are many other tools in the shed than just the vaccines. jt512's imaginary "sterilizing vaccine" isn't one of them, obviously and unfortunately.

Notice the difference between Maria Van Kerkhove's approach and jt512's attempts to normalize the pandemic by calling it "a new normal—that is, an endemic phase—with Covid. We need to accept that so that we can learn to deal with this new reality," which sounds much more like the 'learning to live with the virus' slogan that we have been hearing from minimizers since at lest 2021.

 

[The Atheist]

The other problem is that, now, googling overwhelmingly turns up statements that we are still in a pandemic because that is the narrative that the official public health organizations for whatever reason (despite the definition of pandemic, which they all undoubtedly know) have chosen to pursue (while simultaneously all saying that we are no longer in a public health emergency), and therefore the narrative that just about every media source has quoted.

I said a page or two ago why - there's no money in saying a pandemic is over.

Saying it is means the organisation can ask for more and more money, and since the pandemic will never end, it's a gravy train they're not going to get off anytime soon.

Tedros Ghebreyesus himself linked the "public health emergency" phase to the pandemic phase, but has backed of that when money came into the equation.

 

[jt512]

Ok, so if it's *are* then - according to you - they exist, so you should be able to tell me them.

To be clearer -

I don't want to how how such criteria are determined, I want to know what such criteria are.

As I've already said, such criteria are a spike in the epi curve, or a percentile of the historical distribution (say 90th or 95th), if you have one, or, whether you have historical data or not, a percentile from a model distribution, such as the Poisson or quasi-Poisson.