More younger people at the ICU compared to past? Could be an outbreak affecting them more because of network structure or behavior, vaccine/past immunity among elderly, ICU capacity change compared to past or even temp reporting blip in some countries, among many other things.
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Anyway, things are bad enough in many places around the world. There is definitely more transmissibility with at least some of the variants—and those will soon become dominant in places with outbreaks—and maybe some other effects mixed in (a lot less certainty on that).
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We all would like more clarity—me too!—but some things aren’t easy to figure out, and for good reason. Even “paper published” (peer-reviewed or not!) isn’t the end of the story. There really is a process, and I think it works well when we let it, but it takes time and engagement.
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Anyway, h/t to the tweet/meme from
@jbakcoleman last night that inspired this thread.
https://twitter.com/jbakcoleman/status/1380024099083186178 …This Tweet is unavailable.Show this thread -
Stellar comment in response to my last newsletter (about the unfathomable celebration of Florida's "Grim Reaper" attorney dude who was harassing people on beaches): "Nuance can feel like signal-weakening, so people over-signal to push the equilibrium." https://zeynep.substack.com/p/pandemic-as-metaphor/comments …pic.twitter.com/9hVO2woq4T
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Adding this as it's important even though it's sprinkled in the thread. Potential confounders make confident conclusions hard—but it's also hard to rule out direct causation. We can, and should, act against exponential threats even when facing uncertainty.https://twitter.com/rvenkayya/status/1380222793577594882 …
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Too often, a call for nuance and epistemic humility is conflated with inaction & decision paralysis, leading to the "signal overboost" noted above. Ideal world: perfectly possible to state limits of certainty while advocating for real action within the context of trade-offs.
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Seeing a lot of this in Long Covid discussions, too. We should be able to say that post-viral sequelae/Long Covid is real, important and too often neglected without ignoring baseline comparisons or turning it into something so ill-defined that it becomes easier to ignore/dismiss.
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Yeah sorry about that! I should just keep writing long-form about all this (I will!).https://twitter.com/Goldammerfeder/status/1380239103464247297 …
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This has been one of the take home messages for me: the outcomes change, the predictors change, and very nature of the data collection changes based on what else is happening. It's an inferential nightmare (for anyone who actually understands how to use data to inform decisions)
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I know. I am fascinated by the inference part (have always been) but I’ve been writing on the policy side and my sense is that we know broadly enough for the policy side but there really are big open remaining questions on the causal side.
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. What’s odds last spring 2020? 1 in 3.
That is likely an effect of
(HT