COVID had a longer pre-infectious latent period and a much longer infectious period than I expected, again thinking about influenza. That means fewer generations than expected after time t, and thus higher R0 than one might expect.
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2. Even after we knew that airborne transmission was very important, I remained concerned about fomite transmission through July 2020. (I still don't have solid evidence to rule it out, but to date it seems minimal at most.) Again, anchoring on flu.
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3. I considered it unlikely—though not impossible—that we'd see increases in transmissibility of the scale of B.1.1.7 or B.1.617.2 within the first few years of circulation. Here I was both anchoring on flu and comparing to the greater genetic variation available to flu.
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4. Through fall 2020 I thought that a very best case scenario for vaccine effectiveness was 85%. Again, anchoring on flu to some degree, even though I knew that the antigenic variation we see in flu would not be there for COVID.
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In retrospect, where I've been wrong about things for COVID, it's been not so much because of poor inferences from available data, but rather because my priors were not flat enough.
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Why? Probably because I spent the 2000s thinking about how prepare for a flu pandemic and clearly this—along with knowledge of the epidemiology of other human respiratory RNA viruses—influenced my priors around COVID too strongly.
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Replying to @CT_Bergstrom
This is very interesting to hear! I had a lengthy discussion about this with
@PaulSaxMD (because I had written about this difference, Western countries on flu playbook while East Asia on SARS/MERS). + https://academic.oup.com/ofid/article/8/3/ofab117/6178359 …pic.twitter.com/CePXk7DsDF
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If you get out of the flu playbook, by February 2020, you can see what Dr. Oshitani of Japan has for example: key role of presymptomatic spread, airborne transmission, clustering (just Diamond princess plus Wuhan epi data works). I link to his papers here: https://www.theinsight.org/p/the-gaslighting-of-science …pic.twitter.com/KSUIQKCo5K
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But I thought pre symptomatic SARS1 transmission didn’t occur. So using a SARS/MERS playbook would’ve also missed this
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Playbook doesn't mean assume it is identical. Japan had presymptomatic figured out by Feb 2020 (could already see it in Diamond Princess), but in fact, Chinese minister of health was telling us that in JANUARY. It's in the piece referenced above. https://www.theinsight.org/p/the-gaslighting-of-science …pic.twitter.com/r33la1y5VO
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zeynep tufekci Retweeted zeynep tufekci
That said, presymptomatic spread is the key difference with SARS, and what makes this more a pandemic pathogen. But hint for that was already there in the January 2020 NEJM paper. (See my thread on it, that paper convinced me about the pandemic potential).https://twitter.com/zeynep/status/1222662053329924098 …
zeynep tufekci added,

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I.e. a playbook that weighted early 2020 signals more than previous assumptions from flu/sars1/MERS
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Replying to @scottrosenstein @zeynep and
I think previous experience with SARS/MERS laid a foundation of public health literacy and some infrastructure that was helpful. But good outcomes were more about taking it seriously early along with some good bets at the margins around presymptomatic and indoor spread.
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