Andrew Gelman has a post discussing a website called “Panda”, which provides a wealth of misinformation about Covid-19. What makes the site of interest is that its board contains some pretty big names, including former Trump advisor Scott Altas, as well as some Stanford University professors:
The board also includes, among others, Stanford medical school professor Jay Bhattacharya, Stanford biology professor Michael Levitt, and Michael Yeadon, a retired pharmacologist and drug company executive who, according to the website, “believes the pandemic was over in the summer”?
Gelman points out that until a few days ago the site was discouraging people from using Covid vaccines:
There was also this, from the organization’s webpage entitled, “You asked, we answered,” under the heading, “Would you have the vaccine yourself?”:
As for any other medication, a vaccine must be shown to be safe and effective before it is introduced to the general public. Vaccines take 10 to 15 years on average to be developed. . . .
Currently, there is no one for whom the benefit would outweigh the risk of these vaccines—even the most vulnerable, elderly nursing home patients.
. . . I guess this statement was a bit of an embarrassment after one of the members of the Panda scientific advisory board publicly stated that he and his mother had received the vaccine. The above link is from 22 Jan 2021, courtesy of the Internet Archive. Go to that page now and that whole section has been removed.
OK, fine. But . . . also no acknowledgment of their earlier ridiculous statement.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Even the revised statement is loaded with mistakes:
the mortality overall is relatively mild compared to past severe pandemics such as the 1918-19 Spanish flu and several more recent influenza pandemics such as the Hong Kong flu of 1968 and the Beijing Flu of 1993. The UK government even declared that “[a]s of 19 March 2020, COVID-19 is no longer considered to be a high consequence infectious disease (HCID) in the UK”.
Given that the overall statement was revised within the past week, I’m not sure why they still rely on estimates from March 2020. In any case, Covid-19 is an order of magnitude worse than the Hong Kong Flu of 1968. There was very little social distancing in 1968, and without social distancing the death toll from Covid in the US would already exceed a million. (About 34,000 Americans died of the Hong Kong flu, although the number would be several times larger today, as there are now far more older Americans.)
The low mortality across the South East Asia and Oceania super region is likely driven by other factors, possibly prior immunity.
I don’t think there’s any evidence that prior immunity explains the success of Australia or New Zealand. A recent outbreak in Melbourne spread rapidly before being brought under control, and of course Wuhan was devastated back in January. Does anyone seriously believe that all of China except Wuhan had natural immunity? (Almost all Chinese Covid deaths were in the Wuhan area.) Yes, some countries may have some natural immunity, but it’s disingenuous to minimize the role of behavioral changes, which obviously played a huge role in China, Australia, and elsewhere.
We are unaware of any studies using sound methodology that show a benefit for masks in the general population. The only COVID-19-specific mask study using sound methodology found no significant impact of mask wearing on the spread of the disease.
If you follow the link you find a Danish study that did not even test whether masks help to slow the spread of the disease. To do so, you’d have to test whether mask wearers are less likely to spread the disease. Did they even read the abstract?
The fatality rate in most people infected with SARS-CoV-2 is very similar to that of the flu. COVID-19 is less severe than the flu for children and young people and more severe than the flu for the elderly with severe underlying illness.
I’d call this misleading, albeit not false. It’s true if by “elderly” you mean a 55-year old man. However for older middle-aged people, especially men, Covid is far more dangerous than the flu. Indeed it’s not even close.
And this is just ridiculous:
On the other hand, it has been observed that winter respiratory mortality patterns are usually associated with a single dominant pathogen at any time, so it could be that (this year at least) COVID-19 has simply supplanted influenza and is, in the main, taking the lives that would have previously been lost to influenza.
New York and New Jersey already have more than 65,000 Covid deaths, despite widespread social distancing, and yet they contain less than 10% of the US population. The entire US usually has far less than 65,000 flu deaths each year.
This is also extremely misleading, if not outright false:
There is no clear evidence in the literature showing that asymptomatic transmission is a major driver of the pandemic. The poorly supported theory that suggested this, was the main logic behind lockdown policies, which in any event have been shown to have no beneficial effect on death curves.
The primary worry was that presymptomatic people would spread the disease, but according the Panda those people are not “asymptomatic”:
An asymptomatic person is one who never develops clinical symptoms at all (no sneezing, coughing, fever, loss of taste or smell). This is distinct from a presymptomatic person, who begins to show symptoms after the incubation period of a few days.
A meaningless distinction. Almost every average person would assume the term ‘asymptomatic’ applies to the presymptomatic. People without symptoms often spread Covid.
However, many countries are recording COVID-19 official deaths if there is past evidence of a positive PCR test, or the patient is considered “probable” or “presumed’ to have COVID-19, even where the cause of death is clearly unrelated and symptoms are not present. This generous diagnosing can inflate the number of deaths in the data. Countries categorize deaths as “COVID deaths” using different criteria, so comparisons of such statistics are of questionable validity.
In fact, excess death data suggests that most countries have severely undercounted Covid deaths, and also that the excess deaths cannot be explained by other factors like suicide or people not getting cancer screenings.
Gelman suggests that this website has links to the conservative movement. One thing I’ve noticed over the past year is that conservatives seem obsessed with minimizing the severity of Covid-19, and also seem interested in showing that measures to prevent Covid-19 (such as masks) are not likely to be effective. This “head in the sand” approach has done a great deal to discredit the entire conservative movement with the well-informed part of the population. That’s a shame, as there are areas (such as economic policy) where conservatives have lots of good ideas. But they are rapidly losing votes among the college educated part of the population, and this sort of misinformation doesn’t help.
READER COMMENTS
Mark Z
Jan 31 2021 at 9:39pm
Razib Khan had a couple blog posts last year about the trends in intelligence with respect to political ideology. Conservatives, especially white conservatives, as a group, though once smarter on average than liberals or white liberals respectively, fell behind them in the 1990s, a trend that continued into the 20th century. There’s doubtless a feedback loop, but I think the compositional shift is more a cause than a result of the ‘dumbification’ of the right. Unfortunately this is a net drain on our collective political intelligence, as, imo, the leftward flight of the college educated has not made the left any smarter.
Covid seems like a replay of the Great Recession in a way. Many conservatives felt the only alternative to accepting the need for extensive government intervention in the economy was defending untenable positions on the business cycle, that led to intense inflation hawkishness. Now, they tacitly accept that the conventional wisdom that covid, as it is, would necessitate extensive government intervention, and the dilemma is either accept that, or minimize it as a phenomenon. If one rejects these as false dilemmas, then they’re suffering from a colossal failure of intellectual imagination.
Kevin
Jan 31 2021 at 10:09pm
You’ll have to direct us to the evidence that “proves” that government intervention into the economy saved us from a worse recession after the housing bubble burst. Weren’t we given the typical mantra that the spending wasn’t nearly extensive enough? Isn’t it true that all of that spending must necessarily come at the expense of future consumption? What can the government do other than redirect resources from one entity to another? Surely, you accept that we are ALWAYS engaging in deficit spending, and that left unchecked, this spending will necessitate a devaluation of the dollar that will indeed lead to inflation. Am I a “liberal” or am I a “conservative?” Do these labels mean much? Can you guess my IQ reliably from any of this? Is Wordsum the best way to measure it? People that don’t have much faith in the “wisdom” of government are getting sick of being condescended to by people who think that we are always in a permanent crisis that requires constant deficit spending. What does this have to do with a vocabulary test? Vocab. is one of 5 areas of intelligence that is tested on the Wechsler. I feel that spatial intelligence, mathematical reasoning, memory, and processing speed are important measures of intelligence as well. I’ve seen posts that suggest that libertarians are smarter than “liberals.” https://reason.com/2014/06/13/are-conservatives-dumber-than-liberals/ I’m not sure how much any of this matters, and I’m not a public intellectual, but do you understand why people see the left as incredibly smug?
Mark Z
Feb 1 2021 at 10:42pm
I don’t think that massive government intervention saved us from a worse recession. I agree with the monetarists (from my very limited comprehension of macroeconomics) that it was too tight monetary policy that was the main problem and later better monetary policy that enabled the recovery. But many conservatives seemed to think the only alternative to the Keynesianism was the idea that a harsh correction was necessary/unavoidable.
Scott Sumner
Feb 1 2021 at 2:02am
Mark, Global warming is another example. I’m one of the rare libertarians who believes the Great Recession was a demand-side problem and global warming is a big problem created by carbon emissions.
Kevin
Feb 1 2021 at 3:25am
Climate change is definitely a blind spot for many on the right, but the left’s proposed “solution” seems to be to spend as much through government as they can possibly get away with, including in areas that have little or nothing to do with climate change.
It’s my understanding that getting net CO2 emissions to zero by 2030 or so would perhaps result in global temperatures increasing by only .14 or .17 degrees C less than they otherwise might by 2100; i.e. we would still get almost all of the warming anyway. Considering global temperatures have only gone up 1.02 degrees C in 130 or so years, surely the prescription isn’t to have the government plan and spend our way to “ending” climate change. At the risk of minimization, how big of a problem is this really? What can realistically be done about it in the near-term? We seem to have more time than the left is letting on.
At what point will price signals and technological progress allow the private sector to make meaningful progress on climate change? Why don’t we even seem to be considering nuclear energy? Government seems almost totally impotent at creating meaningful “green jobs” out of the ether, but perhaps I’m missing something.
Also, not directly related, but what gives you confidence that down the line Congress will be responsible enough to raise taxes in the practically inevitable event that we continue to run massive budget deficits?
Thomas Hutcheson
Feb 1 2021 at 8:45am
Yes, it is sad that “conservatives” spend energy denouncing subsidizing everything “green” rather than advocating a tax on net CO2 emissions. Ditto EITC rather than minimum wage, subsidized individual purchase of health insurance rather than employer “provision,” progressive consumption taxes rather than income taxes on businesses and individuals, child tax credits rather than universal day care, VAT instead of the capped wage tax for financing SS and Medicare, Fed action to actually carry out its mandate instead of ???, cost benefit analysis of spending rather than denouncing “deficits,” attracting high skilled immigrants instead of deporting Dreamers, promoting trade agreements rather than trade wars.
Kevin
Feb 1 2021 at 4:43pm
I definitely don’t disagree with everything you wrote, and there probably is a time and a place for deficit spending during a recession (I’m no economist), but ever-increasing budget deficits in perpetuity seem like they could be problematic if the Fed intends on leaving interest rates near zero going forward. I understand that for the foreseeable future inflation expectations are low, but is it wrong to assume that the federal government will have a difficult time making interest payments on it’s debt if interest rates must rise to combat an inflation down the line? We just never seem to want to get our fiscal house in order. There’s always another crisis or other reason to spend more money than we’re taking in, and the government never seems to want to raise taxes and cut spending when times are good. Some “conservatives” don’t seem to think that deficits matter either, and sometimes even when they control the executive branch, but it begs several important questions if they are correct.
Scott Sumner
Feb 1 2021 at 12:18pm
I agree that the left is wrong about climate change. Just do a carbon tax and call it a day.
I am not certain about anything, including the future responsibility of Congress.
MP
Feb 1 2021 at 12:21pm
Kevin,
A global net-zero by 2030 is so outlandish that I can’t find any reputable modeling for you, but the fact is it wouldn’t ‘get almost all of the warming anyway’. The spread between emissions peaking in 2020 and emissions peaking in 2040 results in a 1 C temperature difference. Between the 2020 peaking and a 2080 peaking we are looking at a spread of 6+ C, with the former scenario having temps flatlining or declining in 2100 while the latter keeps rising.
I’d encourage you to more thoroughly investigate what the difference between a +2 C and a +6 C world looks like. For a start, to use just one impact, that is the difference between a 50 cm rise in sea levels and a 1 to 4 metre rise.
As for what can be done in the near term, it is important to remember that people are, right now, making investments in infrastructure that will last 30, 60, or 100+ years. Every eg. coal plant opened today is a burden that will have to be dealt with later (and likely at the public expense) – better, perhaps, to incorporate those costs in assessment now, make some significant changes and set us on a better path?
Mark Z
Feb 1 2021 at 10:48pm
True, and many conservatives’ (and libertarians’) recusal from that issue is detrimental to the quality of environmental policy. ‘Environmental policy is too important to be left to environmentalists.’
Mark Bahner
Jan 31 2021 at 10:06pm
I just skimmed the summary of the results of the Danish study, but the whole study seems a bit weird to me:
First, they “recommend” people wear masks in one group, but don’t make a recommendation one way or the other for another group. But did they actually monitor to see how many people in both groups were wearing masks?
Second, I expect that a great many COVID-19 transmission cases are at home, from one family member to another. But I’d be shocked if very many people actually wear masks at home with family members…except possibly if they expect an infection. And even if people wear masks most of the time, there would be situations like: one person takes a shower, then another person takes a shower at the same location 5 minutes later. In situations like that, people aren’t going to be wearing masks in the shower, so even if people in general wear masks indoors, that wouldn’t help. And unless families make sure to never eat or drink near each other, they’ll have masks off and reasonably close proximity.
Scott Sumner
Feb 1 2021 at 2:05am
The weird thing is that the Danish study doesn’t even test the issue of whether masks reduce the transmission of Covid. They cannot have even read the study.
Mark Bahner
Feb 2 2021 at 1:44pm
No, that’s the weird thing about Panda’s characterization of the results of the Danish study. That’s not the weird thing about the Danish study.
I agree that Panda misrepresented the results of the Danish study…but even aside from that, the Danish study seems weird if they did not: 1) actually try to track whether people were wearing masks in the two groups being studied, 2) try to figure out how the people who got COVID-19 in the two groups became infected.
P.S. Upon further reading, regarding the first item, it seems as though the study may have involved explicitly telling to “non-mask” group not to wear masks. But it’s not clear to me whether the members in that group were explicitly told not to wear masks, or simply not told anything about masks. If they were not told anything, and were not aware that they were specifically in the “no mask” group, they might have decided to wear masks during the course of the study as they became more aware of the dangers of COVID-19.
Philo
Jan 31 2021 at 11:55pm
The pre-symptomatic/asymptomatic distinction is obviously not “meaningless,” though the terminology may be confusing and the distinction may be unimportant for most purposes.
JFA
Feb 1 2021 at 7:57am
It’s important if you want to take a term that has both a popular definition and technical definition and use the technical definition of the phenomenon to minimize risk posed by the phenomenon described by the popular definition.
Scott Sumner
Feb 1 2021 at 12:25pm
Exactly, This report is supposed to educate the general public. Do we really want to tell the general public that asymptomatic transmission is extremely rare? Won’t most people assume that asymptomatic means no symptoms? Especially as the writers of the report seem confused on the point, falsely claiming a motivation for lockdowns was asymptomatic transmission, when the actual fear was transmission by people without symptoms.
BTW, in Wikipedia asymptomatic includes presymptomatic.
Mark Bahner
Feb 2 2021 at 1:50pm
It’s OK to tell the general public that asymptomatic transmission is extremely rare if the same piece of literature makes clear the difference between “asymptomatic” and “presymptomatic” transmission.
Mark Bahner
Feb 2 2021 at 1:56pm
I should have read further. 🙂
It is indeed problematic for the Panda article to make a distinction between asymptomatic and presymptomatic transmission, but then in the same article to blur/misrepresent the distinction.
BC
Feb 1 2021 at 1:42am
From the comments, it appears that content on the website doesn’t necessarily reflect the views of all of the advisors nor do the views of one advisor necessarily reflect the views of all other advisors:
“Strange. Because I just listened to an hour long podcast by some of the folks at the Hoover Institution, featuring Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (who sounds like an eminently reasonable fellow, I might add) saying the opposite of what you think they think about the vaccine.
https://www.hoover.org/research/no-hugging-no-kissing
Bhattacharya is very bullish about the vaccine and was discussing various ways to speed up the process.”
Maybe, because cancel culture isn’t a conservative thing, conservatives might not feel the need to police what every member of every organization they belong to says about Covid. Also, conservatives might view Covid-denialism the way liberals view Marxism: something they don’t necessarily agree with, but not something that they need to dis-affiliate from. In the same way that liberals don’t view the presence of some Marxist leaders and members as sufficient reason to disavow an organization, e.g., Black Lives Matter, conservatives may not view the presence of some Covid-denialists or anti-vaxxers as sufficient reason to disavow an organization.
BC
Feb 1 2021 at 1:44am
By “from the comments”, I meant the comments on the Gelman post.
Scott Sumner
Feb 1 2021 at 2:00am
You said:
“Maybe, because cancel culture isn’t a conservative thing, conservatives might not feel the need to police what every member of every organization they belong to says about Covid.”
This is just a terrible analogy. I have no problem being in a group where individual people say controversial things. But if I were on the board of an organization aimed at educating people about the Covid-19 and the organization created a information website riddled with absurd claims and misinformation, I’d demand the statement be taken down or I’d resign.
JFA
Feb 1 2021 at 8:30am
Well if Bhattacharya’s only difference of opinion was on vaccines, then they changed the statement on vaccines.
If I were in Bhattacharya’s position, though, changing the language on vaccines wouldn’t comfort me as the organization has shown its true beliefs in crazy things.
I will also note that it usually takes so long to deem vaccines safe because the disease infection rates for the population are small relative to the trial sizes.
With the mortality rates similar to the flu for most people, they don’t seem to take into account the probability of getting the disease. So if I’m looking at the risk posed to me by the flu, I would take the mortality rate for my age group and multiply it by the probability of me getting it. When looking at the risk from Covid, if the probability of me getting Covid is 2x that of the flu, even if they have the same IFR, the risk to me from Covid is 2x that from the flu. And just from looking at CDC data, the deaths in the 22-44 year old group is slightly elevated relative to years past, but above that (i.e. starting at 45), mortality is significantly elevated.
Tyler Wells
Feb 1 2021 at 7:31am
You know this or this is your opinion as you interpret the data?
Scott Sumner
Feb 1 2021 at 12:31pm
Most studies suggest that Covid is so contagious that 60% or 70% of the public would contract the virus without social distancing. That’s over 200,000,000 Americans. The death rate (IFR) was originally around 1%, and has fallen to about 0.6% with improved treatment. So even with improved treatment you’d be at over a million deaths. In addition, without social distancing the infections would have been front loaded to last spring (when the IFR was higher), and our hospitals would have been overwhelmed.
JFA
Feb 1 2021 at 8:09am
A note on the 1968 pandemic: the CDC puts the death toll at 100,000, though I believe that was over 2 seasons. I believe the 34k death toll comes from looking at excess mortality not measured flu deaths (https://academic.oup.com/jid/article/192/2/233/856805). But even at the higher mortality figure and even it the 1968 flu death toll were only in 1 season and not 2, the death rate for 1968 is about 1/3 of the covid death rate.
Scott Sumner
Feb 1 2021 at 12:34pm
Yes, but the biggest difference is that the Covid death rate is only a modest fraction of what it would be without social distancing. Compare the death rates in say New Jersey and Oregon. It’s obvious that social distancing has played a big role in holding down deaths. That’s what you want to compare to 1968.
TMC
Feb 1 2021 at 1:36pm
Meta study of 54 studies
https://alachuachronicle.com/university-of-florida-researchers-find-no-asymptomatic-spread/
“The asymptomatic/presymptomatic secondary attack rate is not statistically different from zero”
Largest study of its kind
https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/asymptomatic-transmission-of-covid-19-didnt-occur-at-all-study-of-10-million-finds
“Asymptomatic transmission of COVID-19 didn’t occur at all, study of 10 million finds.”
I agree that the Asymptomatic/pre-symptomatic confusion needs to be addressed, but lumping them together and continuing that confusion doesn’t seem to be right.
They are clearly two different things, and the distinction is important. If believed a pre-symptomatic person could be contagious (maybe possible at 2 days before symptoms?) and an asymptomatic person not, then I’d make different choices if I found out I was exposed to someone who tests positive.
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