Posts
Comments
I might later write a more indepth post, but for now the core idea. Controling a building to have between 50% and 60% humidity might reduce the amount of spread of corona. There are multiple studies that you can reduce the spread of infections in schools and hospitals that way.
There was also a paper out that suggested COVID-19 to spread less in climates with high moisture and temperature.
If anyone wants to collaborate with me on writing a post about this, please contact me.
It seems the primary argument for clothing masks that's made is that if an infected person wears them it's less likely that they will infect others.
That's not the purpose that was tested in "A cluster randomised trial of cloth masks compared with medical masks in healthcare workers" that study seemed more about whether or not the masks have protective qualities for the wearer.
There seem to be different technologies that can produce vaccines. On the one hand there's an old-fashionated way to create vaccines.
Then there are multiple different companies that make mRNA-based vaccines and as far as I understand they all use different technology to do so and are therefore not easily exchangable.
CureVac announced that they got a 80 million Euro loan from the EU that they use to build a facility that can produce ~1,000,000,000 doses of a possible vaccine if the dose is equal to what they found to be needed for their rapies vaccine candidate.
Moderna who started their human trial on March 16th made a SEC filing in which they wrote:
On March 20, 2020, Stephane Bancel, CEO of Moderna, was interviewed by representatives of Goldman Sachs regarding the Company’s work onCOVID-19. During such interview, Mr. Bancel indicated that while a commercially-available vaccine is not likely to be available for at least 12-18months, it is possible that under emergency use, a vaccine could be available to some people, possibly including healthcare professionals, in the fall of2020. In addition, Mr. Bancel confirmed that the Company is scaling up manufacturing capacity toward the production of millions of doses per month,in the potential form of individual or multi-dose vials. As has previously been disclosed, the ability of the Company to make millions of doses per month is contingent on investments in the scale up and further buildout of the Company’s existing manufacturing infrastructure.
I would predict that if Moderna starts giving out a million vaccines to health workers under emergency use any additional doses of vaccines they produce would also find willing patients whether or not the drug is offically commercially-available. Politically it wouldn't be defensible to let millions of doses of a vaccines that's good enough for health workers to lie around.
The highlited passage looks to me like Moderna needs cash to scale up their production.
The problem isn't just one of propaganda whereby certain interests get pushed. It's also one of general lack of deep insight of the reporter in the subject they are reporting on and their necessity to simplify matters.
The argument is that many people make the experience that if they encounter a newspaper article about a subject where they have domain knowledge they discover that the article is full of mistakes. If you then generalize that observation over the whole newspaper it leads to the conclusion that the paper isn't better then sawdust.
The excercise for the reader would be to go to the average science section of a prestigious newspaper from ten years ago, look at the study based on which the article is based, on what happened in the topic afterwards and then judge how informative the article was. Then the next step is to ask yourself what it would mean if that quality level would generalize over the whole newspaper.
Somehow I didn't finish the sentence and didn't reread it before posting. I fixed it.
Why shouldn't 0.1% of the population be reasonable worth as much as 30% of the value of the companies listed in the stock market and why should it be more then 30%?
There have been many examples of non-compliance with authorities, simple idiocy, and outright antisocial conduct.
In Germany, the amount of crime went down not up. Given that it's easy for antisocial conduct to make headlines I think it's hard to reason about this.
Most people have very short timelines when thinking about the issue. To the extend we can think in larger timelines and people read LW because we gave good information in the past, it's worthwhile to continue providing valuable information.
Analysis question such as whether we should do more humidity control and if so what humanity we should target seem to be still completely unexplored.
The question of how to reduce the regulatory bottlenecks on vaccine production seems to have high potential returns.
Analysis of whether or not talking/singing is an important vector for infection seems to be important to get right.
Being one of the people who organizes the Berlin meetup, it's great to be thought of as one of the cool places.
We haven't yet have a public meetup since the lockup started. It requires some creativity to think of a meetup format that works online and my priorities are at the moment elsewhere. I would be open to promote a meetup that someone else organizes through our channels.
For those who know German Die Wahrheit und was wirklich passierte is a classic that's worth watching on the subject of media quality. It was held in 2007 at the ChaosComputerCongress and one of the conclusions is that most newspapers are sawdust and people should read more primary sources.
Fallacies are about ways of reasoning and not the results of it. What you are talking about here is more a result of reasoning that might be right or wrong.
While as Douglas W. Hubbard shows that you can always make up a measurement he doesn't demostrate quantitatively that people who follow the heuristics he advocates as actually making decisions that lead to higher utility then people who don't follow his heuristics of measuring everything. His argument is completely qualitative in nature. This should make the reader a bit suspicious ;)
You also haven't quantified a single variable in your post.
Its possible that he's right. It's also possible that if people would do what he advises they would Goodhart on metrics that lead them to make worse decisions.
On the subject of the value of a human life, Agnes Callard's interview with Tyler Cohen is quite insightful. In it Tyler brings up how economist think they need to put a number on the value of a human life to make decisions about which safety regulations should be passed and Agnes shows quite easily how that's false and likely duo to economists simply being ignorant of the underlying philosophical matter.
For simplicity, I will use the term "true cases"
I don't think this is a time to make up new LW terminology without good reason. It would be worthwhile to look up the established term from the literature before making up terms like this.
how infectious it is, and how serious it is once you have it. The first is roughly described by the R0 (basic reproduction rate), and the second by the case fatality rate.
This seems wrong. The metric of how likely you die when you are infected is the infection fatality rate. The case fatality rate is how likely you are to do once you are diagnosed with the virus and became a medical case.
Whether or not a published paper has a hypnothesis that's true or not true is a known unknown and not a unknown unknown or a black swan.
It seems to me like the role of LessWrong should be to produce new ideas and be at the cutting edge. It's not a place that's valuable as a venue for hearing the same ideas from elsewhere repeated without much filtering.
Noon is a pretty poor definition for an international event where noon is at quite different times.
It might very well be that they can measure the variations with higher accuracy then they can measure the percentage because there are constant factors like skin color that affect the percentage but that can be factored out when comparing daily values. I guess that for doing self diagnosis you want to know how your values derivate from normal.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ gives data. But I don't have much further insight.
Mali for example went yesterday from 4 cases to 11.
It seems to me like a lot of it is already priced in for example the Euro to Brazilian Real exchange went in six weeks from 4.63 to 5.63 and the Brazilian stock-market. There might still be possibilities but I don't know enough about the market.
From a comment on the Quantified Self forum:
Just today @madprime & I launched a small data collection effort to see if there’s any interesting signal that could be used for those predictions: https://quantifiedflu.org/ 1
If there’d be enough data collected one might even be able to see if there’s personalized thresholds
Holding the railing when you walk downstairs seems to be a bad idea. If everybody does it, it's a vector for getting infected.
I'm interested in a more structured version like a writing group.
It seems that our current COVID-19 discourse is very much focused on the developed world. It seems that high temperatures are not as protective as hoped for and temperatures are going to go down in South America and South Africa (the South of the continent) in the next months. Those countries have a lot less slack to deal with crisis.
When people in those countries start buying up all food in preparation for quaranteen it already increases food prices a lot. Many people will starve. Others will riot to get food to live. We could end up with a handful of failed states by the end of the year.
The story about Neil Ferguson suggests he got it while being in the press annoucement. It might very well be that the risk of getting infected was worth the PR of making that press annoucement as best as it could be.
On facebook a person left a comment to an interesting story about military funded research: https://www.nextgov.com/analytics-data/2019/10/military-algorithm-can-predict-illness-48-hours-symptoms-show/160851/
Using its own globally-collected data sets, Philips was able to develop a unique algorithm for the Defense Department. Using 165 distinct biomarkers across 41,000 cases, the Philips team was able to create the Rapid Analysis of Threat Exposure, or RATE, algorithm, which the company says can “predict infection 48 hours before clinical suspicion” with better than 85% accuracy.
This post seems to be a bit confused
Respirators are tight pieces of fabric that form a seal around your mouth and nose. They have various “ratings”; N95 is the most common, and I’ll be using “N95 respirator” and “respirator” interchangably through most of this post even though that’s not quite correct. When used correctly, they theoretically offer complete protection against incoming and outgoing droplet and airborne diseases; since aerosol diseases are a combination of these, they offer complete protection against those too.
Filtering out 95% of viruses doesn't give you complete protection. It gives you 95% protection.
I'm not certain that we will go back to fully normal as far as influenza is concerned. It might be that we want to let all those people doing contact tracing for months go after influenza and general deploy more fever testing.
You could imagine that everybody who travels into the US has to get an influenza test.
It will also get easier to give everyone flu vaccines.
To me the successful CureVac phase I trial for Rabies suggests that they do have a solution for the general targeting.
Given that Moderna is already doing their human trials this month and Biontic next month it seems they also have the problem of delievery to cells-in-general solved.
Whenever you ask people to create a contact it would make sense to be explicit about why the contact would be valuable, and what good will come out of it.
Plenty of women take their temperature daily for getting knowledge about their period. It's plausible that Kinsa has enough daily users to make these kinds of predictions.
Western countries seem to be all doing mitigation but we will see if a country like Afghanistan manages to do it. Will the Taliban who just made their deal to have their land back accept the knowledge of outsiders, that it's important to do mitigation?
I don't think that there's a single "rational thinking methodology". We have a bunch of different tools.
While the current FDA works at allow Moderna to do their human trials very early, it seems the same isn't true for the EMA and CureVac who advises CureVac to do their first human trial only in early summer. Getting the public to be angry at the EMA for giving advice that delays a potential vaccine might be a point of high leverage.
There seems to be a strong need to get the educated public informed about the vaccine development business, so that we can exert public pressure on making it faster at the right points.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SQDKMFmJToYqhZT5d/mrna-vaccine-development-for-covid-19
https://www.covid-watch.org/ for not privacy violating smart phone contact tracing is high leverage that might not get enough support from existing institutions.
Quantified Self has many points where the existing institutions aren't yet focused enough.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6kj6cbcsMQFt4ntd9/using-the-quantified-self-paradigma-for-covid-19
It was in our censi when we asked people for x-risks.
There might be benefits to having an privacy sensitive open-source solution like the one proposed in Covid-Watch over a Google/Facebook solution.
The best way to do that kind of introspection is to not do it alone but with trusted friends. It does take a good friendship to have these kinds of conversations but having a trusted outside perspective is key.
Sir Patrick Vallance seems to be the key figure behind the UK policy. The guy was a professor of medicine in the past and who heads the Government Office for Science. Their policy is likely much more driven by modeling then the policy of other countries where the policies are decided by politicians instead of people with that kind of credentials.
To the extend that they have data on that page that's weeks out of date it's likely because the page has little to do with their actual decision making processes.
Vallance might still be wrong, but I think it's wrong to model him as being simply misinformed.
The idea that hospital administrators can use logic to decide about how resources will get used seems to me very utopian. There's a lot of legal issues that come from reusing masks when not forced to reuse masks in that moment.
There are many application where targeting the delievery seems important. With vaccines the immune system should pick up the proteins regardles of which cell produces them. There still seems to be some complexity to it as far as the CureVac press briefing indicates. They argued that this is a time where they need to have the founder of the company lead it instead of a rather newish CEO because of the complexity.
mRNA vaccines are new technology. CEPI (Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations) was in the past investing money in the technology because of a hope of it being faster. Existing mRNA vaccines did pass phase 1 trials but there's no mRNA vaccine yet that's passed a phase 3 trial.
It's not clear how it affects that actual testing time. Actual testing time will depend a lot on how the actual effects in vivo will be.
There's the saying that if you pitch to investors you say that you are doing AI, when you hire programmers you tell them they will do machine learning and when they actually work for you they are going to do linear regression.
Practially such a tax would be a way to put much more regulatory complexity on the sector and prevent people from innovating by sticking to safe linear regression that can be defended as not being AI.
It seems like it would create a lot of deadweight and unless your intent is to slow down tech development I don't think it's sensible.
Because people don't test positive immediately after getting infected but only after the virus reproduces a bunch of times.
Wuhan got outside help but they were less prepared. There's some learning about how to treat cases going on as time passes. China manages to ramp up mask production.
From last year: From CEPI awards US$ 34M contract to CureVac to advance The RNA Printer™
“Disease X could emerge suddenly and have deadly consquences—we’ve seen this happen with Ebola, MERS coronavirus, Zika, and countless other diseases. That’s why we’re striving to develop rapid-response vaccine platforms—like CureVac’s mRNA technology—to defend against these unknown pathogens. CEPI has now established partnership agreements totaling more than $50 million in three such platforms”.
It seems that the third mRNA vaccine company is BioNTech.
It seems that Johnson & Johnson is still developing a vaccine the traditional way:
Johnson & Johnson appears to be using a more traditional approach in which the virus is inactivated so it can't replicate but can still express viral proteins. The approach takes a little longer for both the development and manufacturing scale-up steps. On the plus side, Johnson & Johnson's slow-but-steady approach could create a vaccine with a better immune response.
There's a forth company with Inovio Pharm that also develops a COVID-19 vaccine. It's technology is based on delievering DNA based.
I have the impression that the mRNA/DNA ways of vaccine delievery allow for faster development of a vaccine then the old fashioned protein based way.
...I'm confused about what method you're even trying to gesture at.
Eggs do have a lot of ovalbumin where it's not really desireable for that to end up in your final vaccine but I don't think this is a discussion to have at a point where our key issue is scaling up vaccine production.
If you have to order the steralized eggs a year in advance, and we want our COVID-19 vaccine before a year is over, that suggests to me that we also have other problems.
If I understand the work Moderna is doing for their COVID-19 vaccine and read the paper where they describe their framework, it seems to me that they use human cell lines:
The modified mRNA was synthesized enzymatically and packaged into lipid nanoparticles (LNPs). Incubation of LNPs containing IgE signal-prM-E mRNA (IgEsig-prM-E) with 293T or HeLa cells resulted in efficient expression and secretion of ∼30 nm SVPs
Just like Moderna, CureVac which is another of the companies that want to produce a COVID-19 vaccine also focuses on delievering mRNA and not viruses. I didn't immediately find information about how CureVac gets their mRNA but it wouldn't surprise me if they also don't use eggs.
The first paper you cite for measuring heart rate is of such a low quality that it didn't pass peer review. They had only 18 subjects, did PCR and did their prediction on their trainings data.
Table8 in Heart rate estimation using facial video suggests that all of the reviewed studies had a mean error that was higher then the 5bpm that the authors call an acceptable error margin in a dynamic scenario.
Why do you need the eggs in the first place? Couldn't you just feed animo acids that you get when you electrolyse proteins instead of having the proteins from the eggs?
Heart rate can be estimated via (webcam or smartphone) video of someone’s face with high accuracy (even with poor video quality).
That's false. The accuracy isn't high. I learned from the last conversation I had with EA who had a startup that did this, that the accuracy isn't high enough to be useful medically. I'll send you the contact in a message given that it's likely who you want to talk to when you want to persue this further.
Fever (body temperature ≥38°C) is the most typical symptom of C19 - in 88% of confirmed cases.
Where do those ≥38°C come from? From what I read the Chinese are using 37.3°C as a cut of for medical decision making with COVID-19.
Of course it's Bayesian evidence for natural pandemics happening more frequently, but the size of the update depends on your previous model.
People who think that climate change is a more serious threat then pandemics should likely update towards pandemics being more serious but I don't think that includes most of our community.
There's a chance that calling this a natural pandemic in the way an earthquake or a supervulano eruption is natural is also misleading. There's a good chance that this pandemic was acciendently created by the human institution of a wild animal market in China. Xi's China seems authoritarian enough to shut down those markets in the future.
Our preparedness towards pandemics was really screwed up. This cricis will affect the public psychy like 9/11 and we will do a lot to get future safety.
LessWrong censi did frequently list pandemics as concern for the annihilation of the human race for many participants. To me this episode suggests that as a group we were right to be more concerned then the average person on the street.
I would expect the crisis to increase public funding of pandemic intervention a lot, so the objective risk will go down in comparison towards pre-COVID-19.
I think it makes sense to go from the previous majority opinion that pandemics are the biggest x-risk to consider AI risk the biggest x-risk with pandemics at the second place.
It would be great to have a list with the current teams that are working on a COVID-19 vaccine. Is such a list out there or otherwise, does someone want to create one?
Most commercial infrared camera's that are used for industrial purposes aren't accurate for measuring temperature with a high enough accuracy for measuring human body temperature. I think you do need a hardware solution and can't bootstrap this on smartphone sensors.
We can use smartphone sensors to look at people's throat and do machine learning. I think that has some potential to provide for a new easy to distribute tool and I'm writing a post for LW about that.
That said thermometers are quite cheap and the price of temperature sensors is cheap enough that many devices have them. It might be possible to build more thermometers out of chips that look differently then our normal thermometers if the production of normal thermometers is at capacity.