[HN Gopher] Setting the record straight: There is no 'Covid heart'
___________________________________________________________________
Setting the record straight: There is no 'Covid heart'
Author : AndrewBissell
Score : 50 points
Date : 2021-05-14 19:11 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.statnews.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.statnews.com)
| ergljlkjsrth wrote:
| More conspiracy theories from the Branch Covidian camp of
| lunatics debunked again and again.
| kleton wrote:
| Is covid still a vascular disease, or does this new study
| negatively replicate this study?
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7556303/
| graeme wrote:
| No that article is about injury to the epithelial system (in
| the blood vessels) whereas the article is about the claims that
| covid damaged the heart itself more than other viruses.
|
| I am not sure if anyone has done before/after studied of
| epithelial function in covid patients.
| renewiltord wrote:
| There was a lot of breathless nonsense from a bunch of people
| about this disease. I just Bayes low-weighted it because the
| prior probability is low. So far a whole bunch of these things
| are coming back non-replicable. It'll be an interesting test of
| each of our epistemological techniques.
|
| My prior to start with is high that the contagiousness-increasing
| mutation (the novel spike protein) improves likelihood of the
| virus attacking more organs and improves its ability to massively
| infect the organ but that once you've got a massive infection of
| the organ, you should see effects after recovery that are similar
| to any other such infection of the organ.
|
| I'm actually curious if anyone has neat software that tracks
| one's predictions and allows one to adjust their knowledge of the
| world systematically. Currently only using a shared spreadsheet
| with friends.
| DubiousPusher wrote:
| For sure. The media tends to report science press releases
| fairly uncritically. The result is that science reporting is
| reporting of claims of scientists and not of "science" itself.
| A better media ecosystem would incorporate the fact that many
| preliminary findings never pan out.
| renewiltord wrote:
| I'm quite curious if there is a group of like-minded
| individuals out there who would participate in a wiki that
| attempts to summarize (with degree of certainty) the current
| known knowledge.
|
| The general Internet has a tendency to consider individual
| papers authoritative summaries of the general state of a
| field. And single studies rarely have that predictive power.
| For instance, one might read a single paper about a single
| study that says "Doubling of rectal cancer risk occurs if red
| meat is consumed right after sugar intake", and most Internet
| commentary will attempt to show this as incontrovertible
| truth. However, few such studies actually last or survive
| replication.
|
| i.e. most Internet commentary over-weights single study
| results, with near binary probability of truth measures:
| either something is almost certain or almost never.
|
| Would prefer a place where I can discuss with people who are
| less stridently enthusiastic about these papers, and where
| long membership retains historical prediction performance (I
| don't mind people disregarding my future predictions if my
| current predictions are poor) with appropriate windowing to
| permit learning.
| _fs wrote:
| > I'm quite curious if there is a group of like-minded
| individuals out there who would participate in a wiki that
| attempts to summarize (with degree of certainty) the
| current known knowledge.
|
| Yes, it can be found at a http://wikipedia.org
| renewiltord wrote:
| I'm actually a long-term contributor to Wikipedia (in my
| 14th year) and, as you can imagine, therefore a huge fan.
| However, Wikipedia does not attempt a synthesis of
| knowledge, preferring to be a repeater of what is
| publicly currently believed to be knowledge.
|
| i.e. if CNN, the WSJ, and the NYT report X is Y, that
| will count a lot more about X being Y than X actually
| being Y.
|
| Wikipedia is a wonderful resource and it definitely
| partly scratches this itch, and I appreciate your sharing
| it, but I am looking for something that occupies a
| slightly different space.
| makomk wrote:
| As I recall, the media applied plenty of scrutiny to any
| claim that Covid might be less deadly than the media coverage
| suggested, the breathless uncritical reporting lent almost
| entirely in one direction.
| krrrh wrote:
| Important to clarify that much of scrutiny went in the
| other direction, cutting down concerns about how bad things
| could get in January and February of 2020.
| mikem170 wrote:
| After that I still saw a pattern where the media kept
| proffering worst case scenarios at every step, with no
| studies to back them up, even contradicting known
| science.
|
| The most recent example of this is fear-mongering
| headlines indicating that the vaccines would not be
| effective against variants. This might be expected
| behaviour for the flu, but not a coronavirus.
| stevenhuang wrote:
| Bayesian reasoning has its limits.
|
| > "The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its
| life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined
| views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to
| the chicken" - Bertrand Russel
| totalZero wrote:
| I can't think of a past novel disease that didn't stir up
| fearful misinformation. Yet I also remind you that every
| disease has a different pathology. It is worthwhile to report
| anecdotal clinical presentations because that reporting spurs
| research. The research can then corroborate or controvert the
| reports.
|
| A lot of what you suggested is kind of silly. Contagiousness is
| not the same thing as virulence or pathogenicity, and you can
| look at things like the common cold (contagious but mild)
| versus ebola (harder to transmit but severe) to disprove the
| proposition in your second paragraph.
|
| The fact of the matter is that some people have not recovered
| after a long time ("long covid") and that clinical observation
| needs to be researched and explained before we brush off
| concerns about organ damage as "breathless nonsense." Some
| suggestions may be wrong but that doesn't mean their study is
| not useful. Every time we disprove a concern, we come closer to
| a full understanding of a disease that has affected people all
| over the globe.
| renewiltord wrote:
| > _A lot of what you suggested is kind of silly.
| Contagiousness is not the same thing as virulence or
| pathogenicity, and you can look at things like the common
| cold (contagious but mild) versus ebola (harder to transmit
| but severe) to disprove the proposition in your second
| paragraph._
|
| This is actually related to the stuff I'm referring to in my
| cousin comment. Existence proofs are not evidence of certain
| behaviour. An analogous situation might be "If you see a car
| slow down approaching a pedestrian crossing with a Stop sign
| it is likely to stop". Most pedestrians will consider this
| statement true (as evinced by how they behave - placing
| themselves in range of bodily harm). However, many
| pedestrians know that at least one car has not behaved in
| this manner. Responding to someone who agrees with that
| statement with "Cars certainly do blow through stop signs
| even if they're slowing down. Here are some news articles of
| that happening" only marginally moves the evidence-o-meter.
|
| Some things need empirical understanding. "Related counter-
| examples" do not set the likelihood of the statement to zero,
| but only downgrade it somewhat.
|
| Personally, I've found my performance on COVID predictions
| pretty decent. My biggest failure was that I believed outdoor
| masking was necessary, and it currently looks like that is
| not the case.
|
| We shall see if Long COVID is any sort of true long-term
| disease that is particularly unique or merely the
| identification of other symptoms that previously went
| untested simply because most illnesses go untested.
|
| And of course I have no problem with anyone sounding small
| alarms on small studies. A sufficient number of independent
| such instances is how we identify common patterns. I,
| obviously, weight each individual such instance low but
| corroboration increases likelihood. Still, we'll see.
| Currently, my method of acquiring knowledge outperforms
| public CDC statements about the disease1, so I'm at least
| better at this than they are.
|
| 1 Assuming, perhaps naively, that they prioritize
| dissemination of truth over public health objectives that may
| temporarily be better met through carefully told untruths.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Humans aren't ideal Bayesian rational agents, and even
| _they_ are susceptible to selective reporting. I don 't
| think this comment is useful.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Oh we most certainly aren't. And I frequently make errors
| as well, but I aspire to be better at this than I am and
| I think I'd enjoy the company of others like this.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-05-14 23:01 UTC)