—TAKEAWAY LESSONS FROM PANDEMIC 2020-21: A THREAD—

Below, a few basic lessons I have drawn, as a political philosopher and informed citizen who has made it my business to closely follow political, social, economic, clinical, & epidemiological aspects of the pandemic:

Last week, Dr. Theresa Tam @CPHO_Canada & the Ontario Scientology table released their latest model that garnered criticism, ridicule, & shame at an international level. The now famous Covid Erection had risen 🍆📈

#Canada #Ontario #cdnpoli #onpoli #COVID19

The Covid Erection model predicted ~5000 cases by the end of February. Well, now that we’re at February’s end, Ontario recorded ~1250 cases. It would seem that the Covid Erection encountered some...ahem, erectile dysfunction 📉

#Canada #Ontario #cdnpoli #onpoli

Since the Covid Erection model had become flaccid, Dr. Tam @CPHO_Canada needed another story to continue the propaganda of fear; public health by dread & distress. So she came out today to say that Canada was experiencing 75X more cases than the spring peak

#Canada #cdnpoli

The spring peak in Canada had ~2000 cases. Today, Canada reported ~3000 cases. That would be 1.5X more cases, not 75X. Dr. Tam @CPHO_Canada just inflated the case counts by only 50X, or what we call here in Canada, by a Fisman

#Canada #cdnpoli #Ontario #onpoli #COVID19

Canada (& Ontario’s) public health officials & politicians have thoroughly embarrassed the discipline of public health & made mockery of the field of medicine. From the MDs fake crying in the news to the high school teachers pretending to be biostatisticians. We’ve become a joke.

SCB has dropped its final 2020 stats on deaths for Sweden. This chart is a breakdown by age for both sexes compared to 2018.

Most notably, there's no excess among children and people of working age, confirming the preliminary stats for males I had published earlier.

Here's the same data, but with spline interpolation applied to the 5-yr age groups. This just smooths out some of the random and cohort-related fluctuations. The picture is the same.

Unfortunately, the fact deaths are exclusively concentrated in the elderly age rage means that all of the deaths you see reported are pretty much all theirs. Fortunately, since they're generally retired, they don't need to sacrifice their livelihoods to protect themselves.

We need evidence-based mitigation strategies. Terrorizing a 15yo with imminent death is neither helpful nor honest. Closing schools isn't helpful (and Sweden hasn't). Be aware around your (grand)parents. Take care of them, make sure they understand the risks.

With the resources we have spent/lost on locking down people below 75 years old, I'm sure we could have devised a far superior targeted approach for those who need it and request it. We don't need to demolish our society, economy, and the lives of future generations to save lives

1/ Let’s talk about vaccine misinformation, @cdcgov style. On Friday the CDC ran a report titled “Reduction in COVID-19 Patients Requiring Mechanical Ventilation Following Implementation of a National COVID-19 Vaccination Program.”

The headline is a lie. No other word will do...

2/ How do I know? From the data in the report itself.

The report, written by three Israeli scientists, intentionally tries to obscure the facts it presents (I’m not entirely sure why it was written at all), but they come out anyway to anyone paying attention...

3/ Your first clue the authors have no interest in presenting the facts honestly comes when they refuse simply to divulge how many people were on ventilators before and after the start of vaccinations on Dec. 19. Instead they focus on the ratio of patients in two age groups...

1/: Scientific integrity is a valuable commodity. What happens when external funders take influence on both scientific™ findings and media coverage can be seen in the current global crisis. It is time to return to the fundamental principles of science: ⬇️A thread⬇️

2/: In this thread, I will roughly explain why #empiricism and #repeatability are important factors for science and why model approaches should be interpreted with caution (and that is what I am saying as a modeller).

3/: I am aware that the principle of science is far more profound than explained in this thread, but this thread is written for laymen on @twitter and not for the lecture room. Also, within the scientific community, there is no clear consensus about this topic either.

4/: In recent years, I have been working on complex food production systems that increase food production and show high nutrient and water use efficiencies. I have thus been involved in plant growth experiments and holistic system modelling activities (@MATLAB, @AnyLogicCo).

5/: The plant growth experiments included environmental factors, #metagenomics (i.e. microbial genome sequencing), flow regulations etc. and the modelling covered the prediction on non-existing systems based on experimental and literature data.