Prof Karol Sikora positive vibes

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 jasonC abroad 31 May 2020

Anybody else follow this man on Twitter

https://twitter.com/ProfKarolSikora

He's a lot more positive about the current situation and how it's gradually getting better.

Nice change/alternative view.

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 arch 31 May 2020
In reply to jasonC abroad:

Yep, he’s a breath of fresh air.

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vancian 31 May 2020
In reply to jasonC abroad:

Worth taking some of what he says with a pinch of salt. An eminent oncologist, no doubt - I spent much time studying one of his big books of cancer - but these days a often keen critic of the NHS. Works for private cancer treatment companies and seems to flirt with alternative medicine sometimes. 

Still, his tweets are interesting

 bruxist 31 May 2020
In reply to jasonC abroad:

His bona fides are questionable to say the least. Perhaps better to understand him as a businessman in the health sector using a dubious vanity title:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2009/may/22/karol-sikora-honorary-profe...

 arch 31 May 2020
In reply to topic.

Yeah, fvck it. Where did a little bit of positivity ever get anyone...........

 The New NickB 31 May 2020
In reply to jasonC abroad:

This is the man who said lockdown should end on 27th April, which was the peak of the crisis. He is also the man who is promoting the work of Sunetra Gupta, who said in March that 50% of the population had already had the virus and is now saying that the virus has a death rate of 1:10,000, despite the fact that at the deaths to date is at least six times that. We all want to be optimistic, but the optimism needs to be credible.

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 Blunderbuss 31 May 2020
In reply to jasonC abroad:

He's full of shit  

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 Yanis Nayu 31 May 2020
In reply to The New NickB:

I’m not sure we can possibly know what the death rate is when we don’t know how many people have had it. 

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In reply to Yanis Nayu:

Random antibody testing suggests just under 7% of the population have had it. Using 60,000 deaths, that's about a 1.3% mortality rate of those infected.

 wintertree 31 May 2020
In reply to Yanis Nayu:

> I’m not sure we can possibly know what the death rate is when we don’t know how many people have had it. 

We can’t know the death rate but we can put a minimum bound on it with readily available data.

So far 38k people in the UK (population 66m) are reported as having died from covid.  38k/66m gives a death rate of 5.8:10,000.  Serology data suggests most people haven’t been infected yet, more people may have died unreported (circa 50k excess deaths) and more people may yet die so 5.8:10000 is an absolute lower bound for death rate.  It’s almost a factor 6 higher than the one given by Gupta.    As extensive serology testing suggests a minority of the population have had the virus the real rate is probably an order of magnitude higher.

So, Gupta is either so incompetent they should be subject to professional censure, or they are intentionally spreading misinformation that can only result in more deaths and so should be investigated by the intelligence services to find out why they are deliberately exploiting their professional status to push false information that is being used to argue for a course of action that will kill more citizens.  

Post edited at 22:52
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 wintertree 31 May 2020
In reply to jasonC abroad:

Today he said “We're around 2/3 weeks behind Italy, so I sincerely hope we follow soon”

Not sure what he’s basing that on.  

8 weeks ago we were behind Italy.  The Cummings news story dominated the press and it wasn’t reported but at the time we moved ahead of Italy in per-capita deaths.

Also does he mean “2 weeks or 3 weeks” or does he mean “two thirds of a week”? 

 The New NickB 31 May 2020
In reply to Yanis Nayu:

> I’m not sure we can possibly know what the death rate is when we don’t know how many people have had it. 

We can however multiply 37,000-60,000 by 10,000, which give us a number between 5.5 and 9 times the size of the UK population.

 Postmanpat 01 Jun 2020
In reply to wintertree:

> We can’t know the death rate but we can put a minimum bound on it with readily available data.

>

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/30/could-nearly-half-of-those-wi...

The point which Gupta and Sikora seem to be making, and which this article seems to support (although it doesn't seem to have grasped the point) is that many people may be exposed to or contract the virus but it leaves no trace. ie. antibody tests will not show that they  have had the virus. "When they both took an antibody test earlier this month, Raje’s husband showed a high level of antibodies to the virus, while Raje appeared to have no response at all, something she found hard to comprehend."

Apparently  (so my friend, a professor of genetics, tells me) the thoeory is that either T cells in the throat or corona antibodies for previous (non covid 19) infections have kept the virus at bay so few or no covid 19 specific antibodies are rtequired..

  I have no idea whether this is correct, although obviously it would be nice if it were. I am simply pointing out that were it correct that it would explain why your particular mathematical refutation of her point would not be valid.

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 Postmanpat 01 Jun 2020
In reply to wintertree:

> We can’t know the death rate but we can put a minimum bound on it with readily available data.

>

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/30/could-nearly-half-of-those-wi...

The point which Gupta and Sikora seem to be making, and which this article seems to support (although it doesn't seem to have grasped the point) is that many people may be exposed to or contract the virus but it leaves no trace. ie. antibody tests will not show that they  have had the virus. "When they both took an antibody test earlier this month, Raje’s husband showed a high level of antibodies to the virus, while Raje appeared to have no response at all, something she found hard to comprehend."

Apparently  (so my friend, a professor of genetics, tells me) the theory is that either T cells in the throat or corona antibodies for previous (non covid 19) infections, or even some other genetic disposition, have kept the virus at bay so few or no covid 19 specific antibodies are required..

  I have no idea whether this is correct, although obviously it would be nice if it were. I am simply pointing out that were it correct that it would explain why your particular mathematical refutation of her point would not be valid.

Post edited at 10:47
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 The New NickB 01 Jun 2020
In reply to Postmanpat:

It doesn't explain why simple mathematical refutation of her point would not be valid. It is conceivable that a large percentage of the population have had Covid asymptotically, something that I would love to be true, but to both her claims of 50% of the population in March and 1:10,000 death rates can easily be dismissed.

 wintertree 01 Jun 2020
In reply to Postmanpat:

>   I have no idea whether this is correct, although obviously it would be nice if it were. I am simply pointing out that were it correct

I have seen this line of thought, and it could be that an immune response leaving no antibody trace sees off the infection for many people.   However...

> that it would explain why your particular mathematical refutation of her point would not be valid.

My refutation remains valid unless each individual in the country has been infected 6 times without realising it - the only way her figures could be correct given the number of dead is if every person in the country has been infected 6 times over.  There are several ways this can be shown to be really very implausible.  

 Postmanpat 01 Jun 2020
In reply to wintertree:

  I maybe being dumb but can you show me your arithmetic on that? O I think I've got it.

Post edited at 11:47
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 wintertree 01 Jun 2020
In reply to Postmanpat:

>   I maybe being dumb but can you show me your arithmetic on that?

Define: IFR = (number of deaths) / (number of infections)

Rearrange: (number of infections) = (number of deaths) / IFR

Plug in numbers: (number of infections) = (38,489) / (0.0001) = 384,890,000

With one in ten thousand people dying from an infection, to get to ~ 40k deaths, ~400m infections would have to have occurred.  It just doesn't stand up to any reasonable scrutiny.  

If we assume everyone has been infected, a bound for the IFR can be estimated by dividing the deaths by the populations and this gives an IFR of ~ 0.0006, or 6x higher than the bound given by Gupta.  As people are still dying we know that our estimate for the bound is low, and that the real number is higher.

 Postmanpat 01 Jun 2020
In reply to wintertree:

  The 1 in 10,000 figure is weird (I didn't realise that was the number that you were refuting) but what she actually said is "On the death rate, I think it would be less than 1 in a 1,000, and probably closer to 1 in 10,000, clarifying that the rate was probably closer to 0.05 percent, or 5 deaths in 10,000 cases.

1 in a 1000 is possible were the theory right. 1 in 10,000 possible for the under 50s or even under 60s.

Post edited at 12:00
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 wintertree 01 Jun 2020
In reply to Postmanpat:

> what she actually said is 

The quote is sufficiently wooly it's hard to understand what she really means.  The 0.05% rate also fails a quick reality check.   If she had said "I think the rate is between 1 in 1,000 and 1 in 5,000" it would at least pass a quick reality test, even if it still seems highly optimistic.  

> 1 in 10,000 possible for the under 50s or even under 60s

For sure, it's even smaller for my age group.  Although the fatality rate isn't really a fixed value for an age group - it seems its linked to the viral load one is exposed to, and this introduces non-linear effects that make it very dangerous to have a lot of infection flying about at any one time.  


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