Weekly coronavirus-related chat, questions, and minor updates - week of June 1

As much as I support their cause and understand why they're doing what they're doing, I'm deeply nervous about the protests in the US being vectors for viral spread. I think it says a lot about the convictions of the people protesting and the magnitude of the tensions that led to these protests that they are happening right now, when people are well aware of the risks. I just worry that we're going to see even more suffering and loss of life due to the coronavirus using these gatherings as chances to propagate.

I'm going to try to summarize a national controversy here, maybe @cwagner or other germans can weight in if I'm missing important details.

Maybe 2-3 weeks ago, Christian Drosten's lab (#1 german scientist on coronavirus epidemics. We're lucky to have him. I quoted him here plenty before) published a paper on their website. From all the samples their lab was sent, they analyzed the viral load. The goal was to suss out whether children could be less infectious, in which case schools could be reopened more easily. They found that the viral load to be effectively the same and given their statistical methods, they found no significant difference. On twitter, other scientists provided feedback, and some statisticians noted that the coarse statistical tests could be improved upon to maybe find an effect after all.

The "news"paper BILD, a right-wing-in-pretty-dress paper, and the shart in the German media community's pants - which has a very wide viewership - anyway, this paper picked up on this controversy. They completely turned the scientific process on it's head, denouncing Drosten as influencing german politics with "false" studies, the works. Intensely damaging to the public perception of our measures, politicians and scientists, nevermind the scientific method as a whole. Super vile rhetoric. Changing your opinion is bad, being corrected as part of peer review is bad, you know how it goes. Quote: "Questionable methods - Drosten Study about infectious children grossly wrong" Taking a nitpicky peer review that far out of context... ooof. Oh, and they also interviewed another scientist about this controversy, who immediately after the interview noticed what the fuck just went on and recalled all his statements. Bild ignored that. The recall, not the interview.

Drosten has since noted publicly, that the tests were intentionally done this way because the data is somewhat noisy since it's just observational and full of confounders. Also note that the differences we're looking for here might be insane ratios. Children regularly carry orders of magnitude higher concentrations of common viruses. Anyway, they onboarded one of the statisticians and have since improved their paper. Result: Statistically significant, very slight difference. Children have less virus, but only so little less that it really doesn't matter. Drosten said the other day that in light of how things went, he'd probably not publish pre-prints the same way, given how he completely ignored the role the media played in that. The scientific outcome, however, he's very pleased with.

Keep in mind, this lab is one of the first to distribute a functioning test for Covid-19. Germany has him to thank for our solid situation wrt. corona. This is the subject matter expert in Germany and a very responsible scientist. I'm sure a lot of other countries would be all too happy to have him.

Thursday night I didn't get enough sleep, and woke up with a sore throat. Saturday got worse at night. I was shaking with chills, felt hot, and was having trouble getting enough air. I was really scared. Sunday it got worse.

There's a certain clarity I gained when I thought it might be the end, or close to it. Things sharpened, the superfluous fell away, and I was left with an intoxicating sobriety. I'm glad for the experience, assuming I make it out.

I called my doctor Monday, got tested Tuesday, got my results Wednesday. Negative. (With a high false negative rate...) I've been steadily improving. If it really is covid, days 7-10 are when it can get worse. Today was day 7.

I'm behind in my online class. It's been a hell of a week.

Alameda County announced new guidance Friday that allows for people to form ‘social bubbles’ of 12 or fewer

37 workers test positive for COVID-19 at Hayward's St. Rose Hospital, CEO says

26 of the healthcare workers who tested positive are in the medical/surgical/telemetry unit. Two are in departments that interact with that unit. The other nine are in departments that have occasional, incidental contact with that unit.

The government here in Brazil delayed/postponed the publishing date of COVID data likely to avoid the press so the main news agency here decided to air it under their emergency news service.

India overtakes Italy's coronavirus tally as lockdown easing looms

With its total number of cases rising to more than 236,000, India now has fewer infections than only the United States, Brazil, Russia, Britain and Spain, according to a Reuters tally.

However, India’s toll of deaths from COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus, is 6,642, small compared with those other countries.

A ‘misclassification error’ made the May unemployment rate look better than it is. Here’s what happened.

Tldr the US economy is improving*, but the figures are lower than they should be.

^{*less people are unemployed at least. This totally won't go away in the second COVID wave (now supercharged with the George Floyd protests), lol.}