With CDC’s updated mask policies, we have an even more divided population when it comes to this pandemic. Half of the population is celebrating the ease of restrictions while the other half is super concerned. Each side believes the other side to be a bunch of morons. One of the biggest reasons for this extreme polarization is the lack of good quality data available to the public. We keep on getting bombarded with COVID deaths and cases like it’s a basketball score card but that data hardly has any useful information such as the strains people tested positive with, reinfection statistics, or vaccination status of COVID cases, hospitalizations and deaths. Due to this uncertainty, people interpret this data on their own based on their own personal biases and choose a side whether Yes Restrictions or No Restrictions. People who are concerned about vaccines’ potential lack of efficacy for newer strains want to play extra safe by masking and expecting others to mask up even when they’re fully vaccinated whereas people who are confident find it utter stupidity to mask up especially after they’ve been vaccinated. This uncertainty can easily be overcome if the labs collect and share some additional data fields. The following information from a patient who comes to a lab for a COVID test can remove a lot of uncertainties and make us better equipped to deal with this situation. 1. If a person tests positive, what strain was the person infected with (I have heard this test is possible although a little more expensive for the lab. The government could sponsor this test to gather better statistics for better public health policies. If not for all, then maybe for some random 10% or 20% of the cases) 2. Vaccination record of the person. Also collect this and share if a person is hospitalized or dies. 3. Link the results with a National ID such as the SSN so that we get clean data about reinfections rather than us relying on anecdotes from friends and family. With such useful information, we can easily figure out how various strains affect the unvaccinated, J&J vaccinated, partially Moderna vaccinated, fully Pfizer vaccinated, etc for various age groups. Reinfection statistics will also help us understand the duration of natural immunity this disease provides along with natural cross immunity across strains. Reinfection seems extremely rare but we still have policies requiring recovered people to mask up and social distance. If we could put a number to reinfections, we can possibly make better decisions. The vaccines have been proven to be exceptionally effective against serious illnesses with the older strain when we had vaccine trials in November - December. Experts believe them to hold their ground against variants as well. However, there’s a lack of real data against newer variants making half the population concerned about their efficacy for newer variants. We have heard anecdotes of Pfizer fully vaccinated people dying in India due to the variant currently in circulation over there but we lack good data, only anecdotes. Until we have good quality data, we’ll make gross errors in risk calculations and keep on making suboptimal policy decisions. We’ll also keep on increasing the distance between the already divided world on what’s the right approach. I hope we all can come together and appreciate the way vaccines have been produced in record time and at the same time understand the need for good data which we currently lack not a couple of weeks into the pandemic but full 15 months deep into this situation. We might already have preconceived notions about whether to mask up and lockdown or abandon our masks but let’s try to be open as there’s half of the world (including epidemiologists and virologists) whose beliefs are against you whichever side you’re on. I don’t think any of the readers here has a connection higher up with their country’s top government officials but I still wanted to give it a shot. If you do and you do understand the need for better data, please try to convince your country’s government to instruct the labs to collect and share richer data. Or we’ll keep on blindly enforcing public policies with no evidence which half of the world will cheer for while the other half will condemn. PS: Please keep the comments section clean. I would appreciate if we don’t make this post the usual Mask v/s No Mask or Lockdowns v/s No Lockdowns social media battleground. I have observed this before. I write something along the lines of how much uncertainty there exists about this pandemic, this virus, and the state of affairs on vaccination and I always find clowns commenting on the lines of either “Stay the fuck home” or “Lockdown supporters are pussies” Readers in support for lockdowns begin delivering their usual moral science lectures which nobody asked for whereas people against them start mocking how big pussies lockdown supporters are. Let’s not repeat this and keep the comments section civil. Most of us have already picked up our sides but let’s try to be open to new ideas in the light of better data. Highly Irrelevant but since specifically asked for TC: 200K TL;DR We lack data on vaccination records for COVID outcomes as well as reinfection statistics for various strains. This uncertainty has resulted in a lack of consensus among virologists and epidemiologists about the possible risks fully vaccinated people face, COVID recovered people face, and how this pandemic might proceed in the future since all epidemiological models rely on this information. This uncertainty has trickled down in the public and has made our world extremely divided on numerous public health policies. My question is “Is it really such an impossible task to gather good data about this disease? We have had those shitty updates about this pandemic each day like it’s a basketball scoreboard since day 1 but even 15 months into the pandemic, we’re relying on the same poor quality data.”
You want to publicize individuals health information? Otherwise what you just spewed out is happening, at least here in the US.
Look at my reply to Accenture. I have addressed your concern for health data privacy.
Also TC or delete the thread.
There is no vaccine resistant strain recorded right now When / If this happens you will see scores of vaccinated falling sick. That will signal a red alarm. Apart from that vaccinations are largely effective against severe symptoms and death so this data would be good but not really necessary
https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202105/1222709.shtml Agreed this is just an anecdote but good data would certainly help us know if this is an outlier or not. One reason why we might not have heard about more number of deaths in people fully vaccinated with Pfizer or Moderna dying in India could be that not a lot of people from US are traveling to India these days. In addition, I personally know a number of people fully vaccinated with India’s Covishield vaccine who faced severe illness two months after the second dose. MRNA based Pfizer is claimed to be more effective but until we have good data, it’s just wishful thinking.
These problems are not new to public health - there are many that have spent their entire careers trying to enable more timely access to data 1) This requires sequencing the sample. Not every lab is equipped with the tech to do this. It's not only expensive, but requires an entirely different skillet and infrastructure. That's why historically this was done at larger, centralized labs even before COVID 2) This information is not centralized in the US and each state has a separate vaccine registry. How quickly this information is updated varies according to state and site of vaccination. 3) There is no national patient identifier, or anything that can act as a national index to match patients to health records exactly every time. While SSN is close, not every health organization collects this, and not every person has one. This isn't meant to discourage, but rather to inform. The public health community knows what needs to be done, there just isn't enough funding or manpower to do it. What actions those frustrated with this situation can take is provide more funding to public health agencies and consider working for them if you have the desired skill set - it's not the best paying work in the world, but it's a great way to make an impact if you know how to manipulate data quickly.
1) Agreed. Virus strain sequencing is only possible at specialized labs. It requires a lot of changes to our current testing approach but haven’t we already made significant changes to our lives? I totally understand it’s absolutely infeasible to sequence to virus for all positive cases but if the government wants, we could do that for a random sample of volunteers. 2. That’s fine. Even if there’s a delay in when vaccination data is uploaded to a central location, it’s fine. Anyways, the labs can also ask people to self report their vaccination status (which vaccine shots did they get and when) when they register for a COVID test. They already ask a bunch of information. 3. Not every person has an SSN. That’s fine, at least gather these statistics from people who do have a national ID. Someone in another comment showed concern for data privacy. That concern can easily be alleviated with anonymization along with a one way function applied to the SSN or some other National ID to encrypt it in a manner that requires no secret key. Given an SSN, you’d be able to obtain the secret code but the other way round would be computationally intractable. It’s extremely simple, not at all complex. The governments have already done so much to tackle this pandemic. Providing a simple software to compute a one way function on the SSN to all labs is no big deal. If this SSN linkage is really not desired, then people can simply be asked to self report their prior COVID results. They may not remember the exact dates when they were tested earlier but that’s fine. I am actually frustrated with how we are all working with noisy data and am willing to fund public health in a meaningful way. It’s the government’s job to do so but that’s not happening apparently. However, there’s no specific program requesting people to fund in that attempts to obtain better data. And I am not interested in donating to public health so that they use it enforcing a policy based on uncertainty. I already donated to the poor affected with unemployment during the pandemic and am keen to donate more if it’s used in a meaningful way.
I would take the time to read public health literature as the points you are making have already been addressed: 1) Yes, random sampling it already occuring - this is already a part of pandemic surveillance. There is a significant magnitude of change that is required to perform this on a larger scale though - labs would have to go from testing positive and negative to sequencing viral genomes. The latter requires not only significantly more computing power but also complex data infrastructure to store and analyze it all at scale. This is not something a simple lab is capable of doing nor something a significant portion of labs can afford to do. While the government can allocate more funding to that, it will be at the expense of being able to fund other components of the covid response. It's incredibly myopic to chalk this up to a simple change. The government has scarce resources, limited time, and a virus that is determined to spread and could care less that we are scrambling to respond. 2) There is no central location - that's the root problem. The lack of coordination in response activities last year lead to each state handling their response differently and creating their own means of documenting vaccinations. 3) Collecting this information is simple in hindsight, but the point is it was never collected, and patients have no incentive to go back to where they got their vaccination and provide an SSN. As with anything in medicine, everything else comes secondary to saving lives when time is of the essence. TLDR it's very messy to go back and wish data were collected better, but due to fragmented leadership and coordination the data are what they are. If this is frustrating, vote politicians into office that support public health funding because this is a change that will need to come from the top down due to this infrastructure being part of the government. While the response last year was incredibly fragmented, there is hope that the new administration will be more aggressive, and may bring order to the data that has already been collected. As any scientist knows, you can't go back and change old data, so you have to work with what you have + learn moving forward.
TLDR jesus
The government has absolutely no business cross-referencing the fact that I’m not vaccinated with my SSN. I’ll never understand the people who’d willingly hand over their data to the government or who believe it should have more control over their lives.
Damn chill on the mind dump, your tl;dr needs a tl;dr I think basically your question/comment is: there is insufficient information about how the virus is spreading and the variants and the effectiveness of the vaccine. You're basically asking why don't we have contact tracing and investigations into outbreaks which happened in January - March of last year until everything went to shit and everyone tried to cover their ass. At this point I think it would be financially prohibitive to do any major contact tracing or investigation. Sampling is done to some extent but whenever it becomes publicized it gets polarized to the point of 1/250,000,000 vaccines and someone dies cause still TBD? The vaccine is killing people!! 1000 people got COVID after being vaccinated but don't know when they were vaccinated? The vaccine doesn't work!! Sad to say, at this point any release of new data or information without a thorough scrub is just going to cause idiocracy to rear it's head and 100s of youtubes and articles from random people and doctors stating their opinions and viewers treating it as gospel
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When the guy making this rule is literally the one who illegally funded Coronavirus gain of function research we know we are fucked. Add to insult his best buddy is leading charge at WHO for finding the source of virus they helped fund and create.
What? Honest question. I'm not sure who you're referring to, and what research where
Not sure I understand either what and who you’re trying to refer to.