A false sense of security
diamandis.com
diamandis.com
Antigen tests are trash, there is no such thing as a 15 minute rapid test for covid
PCR tests cannot be relied on without specific controls (a test X number of days into exposure, no subsequent exposure, multiday quarantine after the test regardless). PCR tests and can only help with statistics but not your personal assurance of avoiding covid
Don't trust anyone that says they have a covid safe solution for their gathering. Only consider the prevalence of covid in the area (really, LA? really?) and your mitigation strategies like wearing a mask. Even a respected figure with a vaccine company has no idea what theyre talking about.
The county of Kuau’i has a mandatory 3 day quarantine no matter what the result, or port of prior-entry. This is down from 10-day quarantine. They have 0.2 cases per 100k now alongside the significant deterrent from going there
There are a lot of examples that can function as control groups
If you care about contracting coronavirus, if for you infection is a death sentence, then you need something daft like a 99.9999% certainty that people and things you interact with aren't carrying the virus, and that doesn't just include their nasal passages; it means them not having it on their hands, or on their clothes, or whatever else.
In the real world, outside of these hyper corporate events, most people I know who aren't vulnerable just take basic measures because if we get the virus it'll probably be fine.
But that's not good enough if you're selling snake oil.
There is no way to completely avoid the coronavirus whilst interacting with other humans unless it's simply not prevalent in your area (e.g. Australia, NZ).
Pretty much everyone has failed. Football teams, film studios, politicians, the lot. It's like trying to catch the wind.
The way to eliminate it, if you want to, is to accept that it will infiltrate your group, slowly quarantine it out until there's none left, and then allow no-one into or out of the group.
I don't understand how an intelligent person couldn't simply derive this from first principles, it's been eleven months or so now.
Do they exist in a different world to the rest of us or what? Most people I know, unless they're barricaded inside, have pretty much accepted that they're going to get it, the last study I read indicated that 1 in 4 individuals in the UK have already been infected.
Nobody is going to be 100% safe without choosing unreasonably cautious isolation. But there's a world of difference between being 10% safe and being 98% safe. I live in a group house and through shared risk concerns and a good understanding of the virus's mechanisms, I'm confident in saying we're successfully being 98% safe.
(I think the larger group (30 people) in the article really makes this somewhat intractable though. They were closer to the 10% safe.)
You can wear a helmet, and you can cycle safely, but given enough years, you'll eventually end up falling off.
That doesn't make helmets or cycling proficiency pointless, but it does mean not making wild claims that you're "immune" to accidents.
Avoids germs, you see.
Why? Let's just get this over with already. All these "cures" are turning out to be worse than the disease.
I personally couldn't give a toss; in the UK we're eleven months in to the sunk cost fallacy. But that's outside of the scope of this article.
There's no way you're going to put this genie back into the bottle, Covid is already endemic.
What should have been done instead is to figure out what factors cause Covid complications, because for the vast majority of people Covid is harmless. One year in and we still haven't even started...
(We spent so much time and effort on vaccines instead, even though there are several strains of Covid in the wild and people routinely get it twice...)
Well, I've certainly learned a lot about society in these eleven months, that's for sure.
They have done for some countries. Lockdowns _done badly_, I agree, didn't do squat.
> What should have been done instead is to figure out what factors cause Covid complications, One year in and we still haven't even started...
You seriously don't think people are researching that like crazy? Good science, sadly, takes time. Especially when trying to measure an _ongoing_ pandemic.
> (We spent so much time and effort on vaccines instead, even though there are several strains of Covid in the wild and people routinely get it twice...)
I've had the flu multiple times in my life. Only had it once since I started getting vaccinated for it annually 16 years ago.
As an asthmatic, I really appreciate the flu vaccine. (And likewise, really keen on a Covid vaccine, my lungs are rough enough already, cheers).
And I really appreciate it even though there are several strains of flu in the wild and people routinely get it twice (or more).
Now you just have to deal with long COVID-19 and people claiming that avoided deaths are meaningless.
Certainly, there are hospital settings where doctors and nurses are around many highly infectious patients with regular high risk asperating events who do not become infected for many weeks or months. So it's not at all impossible it just takes effort and diligence. They are just viruses after all.
I'd also say that they selected for who were less risk averse since those were the ones who showed up. And most of them flew and traversed public transport so really not that surprising they found what was likely a single superspreader.
It did work for the NBA finals AFAIK. And it worked for the 2020 MotoGP season, even though it wasn't a "persistent" bubble and people were allowed to leave the venue between events.
But I don't understand one thing from the article: were all the people locked into the venue? Or would they go out eating? If they were locked in, what about the staff which served meals and such? Was it actually a bubble?
I'm not barricaded anywhere like most other people where I live (BC, Canada) and about 1% of the population has had the virus. And this number is high (yes, high) because people feel like cramming hundreds of people in a small place and partying during a pandemic (or in this case 100 people together) is the right thing to do and in general people not willing to be put to the slightest inconvenience like reducing their social circle, doing stuff outdoors instead of indoors, wearing a mask, staying home when sick etc. Where did you get the 1 in 4 for the UK number from? No way it's so high and the UK is the second worst in the world in cases per capita. Vietnam? Taiwan? China? Japan? Finland? Norway? Greece?
<rant> The problem is that in order to get each person on average to infect less than one person everyone has to do their bit. If 95% of the population is infecting 0.98 people at average but the remaining 5% are each infecting 20 people it's not going to work. Those 5% push the total reservoir for the virus up (more mutations, fun) and they keep increasing the odds of getting sick for each of the individuals in the 95%. And I'm being generous when I say 95% actually do their part. If there's a single sick person in BC and they transmit to 0.98 people then my odds of getting sick are essentially zero, but if there are 6000 that transmit to 1.02 people each that's a different story. </rant>
Models indicate around 25% infected in the country, 37% in London.
The rest of your post, well, I'm glad that you find it easy and have lots of compassion for people who don't find social isolation as trivial as you do.
The point is you don't have to be isolated, you just need to infect less than one other person if you're sick. You can hang out with your friends on the lawn, sitting a little further apart, you can be closer with a smaller number of people, you can go for walks outdoors, you can take out at the restaurant instead of eating in. You might choose to buy something online instead of going to the store.
Some of the people who are flaunting the rules aren't doing that because this is unworkable, they're doing it because they don't give a damn (well, some of them). I do realize some people are put in situations where they have no options (e.g. poor and works in a meet packing factory, that's not what I'm talking about here though that has solutions too).
The topic in question is an attempt to stage an event with zero coronavirus. I am simply saying that you cannot test your way into a 100% safe event in a country that has high prevalence.
You seem to be talking about how to reduce prevalence in the country and shoe horning in your own opinions about people for the sake of feeling good about yourself.
Two different topics.
"There is no way to completely avoid the coronavirus whilst interacting with other humans unless it's simply not prevalent in your area (e.g. Australia, NZ)."
<snip - here you did say something about events but your generalization on top seems overriding>
"I don't understand how an intelligent person couldn't simply derive this from first principles, it's been eleven months or so now.
Do they exist in a different world to the rest of us or what? Most people I know, unless they're barricaded inside, have pretty much accepted that they're going to get it, the last study I read indicated that 1 in 4 individuals in the UK have already been infected."
If you simply said what you're saying in your reply I'd simply upvote that and not argue, since yeah, that's a pretty good observation, you can't test your way into a 100% safe event, sure.
Probably just a miscommunication.
The absolute worst line is: "my deepest apologies to all for whom my actions may have caused suffering." Why the "may have"?
Something like the porn industry? AFAIK very few actors and actresses got infected so far.
https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Works_of_the_Late_Edgar...
The people in the story, also tried to create a “bubble”
The one thing that I still don't understand (and that, probably, we don't understand at a scientific level) is: if the virus levels are that low that a PCR test is negative, can such patient infect others?
Personally, I don't think this guy should pass GO on his way to jail.
> His blog post also did not acknowledge that public health orders had banned gatherings between December 3 and January 25 in California. Diamandis would not respond when I asked whether he was aware that he was violating state health rules by holding his event. “I knew that there were challenges. But I don’t know that I want to answer that on the record,” he said.
- Paid event where attendees flew in from around the world and A360 membership costs upwards of $30k per year
- Employees knew they should be seeking indoor filming permits (and shifted venue / accommodations multiple times) but decided to avoid / abandon the effort
- Mask wearing was not enforced and there was no self quarantine required
- Diamandis directed employees to be tested by a company he's intimately involved in, HIPAA violations occurred on a text chat, and they didn't report infections (as legally required) to California
Extract from MIT Tech Review article:
> His blog post also did not acknowledge that public health orders had banned gatherings between December 3 and January 25 in California. Diamandis would not respond when I asked whether he was aware that he was violating state health rules by holding his event. “I knew that there were challenges. But I don’t know that I want to answer that on the record,” he said.
That anyone could believe such an immunity bubble could be maintained when the White House failed or that they claim to have provided "Immunity Boosting: Intravenous vitamins and minerals" or "Regenerative Treatments" to safeguard against COVID just highlights the lunacy of the entire enterprise.
Their final infection rate was 43%[2] for those who were unmasked. That his surprise conclusion was "Bottom line again: Masks Work." when noting the 35 (!) AV employees that were there in person "isolated in one corner of the office" who walked away uninfected has not been a shock to nearly anyone for months.
Yet this blog post makes it sound like they were completely blindsided and that even the most intensive analysis of the available medical literature (or common sense) would say otherwise.
[1]: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/02/13/1018374/peter-di...
[2]: From his own blog which may not be accurate given Diamandis noted to the MIT Tech Review regarding discrepancies in the count "“Someone is tracking,” he said, though he said he was not sure who."
I personally find it baffling that someone organizing an event would not have realized, one year into this thing, that COVID tests are not 100% reliable.
Part of me thinks that he knew full well it was a risk and just assumed he'd get lucky. The alternative is that he was badly misinformed and really didn't know what he was doing in the first place.
Surprising is the spit test, which should be made official really soon.