Thanks. Looks like the really good stuff has been declared secret :( In particular, it really doesn’t illuminate at all why they ended up believing what they did. “Who knew what and when” is the question that needs to be answered, and these emails didn’t really illuminate that.
That said, the emails are pretty entertaining. Three things stand out there to me.
WTF is that March 19th email from Tegnell asking about whether it’s possible to model the effect of immunity on the reproduction rate. It’s like the most fundamental formula of epidemiology. And while I’ve asked my fair share of questions that I new the answer to just to guide people into doing the right work, a) the email really doesn’t read like a rhetorical question, b) it doesn’t make sense given the recipients of the email.
The discussion with THL on March 14th/15th around schools is bizarre. Like, the reason this department exists is to figure out what the best interventions are given what they know. Tegnell’s method for figuring out what the impact of not closing schools seems to be to contact foreign public health officials and see what they think. While his counterpart at THL gets the modeling department to actually run the numbers.
The emails between Giesecke and FHM from before he joins are again really strange. So he determined as part of a private consulting gig, with no access to special data or resources, that Covid would be unstoppable but also not that serious. And then tries to commandeer the FHMs analysts to produce literal propaganda to support his viewpoint. When the analysts push back, he starts complaining to their boss about the analysts having too much autonomy. What a toxic person.
The narrative is fairly obvious. Tegnell was in over his head, and knew it. He hired his old boss to help. Said ex-boss had already made up his mind before seeing any of FHM’s modeling, so that’s how they ran this. But it’s hard to say just how much cherry-picking was required to build this narrative.
The worst think about the opening schools thing is that we could have used this time to prepare for the winter. The winter is going to be very long and hard. We could have prepared services, trained people, hired IT people. You have to prepare for the worse, and hope for the best. Instead people are preparing for the best and hoping for the worst? Like “not prepare to do online learning, opening, then closing again and doing online learning”.
I came into the office tonight to take advantage of the internet speed here, and I had the same thought. The square right now is packed with people eating outside. The local restaurants set up big outdoor areas and the city closed a lane on the road to allow them room to do this. It looks busy and it’s great they can keep themselves going this way.
In like 4 weeks that’s all done. Around mid September it gets too damn cold here to make being outside enjoyable. And Covid isn’t going anywhere.
I’m worried about sending my kids back to school here in Norway, and I live in a municipality where there is very little infection, and with the number of people hospitalized in the entire country in single digits (that will change in two weeks time, though - the infection rate pretty much guarantees that).
I can only imagine the frustration and fear of parents in (some parts of) the US and other places where there is little to no control of the virus.
A 10 percentage point difference in deaths was found when comparing hospitalized COVID-19 patients who received donor plasma with high concentrations of virus-fighting antibodies compared with those who received lower concentrations, Mayo reported.
The findings are good news in the fight against a global pandemic with few proven treatments and an infectious disease that as of Wednesday had caused 57,779 known infections and 1,629 deaths in the state, according to the Minnesota Department of Health.
Same study, different reporting:
“If we had just done the randomized controlled trials, we would know the answers we are still guessing at,” Bach said, noting the authors of the study were “appropriately cautious.”
“It raises the question of what strength of evidence is necessary to treat during a pandemic,” said Harlan Krumholz, director of the Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation at Yale New Haven Hospital. “The problem is we have yet to resolve what is sufficient evidence to change the treatment paradigm.”
Steven Nissen, a noted clinical trialist at the Cleveland Clinic, agreed: “The lack of high-quality trials in making clinical decisions about how to treat patients with coronavirus infection is a national embarrassment. Here we have another non-randomized study, NIH-funded, and uninterpretable.”
The Economist is behind the paywall, but you can sign up and get several free articles a month. Not sure if WaPo is,but at $50 a year I think everyone should be supporting good journalism.
