How 700 Epidemiologists Are Living Now, and What They Think Is Next

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/upshot/epidemiologists-virus-survey-.html

by imartin2k • 6 years ago

59 68 6 years ago

nytimes.com

leetrout2• 6 years ago

Another source that wasn’t paywalled for me

https://news.yahoo.com/700-epidemiologists-living-now-think-...

neom2• 6 years ago

FYI you can read this article (and a lot of the NYT) by simply creating an account, it's painless and free.

leetrout2• 6 years ago

I fail to understand why I was downvoted for linking a no-nagging source of the same article.

xchaotic• 6 years ago

Tl;dr it will take a lot longer than most people expect to get back to ‘normal’. Summer 2021 being normal is a maybe at best.

IAmGraydon3• 6 years ago

The article said “many years”. Summer 2021 is a pipe dream. Early 2022 is a very optimistic possibility.

maxerickson4• 6 years ago

The US likely has something like 50 million people with acquired immunity (14.5 million have tested positive) and another 50 million people are slated to be vaccinated by March (this estimate is assuming weeks after the second doses), with tens of millions more each following month, so it can be sometime next year that the pandemic is waning here.

free2OSS2• 6 years ago

No Politicians framed the issue like this. Canceling school in 3 month bursts is a political move because it's much harder to tell a generation of parents their kids won't return to school for 2-3 years.

Shame on our politicians, shame of Fauci for not making this clear.

SpicyLemonZest4• 6 years ago

I think we’ve gotta start thinking about how to make people more comfortable with living freely post-vaccine. I’ve always been concerned about this as a downside of the “this is a super terrible disease” messaging - there’s a huge range of outcomes where the disease spread is merely mitigated rather than halted, and we’ve trained a lot of high-conscientiousness people to not accept that as a success. When I see experts talking about how they won’t ever go back to normal, I’m concerned about how much of the population will get stuck in that rut with them.

IAmGraydon3• 6 years ago

The experts are full of it if they say they’ll never return to normal. This is akin to saying “I’m never drinking again” after waking up with a hangover. Humans are programmed to quickly forget rare or non-recurring negative stimuli. It’s called fear extinction, and it does its job very well to keep us taking risks and seeking reward.

throwaway2245• 6 years ago

Epidemiologists likely do know something about human behaviour.

One quote from this article:

“For some, it has gone back to normal, and because of this, it will be two to three years before things are back to normal for the cautious, at least in the U.S.”

blockmeifyoucan• 6 years ago

Making all vaccine testing data and study details publicly available might be a good start.

morelisp• 6 years ago

Why should our goal be a return to normal? Why not normalize wearing masks during flu season or when you have a cold? Why not mandate payments to let contagious workers stay home rather than spread infection all the time, not just during a pandemic? Why not mandate flu vaccines to attend school or take public service jobs?

SpicyLemonZest4• 6 years ago

I don’t think those kind of changes are what they mean. Many of the quotes seem to be expressing reluctance to socialize or be in large groups.

Perhaps more importantly, I think “let’s never go back to normal” is catastrophically bad messaging for those kinds of changes. A lot of people are desperate to go back to normal as they understand it; if we tell them “let’s never go back to normal”, they’ll tell us to shove it, even if they would have been fine with masking when you’re sick and excited about mandatory sick leave.

libertine2• 6 years ago

Uh, you've gotta do the exact opposite: you have to make people aware that they will have to wear masks and maintain social distancing even after the vaccine, for who knows how long.

Will depend on vaccine adoption, availability, etc.

Makes you wonder if stricter measures shouldn't have been taken right after the initial spread, just like many countries did and are currently in economic recovery.

SpicyLemonZest4• 6 years ago

But I think this is a good reflection of the attitude I’m concerned about. If you don’t know how long people should maintain social distancing, how can we tell whether it’s the right decision and how much compliance can we really expect?

claudeganon4• 6 years ago

Having a disease ravage a country, kill friends and family, while the government does almost nothing to help, with millions upon millions of people say it’s a hoax or conspiracy, tends to have that effect on people.

The consequences of living in a failed state are something very few Americans are equipped to deal with using anything besides denial or extreme precaution. Maybe we can ask some people who survived Russia in the 90s what the right course of action should be.

Camas2• 6 years ago

In what way is the current situation in the US even remotely similar to the collapse of the USSR?

IAmGraydon3• 6 years ago

The epidemiologists have almost entirely avoided other parts of pre-pandemic life — including activities that many Americans are doing now. Almost none said they had attended a sporting event, play or concert; met up with someone they didn’t know well; or attended a wedding or funeral.

Sorry, where are these people living where it’s even possible to do these things?

wolfram74• 6 years ago

Are you asking in the sense, how are they accomplishing this, or how are they even given the choice of this? Because in the US, a lot of those things are still on the table.

chollida1• 6 years ago

Well Europe has people in soccer/football stadiums. The US has people in football(American style) in stadiums. The states has "famously" had several country music concerts that, well probably not a wise idea to attend, were packed.

And I feel pretty confident saying that practically every country on the face of hte planet has atleast one wedding a day.

I mean, I've been to 4 funerals over the summer and I live in Canada.

Where are you that there are no funerals or visitations to attend?

o-__-o3• 6 years ago

I see you don’t live in the south. Just got off a FaceTime with my sister in law who is currently at a farmers market with her kids. I am intrigued how others would respond to this, I just had to watch on in disbelief (these kind of actions are the norm down here)

derwiki• 6 years ago

I'd amend "south" to "rural" because I think it's similar in Montana and Ohio

SpicyLemonZest4• 6 years ago

Farmers markets were allowed and well-trafficked, even during lockdown, in every state I'm familiar with.

cbsks• 6 years ago

There are drive-in concerts in my city in the US. Weddings are allowed to be held outdoors. Some states have allowed limited spectators of professional sports.

sradman• 6 years ago

Of 23 activities of daily life that the survey asked about, there were only three that the majority of respondents had done in the last month: gathering outdoors with friends; bringing in mail without precautions; and running errands, like going to the grocery store or pharmacy.
Almost none said they had attended a sporting event, play or concert; met up with someone they didn’t know well; or attended a wedding or funeral.
Three-quarters of respondents said they planned to spend Christmas, Hanukkah or other winter holidays only with members of their household, or not celebrate at all, similar to how they spent Thanksgiving.
Most scientists say around 70 percent of the population will need to be immune for the United States to reach herd immunity, when the virus slows down significantly or stops.

mynegation• 6 years ago

A reminder: 70% number is probably based on the estimates of R_0~3.0 for Covid-19 (1-1/3). Even with partial vaccination some activities can be carefully resumed as long as R_t stays under 1.0.

neom2• 6 years ago

I wish they would state what a "minority" of the epidemiologists is. 345 (slightly under half), that's a lot different in my mind to say, 7.

carapace2• 6 years ago

But epidemiologists are a very cautious group.

No... they are the correct norm of cautious, it's the rest of us that are blithely charging around recklessly with wild abandon. It's like how on Star Trek they were always beaming to new planets in their regular uniforms with no spacesuits or anything. The gimmick or conceit there was that the transporter filtered out nasty bugs during rematerialization. Until we have "magic" bug filters jet-setting is a disease vector.

People are talking about "returning to normal" but there's no normal to return to: mass international rapid transit is not normal. Huge cities with millions of people are not normal. Nothing about the last ~N centuries is normal (for whatever value of N up to about 120 or so? Younger Dryas happened about 12Ky ago, eh? The Potbelly Hill dates from around the 10th millennium BCE[1]. Somewhere around there we started in with farms and cities. This has been the blink of an eye in evolutionary and geological timeframes. Everything we're doing is new and radical!)

What I'm getting at is this: this won't be the last virus. Remember swine flu? SARS? Ebola? Zika? Hantavirus? Heck, Lyme? Polio is making a comeback, that's the one that paralyses children.

We keep expanding into new wilderness. The "attack surface" of humanity is growing exponentially.

There's no normal to go back to.

(I really do hate to be such a downer, but I just don't see a lot of people taking the long view. Everyone is understandably eager to get back to pretending that viruses don't exist, but they do. Connect the goddamned dots.)

[1] Göbekli Tepe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe

StavrosK• 6 years ago

There's no normal to go back to.

I mean, sure, if you define "normal" as something other than what was there before, okay, but then it becomes a moot point. There is a clear meaning to what "normal" means when people say it, and it's "whatever we were doing before".

Who defines what "normal" really is, anyway?

carapace2• 6 years ago

That's what I mean, what we were doing before was exponential growth and the Industrial Revolution resulting in, specifically, mass international travel and huge numbers of people crammed together into mega-cities. The recent viral outbreaks aren't a one-off: they are the beginning of the new normal. We're victims of our own success.

free2OSS2• 6 years ago

Epidemiologists are the experts, I'm baffled why so many people are asking physicians about coronavirus.

Physicians are not scientists, they aren't supposed to make policy decisions.

It goes to show how few people understand what Science is and probably more dangerously that Medical is mistakenly thought as Science. (Medical is older than the scientific revolution,it's a hybrid of Tradition/Authority/Art/Science)

rscho2• 6 years ago

Epidemiologists are also MDs. And epidemiology also is a hybrid of the kind you mention. Dogmas exist in every science, and although it is true that clinical medicine is far behind other disciplines regarding getting rid of dogmas, things are improving steadily.

Epidemiologists don't always understand better regarding what to do in practice. They understand things in their own manner shaped by their profession and that's exactly what we ask of them.

jhbadger• 6 years ago

Some are MDs, but most have a Ph.D or MPH (Master of Public Health) instead or in addition to a MD. Epidemiology is a science and one that is not well covered in medical schools.

giardini• 6 years ago

ree2OSS says>"Epidemiologists are the experts"<

Epidemiology of COVID-19 has been a train wreck. Indeed we must ask if epidemiology is a science at all.

Interviewing 700 epidemiologists is a fool's errand providing no useful information. One might as well simplify the selection criteria and interview 700 (or better, simply 30) people of above-average intelligence.

ree2OSS says>"Physicians are not scientists, they aren't supposed to make policy decisions."<

I agree with the first sentence but not with the second. Most medical organizations/hospitals/institutions/clinics are headed up by physicians who make policy decisions all day long.

onecommentman• 6 years ago

“Interviewing 700 epidemiologists is a fool's errand providing no useful information.”

Do you seriously believe there is “no useful information” from such an exercise? None? Methinks you are being facetious.

I agree you shouldn’t necessarily follow what they say they do, but even realizing there is a diversity of responses among those who have some formal training is surely of some value. Especially among the target audience of the NYT that tends to believe what an authority tells them more than the average American.

disown• 6 years ago

Physicians are not scientists

Neither are epidemiologists.

they aren't supposed to make policy decisions.

Scientists don't make policy decisions either. Politicians do.

It goes to show how few people understand what Science is

Ain't that the truth.

gnusty_gnurc• 6 years ago

Scientists don't make policy decisions either. Politicians do.

Even politicians aren't that good at solving this issue clearly.

It's because centralization is bad at responding to the needs of individuals.

The reason that this top-down bureaucratic management approach does not work is because the knowledge we need to plan is local, widely dispersed, and held by individuals. Hayek’s point, which won him Nobel honors in 1974, was that there is no such thing as a centralized repository of knowledge from which epidemiologists, policy-makers, or anyone else “in charge” can pull any required data at any time and then — poof — solve societal problems. He further warned that we must treat economic problems differently from scientific problems. Truer words have not been spoken regarding how we should think about the COVID-19 pandemic. Successfully containing COVID-19 is a problem that both requires scientific investigation and economic thinking.

https://spectator.org/covid-experts-shutdowns/

bane2• 6 years ago

Most people don't really understand that.

Even relatively informed people don't understand that physicians aren't members of the scientific class and in practice are closer to car mechanics than fuel chemists.

A person with a DMA, DPA, or a DMM are all still called "Doctor" colloquially, but not people with a JD.

A Doctorate of Science should by the sound of it be the one that members of the science class have, not a PhD, but it curiously represents both an award that's equivalent, beyond, and less than a PhD depending on who awards it and how it's awarded -- and is curiously often the degree of choice for medical doctors and other health practitioners but almost never the degree for chemists, biologists, physicists or other sciences.

Most people don't even know there are doctorate degrees other than PhD.

ghaff5• 6 years ago

Most people don't even know there are doctorate degrees other than PhD

I think you sort of answered why institutions often award a PhD rather than ScD/DSc/etc. (And there are some related examples related to Masters degrees.) If there's an industry job opening for a PhD, how many ScD resumes end up getting filtered out because the candidate doesn't have the "right" degree? I've definitely heard this type of thing on occasion from graduates who don't or at least didn't award the standard degrees. Even my undergraduate degree isn't quite "normal" (SB vs. BS) so I use the standard form on my resume not that it matters at this point.

hanoz• 6 years ago

These epidemiologists have some strange priorities in life. Only about 3% of them would have, if needed, attended a wedding or funeral. Ten times as many would have gone for a haircut.

Pfhreak2• 6 years ago

Maybe they are better at assessing risk and understand the risk involved in attending a wedding or funeral.

dzdt• 6 years ago

A haircut exposes them to probably one person in close contact, with precautions like masks. A wedding or funeral has potentially a large number of close contacts and presents ethical issues of supporting the event even if the epidemiologist participating will take personal precautions.

PaulRobinson• 6 years ago

All this tells you is that they believe weddings and funerals are likely higher risk than getting a haircut. I would agree that's a sensible assessment.

ghaff5• 6 years ago

The question though was what they had personally done.

I am a bit surprised haircut was so high, not because a haircut is likely especially risky but because--to me--it seems so unnecessary, especially without being out and about a lot. Going to a dentist for a cleaning or whatever is maybe higher risk (more contact but medical professionals) but it also seems more important to stick with your schedule than getting your hair cut is.

(Their answers also are presumably influenced by how frequently they would normally do the activities in question as well as the degree to which they're available at the moment. During normal times I'd be much more likely to have recently flown someplace than gone to a wedding or even a live sporting event.)

subpixel• 6 years ago

If a funeral involved just two people, as does a haircut, more may have been down to attend.

haltingproblem• 6 years ago

Their predictions of future human behavior are bunk. First, look at the heterogeneity in behavior across the epidemiologists - indoor dining, hanging out without social distancing and going to gyms! This lack of consensus indicates that epidemiologists do not think alike and hence that field is not a settled science. Second, life has mostly returned the normal in the far east where they have successfully contained the virus so far. This is before a vaccine. Human beings have short memories otherwise humans would not indulge in repeated destructive behavior on an individual (alcoholism) or societal level (bubbles, mass hysteria). Finally, after past pandemics like the Spanish flu, life did return to normal. The great depression more scarred human behavior than the Spanish flu ever did.

Epidemiologists are essential during a pandemic to help us understand the virus, the properties of its spread and build models of human behavior along with risks/costs. We need to factor in their input along with advice from others. However, the notion that Epidemiologists are the best mediators of our behavior during and after this epidemic has been falsified. Why?

Exhibit 1: Masking

The consensus at the beginning of the pandemic and through most of the summer was that masks are not essential because we lack the evidence of it. Folks like Taleb et.al, Zeynep, Balaji, Howard et.al in the US who understand complex systems argued for masks back in Jan/Feb. This skepticism of masking because of lack of evidence probably bumped up death count by 50-90%.

Exhibit 2: Epidemiology Models

The models have been greatly off and as a modeler in an unrelated field, I could see the heterogeneity in the model predictions across models and intra-model volatility. When a bunch of models differ, the question is not which is right but are they all wrong? A lot of the models like the one from Imperial had predictions that moved by a lot and never converged to the observed behavior.

crusty• 6 years ago

"...look at the heterogeneity in behavior across the epidemiologists - indoor dining, hanging out without social distancing and going to gyms! This lack of consensus indicates that epidemiologists do not think alike and hence that field is not a settled science.

Scientists exhibiting different personal behaviors has very minimal connection to scientific consensus. Is settled science that smoking causes lung disease and yet some doctors smoke. Just because you know what the "safe" behavior is doesn't mean you're going to do it. And if the question is, which of these have you done and not which of these do you think is safe to do, then the question isn't about best practices at all.

How 700 Epidemiologists Are Living Now, and What They Think Is Next

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