Thursday Throughput: Fetal Gene Edition

Michael Siegel

Michael Siegel is an astronomer living in Pennsylvania. He blogs at his own site, and has written a novel.

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36 Responses

  1. Brandon Berg says:

    On the very same day that ThTh4 was published, Scientific American plumbed new depths with this breathtakingly ignorant smear of the recently deceased E. O. Wilson. It’s pretty terrible throughout, as is to be expected, but the author, Monica McLemore, really went above and beyond in bringing shame upon herself, Scientific American, and the UCSF with this gem:

    First, the so-called normal distribution of statistics assumes that there are default humans who serve as the standard that the rest of us can be accurately measured against.

    Report

  2. Jaybird says:

    ThTh2: The recent changes in CDC guidance have also received criticism from the pro-lockdown people. There are a bunch of different forms of the criticisms but the one that first comes to mind is “You can get Covid at the beach, in the park, in restaurants, at concerts, and in grocery stores but office jobs are safe!” (Some wags might point out “Oh, and Mostly Peaceful Protests are okay as well.”)

    What should have been done? Well, the CDC’s messaging has been horrible. Absolutely awful. I have no idea how messaging about risk ought to have been done, but it’s difficult to imagine worse ways than the way that it was done over the last couple of years.Report

  3. Oscar Gordon says:

    ThTh4: It’s been a while since I paid for a subscription to it, and articles like this is one of the reasons I stopped.Report

  4. Mike, I know there’s no way for you to know this, but actually, the NIPT tests are a godsend. They are freaking fabulous, I consider them to be the greatest thing since sliced bread, and if companies are at present unable to deliver on predicting some of the more rare conditions, well, technology marches on and I bet the tech will be there within the next 3-5 years. Parents will not stop using these tests because they’re AMAZING and wonderful and create so much more benefit vs potential harm, that I am literally baffled by the existence of this hit piece.

    The previous tests they used, the triple/quad screen, were riddled with false positives. Nearly every woman over 35 got a false positive on them and doctors never bothered to explain this to anyone. There were millions of unnecessary amnios and CVS because of those tests. Two of my clients lost genetically normal babies after a false positive on the old tests (due to the unavoidable risks of amnio/CVS). People who did not receive proper counseling had abortions rather than bothering to do amnio and most of those babies were genetically normal. I know of people over 35 who had 2 and 3 abortions before being told that most women over 35 had a false positive on the triple/quad screens. I cannot tell you the number of people who have come to me in despair, convinced that their baby had Downs when they didn’t because of those older tests. They sucked and were terrible and the NIPT replaces them, and does an absolutely phenomenal job of it, BTW. Those old tests killed babies, NIPT tests save them.

    The NIPT does away with far, far more false positives and unnecessary amnios than it causes. It does away with far, far more heartbreak and angst than it causes. Whoever wrote this article did not do their homework and was trying to produce clickbait in light of the Theranos verdict. Shameful and absolutely terrible bottom of the barrel scientific journalism.Report

  5. Chip Daniels says:

    No account of the Covid era in America will be accurate without acknowledging the role of the Republican Party going all in on the anti-vax hysteria. More than any other development, this is what has brought us to this point where such a large percentage of people reject both masks and vaccine and belligerently demand to circulate among other people.Report

  6. Pinky says:

    ThTh5 — I found Surowiecki’s list to be a reasonable starting point, but I’m struck by a few caveats:

    4 – This appears to be true, but I don’t know if the data demonstrates it conclusively. I’m not saying it’s wrong.
    5 – I disagree with the second half of this.
    6 – While limiting the spread prevented covid deaths, it had a lot of unintended consequences that shouldn’t be ignored.
    7 – I’m not comfortable blaming the government without reviewing what was known and possible at any given time.
    9 – Did the CDC director say that? I’m glad I wasn’t listening.Report

    • Oscar Gordon in reply to Pinky says:

      7 – Short of buying them up from China (assuming China wanted to sell us their supply), I’m not sure what the government could have done. We don’t want our government stockpiling such things (waste of tax payer money, doncha know), and there was no financial incentive to maintain a domestic supply chain.Report

      • Recall that there was (probably still is) a national strategic reserve of ventilators. Many/most of them were old and had not been properly maintained, so were unusable. Masks have use-by dates. A government stockpile would probably have been largely out of date, absent an ongoing program to replace the ones that had already or were about to age out.Report

        • Oscar Gordon in reply to Michael Cain says:

          Ergo, waste of taxpayer money.

          About the best the government could have done is subsidize a local production base so that it could be competitive with the masks from China. But that would require a considerable bit of foresight on the part of the government.Report

          • JS in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

            IIRC, one local manufacturer of either vents or PPE called up the WH early in the pandemic and asked for help to get another line running. They got ignored.

            It would have been slack capacity outside of a pandemic, and basically all they wanted was a contract for the Feds to purchase the new line’s output at a cost they’d basically defray the investment of what would unused capacity for years post-COVID — so like 10% more than their previous costs.

            This being the Trump WH, and this at the height of the “It’s a blue state problem, let them die” view from Kush and Co, they were roundly ignored.Report

    • PD Shaw in reply to Pinky says:

      9 — I don’t recall the CDC director ever saying that the vaccinated couldn’t transmit disease. Biden has said it a few times though:

      https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/dec/22/joe-biden/biden-says-vaccinated-people-cant-spread-covid-19-/Report

  7. Kazzy says:

    Where did the CDC change their recommendations with regards to cloth masks? It wasn’t in the link provided. To date I’ve only seen one article on CNN that cited two doctors, one of whom worked for the outlet.

    Do we have studies on the effectiveness of cloth masks for Omicron?Report

    • Philip H in reply to Kazzy says:

      Care to share the citations you work from?Report

      • Philip H in reply to Philip H says:

        That HEPA study is pre-print, meaning not yet peer reviewed. A number of such studies on a number of COVID related topics in the last two years have had to be retracted after peer review because they don’t hold up. While HEPA filters (properly used) may indeed be part of the solution, this isn’t saying that just yet, and it make no statements on effectiveness of masks as its not a study on masks.

        Your mask study – while fully peer reviewed – is over a year old. There have been other more recent peer reviewed studies with different conclusions. And more importantly this study says the masks provide some protection.

        Which means we shouldn’t toss them, especially with so many individual states ignoring even modest social distancing guidelines, to say nothing of low vaccination rates in many areas and lack of air filtration upgrades. We need every tool in the tool box because a bunch of partially effective tools are still collectively better then no tools at all.Report

    • Mark Grant in reply to Kazzy says:

      https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/community/ventilation.html#refphf
      Effective controls exist that are 99.97% effective.
      Why talk about ineffectual ones?Report

    • Kazzy in reply to Kazzy says:

      To be clear, I’m not questioning the effectiveness of masks.

      But I haven’t yet seen an official recommendation that we should abandon cloth masks for K/N95s. The article implies that was offered by the CDC but it wasn’t mentioned in the link provided.

      My girlfriend’s school has shifted to requiring the K/N95s and it is causing major issues there, including availability, costs, and parent pushback.

      My school has not changed our mask rules.

      We are in the same city so our regs aren’t different.Report

      • Jaybird in reply to Kazzy says:

        An official recommendation? Would a study done by Nature qualify or are you specifically talking about the CDC (or similar)?

        Here’s the CDC. It’s okay with cloth masks.

        Here’s the study in Nature.

        Here’s the paragraph that I excerpted last time:

        Surprisingly, wearing an unwashed single layer t-shirt (U-SL-T) mask while breathing yielded a significant increase in measured particle emission rates compared to no mask, increasing to a median of 0.61 particles/s. The rates for some participants (F1 and F4) exceeded 1 particle/s, representing a 384% increase from the median no-mask value. Wearing a double-layer cotton t-shirt (U-DL-T) mask had no statistically significant effect on the particle emission rate, with comparable median and range to that observed with no mask.

        Is that an official recommendation or not?

        (I’ve also heard people argue that the study itself was “sus” and we should therefore ignore it.)Report

        • Kazzy in reply to Jaybird says:

          Here, I’m asking specifically for the CDC because it is what was offered.

          “ There has been some smug commentary from the COVID-19 skeptic corner on recent changes in CDC pandemic guidance. But these changes make complete sense given what we now know about the dominant omicron variant.

          The new recommendation against cloth masks is because, while cloth masks were fine against wild COVID and delta, omicron is far too infectious. Only KN-95’s or surgical masks will do.”

          Where is this “new recommendation” coming from?Report

  8. Kazzy says:

    If the tests are 99.9% accurate, why not run them twice? What are the odds of two false positives in that scenario?Report

    • Pinky in reply to Kazzy says:

      So much depends on what causes a false positive or negative. Was it a mix-up of a sample, or someone sneezing on it, or a lack of sensitivity to a low level of what’s being tested for, or a false positive caused by the presence of something similar? Are you checking for the presence of a thing, or the presence of a common effect of the thing? How much variability is there in natural levels of the thing?Report

    • Motoconomist in reply to Kazzy says:

      So the tests can say 99.9% accurate, but when the underlying condition is rare, you are going to get alot of true negatives, so what really matters is the false positive rate [ false positive / (true positives plus false positives)], which is most certainly not 99.9%

      Its entirely possible for a test to have a 75% false positive rate but be overall 99.9% accurate. That’s the issue.Report

      • Brandon Berg in reply to Motoconomist says:

        I believe that false positive rate is more commonly defined as the likelihood of a false sample testing positive, rather than the likelihood that a positive test was incorrect.

        Here it doesn’t matter so much because the term is used as defined in the comment itself, but it’s worth keeping in mind when seeing the term in other contexts.Report

  9. Philip H says:

    I hate it when a good troll thread with fantastic responses by me get appropriately moderated.
    That said, a reminder on masks:

    A conclusion can be reached based on the current studies: correctly wearing masks of all kinds, despite their different designs, functions and effectiveness, will to a large degree reduce the overall risks of COVID‐19 infection and enhance general protection from coronavirus.

    https://www.pnas.org/content/118/4/e2014564118

    Community mask wearing substantially reduces transmission of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in 2 ways. First, masks prevent infected persons from exposing others to SARS-CoV-2 by blocking exhalation of virus-containing droplets into the air (termed source control). Second, masks protect uninfected wearers. Masks form a barrier to large respiratory droplets that could land on exposed mucous membranes of the eye, nose, and mouth. Masks can also partially filter out small droplets and particles from inhaled air. Multiple layers of fabric and fabrics with higher thread counts improve filtration. However, the observed effectiveness of cloth masks to protect the wearer is lower than their effectiveness for source control,3 and the filtration capacity of cloth masks can be highly dependent on design, fit, and materials used. Standards for cloth masks are needed to help consumers select marketed products.

    https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2776536

    This systematic review and meta-analysis suggests that several personal protective and social measures, including handwashing, mask wearing, and physical distancing are associated with reductions in the incidence covid-19.

    https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj-2021-068302

    None of these suggest wearing masks by themselves, but if you live, as I do, in a place where vaccination rates remain low, case counts remain high (and increasing due to omicron), social distancing is non-existent, schools are fully open, and most businesses are as well, then mask wearing needs to be part of your ongoing personal defense against COVID.Report