And then there are confounding factors. Seasonality: these viruses are Winter viruses, they come as Winter starts, peak in the bleak mid-Winter, then wane as Winter moves towards Spring. Gompertz curve: the virus follows a particular trajectory, low activity, sudden exponential rise, peak, then gradual decline. This is due to the virus rapidly infecting and causing serious disease in the most susceptible but as it moves through the population there are fewer and fewer new victims, so activity falls away.
You can see both seasonality, and Gompertz curve on the September to January part of the figure in the article.
When this natural decline is observed, ‘triumph’ is declared for lockdowns, masks, vaccination.
But the same trajectory was observed before we had vaccines in places like Sweden where there was no lockdown, no masks. And comparing various territories there is no difference irrespective of what measures were taken, how strict, for how long or when, or levels of vaccination or when the programmes started.
What characterises this whole panicdemic, is the determined way evidence from observation has been ignored.
You nailed it! There's a reason we 'seasonality theorists' have been able to predict virus movement since the summer of 2020. In spring 2021, the jabmakers literally took credit for spring. But, as you say, we saw the same drastic drop in 2020 without any vaccines at all.
The virus follows the Hope-Simpson predictions, which not only predict WHEN the curves will happen, but WHERE. In places where it's so hot in the summer that people gather indoors, you see a summer spike. (This is presumably the case with South Africa, as I see they have classic 'double hump')
In northern states, the virus for the most part disappears after spring until fall rolls around. In southern states, you see the 'double hump' like they have in South Africa.
Last spring Fauci claimed to have no idea why cases were continuing to drop in Texas during the spring. We were not only explaining this was seasonality, but warning of the summer spike that would hit the sunbelt (and only the sunbelt) once temperatures got hot enough. And that's exactly what happened. Then we said the virus would taper off naturally (no rules) until the winter wave crashed over the whole country. That's exactly what happened.
Nothing we do trumps the seasonality of the virus. Luckily we'll be in a long lull until the summer sunbelt spike -- and by then the politicians should be paying attention to other things.
"In places where it's so hot in the summer that people gather indoors"
Note this is not an alternate 'seasonality' hypothesis, that's mainstream epidemiology. And your own wording here implies that lockdowns would of course work – if people are clustered together less indoors in working places, restaurants etc. then spread would be less.
To get traction in science, you need testable hypotheses of course. You also need physicality – mechanisms how things work. These articles are written as if you have a radical alternative, but these follow-up comments suggest you are accepting the germ theory of disease framing, i.e. a viral agent that jumps from human to human. If this is true, it can't really be possible that "nothing we do trumps the seasonality of the virus". And in fact the radically different outcomes in terms of death and hospitalization of vaccinated vs. unvaccinated are a quick falsification of the idea that "nothing we do trumps".
I think it is the mainstream view that there is probably some environmental/seasonal factors, but you seem to be conflating that with a stronger hypothesis that seasonality is the *only* factor, though in drilling in you seem to acknowledge (above) that things like human proximity are more the driving factors.
Have you been reading along with the many published scientific studies on seasonality? They tend to find what you'd expect in my reading, e.g. (Zoran et al Aug21)
"In conclusion seasonal variability of climate and air pollution parameters can explain some seasonality and important aspects in the COVID-19 disease transmission (Rahimi et al., 2021), but epidemiological measures of social distance are essential"
Do you have a model making specific predictions for say spring and summer? Happy to bookmark and follow along.
Btw, saying "I don't know" when you don't know specifics behind some result or another, as you criticize Fauci for doing, is actually a long-respected scientific approach.
Lockdowns don't work because people still go to work, especially in hospitals, where many people get covid to begin with. As an extreme example, shooting everybody in the face would cut down covid transmission, too, but some things aren't worth the cost. The level of lockdown that could 'work' would basically be welding people in their homes. And even then, the virus is waiting as soon as you lift the lockdowns and let people out.
Most of the predictions that the 'seasonality theorists' have made were on Twitter before I was banned. If you know of a way to download tweets and search them, I'm certain we'd find numerous examples of us predicting virus activity. That's what you're missing. We're not just taking credit now -- we predicted exactly when and where the virus would appear this summer AND this winter. Seasonality may not be the 'only' factor, but it's the factor that trumps everything else we do. That's why places with no rules have curves that look like neighboring places with crazy rules.
We have years and years of data at this point. It all points to the same thing: Virus gonna virus.
Well some of these things definitely aren't true, like the implied inevitability of "the virus is waiting as soon as you lift the lockdowns and let people out". E.g. for omicron there was probably 20x more virus around in my local county at the top of an omicron-like wave in a region vs. on the other side of it, which must be significant if germ theory holds.
Suggest trying to publish serious work vs. twitter. Perhaps peer review is just gate-keeping, but perhaps the feedback you'd get trying to do it would be significant.
"That's why places with no rules have curves that look like neighboring places with crazy rules"
I hear the hypothesis, I'll keep an eye out for evidence that it is true. There is continual evidence indicating it isn't true, and the hypothesis continues to sound unphysical (how can the virus not care whether it has a new target host in proximity to jump to?)
There are simpler competing explanations for selected cases where regions with different policy profiles have similar curves, like (a) the number of factors driving spread are large and so it is hard to test just one aspect, (b) people often decide to isolate independent of whether there are rules doing so, which makes testing the effect of the rules difficult.
Distinguishing correlation from causation is difficult in studying lockdown, so I tend to be skeptical of 'we compared state X to Y and we see this' type analysis. You can generally get any conclusion you want by selection of X and Y.
This is why we tell you what's going to happen before it happens. Now we start a long decline until the summer spike hits again in the sunbelt. This will be true regardless of the covid rules that a place has.
Surely if there are places with rules doing significantly better than their neighbors with no rules, you can point them out? https://imgur.com/a/rhjjweY shows five neighboring states with vastly different rules and roughly the same curves. I can recreate maps like this for the entire country If this isn't seasonality, what is it? Did everybody just start taking it seriously all at once?
The model you're asking about is Hope-Simpson. It's not advanced stuff at all, and thinking Fauci doesn't know about it is crazy. Especially after we've read his e-mails.
btw if you have a link to what Fauci said about "Hope-Simpson" in his emails I'd be happy to read.
Nobody claims Fauci doesn't know about seasonality questions. Everybody knows about seasonality questions. Though I think it is probably common in the contrarian community to not be familiar with the relevant science lit.
Then why do we have to be the ones pointing out the seasonality and patterns of the virus? Why isn't he up there doing it? Instead we get "I don't know why cases are going down".
Maybe we should listen to the people who are right?
"shows five neighboring states with vastly different rules and roughly the same curves"
Very roughly, the heights of curves can be 3x different. But again there are actually zero controls here. Why did NYC spike first? Because that's where the virus was seeded. Someone could post a comparison of NYC in that period to Chicago after NYC was first to move towards interventions, and claim it is proof that interventions *cause* covid. In fact many make those sorts of comparisons and I think the link here is a variant of this sort of reasoning.
Interventions are primarily about protecting lives and hospital capacity, not pretending they will make waves go away.
To be clear I am mostly interested in this academically. I think it has been the right choice to avoid lockdowns in the past year with vaccines, and hospitals are (barely) holding through omicron. Regardless of discussions like this, if future waves threaten hospital functioning you will likely see emergency responses including closures simply because it becomes politically impossible to do nothing if you are losing your society's health care capacity.
NYC 'spiked' first because that's where we started testing. The virus was already all over the country by Christmas 2019, and testing of bloodwork from that timeframe proves it.
They also sped up their curve by infecting all the at-risk at once. And even then, during the point of lowest immunity, the hospitals weren't overrun.
Incidentally, I went back onto my Twitter to try to dig up some predictions. Not only can I not download my data, I can only see Tweets from the last 5 months or so, and NONE of the pictures that go with the Tweets. Interesting, huh? :)
I'm not finding a lot on Hope-Simpson as an epidemiological model online. Are you just using it as a term that refers to seasonality? I don't think the original Hope-Simpson topic is this anti-epidemiological notion of "virus gonna virus it's purely seasonal".
"This will be true regardless of the covid rules that a place has"
There are two different questions – when will the spikes happen, and how big. The point of interventions generally is to lessen the size of the spike. Conceptually a given spike will the people who match a profile based on their availability to be infected and immunity status in the window of the infection. So just saying there will be a spike and it will go up and down is evading the testability requirement for this aspect of the model.
The sun belt prediction is testable.
I just spot checked Arizona out of curiosity, their larger spikes have both been in December, with a mild rise in August – overall more consistent with the epidemiology models of new variant waves (Delta in August, Omicron in Dec).
...exactly as predicted by Hope-Simpson. The chart is here if you haven't seen it already. Every state follows the predicted path. The rules make no difference at all.
I suggest adding Iowa to the graph if you can. Iowa has emulated Florida as far as no masks, no more lockdowns and no vax mandates. I would love to see how Iowa compares. It should not be overlooked but it often is. I think people forget it borders Illinois.
I live in the Iowa Quad Cities a two mile trip across the Mississippi River from IL. Relentless attacks by the skyfallers last winter caused Gov. Reynolds to cave and institute a short lived mask mandate but she quickly recovered her senses and even banned mandates for public institutions. The difference between here and two miles away is legitimately night and day. Thankful to live here but deeply saddened by all restaurants, breweries, shops, etc. I haven't patronized in two years, many of which I couldn't visit again if I wanted to as they didn't survive. Much of IL was already a shit hole but what Pritzger has done since is nothing short of criminal.
And all the 'wisdom' of all the 'leaders' put together couldn't piece together that people will simply travel from IL to your city just across the border.
And then there are confounding factors. Seasonality: these viruses are Winter viruses, they come as Winter starts, peak in the bleak mid-Winter, then wane as Winter moves towards Spring. Gompertz curve: the virus follows a particular trajectory, low activity, sudden exponential rise, peak, then gradual decline. This is due to the virus rapidly infecting and causing serious disease in the most susceptible but as it moves through the population there are fewer and fewer new victims, so activity falls away.
You can see both seasonality, and Gompertz curve on the September to January part of the figure in the article.
When this natural decline is observed, ‘triumph’ is declared for lockdowns, masks, vaccination.
But the same trajectory was observed before we had vaccines in places like Sweden where there was no lockdown, no masks. And comparing various territories there is no difference irrespective of what measures were taken, how strict, for how long or when, or levels of vaccination or when the programmes started.
What characterises this whole panicdemic, is the determined way evidence from observation has been ignored.
You nailed it! There's a reason we 'seasonality theorists' have been able to predict virus movement since the summer of 2020. In spring 2021, the jabmakers literally took credit for spring. But, as you say, we saw the same drastic drop in 2020 without any vaccines at all.
In this framing, what does 'seasonality' predict other than curves going up and down and taking credit for them?
Just curious, how did Omicron spike in South African summer and shortly after in North American winter?
The virus follows the Hope-Simpson predictions, which not only predict WHEN the curves will happen, but WHERE. In places where it's so hot in the summer that people gather indoors, you see a summer spike. (This is presumably the case with South Africa, as I see they have classic 'double hump')
In northern states, the virus for the most part disappears after spring until fall rolls around. In southern states, you see the 'double hump' like they have in South Africa.
Last spring Fauci claimed to have no idea why cases were continuing to drop in Texas during the spring. We were not only explaining this was seasonality, but warning of the summer spike that would hit the sunbelt (and only the sunbelt) once temperatures got hot enough. And that's exactly what happened. Then we said the virus would taper off naturally (no rules) until the winter wave crashed over the whole country. That's exactly what happened.
Nothing we do trumps the seasonality of the virus. Luckily we'll be in a long lull until the summer sunbelt spike -- and by then the politicians should be paying attention to other things.
https://simulationcommander.substack.com/p/seasonality-a-story-in-pictures
https://simulationcommander.substack.com/p/seasonality-in-pictures-part-ii
These go over it in more detail.
Appreciate the response and links.
"In places where it's so hot in the summer that people gather indoors"
Note this is not an alternate 'seasonality' hypothesis, that's mainstream epidemiology. And your own wording here implies that lockdowns would of course work – if people are clustered together less indoors in working places, restaurants etc. then spread would be less.
To get traction in science, you need testable hypotheses of course. You also need physicality – mechanisms how things work. These articles are written as if you have a radical alternative, but these follow-up comments suggest you are accepting the germ theory of disease framing, i.e. a viral agent that jumps from human to human. If this is true, it can't really be possible that "nothing we do trumps the seasonality of the virus". And in fact the radically different outcomes in terms of death and hospitalization of vaccinated vs. unvaccinated are a quick falsification of the idea that "nothing we do trumps".
I think it is the mainstream view that there is probably some environmental/seasonal factors, but you seem to be conflating that with a stronger hypothesis that seasonality is the *only* factor, though in drilling in you seem to acknowledge (above) that things like human proximity are more the driving factors.
Have you been reading along with the many published scientific studies on seasonality? They tend to find what you'd expect in my reading, e.g. (Zoran et al Aug21)
"In conclusion seasonal variability of climate and air pollution parameters can explain some seasonality and important aspects in the COVID-19 disease transmission (Rahimi et al., 2021), but epidemiological measures of social distance are essential"
Do you have a model making specific predictions for say spring and summer? Happy to bookmark and follow along.
Btw, saying "I don't know" when you don't know specifics behind some result or another, as you criticize Fauci for doing, is actually a long-respected scientific approach.
Thanks for the comment!
Lockdowns don't work because people still go to work, especially in hospitals, where many people get covid to begin with. As an extreme example, shooting everybody in the face would cut down covid transmission, too, but some things aren't worth the cost. The level of lockdown that could 'work' would basically be welding people in their homes. And even then, the virus is waiting as soon as you lift the lockdowns and let people out.
Most of the predictions that the 'seasonality theorists' have made were on Twitter before I was banned. If you know of a way to download tweets and search them, I'm certain we'd find numerous examples of us predicting virus activity. That's what you're missing. We're not just taking credit now -- we predicted exactly when and where the virus would appear this summer AND this winter. Seasonality may not be the 'only' factor, but it's the factor that trumps everything else we do. That's why places with no rules have curves that look like neighboring places with crazy rules.
We have years and years of data at this point. It all points to the same thing: Virus gonna virus.
Well some of these things definitely aren't true, like the implied inevitability of "the virus is waiting as soon as you lift the lockdowns and let people out". E.g. for omicron there was probably 20x more virus around in my local county at the top of an omicron-like wave in a region vs. on the other side of it, which must be significant if germ theory holds.
Suggest trying to publish serious work vs. twitter. Perhaps peer review is just gate-keeping, but perhaps the feedback you'd get trying to do it would be significant.
"That's why places with no rules have curves that look like neighboring places with crazy rules"
I hear the hypothesis, I'll keep an eye out for evidence that it is true. There is continual evidence indicating it isn't true, and the hypothesis continues to sound unphysical (how can the virus not care whether it has a new target host in proximity to jump to?)
There are simpler competing explanations for selected cases where regions with different policy profiles have similar curves, like (a) the number of factors driving spread are large and so it is hard to test just one aspect, (b) people often decide to isolate independent of whether there are rules doing so, which makes testing the effect of the rules difficult.
Distinguishing correlation from causation is difficult in studying lockdown, so I tend to be skeptical of 'we compared state X to Y and we see this' type analysis. You can generally get any conclusion you want by selection of X and Y.
Cheers.
This is why we tell you what's going to happen before it happens. Now we start a long decline until the summer spike hits again in the sunbelt. This will be true regardless of the covid rules that a place has.
Surely if there are places with rules doing significantly better than their neighbors with no rules, you can point them out? https://imgur.com/a/rhjjweY shows five neighboring states with vastly different rules and roughly the same curves. I can recreate maps like this for the entire country If this isn't seasonality, what is it? Did everybody just start taking it seriously all at once?
The model you're asking about is Hope-Simpson. It's not advanced stuff at all, and thinking Fauci doesn't know about it is crazy. Especially after we've read his e-mails.
btw if you have a link to what Fauci said about "Hope-Simpson" in his emails I'd be happy to read.
Nobody claims Fauci doesn't know about seasonality questions. Everybody knows about seasonality questions. Though I think it is probably common in the contrarian community to not be familiar with the relevant science lit.
Then why do we have to be the ones pointing out the seasonality and patterns of the virus? Why isn't he up there doing it? Instead we get "I don't know why cases are going down".
Maybe we should listen to the people who are right?
"shows five neighboring states with vastly different rules and roughly the same curves"
Very roughly, the heights of curves can be 3x different. But again there are actually zero controls here. Why did NYC spike first? Because that's where the virus was seeded. Someone could post a comparison of NYC in that period to Chicago after NYC was first to move towards interventions, and claim it is proof that interventions *cause* covid. In fact many make those sorts of comparisons and I think the link here is a variant of this sort of reasoning.
Interventions are primarily about protecting lives and hospital capacity, not pretending they will make waves go away.
To be clear I am mostly interested in this academically. I think it has been the right choice to avoid lockdowns in the past year with vaccines, and hospitals are (barely) holding through omicron. Regardless of discussions like this, if future waves threaten hospital functioning you will likely see emergency responses including closures simply because it becomes politically impossible to do nothing if you are losing your society's health care capacity.
NYC 'spiked' first because that's where we started testing. The virus was already all over the country by Christmas 2019, and testing of bloodwork from that timeframe proves it.
They also sped up their curve by infecting all the at-risk at once. And even then, during the point of lowest immunity, the hospitals weren't overrun.
Incidentally, I went back onto my Twitter to try to dig up some predictions. Not only can I not download my data, I can only see Tweets from the last 5 months or so, and NONE of the pictures that go with the Tweets. Interesting, huh? :)
I'm not finding a lot on Hope-Simpson as an epidemiological model online. Are you just using it as a term that refers to seasonality? I don't think the original Hope-Simpson topic is this anti-epidemiological notion of "virus gonna virus it's purely seasonal".
"This will be true regardless of the covid rules that a place has"
There are two different questions – when will the spikes happen, and how big. The point of interventions generally is to lessen the size of the spike. Conceptually a given spike will the people who match a profile based on their availability to be infected and immunity status in the window of the infection. So just saying there will be a spike and it will go up and down is evading the testability requirement for this aspect of the model.
The sun belt prediction is testable.
I just spot checked Arizona out of curiosity, their larger spikes have both been in December, with a mild rise in August – overall more consistent with the epidemiology models of new variant waves (Delta in August, Omicron in Dec).
...exactly as predicted by Hope-Simpson. The chart is here if you haven't seen it already. Every state follows the predicted path. The rules make no difference at all.
https://simulationcommander.substack.com/p/great-news-seasonality-still-works
I suggest adding Iowa to the graph if you can. Iowa has emulated Florida as far as no masks, no more lockdowns and no vax mandates. I would love to see how Iowa compares. It should not be overlooked but it often is. I think people forget it borders Illinois.
I live in the Iowa Quad Cities a two mile trip across the Mississippi River from IL. Relentless attacks by the skyfallers last winter caused Gov. Reynolds to cave and institute a short lived mask mandate but she quickly recovered her senses and even banned mandates for public institutions. The difference between here and two miles away is legitimately night and day. Thankful to live here but deeply saddened by all restaurants, breweries, shops, etc. I haven't patronized in two years, many of which I couldn't visit again if I wanted to as they didn't survive. Much of IL was already a shit hole but what Pritzger has done since is nothing short of criminal.
I’m a native Iowan so I’ve been paying attention to your Governor who has been pretty darn impressive through this.
And all the 'wisdom' of all the 'leaders' put together couldn't piece together that people will simply travel from IL to your city just across the border.
https://imgur.com/a/rhjjweY
Surprise! They also follow the trend line.
You can filter for any states you like and look at cases, deaths, or hospitalizations here: https://public.tableau.com/views/CovidDashboardsbyTCoddington/KeyMetricsoverTime?:language=en-US&:display_count=n&:origin=viz_share_link
Best viewed on a larger screen
Thank you! Quite lovely and useful 👏👏👏
Excellent thank you
https://twitter.com/VanVoorheesVII/status/1486037195395932166?s=20&t=UsNqpO4tq9LCcy187sz4Wg
Why, it's like the rules don't even matter!
Must have been the masks then?
https://nakedemperor.substack.com/