Thomas House 热爱科学 @TAH_Sci Twitter profile | Pikagi

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Thomas House 热爱科学

@TAH_Sci

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Professor of Mathematical Sciences. Views own & open for revision. Mainly COVID plus other modelling & data science in health.

Manchester, UK

https://t.co/mlxA9TxxSD

Joined September 2012

Don't wanna be here? Send us removal request.

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@TAH_Sci

Thomas House 热爱科学

5 days

New preprint! "Epidemiological and phylogenetic analyses of public SARS-CoV-2 data from Malawi." We look at the COVID-19 pandemic in Malawi, quantifying key epidemiological parameters and seeing some evidence for interaction between space and strain.

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@TAH_Sci

Thomas House 热爱科学

3 years

I started a pessimism jar - kind of like a swear jar where you put money in if you have negative thoughts. It's already half empty.

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@TAH_Sci

Thomas House 热爱科学

3 years

It's easy to forget what the sheer scale of global health inequalities is. To give a rough idea, the total UK coronavirus pandemic mortality is close to the number of African children under 5 who die of infectious diseases every month in a typical year.

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Thomas House 热爱科学

3 years

Just think for a second how a 20yo delivery driver who's spent a year in a bedsit for a disease they have negligible risk from is going to feel if they can't travel while vaccinated 70yo's who had a comfortable lockdown internet shopping from their garden jet off to Tuscany.

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Thomas House 热爱科学

2 years

There's a real chance 🤞 that we're through the most concentrated phase of what this two-year-old Tweet called the "1st wave". There is zero chance that we're anywhere near through the other three "wave"s. And these require resources, not restrictions or rationing.

@VectorSting

Victor Tseng

4 years

As our friends and colleagues brave the font lines, we must also get ready for a series of aftershocks. It's very hard to plan this far ahead while we're in survival mode. We must prepare early and strategize our response to the collateral damage of #COVID19

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Thomas House 热爱科学

2 years

The claim here that we're not getting herd immunity is bizarre - the BA.1 and BA.2 waves stopped growing because we reached herd immunity to them; whatever one thinks about policy that's just how infection works at the population level.

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People who caught Covid in first wave get ‘no immune boost’ from Omicron

Study of triple vaccinated people also says Omicron infection does little to reduce chance of catching variant again

www.theguardian.com

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Thomas House 热爱科学

3 years

So as most numerate people can see, it's pretty plausible that delta will generate a significant third wave, and we just might want to make a plan for that.

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@TAH_Sci

Thomas House 热爱科学

2 years

On Monkeypox: The scenario to fear is *not* a global pandemic like for coronaviruses or influenza, but rather something like the 2014 Ebola outbreak that caused disruption and death for a long time (and is arguably ongoing) but without infection of a large % of the population.

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@TAH_Sci

Thomas House 热爱科学

2 years

So "multiplex" rapid tests are here and they cost a fiver commercially! Will be interesting to see what this pretty amazing tech does - hopefully will benefit infection control amongst vulnerable not be oversold to "worried well".

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@TAH_Sci

Thomas House 热爱科学

3 years

Goodness, the number of lefty blue hearts who think that Matt Hancock, Rory Stewart and Dominic Cummings just lacked the courage in the face of a committee of mild-mannered scientists to lock down 5 days, 4 hours and 29 minutes earlier and save 124,271 lives is quite something.

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@TAH_Sci

Thomas House 热爱科学

2 years

In case people are interested, we have already returned to the situation in March 2020 where no group outside Imperial has sufficient resources to respond in a timely way if there were a major outbreak and so UK policy would again be informed by just one model if that happened.

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@TAH_Sci

Thomas House 热爱科学

2 years

Three peer reviewers walk into a coffee shop. Reviewer 2 says, "I'd have set this joke in a pub."

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Thomas House 热爱科学

2 years

@apsmunro Would you rather HIV a seatbelt like measles, learn the lessons from Asia while standard public health measures, eugenics herd immunity or hopium kill Granny New Zealand take things seriously like unethical? Did you think of any of that before tweeting????

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@TAH_Sci

Thomas House 热爱科学

2 years

This is everything wrong with modern academia - hyped on social media, ignoring the prior commentary by subject experts, claiming causation from association. Embarrassing.

@PWGTennant

Peter Tennant

2 years

Our new study confirms the tragic consequences of delaying the UK's first lockdown. If it started 1 week earlier, there would have been 20k-35k fewer deaths. The required duration, for the same exit incidence, would also have halved from 69 to 35 days 1/6

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Thomas House 热爱科学

10 months

This has to be amongst one of the most unfair attempted pile-ons I've seen from a mainstream journalist on a mainstream scientist. The point that @BallouxFrancois has been making repeatedly is the uncontroversial one that pathogens don't have to be extinct for pandemics to end.

@mehdirhasan

Mehdi Hasan

10 months

Unserious people like this Balloux guy should be reminded again and again how their Covid predictions were wrong time and again and how many people died because they listened to the Covid minimizers

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Thomas House 热爱科学

2 years

The Chief Medical Officer was quite right to highlight this as a problem a while ago - and it's at least one reason why we're going to be struggling with polio more than we should be, showing yet again how ubiquitous false economies are: fix predictable issues *early* please!

@CMO_England

Professor Chris Whitty

2 years

Keeping human faeces out of the waterways people use recreationally is a key public health intervention. Water companies can and should act on sewage and effluent discharge. We lay out why and how below.

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Thomas House 热爱科学

3 years

Far more interesting than the question of handling the first wave (new situation, huge uncertainty) is handling of the much more lethal, and extremely predictable, second. Not least because of the likelihood of a third.

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Thomas House 热爱科学

2 years

Smallpox was endemic in London in the 18th century, when it accounted for close to 10% of all deaths in the city annually. Would be very interested in any historical perspectives of how this was viewed (I do know that the "Great pox" was syphillis).

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Thomas House 热爱科学

2 years

@minusplnp Also, the gender neutrality of 人 is quite a nice feature of languages that use it.

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Thomas House 热爱科学

3 years

"ThE mOdElZ aRe RoNg". In October 2020 remember the amount of scorn heaped on the idea that there would ever be over 1000 deaths a day with no lockdown, then we saw it even with a lockdown. Yes, the way modelling is presented is often suboptimal but what are *your* numbers?

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Thomas House 热爱科学

3 years

Maybe I get a bit grumpy about this here - but we rely on *herd immunity through natural infection* to avoid surges of RSV above those that paediatric departments can cope with. The fashionable denial of this basic fact is potentially very harmful.

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Exclusive: Government alert over surge in respiratory virus ...

The chief medical officers of the four UK nations are set to warn about a surge in admissions of severely ill, very young children later this year, due to the resurgence of a respiratory virus which...

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Thomas House 热爱科学

2 years

Quick update on my Long Covid. It sucks. Lots of unpredictable coughing. Fitness improving incredibly slowly. Probably didn't help that I got so fat and despondent in lockdown. GP surgery keeps texting to say don't bother them so I haven't consulted anyone about it yet.

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Thomas House 热爱科学

3 years

This is at the intellectual level of "if evolution is true, then why are there still monkeys?" Why a year in do people who claim to be experts not know the basics? There is nothing magical about vaccines that makes herd immunity work differently from natural infection.

@GidMK

Health Nerd

3 years

The weirdest thing about the whole herd immunity through natural infection argument is that it's never happened ever for any disease long-term so it was always a wild idea for COVID-19

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Thomas House 热爱科学

1 year

So, end of an era. Being an academic collaborator on this study has been a huge part of my life over the last three years - daily meetings at first. I can still see the thousands of lines of code I wrote over the time when logged in 1/5

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COVID-19 Infection Survey participants thanked for ‘huge contribution’ to pandemic response

UKHSA, ONS and the University of Oxford are thanking over 500,000 people from across the UK for their contribution to the COVID-19 Infection Survey.

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@TAH_Sci

Thomas House 热爱科学

3 years

A psychologist told me quite early in the pandemic that the way rules work is we all break them a little bit, and in different ways, but tell ourselves that *our* violations are fine. Like the driver who ways: "I'll go over 70 on the motorway, but never risk running the red".

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Thomas House 热爱科学

3 years

The natural conclusion from such research is to include it in our calculations of whom to offer the (safe, effective) flu vaccine to, not to diminish COVID:

People also suffer 'long flu', study shows - BBC News

Similar to Covid, other viruses can cause prolonged symptoms that take time to get over.

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Thomas House 热爱科学

3 years

Not many expensive suits and briefcases amongst these commuters - @jackiecassell and @mugecevik I'm sure take no pleasure in being right about the economic inequalities inherent in the current situation.

@BBCTomEdwards

Tom Edwards

3 years

EXC: Tube drivers getting increasingly concerned at number of travellers. This footage sent to me was Canning Town first thing.

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Thomas House 热爱科学

3 years

This is the most important thread on Twitter at the moment imo, and deserves an enormous amount of attention.

@MoritzGerstung

Moritz Gerstung

@MoritzGerstung

3 years

Some thoughts about the punctuated evolution of variants of concern including B.1.1.529 in Southern Africa. 🧵 A shared characteristic of all known VOCs is that they appeared suddenly with a large number of mutations, many more than the incremental changes we see normally.

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Thomas House 热爱科学

3 years

The main risk over the next few months isn't that the epidemic gets "out of control" like it did a year ago, but rather that the total volume of illness, together with resurgent endemic infections, fatigue, backlog of work, additional demand from other pandemic harms etc. (1/2)

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@TAH_Sci

Thomas House 热爱科学

3 years

Somehow I feel calling JCVI heinous, sinister, anti-vaxx ditherers who can't be trusted, and encouraging Twitter pile-ons of their members through a funded "Troll army", isn't really what senior academics and medics ought to be doing if they really want high vaccine uptake.

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Thomas House 热爱科学

4 years

I have written a blogpost about herd immunity, social distancing, and #COVID_19uk . I hope that this makes some of the technical considerations in modelling clear, and provide model code. All code, figures and text can be reused freely with attribution.

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Thomas House 热爱科学

2 years

Long COVID update: Good news that may help others. In July I was still unable to dance at a family wedding, out of breath lifting luggage on and off trains, coughing at night, then a few weeks back - dramatic improvement. It felt like my body had "fixed itself" >

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Thomas House 热爱科学

3 years

So here we have a PhD student in an unrelated area, who has been repeatedly and vocally wrong about technical issues relating to infectious diseases (but is on the 'right side' politically) encouraging a journalist to run hit pieces on academics he disagrees with.

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@TAH_Sci

Thomas House 热爱科学

7 months

Can anyone explain to me, genuinely, why a flu pandemic and a coronavirus pandemic need a different plan? We could have had a completely new flu with e.g. the IFRs and R0 of SARS-CoV-2, or a coronavirus that looked more like 2009 flu.

@UKandEU

UK in a Changing Europe

7 months

🗨️ "I'm still intrigued as to why the Department for Health wasn't asking itself whether a flu pandemic plan was right for a very different sort of virus" 🎙️ @jillongovt was on Newscast last night with @ChrisMasonBBC & @adamfleming . 📺 Watch back now:

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Thomas House 热爱科学

8 months

One very important issue that hasn't surfaced in the UK's COVID Inquiry is that there was a £900M real-terms cut in public health spend in the five years leading up to the pandemic.

New reductions to the public health grant will heap more pressure on local authorities

Health Foundation response to Public Health Grant funding announcement.

www.health.org.uk

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Thomas House 热爱科学

2 years

The best argument for vaccination being voluntary is it keeps up confidence and take-up long-term. This goes hand in hand with high levels of caution about adverse events. The arguments the consultant made to Javid make me uncomfortable in that context. 1/3

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Thomas House 热爱科学

3 years

I don't think this kind of systematic undermining of our expert committees nationally and internationally, when their decisions are extremely clear and open, is helpful. Better to engage with arguments than insinuate.

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Thomas House 热爱科学

2 years

I'm seeing that the "Flu deaths are only a few hundred a year" claims circulating again, seemingly based on the report below. This is wrong, because it's based on ICD-10 codes for "influenza", but many of the "pneumonia" deaths have influenza >

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@TAH_Sci

Thomas House 热爱科学

2 years

When someone is an actual expert in something, it really shows. Thread on what is involved in no fly zones:

@mewalters101

Dr. Mary Elizabeth Walters 🇺🇦

2 years

I've been seeing a lot of calls for a #NoFlyZoneOverUkraine . On the surface this might seem a great option - no more Russia bombing civilians. But imposing a no-fly zone involves active combat. #NATO would be declaring war on Russia. So let's talk about no-fly zones. 1/

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Thomas House 热爱科学

3 years

This is not zero COVID though, neither is it remotely close to a how we manage measles. Israel is allowing continued infection to happen because vaccination reduces case severity - it is a mitigated approach to herd immunity / endemicity.

@devisridhar

Prof. Devi Sridhar

3 years

Promising signs for how we can manage COVID in next 6 months: vaccinate bulk of population (like we do with measles, jump on outbreaks with testing & re-open economy and society.

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Thomas House 热爱科学

3 years

No-one is going to win support for any infection control measures with the argument that something that people love and sustains them is "not important". Particularly this far in where many activities have been compromised for almost two years.

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Thomas House 热爱科学

3 years

We should all say more loudly and often that ordinary people's sacrifices during the pandemic helped to manage it and saved lives. Diminishing this tremendous display of altruism because one's preferred policy goal wasn't met won't help with future asks of the public.

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Thomas House 热爱科学

3 years

Just so people know, this has always been roughly Mark Woolhouse's view, as expressed in his peer-reviewed and SPI-M papers, newspaper articles and comments to MPs etc. It isn't GBD although the words sound similar.

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Britain got it wrong on Covid: long lockdown did more harm than good, says scientist

A new book outlines the mistakes and missteps that made UK pandemic worse

www.theguardian.com

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@TAH_Sci

Thomas House 热爱科学

1 year

I need mainstream biostatisticians and epidemiologists to know that what Thomas Pueyo is saying about meta-analysis now is exactly as credible as what he said about infectious disease dynamics three years ago.

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@TAH_Sci

Thomas House 热爱科学

2 years

This kind of thing is more than troubling really. The *whole point* of freedom is it includes the right to do things that might upset others. It's why I think we *do* have to ensure that freedom of speech involves freedom from (most) consequences.

@paulpowlesland

Paul Powlesland

@paulpowlesland

2 years

Just went to Parliament Square & held up a blank piece of paper. Officer came & asked for my details. He confirmed that if I wrote “Not My King” on it, he would arrest me under the Public Order Act because someone might be offended.

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Thomas House 热爱科学

3 years

People deserve answers, and without them florid conspiracies flourish. So why, before this pandemic, was all the thinking about mitigation rather than suppression? Well, coronaviruses are not *that* different from flu, so it's reasonable to start from thinking about flu. /1

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@TAH_Sci

Thomas House 热爱科学

3 years

I'm happy to report that after two years of pandemic science slog, my papers are mainly desk rejected, emergency funding is all ending soon, I've won no awards, can't tell people about most of the contributions I've made because confidentiality, get regular threats from >

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@TAH_Sci

Thomas House 热爱科学

3 years

No, this really isn't the way public health should go. Really. Why are people relying on takeways? They're tired from overwork, struggle with transport to get fresh food etc. Address those first.

@MENnewsdesk

Manchester News MEN

3 years

Takeaway ban considered for 'most obese area in Lancashire'

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Thomas House 热爱科学

4 years

I'm six months into lockdown, and have followed all the rules, as is the case for millions of others. Honestly, there's no more gas in the tank. Talk of stricter measures without extremely Draconian enforcement is a fantasy.

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@TAH_Sci

Thomas House 热爱科学

5 months

@littmath OK so the best "intuitive" answer I can get here is that the increase in the expected value of n from an initial red more than compensates for the "missing" red ball, because Pr(N=n|red 1st) is quadratic rather than linear in n.

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@TAH_Sci

Thomas House 热爱科学

11 months

Will there be a proper accounting for how doctors were forced to apologise and enter mediation for trying to stop babies being killed?

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Hospital bosses ignored months of doctors' warnings about Lucy Letby

Hospital bosses failed to investigate allegations and tried to silence doctors, BBC investigation finds.

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Thomas House 热爱科学

2 years

@james_e_b_ @PWGTennant This kind of "study" is just people dressing up their prejudices as science. I'm embarrassed on behalf of the people who put their names to it.

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Thomas House 热爱科学

4 years

People are sharing Swedish statistics as though this proves a lighter touch to control is bad. I live in Manchester, where measures were arguably the most in Europe: 8 months, 3M people, almost no relaxation. We are also having a bad second wave. It's complicated.

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Thomas House 热爱科学

4 years

"Herd immunity" and "protect the vulnerable", a thread. These terms have become very divisive, and having an extreme libertarian group promote them doesn't help. But for me, they reflect the central dogma of epidemiology, which is to *target* interventions. /1

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Thomas House 热爱科学

3 years

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Thomas House 热爱科学

3 years

Even without Omicron, we'd have been due a bad winter where many people died from overstretched healthcare. Bluntly, now that's all but certain. There's no easy answer for what to do about this - but I wish we were in a position where serious debate was still possible.

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Thomas House 热爱科学

2 years

Genuinely shocking graph.

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@TAH_Sci

Thomas House 热爱科学

4 years

The wording here is not going to age well. A likely (not desirable) outcome of this pandemic is the same as every other respiratory pandemic in history - worldwide endemicity driven by natural immunity. Not being clear now will reduce credibility next pandemic.

@TheLancet

The Lancet

4 years

NEW Correspondence—80+ researchers warn that a so-called #herdimmunity approach to managing #COVID19 is “a dangerous fallacy unsupported by the scientific evidence” #WCPH2020

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Thomas House 热爱科学

3 years

There's some interesting sociology here, very similar to the way that left-right politics, or many other contentious issues, work. Which is that there will be some objective truths, both of fact and (I believe) of morality, but we struggle to explain others' worldviews. 1/n

@theAliceRoberts

Prof Alice Roberts💙

@theAliceRoberts

3 years

When this pandemic started to take hold, I knew it would be brutal. But I never imagined that the virus would find itself so many human allies - people who would reject science and argue for a medieval approach, rejecting masks, vaccines, even ventilation - as the devil’s work.

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Thomas House 热爱科学

3 years

None of the experts quoted here said that the HIT is not attainable, only that it isn’t by vaccination alone. There will need to be some contribution from natural immunity, which is likely already to be close to sufficient. Why can’t the US paper of record utter this?

@NYTScience

NYT Science

3 years

The herd immunity threshold for the coronavirus is not attainable — at least not in the foreseeable future, and perhaps not ever, many experts now believe.

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Thomas House 热爱科学

2 years

Can't believe the people replying to this saying "just plan" - it's not possible for many people to know exactly what train they'll need to get. A *standard* return between two major cities 2 hours apart by rail shouldn't cost a week's pay.

@AndyBurnhamGM

Andy Burnham

2 years

For those who don’t believe it 👇🏻

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Thomas House 热爱科学

3 years

Maybe we should, as a society but particularly those with academic positions, work towards a public discourse where we read, check we've understood what everyone is saying, discuss, and think, maybe even for as long as a week, before we insult and condemn.

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@TAH_Sci

Thomas House 热爱科学

2 years

Clearly, no-one who advocated for zero covid wanted the scenes we're seeing from Shanghai. But in accusing those of us who were worried the policy would lead to that of unconcern about COVID harms, some have created a climate where such mudslinging flourishes.

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@TAH_Sci

Thomas House 热爱科学

3 years

From the ages of 18-20 you weren’t able to date, work, study or see friends. You had to stay in your parents’ house in your childhood bedroom. Now that most over-40s are vaccinated and prevalence is low, how bad is it that you want music and dance after a COVID test?

@TAH_Sci

Thomas House 热爱科学

3 years

@sdbaral @BillHanage @MountPercy Also, for many young scousers, night clubbing will be central to their enjoyment of life and they’ve forgone it for over a year - there has to be some ethical weight on that.

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@TAH_Sci

Thomas House 热爱科学

3 years

Why write a piece saying that *all* the UK is doing is vaccination, then illustrate it with a figure of people distributing free tests, which is surely *something* else? I know it's super lame to say that facts matter but they kind of do.

It’s not too late for the British government to develop an effective Covid strategy | Gabriel Scally

A public health-focused response should have three pillars: prevention, vaccination and control, says Independent Sage member Professor Gabriel Scally

www.theguardian.com

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Thomas House 热爱科学

3 years

A lot of suffering is caused by people taking themselves too seriously. The causal pathway is caring too little about others, but it's taking yourself seriously where the rot sets in.

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Thomas House 热爱科学

3 years

I told my new students that Bayes' theorem is like a superpower to see through nonsense.

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@TAH_Sci

Thomas House 热爱科学

3 years

@FraserNelson @juji_gatami @GrahamMedley I tagged Graham because for a while he was tweeting that the shorter term model averages did really well against real data - these may be harder to visualise of course. Personally, I'd be very happy to debate this further since the public has a right to scrutinise.

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Thomas House 热爱科学

3 years

It may also be worth someone sufficiently diligent looking back at the incredulity heaped on SAGE scenarios predicting in excess of a thousand deaths per day last Autumn.

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@TAH_Sci

Thomas House 热爱科学

3 years

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Prof Francois Balloux: ‘The pandemic has created a market for gloom and doom’

The UCL scientist and ‘militant corona centrist’ on the risk of new variants, psychosomatic long Covid and when he expects the crisis to end

www.theguardian.com

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@TAH_Sci

Thomas House 热爱科学

2 years

(subtweet) Attacking someone as a 'trainee', particularly when that person is scientifically right and actually has the agreement of the public health infrastructure from the CMO downwards, reflects worse on you and how you likely treat people than it does on them.

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Thomas House 热爱科学

3 years

Scientist: My work is meaningless if you take it out of context! Media: Scientist says her work is meaningless!

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Thomas House 热爱科学

2 years

So important to remember and support the well-being of ordinary Russians, who are also among Putin's victims.

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Russians at UK universities ‘lonely and guilty’ as they fear for the future

Many studying here are anti-Putin, but still feel they’re being judged for the Kremlin’s actions

www.theguardian.com

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Thomas House 热爱科学

3 years

My capacity for argument is spent, but there are people talking about the UK "allowing" spread over summer. It was mainly a wave of children so please say how many deaths due to increased abuse you think are acceptable to get to whatever % COVID prevalence you prefer and why.

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Thomas House 热爱科学

2 years

I've joined 300+ scientists (too many to tag, but many on here, and many collaborators whose agreement is unsurprising) to tell the government to clear away patents and let low and middle-income countries manufacture Covid-19 vaccines. #PeoplesVaccine

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Thomas House 热爱科学

2 years

R0 for COVID isn't 18, but it's very high - let's say it's 9 for the sake of argument. When people talk about continued masking etc., what value of R0 are they expecting to arise from that? Even incredibly optimistic numbers like 6 don't actually >

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Australia's latest Covid wave may be passing but the crisis in hospitals has only just begun |...

Each day I weigh the pressure to prematurely discharge those in my care on the wards, against the needs of those on stretchers waiting their turn

www.theguardian.com

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Thomas House 热爱科学

3 years

🚨🚨🚨 3000 people in South Korea who didn't need to die if only they'd followed the EPIDEMIOLOGY TEXTBOOK RESPONSE of TURKMENISTAN! Step 1: Brutal Dictatorship. Step 2: No cases. Step 3: No deaths. IT'S THAT SIMPLE!!!!!! 🚨🚨🚨

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Thomas House 热爱科学

3 years

A year into the pandemic, it's extraordinary how many non-infection epidemiologists haven't spent even the tiniest amount of time learning about infections, can't explain herd immunity, R0, exponential growth, extinction, strains ... but still provide lots of 'expert' comment.

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Thomas House 热爱科学

3 years

We talk about unpredictability of pandemics, but unless we're really unlucky with zoonotic viruses the next major one is already with us: Antimicrobial resistance. This has the potential to generate deaths and economic costs comparable to and even greater than covid. /1

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Thomas House 热爱科学

10 days

@focusfronting Can't see full paper but I don't think tSNE is the problem, they say in the abstract they use neural networks and so it seems likely they've overfitted somehow - I suspect PCA would also show dramatic class separation under those circumstances.

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Thomas House 热爱科学

3 years

Something about this viral image speaks to every scientist (or probably everyone doing a technical job) in a different way:

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Thomas House 热爱科学

1 year

Oh no, the maths department put these up and now we are all so woke we think 2+2=5! Or in the real world, maybe in the city where Turing was prosecuted for homosexuality in living memory our LGBT colleagues and students feel more safe and respected ...

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Thomas House 热爱科学

2 years

OK - so I see various people here who don't believe that things like RSV and flu will be worse after the pandemic due to immunity debt. What this skepticism usually stems from is the difference between *individual* and *population* level impacts. /1

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Thomas House 热爱科学

1 year

This is an incredibly important point. Vaccines are just about the most overwhelmingly positive intervention it's possible to imagine in medicine in terms of cost-benefit. And the bodies that exert oversight on them work exceptionally hard to ensure that remains true.

@apsmunro

Alasdair Munro

1 year

I understand mistrust of health institutions, but a substantial amount of doubt thrown comes, ironically, from frauds and grifters themselves For e.g., there are numerous drugs/interventions of dubious value Vaccines, as recommended, are about as clear cut positive as it gets

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Thomas House 热爱科学

2 years

> duty of candour as public scientists not to oversell the possibility of easy solutions to complex problems.

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Thomas House 热爱科学

2 years

Sorry, but are we supposed to pretend that the president of the BMA didn't spend the pandemic accusing people who wanted to make more use of rapid testing of being unethical? Are we not going to get even the tiniest rescission of the most extreme polemic?

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Thomas House 热爱科学

1 year

People asking about avian flu / H5N1. Here's the thing - there's something like this several times a year that gets on the radar of serious people and is a real potential problem but is almost impossible to quantify just how likely or bad the worst outcomes could be.

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Thomas House 热爱科学

2 years

Jeremy Hunt claims he'd have managed less death from lockdown and COVID because he'd have acted one week earlier. No accountability for running down the NHS, cronyism, or inadequate resources - and enabled by academics desperate to claim only they understand exponential growth.

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Thomas House 热爱科学

2 years

@BinitaKane Hi 👋 - measles has, even post-vaccine, killed hundreds of thousands of mainly children under five worldwide *every year* this century, and WHO estimates the vaccines saved over 20 million lives since 2000. I don't understand why that's a 'low risk'?

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Thomas House 热爱科学

2 years

When people say that late lockdowns last longer and so by implication early lockdowns end earlier - what do they think happens where the red question marks are here? It has been driving me up the wall for over two years now - what is the actual epidemic curve they envision?

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@IanDunt

Ian Dunt

2 years

Hard to properly encapsulate how angry this makes me. From one of the ministers responsible for making sure lockdowns were too late, over and over again, and therefore had to go on much longer than they would have otherwise needed to.

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Thomas House 热爱科学

2 years

"Anscombe's Quartet" - developed by J. F. Anscombe in 1973, presumably after a lot of trial and error / hand calculation, demonstrating that very disparate datasets can have the same regression line. 50 years on, it's easier than ever to plot your data - remember to do it!

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Thomas House 热爱科学

3 years

Sensible and silly criticisms of modelling. (1/7)

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Thomas House 热爱科学

3 years

creates a pressure on the health system that leads to all sorts of not particularly speculative bad outcomes. This isn't an NHS-specific issue, except that the UK doesn't seem as prepared to deny people healthcare as the US, or as prepared to fund it adequately as Europe. (2/2)

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Thomas House 热爱科学

2 years

Feeling so ill still; the bout of COVID I just had might well have put me in hospital without being prior infection + 💉💉💉. I ❤️ vaccines so much. Maybe I should marry them? Me and vaccines sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G. Also, anyone who wants them should have access.

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Thomas House 热爱科学

9 months

People should really spend at least five seconds looking up global mortality figures from infections before opining that COVID is a uniquely bad pathogen unless they're particularly keen to expose how little consideration they give to low and middle income countries.

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Thomas House 热爱科学

3 years

These are really very expert scientists it would be routine for a UK scientist to ask about international matters, I'm personally very happy to see our politicians engaging with them directly - it's not another late 2020 meeting where SAGE were sidelined.

@sajidjavid

Sajid Javid

3 years

Productive discussion today on the latest Omicron situation with international experts @mlipsitch , @bencowling88 , @mvankerkhove and @BallouxFrancois .

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Thomas House 热爱科学

2 years

I don't know any specialist epidemic modellers who are particularly surprised by this.

@theipaper

i newspaper

2 years

Covid cases have peaked much lower than expected - and scientists don't know why 🔴 Exclusive from @BawdenTom

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Thomas House 热爱科学

1 year

thing you've ever done", and I'll have that. Quite emotional at the moment to be honest - there's three years' worth more stories for another time. 5/5

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Thomas House 热爱科学

2 years

This is absolutely true - look up "Little's law" and the fundamentals of queueing theory. Spare capacity is essential for efficiency, not a sign of lack of it.

@FinanceDirCFO

Alastair Thomson

2 years

I'm not a medical expert, but from a lifetime running private sector businesses know there are fewer more expensive ways to run an organisation than to stack out every minute of productive capacity. It sounds counterintuitive, but being too busy is high risk, and v expensive...

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Thomas House 热爱科学

2 years

@james_e_b_ This is absolutely, absolutely my specialism - people don't realise but secondary attack rates in households are not 100% - they are actually well below 50% in every study, even pre-vaccine. It's sometimes just luck!

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Thomas House 热爱科学

3 years

Not believing that the UK could have been the only European country to avoid a significant pandemic wave is British exceptionalism.

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