Comments by "iampdv" (@iampdv) on "Current state of COVID knowledge" video.

@johnwang9914 What?!*&@! This is rich.... What you are posting is not a peer-revied article as it was written by a journalist, not a scientist. What I have sent you are articles in scientific peer-reviewed journals written by scientists. Published in nature is not equal to truth, one of the main criteria for accepting papers there is a catchy idea. Catchy ideas are not that frequently good ideas.
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@johnwang9914 1. Don't tell me about peer-reviewed journals. I talk from my personal experience of interacting with those on a professional basis, while you appear to not even know that scientific articles were peer reviewed for much longer than the last 20 years. Google the author of that article, it is written by a journalist who does not seem to even have a PhD degree or education in actual science. Yes, it might have been read by some experts, but it is not clear how this kind of review would work with a news article. In any case that was not a regular peer-reviewed article, and such articles do not build 100% of a printed Nature issue. I guess your attitude is what they talk about when speaking about easily manipulated people.... 2. Apparently there is a theoretical basis for saying that masks prevent the spread of bacteria, much less so in case of viruses. There are studies suggesting that masks help by looking at infection rates. That is roughly what your nature article talks about. But neither this paper nor you cite controlled randomised studies that would suggest that masks work. Controlled randomised studies studies exist for flu, and now even for covid, and they suggest no statistically significant effect, see the real peer-reviewed papers I cited before. This is probably why Swedes did not mandate masks - there is no evidence to suggest that they work, only that they might work.
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@johnwang9914 You can check my comments, I never claimed that nature is not a reputable journal. This is because I would prefer to define the word "reputable" before discussing anything like this, which we did not do. I merely pointed out that what you cited is not a regular peer-reviewed article written by a scientist, and that nature tends to publish catchy ideas even if they are quite questionable (without giving my assessment of whether this is good or bad). In contrast, you claimed that I have provided links to non-peer-rewieved conspiracy sites. I fail to understand how someone with working experience in academia cannot differentiate between news on the nature website and real peer-reviewed articles. The only evidence that matters in this context is a controlled randomised experiment. Any drug that comes to the stage of controlled randomised trials has some scientific basis suggesting that it might work. But not all of them get into widespread use after such trials. Why? In case of viral diseases there is no controlled randomised studies suggesting that masks work, none cited in that nature article. There are some suggesting that masks don't have any statistically significant effect - see the four studies that I cited above (one has slightly different message, but supplements the whole picture).
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The question is what is your evidence for wearing masks? Any controlled randomised studies? Apparently there have been such studies on influenza and these showed no effect. Why vivid should be different?
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@johnwang9914 1. this is not what is called a peer-reviewed publication, although possibly it was checked by some experts. 2. the mention of most scientists is not a good argument. Some time ago most scientist thought that humans were created by the God. 3. par exemple https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-6817 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2984432 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/epidemiology-and-infection/article/face-masks-to-prevent-transmission-of-influenza-virus-a-systematic-review/64D368496EBDE0AFCC6639CCC9D8BC05 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jebm.12381
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@vickit3124 incorrect. this is the section where you look at peer-reviewed nature papers: https://www.nature.com/nature/research . Note the difference in style.
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@johnwang9914 This is not a childish interpretation. Most people don't care because we are talking about the disease that is a lot safer than the ones you've listed. For example, for my family it is much safer than even flu, which we never cared about. Which raises an important question - why so much hassle? I know a few people who died this year, thus far none from covid but from lockdowns. When you create such a hysteria in mass media and lockdowns, people's health becomes undermined due to stress. My health was undermined because of shit I have been put through, and this is not the worst that can happen. I know that one of the Asian country, which you praise so highly here, has separated small children from their parents for months in their "fight against covid". As to the conspiracy theories. I think people just intuitively feel that they are being played, but cannot identify what exactly is wrong. It is like with crooks on a market - you have this feeling that you are fucked, but can't really tell what's wrong. And many things are wrong. Like Biden crying for months that "just a simple mask can save hundreds of thousands lifes", same in other countries. What evidence is this claim based on? As a regular guy trying not to follow conspiracy theories I thought for months that on some (as Biden says "science says"). But it turns that on none, and all the relevant evidence that exists (not too much but some) suggests that masks don't make any statistically significant difference. I am therefore forced to a conclusion that mask wearing is a political thing, as the entire covid hysteria. Then, how far does it go? Was it all just about the us election, or is it something more global? I don't know, but every other funky coincidence like with the dates of vaccine announcements forces me towards conspiracy theorists. Regarding you numbers. You trust them? I don't know how is it in your home country (which seems to be USA), but I know a bit about several European countries, some of which have been referenced as good examples on this channel. I know quite a lot of people, including myself, who lost smell at some point in the past year, none of these got tested or got approached by those who supposedly trace the spread of covid. I know only few people who got tested, usually something like one in the family to confirm that this is it. I know an anecdotical case how a 90 years old person was refused an important treatment in a hospital because of a positive covid test, and this person showed no symptoms at all. If this person died because of not receiving that treatment, which luckily did not happen although there was a chance, they would likely be marked as covid-related death.
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@johnwang9914 This is you who missed the point yet again. The role of the governments is to fuck off in this instance. Lockdowns affect everyone in many ways, including health. Several people whom I knew personally died this year, none because of covid or even with covid or any kind of flu near the time of their death, but because of stress and because of lack of access to hospitals that is only related to government's stupid actions (many doctors were told to sit at home and not treat anyone, procedure of getting to a hospital has become exceedingly complicated). Even if we don't count such deaths, we need to look at reduction of life expectancy caused by lockdowns. Bear in mind that given the demographics of covid-related deaths (average IFR of ~0.3%, average age of people who is generally close or exceeds the average life in the area), the effect of covid is equivalent to reduction of average life expectancy by just a few days or weeks. How can you guarantee that there will be no such effect? Can we count the time in lockdowns as life? Or is this stolen time? Finally, why don't we have even a fraction of such hassle with annual flu sparks, which can have comparable IFR? Or are you still going to insist that this is not just another flu? My understanding of how dangerous this virus is and why it is spreading has formed back in January and since then did not change. So I don't need your condescending explanations of that. But you might try to explain what is wrong with inductive reasoning, and more importantly what are the alternatives in this case. Furthermore, you might try to finally provide real evidence to support your suggestion that masks help,. Thus far you have not, while I gave you three refences suggesting the contrary based on controlled randomised studies. Regarding being childish and selfish. Would the likes of yourself ever fuck off with comments like that??? Unlike the majority of people around me I had to deal with stupidity of not one but three governments at the same time, each following their stupid bureaucratic agendas and requiring me to take certain actions, at the same time creating rules that prevent me from taking these actions and after all that not even following these stupid rules. Nobody cared about my family's and my health and well being. So I reserve my right to not give a fuck about others.
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@johnwang9914 So you are going on to saying that this shit is not about that <1% who die but about 30% who get sick?! And why in this case your require the majority to stop their lives?! How the lives of that <1%, or even those 30% are more important than lives of the rest? How the lives of those who die from covid are better than lives of those who die from stress and lack of treatment due to lockdowns? Why will we all need to suffer socioeconomical consequences of lockdowns because of those? Is this really a little price for supposedly saved lives of those who did not get covid? How you calculate that? Who is really childish and not seeing the entire picture is this type of lefties who cry about old people dying from covid a year earlier than they were supposed to. Everyone's life shortens from lockdowns, both due to inability to live normally on everyday basis during them and likely reduction of life expectancy after them. Furthermore, many people die directly from lockdowns, that is not a figure of speech. When you start crying about those old people and covid, you have to compare that 1 year of life of 1% equals 4 days of life of 99%.
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@johnwang9914 Why is the health system overwhelmed wherever you are located and not in Sweden or Belarus? Are doctors unable to treat other diseases because hospitals are overwhelmed? Or maybe this is because they were told to sit at home?
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@amyfay5791 I don't know whether this is the case, but in principle the uselessness of masks in stopping viruses does not make them safe.
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 @amyfay5791 not because of viruses. although I have read that there is evidence to suggest that this is not useful at all. I was not interested enough to pursue this further...
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