How likely is it that the spread of this new strain was caused by a few superspreaders, and that most of the above is blown out of proportion?
The probability is basically zero. But the question is whether the obvious hypothesis is false, not whether a particular alternate hypothesis is true. There are many alternate hypotheses more likely than that, and most important the final bucket of “other,” hypotheses that I have not thought of. Here are a few suggestions I have heard: (1) It is biologically different and spreads easily in children, but if they closed the schools, it would be negligibly different. (2) Measurement error. 2a: All sars2 produces RNA after infectiousness is over, effectively false positives and maybe this produces lots of RNA for much longer, effectively higher false positives and more lagging signal. 2b: It is mainly detected by applying the usual 3 tests for sars2 and failing a particular one. So it is inherently a noisier test, although it is not at all clear how this could produce the observed pattern.
Your point on alternative hypotheses is well taken, I only mentioned the superspreader one since that was considered the main possibility for strong relative growth of one variant over another without increased infectiousness. Could you expand on the likelihood of any of these being true/link to discussion on them?
If you make any of these hypotheses precise enough to calculate, then I don’t think that they are likely enough to be worth calculating. The point was just to give suggest how big the space of unknown unknowns is. I think you need an outside view to estimate it. You might hope to get that from the virologists, but they are dismissing it as a “founder effect” which is even more specific, rather than accepting the ignorance of an outside view.
I think I got them all from Francois Balloux, though I’m not sure what he was saying and I may have interpolated a lot of detail. I got 2a and maybe 1 from here. 2b is from here, a response to the first thread. Added: actually, I think I got 2a from the “Does it matter” video, which was generally hostile to reason and knowledge epidemiology, but did suggest something like this at the end.
The probability is basically zero. But the question is whether the obvious hypothesis is false, not whether a particular alternate hypothesis is true. There are many alternate hypotheses more likely than that, and most important the final bucket of “other,” hypotheses that I have not thought of. Here are a few suggestions I have heard: (1) It is biologically different and spreads easily in children, but if they closed the schools, it would be negligibly different. (2) Measurement error. 2a: All sars2 produces RNA after infectiousness is over, effectively false positives and maybe this produces lots of RNA for much longer, effectively higher false positives and more lagging signal. 2b: It is mainly detected by applying the usual 3 tests for sars2 and failing a particular one. So it is inherently a noisier test, although it is not at all clear how this could produce the observed pattern.
Your point on alternative hypotheses is well taken, I only mentioned the superspreader one since that was considered the main possibility for strong relative growth of one variant over another without increased infectiousness. Could you expand on the likelihood of any of these being true/link to discussion on them?
If you make any of these hypotheses precise enough to calculate, then I don’t think that they are likely enough to be worth calculating. The point was just to give suggest how big the space of unknown unknowns is. I think you need an outside view to estimate it. You might hope to get that from the virologists, but they are dismissing it as a “founder effect” which is even more specific, rather than accepting the ignorance of an outside view.
I think I got them all from Francois Balloux, though I’m not sure what he was saying and I may have interpolated a lot of detail. I got 2a and maybe 1 from here. 2b is from here, a response to the first thread. Added: actually, I think I got 2a from the “Does it matter” video, which was generally hostile to
reason and knowledgeepidemiology, but did suggest something like this at the end.