Big jump in cases and hospitalizations likely means winter surge.
Not sure how reliable case counts are at all since it goes down whenever the government shuts down testing centers. It should at most be considered alongside case positivity rates, because of the risk that something goes wrong with measuring case positivity, I’m not sure why case counts would be considered a very good way of measuring the pandemic on their own.
2. Chinese protests suppressed, some modest loosening did result.
This is definitely an area where corellation does not strongly imply causation, because it is well within the interests of the PRC to visibly halt opening up after large-scale protests demand opening up in order to discourage future protests, and because protest organizers in China are definitely capable of strategically timing protests before opening up was already planned in order to make it look like the protests caused the subsequent opening up.
I’m not saying that protests didn’t increase the subsequent loosening (protests tend to do that, so it could possibly happen in China), but lots of unreliable sources are loudly trumpeting that exact claim, so the burden of proof for this is much higher than anything mentioned in the China section of this post.
3. Long Covid study finds control group that had other respiratory illnesses did worse than the Covid group.
How were the covid positive and covid negative categories sorted? Rapid antigen tests had a massive false negative rate and that was before omicron. I’ve encountered a lot of anecdata of intelligence/energy being permanently lowered after a covid infection such as insomnia and shortened attention spans. We’re still in the middle of the post-truth infodemic, and there’s a long history of unusually flawed studies that claim to confirm or deny covid brain damage. So I don’t see why this particular study is supposed to count as any sort of “reiteration of the central point of Long Covid” when the issue is that any single methodology flaw would make it around as likely to point in the wrong direction as the right one, and such methodological flaws are extremely common in publicly available Long Covid studies.
Not sure how reliable case counts are at all since it goes down whenever the government shuts down testing centers. It should at most be considered alongside case positivity rates, because of the risk that something goes wrong with measuring case positivity, I’m not sure why case counts would be considered a very good way of measuring the pandemic on their own.
This is definitely an area where corellation does not strongly imply causation, because it is well within the interests of the PRC to visibly halt opening up after large-scale protests demand opening up in order to discourage future protests, and because protest organizers in China are definitely capable of strategically timing protests before opening up was already planned in order to make it look like the protests caused the subsequent opening up.
I’m not saying that protests didn’t increase the subsequent loosening (protests tend to do that, so it could possibly happen in China), but lots of unreliable sources are loudly trumpeting that exact claim, so the burden of proof for this is much higher than anything mentioned in the China section of this post.
How were the covid positive and covid negative categories sorted? Rapid antigen tests had a massive false negative rate and that was before omicron. I’ve encountered a lot of anecdata of intelligence/energy being permanently lowered after a covid infection such as insomnia and shortened attention spans. We’re still in the middle of the post-truth infodemic, and there’s a long history of unusually flawed studies that claim to confirm or deny covid brain damage. So I don’t see why this particular study is supposed to count as any sort of “reiteration of the central point of Long Covid” when the issue is that any single methodology flaw would make it around as likely to point in the wrong direction as the right one, and such methodological flaws are extremely common in publicly available Long Covid studies.