Sameerishere

• SameerishereMar 14, 2022, 8:06 PM

  1 point

  on: Micro­covid Be­com­ing Less Useful

  A friend raised concerns that as people are increasingly using at-home tests instead of PCR, the data sources for microCOVID are underreporting risk.

  Detailed her concerns further here:

  https://​​www.lesswrong.com/​​posts/​​kCrX2mPEdnuTPCK3A/​​microcovid-risk-levels-inaccurate-due-to-undercounting-in

  Would be curious to hear thoughts from you all who have been thinking about the related issues Jeff raised earlier (albeit with the trend in the opposite direction).

[Question] MicroCOVID risk lev­els in­ac­cu­rate due to un­der­count­ing in data sources vs wastew­a­ter data?

• SameerishereMar 12, 2022, 7:26 PM

  3 points

  on: Ex­pe­rience Res­tart­ing Contra

  Glad to hear you’ve been able to bring back events! As a fusion dancer in SF, I know how amazing it has been to have partner dance in my life again.

  Couple thoughts:

  • why not have the sign-in form (and email collection) be on a spreadsheet on a tablet or something, to avoid the burden of having to transcribe?

  • check out this group for how other organizers are navigating questions around masking and others https://​​www.facebook.com/​​groups/​​158671312715141/​​?ref=share. It’s led by a COVID researcher/​​MD who is also a dance organizer

• SameerishereMar 6, 2022, 12:38 AM

  4 points

  in reply to: gabrielrecc’s comment on: The Long Long Covid Post

  Thanks for sharing this! It is worrying, but the magnitude does not seem like it would change Zvi’s overall conclusion. Some reasons why:

  • Not enormous increase in absolute terms. Per the article

    • Increase in stroke: 0.4% pts

    • Increase in HF: 1.2% pts

  • Most participants likely were not vaccinated (looking at the study itself)

    • 162,690 participants who had a positive COVID-19 test between 1 March 2020 and 15 January 2021 were selected into the COVID-19 group

  • Increase in any cardiovascular outcome for non-hospitalized individuals was 2.85% points (difference of 28.5 cases out of 1000) (Supplementary Table 8 in the study itself)

    • Stroke is 1.85 /​ 1000 (0.2% pts), heart failure is 6.05 /​ 1000 (0.6% pts)

    • I assume they highlighted stroke and HF because those are particularly severe issues, but eyeballing the table for other scary things (as someone who is not a medical expert): myocardial infarction 0.39, cardiac arrest −0.04, MACE (any major adverse cardiac events) 11.29 (all out of 1000)

  • Limitation with controls (though I dunno if this is likely to make a significant difference)

    • Ardehali cautions that the study’s observational nature comes with some limitations. For example, people in the contemporary control group weren’t tested for COVID-19, so it’s possible that some of them actually had mild infections. And because the authors considered only VA patients — a group that’s predominantly white and male — their results might not translate to all populations.

• SameerishereMar 5, 2022, 5:58 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: Dawn Drescher’s comment on: Micro­covid Be­com­ing Less Useful

  Thanks!

• SameerishereFeb 26, 2022, 8:38 PM

  6 points

  on: Micro­covid Be­com­ing Less Useful

  FYI, prevalence updater now seems to be fixed https://​​github.com/​​microCOVID/​​microCOVID/​​issues/​​1358

• SameerishereFeb 22, 2022, 2:19 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: Dawn Drescher’s comment on: Micro­covid Be­com­ing Less Useful

  I’m a little confused by your methodology here—if the last day they have is ²⁄₁₈, and today is ²⁄₂₂ (or was ²⁄₂₁ when you posted it), why are you extrapolating out by 10 days (29.7 − 21 ~ 9k)?

  More generally, does the following seem like a valid way to input data manually into microCOVID?

  • Take the last reported daily cases/​100K from covidactnow.org. Reduce by extrapolating to what you’d expect for today

  • Multiply by 7 and input into “Reported cases in past week”

  • Enter “100000” into Total Population

  • Leave “Percent increase in cases from last week to this week” at 0%, since you can’t set it to negative

  • Take the latest “percent of tests that come back positive” as-is from the latest number available at covidactnow

  • Take the “2+ or J&J” number and enter it into “Percent of population fully vaccinated” (looking at the default number in there before I typed mine in, it looks like that’s what microCOVID is using, not % boosted)

  Thanks!

• SameerishereFeb 22, 2022, 2:13 PM

  3 points

  on: Micro­covid Be­com­ing Less Useful

  Thanks for this!

  What had you conclude that microCOVID fails to model the impact of vaccinations? I haven’t looked closely at their methodology, but just toggling “Their vaccine” from “Yes” to “No” to “I don’t know” does change the risk estimate.

• SameerishereFeb 20, 2022, 12:57 AM

  2 points

  in reply to: idle’s comment on: Long covid: prob­a­bly worth avoid­ing—some considerations

  So sorry to hear you’re suffering through this, and thank you for sharing your experience!

• SameerishereJan 31, 2022, 2:10 PM

  17 points

  on: Reflec­tions on six months of fatherhood

  This was very sweet and reinforced my desire to have a child (a topic I’m chewing on at the moment).

• SameerishereJan 16, 2022, 7:48 PM

  2 points

  on: Omicron var­i­o­la­tion?

  I’m still worried about the risk of long COVID. See e.g., Katja Grace’s recent post, though I am still trying to incorporate the comments on that post into my mental model. I also saw some really concerning Twitter threads on long COVID, but I don’t know how good the posters’ epistemics are, and don’t know how they interface with say, Zvi/​Scott/​Elizabeth’s earlier analyses of earlier studies on long COVID which treat it as a minor concern.

• SameerishereJan 14, 2022, 5:31 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: jmh’s comment on: I have COVID, for how long should I iso­late?

  Both, I guess, though my primary strategy for protecting others is to not get COVID myself, so protecting myself is paramount.

• SameerishereJan 14, 2022, 5:29 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: Florin’s comment on: I have COVID, for how long should I iso­late?

  Thank you!

• SameerishereJan 14, 2022, 12:36 AM

  5 points

  in reply to: Florin’s comment on: I have COVID, for how long should I iso­late?

  I’ve found it really hard to find a respirator that seals (judging from the fact my glasses fog), and per microcovid.org that still leaves me with a fair amount of exposure. I imagine many others are in the same boat.

• SameerishereJan 2, 2022, 1:06 AM

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: gwillen’s comment on: What would you like from Micro­covid.org? How valuable would it be to you?

  Good point, agreed! Here is my (not very good) current attempt to adjust manually: https://​​www.lesswrong.com/​​posts/​​YtWqgzLDqxSvJDkCi/​​how-should-we-adjust-microcovid-estimates-for-omicron

• SameerishereJan 2, 2022, 1:04 AM

  4 points

  0

  on: What would you like from Micro­covid.org? How valuable would it be to you?

  Most urgently, I’d like the bugs around missing vaccination data for SF and NYC (and possibly other locales) to be fixed. https://​​github.com/​​microCOVID/​​microCOVID/​​issues/​​1280

  I hope the team is not holding off on fixing critical functionality that is obviously broken /​ missing (e.g. this bug, adjustment for omicron) while they wait for data in response to this post.

  If the team is resource constrained in some way (money, people with particular skillsets), would love to know how the community can help!

• SameerishereDec 31, 2021, 9:35 PM

  2 points

  in reply to: Zvi’s comment on: Omicron: My Cur­rent Model

  Thanks for responding. The first study did find that severity is correlated with incidence of long COVID, and controlled as follows: “Propensity score 1:1 matching [19] (with greedy nearest neighbor matching, and a caliper distance of 0.1 pooled standard deviations of the logit of the propensity score) was used to create cohorts with matched baseline characteristics and carried out within the TriNetX network” My knowledge of statistical analysis is rather insufficient to evaluate the controls in that study, so hoping you or another commenter can chime in on that.

• SameerishereDec 30, 2021, 7:53 AM

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: lynettebye’s comment on: What would you like from Micro­covid.org? How valuable would it be to you?

  If you feel reasonably confident in your ability to estimate the changing risk yourself with what you currently know, I’d be grateful for your input here!

• SameerishereDec 30, 2021, 7:45 AM

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: Elizabeth’s comment on: What would you like from Micro­covid.org? How valuable would it be to you?

  Thanks for sharing that! I guess I’d be willing to pay $500 (per year? maybe more than that per year?) for someone to do the math for me and keep it updated as new data comes in. (For example, the findings I mentioned here). I think part of it is that I’d just prefer to spend my free time doing other things; part of it is that I’m not very good at evaluating studies, so I don’t trust that my attempts to update on new information would necessarily be valid.

  (I did read your post back when you wrote it, and Zvi, Scott, and Matt Bell’s posts around the same time, and kind of hand-waved my way to bumping my weekly budget to ~400 microCOVIDs, then roughly 1000 before Omicron kicked up, but am at a loss for how to update it as new findings come in.)

• SameerishereDec 30, 2021, 12:16 AM

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: Sameerishere’s comment on: What would you like from Micro­covid.org? How valuable would it be to you?

  My current shitty attempts to adjust manually are here: https://​​www.lesswrong.com/​​posts/​​YtWqgzLDqxSvJDkCi/​​how-should-we-adjust-microcovid-estimates-for-omicron