ivanonymous

It's a bad reply!

Narrowly because it's actually unfair point by point, as you say.

And slightly dishonest, because Scott does in fact entertain ideas that are scandalous to an expected arrival from the NYT. (Though not, I would say, for the reasons they might assume.)

But also more broadly, it doesn't take the opportunity to make intelligible to that arrival his insider's view of these related-but-distinct phenomena (his blog, the Rationalists, "Grey Tribe", the counter-techlash). Which the article predictably muddles.

Perhaps saddest to me, by responding defensively (however understandably!), he reinforces the emphasis in the piece on this sort of culture war stuff. Rather than perhaps channeling this new interest towards the meta-science and history and psychiatry and the like.

Besides close monitoring of people on O2 to adjust amounts and intubate if that time comes, there are potentially other components of supportive care that might alter outcomes, like IV anti-virals (e.g. remdesivir) or anti-coagulants, e.g. heparin. Some anti-coagulants can be given at home, but the strong doses being discussed also come with high risk of bleeding, benefitting from bed rest and close observation. For a good slice of the sickest COVID patients, hospitalization is helpful and hard to replicate at home, even with our limited therapies.

That said, oxygen and heparin at home could be good for a lot of patients. Improvements in prognostication may help distinguish that group in the future.

An outright cure at a year strikes me as unlikely, given the record with anti-virals.

But improvements in supportive care (anticoagulants?) and lucky repurposing might win meaningful reductions in morbidity (some permanent) and mortality within months.

I'm not sure how to weight that possibility. (Metaculus has settled on a likely ~5% relative risk reduction for chloroquine, which is no game changer.) But it seems underweighted in general in discussions about different paths to herd immunity.

That framing implies that all the relevant actors have committed to strategies that they'll see through to the end.

Learning from what's happening in Sweden should help guide decisions elsewhere.

The process of comparison is messy and politicized and in some sense always potentially premature, but I don't think for all that it should be forsworn.

I'm curious as a non-expert what's specifically worrying about their privacy model?

My intuition is that rapid adoption of a relatively transparent privacy-preseving option could preempt more heavy-handed approaches to what could be a very valuable public health intervention.

I don't want to discourage you, but please don't take your experience as a justification to ignore medical evidence and advice.

Kidney function is most often estimated indirectly, based on measurements of the amount of a chemical called creatine in the blood. Higher functioning kidneys lower creatine levels more effectively. But lowering the amount of creatine generated by your diet, by cutting out animal products, will also lower the creatine measured in your blood. That change in measurement does not reflect an actual improvement in your kidney function, I'm sorry to say.

At lower levels of kidney function, attempting to game the numbers in this way, by minimizing the creatinine you consume and by over-consuming water, could be dangerously misleading. And it shouldn't distract from measures that do stop the decline in kidney function, like blood pressure control and avoidance of certain kidney-damaging meds (e.g. high dose ibuprofen).

Good luck!