Friday, May 29, 2020

covid shows exponential decay almost certainly linked to hours of daylight

Will publish our results soon. In any case, it is a moral and health imperative that the lockdown end NOW



21/5/2020




Set the people free; explaining the end of the covid epidemic


Executive abstract



In the Irish times of 23/5/20. Luke O'Neill of TCD – the Irish scientist with most prominence on this issue – explained that 90% pf science was making mistakes. This he spectacularly exemplified by deliberately destroying a state-funded experiment to show off to the journalist Jennifer O'Connell. Unfortunately, this world of mistakes and state largesse has collided with the real world of people's livelihoods at enormous cost to the latter. While it is indeed a mistake that science has not yet worked out the details of how covifd-90 is transmitted, a mistake explicable at least in part by problems with the disciplinary formation of biologists, the primitive statistical models used by the epidemiologists to define public policy are currently ruining large swathes of civil society as well as the economy. There is a way forward, one that uses the advances in time series analysis made since WW2, one that exploits the natural experiment resutling in the small infection rates in India and Africa, and one that can set the Irish people free by June 2020 to enjoy the activities that give joy and meaning to life. Proper attention needs to be paid to the priorities in state funding of science in ireland that have led us to this mess.

In particulat, covid-19 infrction rates show a negative exponential decline with the coming pf spring and lengthening of days. This we have seen in Ireland and Brtitain Yet, in apparent paradox, infection rates have been less in the winter months of colder countries like Estonia. There are two hypotheses that emerge. The first is that the negative exponential in infection which we have calculated preceisly at our research group using publicly available data is due to the rate of decay of covid-19 particularly in UV light. The second hypothesis is that infection requires an endothermic reaction, and beneath a certain ambient temterature it cannot occur. Whi;e we have had natural experiments suggesting this, we need more controlled experiments.

Main text


The panicked response to covid19 is the greatest scientific failure of our lifetimes. We are putting our entire population under house arrest for a disease that will from now on in mid 2020 - even with all restrictions lifted - will kill fewer than suicide or car accidents.

For those rare individuals without time on their hands, here are the take-home-messages;
The new infections in Ireland from sars-cov-2 are nearing an asymptote since sometime in late April and the acceptable rate of 50-100 cases or so a day HPET model, is in place since the week of 18 May;
There is no point in continuing the severity of the phased lockdown, and a return to those activities that give joy and meaning to life should be accelerated starting with unrestricted travel in time for the Whit weekend and saving – inter alia- the GAA season, Willie Clancy week, the Rose of Tralee and the Galway races by opening up in line with the rest of the EU on June 15;
In particular, the epidemiological, immunological models are too primitive to warrant the current and planned state actions
Specifically, it is clear that the immunologists do not even know the basics of sampling methodology as they were until 20th may seriously asserting the necessity of testing everybody. Somehow an entire century in the development of the understanding of time series has escaped the epidemiologists; and genetic determinism has destroyed the possibility of understanding the details of transmissions in virologists as well;
In particular, there is no explanation as to why children are less susceptible and contagious, why Africa, Estonia, India and so on have largely escaped, and so on
Nor is there an explanation for the fact Madagscar up to last week has had zero deaths;
Specifically, Covid19 cannot work without a particular metabolic context or to put it in very simple terms within a very specific temperature range. The reason that the medical establishment does not understand that is that it has succumbed to genetic determinism at the cost of tens of thousands of lives and crashing the world economy.

Here are a few predictions that were first made in mid- April by this author in a paper to be presented at a conference in the USA on June 22 2020;

India and Africa will continue to confound expectations with a very low rate of infections

The distribution of infection in France Italy and Spain will surprise epidemiologists who are still using a 1927 model . To put it in simple terms these countries even more than is already the case in Ireland will get rid of covid19 much quicker than they expect to as they warm up.

So what went wrong? Let us first look at the SIR epidemiological model whose champion, Neil Ferguson, by his behaviour in violating his own strictures spectacularly showed that he does not believe any more than does this writer. It was developed in 1927 and assumes a normal or bell-shaped progress of the disease, with cholera the paradigm. This is precisely the model that Taleb excoriates in his classic book “The Black Swanas he argues it caused the 90's LTCM crash.

Power laws, with exponential growth and decay, are more prevalent. It does look as though covid infections converge to an asymptote with a negative exponenetial curve of infection rates, both new and current, at the end as is currently confounding NPHET, the body tasked with advising the Irish government. The deaths may indeed seem to follow a normal distribution perhaps due to mis-reporting while the tail for infection is a negative exponential and it is the tail that should shape the lifting of restrictions. In conjunction with our colleagues we are currently fitting the most correct curve to the public Irish and Spanish data. This will be again checked with respect to data derived from the late proposal by Ireland's National virus reference lab to sample randomly for antibodies, controlling for age and other factors, a step that should have been taken months ago.

In the method Ferguson promoted, either the population is exposed and develops herd immunity when about 70% (this number keeps changing!)have antibodies or - as happened here- we lock down so that only a limited sample is exposed. Various estimates have been given as to how many such lockdowns will be necessary to flatten the curve but it does not matter as this method cannot repeatedly be used without destroying our whole society. The mediaeval process, so described by Nobellist Michael Levitt, we have endured takes no account of the fact that a 2km walk and metro ride in the city brings one in contact with thousands, and in the countryside with single figures; the susceptibility differences due to age, obesity; and so on.

Nor does this model reflect the fact that, using methods like wavelets and the Hilbert Transform we can find the instantaneous analytic amplitude and phase of a signal like the infection rate. The curve is not bell-shaped as the phase will show. It is clear that the R or contagion changes but help is at hand; by using wavelet analysis, we can find the instantaneous frequency. In fact, we can distinguish the carrier wave (like the FM frequency of a station or the current R) from its instantaneous modulation (resulting in the music being played in the case of radio or the danger from covid-19 to a specific location or age group). Specifically, at worst we should be able to send texts out every day to citizens telling them of covid-19 hotspots to be avoided given their age and health history the next time it hits, as it will, instead of reaching for the lockdown nuke.

Readers have been exposed to so much nonsense not least from the current (as distinct from previous) unelected government that I will dare develop some of these points. There are two meanings of the word statistics that are germane to this discussion. The first is that a statistic is a parameter like a median taken from a sample. There is a very well-attested science that can tell you within specific confidence limits whether this sanple reflects a population, so no need to test everybody, as the virology lab seems to have realized. A statistic is the use by the state of laws of large numbers that most famously resulted in the number of undelivered letters in France converging year after year. Almost unbelievably, modern states have conceded these data to google and Facebook, who clearly have been bursting to tell us that, yes, they can track everybody. In any case, citizens should not allow the state to lock them down ever agin unless it demonstrates mastery of modern statistical techniques.

Secondly, and even more shockingly, the central dogma of molecular biology forced on all immunologists, virologists and epidemiologists as biology students cannot countenance the fact that metabolic effects obtain in gene expression. So, for example, the ratio of NAD+ to NADH is probed by proteins called transcription factors and differentially affects gene expression. Alternatively put, while Trump undoubtedly plays with the truth, the enunciation of a finding in his presence does not vitiate that finding. Will Bryan in such a context cited work from Johns Hopkins explaining the anomalous lack of impact of covid-19 in Africa, India, Estonia and so on; it is extremely heat sensitive, and its half- life is 2 minutes in bright sunlight. While we as yet know little about its transmission, for reasons that should now be clear to readers, so little of it survives after 15 minutes in the outdoors that one's chance of death by contagion is about the same as being kicked to death by a herd of donkeys.

But wait? Did we not, along with readers of Science and Nature in 2015, hear that the billions invested by the Irish taxpayer in SFI made us number 1 in the world in immunology? Where are these experts now? Or why is it that no Irish journalist has examined the Wall street Journals' expose of Dr Anita Jones, founder of SFI, and a board member of INQTEL? Has the aggressive alignment of Irish science with the goals of INQTEL - implemented at great Irish taxpayer expense mainly by the import of foreign scientists and in one case the firing of the chief state scientist - made us vulnerable as we have slipped down the real international science rankings since SFI started in 2003? It was this writer's great privilege to learn the science alluded to in this letter at UC Berkeley and Stanford. Funny how SFI never managed to lure anybody full-time from there, Harvard, MIT and other truly elite institutions?


Remarkably, some of the Irish scientists are beginning to catch on, and are now suggesting that vitamin D might help the body's immune system resist sars-cov-2. They posit a picturesque explanation in terms of marshalling cytokines, rather reminiscent in its vagueness of the hand-waving when immunology experiments had casualties with the cytokine avalanche at the testing on tgn1412. Essentially, a legacy drug that had no effects on other mammals killed humans; such is our knowledge of immunology! More importantly, they properly suggest that taking the elderly out of their nursing homes into the fresh air for 15 minutes a day to experience nature's bounty of vitamin D in the great outdoors may help.

It is a measure of our ignorance that there is a much simpler explanation, and a much simpler way to avoid the killing fields of the nursing homes. Might it not be the case that covid-19 is so damaged by UV light that lengthening days in themselves stall the epidemic? Conversely, keeping people indoors will perpetuate it, and Autumn will possibly revive it. Likewise, we must be open to the model of that the elderly currently in nursing homes may go back to their next of kin for each recurrence. What we can't afford is the current confusion of tongues between different specialists, a confusion imposed by funding of scientific research from the public purse.



Dr Sean O Nuallain

Foundations of Mind Summer School, University of Pisa
info@foundationsofmind.org