We really need follow-up effectiveness data on the J&J one shot vaccine, but not sure what this study tells us. A short epi 101 on case-control studies & why they’re hard to interpret.

Countries across the globe are currently experiencing a third or fourth wave of SARS-CoV-2 infections; therefore, the need for effective vaccination campaigns is higher than ever. However, effectiveness of these campaigns in disease reduction is highly dependent on vaccination uptake and coverage in susceptible populations. Therefore, this systematic review and meta-analysis estimated the vaccination intention and identified determinants of willingness and hesitancy. This study updates the existing body of literature on vaccination willingness, and was conducted according to the PRISMA guidelines. PubMed was searched for publications, selecting only studies published between 20 October 2020 and 1 March 2021, in English, with participants aged >16 years of age. The search identified 411 articles, of which 63 surveys were included that accounted for more than 30 countries worldwide. The global COVID-19 vaccination willingness was estimated at 66.01% [95% CI: 60.76–70.89% I2 = 99.4% [99.3%; 99.4%]; τ2 = 0.83]. The vaccination willingness varied within as well as between countries. Age, gender, education, attitudes and perceptions about vaccines were most frequently observed to be significantly associated with vaccine acceptance or refusal. View Full-Text

Worldwide Vaccination Willingness for COVID-19: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Company documents show antivaccine activists undermined the CEO’s ambition to support the rollout by flooding the site and using Facebook’s own tools to sow doubt about the Covid-19 vaccine

How Facebook Hobbled Mark Zuckerberg’s Bid to Get America Vaccinated

Thread On tests and the media It is almost universal that any piece discussing Rapid Ag tests says “PCR is more accurate but…” But even this isn’t true. It simply depends what you want to detect. If wanting to identify ppl who are contagious, PCR is much less accurate.

THREAD on the new variant B.1.1.529 summarising what is known from the excellent South African Ministry of Health meeting earlier today TLDR: So much uncertain but what *is* known is extremely worrying & (in my opinion) we should revise red list immediately.

Quantifying the relationship between specialisation and reputation in an online platform

3 studies today on antibodies & Omicron. There may be a large drop in neutralization of Omicron Antibodies stop Omicron well in hybrid immunity (infected+vax) Sotrovimab is active versus Omicron Take home: Get vaccinated. Get boosted. Immune system is clever.

reports of Covid "parties" and resultant deaths from Austria. This presumably is a potential reason for why policy might chose to not treat recovery as equivalent to vaccination where restrictions based on status are in place (e.g., 2G,3G in Germany and Austria)

If you don’t know about base rate fallacy then maybe don’t play dress up as an epidemiologist

People drastically underestimate how often an event with an 0.01% chance of happening will happen if you have millions of events

Online phenomena like echo chambers and belief polarisation are believed to be driven by humans’ penchant to selectively expose themselves to attitudinally congenial content. However, if like-minded content were the only predictor of online behaviour, heated debate and flaming on the Internet would hardly occur. Research has overlooked how online behaviour changes when people are given an opportunity to reply to dissenters, potentially turning a preference for attitudinally congenial information into a preference for uncongenial information. Three main experiments consistently show that in a discussion forum setting where users can respond to earlier posts, larger conflict between user attitude and post attitude predicts higher likelihood to respond. The effect of conflict on response behaviour is shaped by the attitudinal composition of the forum, and it also predicts subsequent polarisation of users’ attitudes. These results suggest that belief polarisation on social media can be driven by conflict rather than congeniality.

10.31234/osf.io/r87bm

Online interaction turns the congeniality bias into an uncongeniality bias

Given ~680k cases per day, this would in turn suggest 0.8% or 1% of the US being infected with SARS-CoV-2 every day. This would translate to perhaps 5% or 10% of individuals currently infected with SARS-CoV-2 in the US. 15/15

I don't have a good sense of how well testing infrastructure held up in London and how this compares to the US, but in general, this would suggest to me to be using something closer to 1 in 4 or 1 in 5 for reporting rate in the US rather than the 1 in 10 I've seen floated. 14/15

This fits with case reports suggesting a large fraction of symptomatic infections for Omicron (https://eurosurveillance.org/content/10.2807/1560-7917.ES.2021.26.50.2101147…, https://medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.22.21268021v2…). 13/15

This suggests to me that despite severe outcomes being more rare with Omicron and despite a huge surge in cases that reporting rate for Omicron in London remained fairly stable and did not differ hugely from Delta. 12/15

Importantly if we look at this ratio in Dec during which time Omicron became predominant and case loads increased dramatically, we see that both prevalence and cases increased in tandem and the ~35X ratio was largely maintained. 11/15

If we assume the average infection tests positive for ~10-days (based on @stephenkissler et al https://nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2102507…), we get an estimated reporting rate of 10/35 = ~29% or very roughly detecting 1 in 3.5 infections as a case. 10/15

We can plot the ratio of prevalence to cases with this 0-day lag to arrive at the following picture through time, where there's some variation, but a ~35X ratio of daily prevalence to daily cases is decently consistent. 9/15

We can compare timeseries of prevalence to cases since Oct 2020. Here we observe a 0-day compatible lag between specimen collection date for cases and prevalence. 8/15

In late December, London had ~26k daily confirmed cases, or 0.3% of the population being recorded as confirmed cases every day. 7/15

Recent data from late Dec from London had ~9% of individuals positive by PCR for SARS-CoV-2. So roughly 1 in 11 people with infections with detectable virus in London. 6/15

Here, I'll be comparing @ONS survey data to @UKHSA case counts in a dataset compiled by @seedragons and available at https://github.com/seedragons/london_covid… (and supplemented with data through Dec 31 via https://ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddiseases/datasets/covid19infectionsurveytechnicaldata…). 5/15

However, the single best study I'm aware of for estimating reporting rate is the ongoing @ONS study in the UK that mails swabs to a fraction of households regardless of symptom status (https://ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddiseases/methodologies/covid19infectionsurveypilotmethodsandfurtherinformation…). 4/15

Historically, I have assumed that around 30% of infections in the US are reported as cases. This number was derived from seroprevalence and modeling estimates from sites like (no longer updated) https://covid19-projections.com. 3/15

However, a large fraction of infections, symptomatic and otherwise, don't end up reported as cases due to lack of testing (either the individual doesn't seek testing or testing is desired but not readily found). 2/15

With Omicron, case counts in the US and many other countries have skyrocketed. The US 7-day average is now ~680k cases per day, or 0.2% of the population recorded as confirmed cases each day. 1/15

99.995% of people who drank from that pump didn't die. We need to learn to live with the dirty water. Dirty water is fine to drink if you don't have underlying health conditions. It's not necessary to clean the water unless it's *wholly* waterborne.

3 big questions about the Biden administration’s COVID response in 2022

2021 was supposed to be the year the pandemic ended. At least in the United States, anyway, where health officials administered roughly 500 million vaccine doses, more than any other country besides China or India. President Biden declared last spring that by summer, the country would be “closer than ever to declaring our independence from this deadly virus.” Things didn’t quite go to plan. U.S. health officials are currently reporting well over 238,000 new infections each day. The emergence of the Delta variant last summer, and the omicron variant more recently, threw a wrench into the administration’s grand plans to bring back “normal” life. As the pandemic stretches into its third year, Biden’s approval rating has slipped. And, more importantly, over 1,000 Americans continue to die from the disease each day, inching closer to the grim milestone of 1 million. In short, the White House has its work cut out for it, a year after assuming control of the U.S. coronavirus response. Below, STAT lays out the three biggest questions about the Biden administration’s COVID-19 strategy, and whether 2022 can finally be the year the pandemic fades into the background.

perhaps that is the lesson. There are some people out there who might need help, some rude and threatening types who really need to look at themselves, some confused souls who need advice, and some magical, whimsical sorts who just need to carry on doing what they do. Help those who need it, block out the idiots (spam filters are great) and concentrate on the wonderful, the wacky and the profound.

I’m a UK Covid scientist. Here’s a sample of the abuse in my inbox

Curious if this what @Twitter meant when they talked about their commitment to combat covid disinformation.

The present descriptive study investigated the challenges experienced and the coping strategies used by Egyptian university educators from different institution types while teaching online during the pandemic. The cross-sectional study drew participants (N = 222) from three different academic institution types, private universities, public universities, and adult education institutions, who responded to a survey that examined the technical, professional, administrative, social, and psychological challenges teachers encountered as well as their coping strategies. Data were analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. Results indicated that the challenges and coping strategies reported by teachers varied according to the teaching context and the requirements of each academic institution. The most reported challenges experienced were exhaustion, internet problems, technical issues, and anxiety. Despite the challenges, participants reported a few positive effects, including feeling more productive, being motivated to learn something new, feeling appreciated by the students and administration, and feeling confident using online teaching tools. Results also revealed that the participants used social and professional strategies to cope with the circumstances accompanying the sudden shift to online teaching. The results indicated how challenges faced by educators from different institution types may diminish with more training on, and experience with, online teaching, forming communities of practice as well as other coping strategies they developed. Such findings should be helpful to educators, institutions, and policymakers in different academic institutions all over the world and in various teaching contexts.

10.31235/osf.io/7yuek

Egyptian Educators’ Online Teaching Challenges and Coping Strategies during COVID-19

An unfounded theory taking root online suggests millions of people have been “hypnotized” into believing mainstream ideas about COVID-19, including steps to combat it such as testing and vaccination.In widely shared social media posts this week, efforts to combat the disease have been dismissed with just three words: “mass formation psychosis.”“I’m not a scientist but I’m pretty sure healthy people spending hours in line to get a virus test is mass formation psychosis in action,” reads one tweet that was liked more than 22,000 times.The term gained attention after it was floated by Dr. Robert Malone on “The Joe Rogan Experience” Dec. 31 podcast. Malone is a scientist who once researched mRNA technology but is now a vocal skeptic of the COVID-19 vaccines that use it.But psychology experts say the concept described by Malone is not supported by evidence, and is similar to theories that have long been discredited.

FACT FOCUS: Unfounded theory used to dismiss COVID measures

doi.org/10.1111/bjso.12470

The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered health-related anxiety in ways that undermine peoples’ mental and physical health. Contextual factors such as living in a high-risk area might further increase the risk of health deterioration. Based on the Social Identity Approach, we argue that social identities can not only be local that are characterized by social interactions, but also be global that are characterized by a symbolic sense of togetherness and that both of these can be a basis for health. In line with these ideas, we tested how identification with one’s family and with humankind relates to stress and physical symptoms while experiencing health-related anxiety and being exposed to contextual risk factors. We tested our assumptions in a representative sample (N = 974) two-wave survey study with a 4-week time lag. The results show that anxiety at Time 1 was positively related to stress and physical symptoms at Time 2. Feeling exposed to risk factors related to lower physical health, but was unrelated to stress. Family identification and identification with humankind were both negatively associated with subsequent stress and family identification was negatively associated with subsequent physical symptoms. These findings suggest that for social identities to be beneficial for mental health, they can be embodied as well as symbolic.

A trouble shared is a trouble halved: The role of family identification and identification with humankind in well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic Svenja B. Frenzel, Corresponding Author Svenja B. Frenzel frenzel@psych.uni-frankfurt.de Department of Social Psychology, Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany *Correspondence should be addressed to Svenja Frenzel, Department of Social Psychology, Goethe University Frankfurt, Theodor-W.-Adorno-Platz 6, 60323 Frankfurt, Germany (email: frenzel@psych.uni-frankfurt.de).Search for more papers by this authorNina M. Junker, Nina M. Junker Department of Social Psychology, Goethe University Frankfurt, GermanySearch for more papers by this authorLorenzo Avanzi, Lorenzo Avanzi Department of Psychology and Cognitive Science, University of Trento, ItalySearch for more papers by this authorAidos Bolatov, Aidos Bolatov Department of Biochemistry, Astana Medical University, Nur-Sultan, KazakhstanSearch for more papers by this authorS. Alexander Haslam, S. Alexander Haslam School of Psychology, University of Queensland, Brisbane, AustraliaSearch for more papers by this authorJan A. Häusser, Jan A. Häusser Department of Social Psychology, Justus-Liebig-University Giessen, GermanySearch for more papers by this authorRonit Kark, Ronit Kark Department of Psychology, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel School of Business, University of Exeter, UKSearch for more papers by this authorInes Meyer, Ines Meyer School of Management Studies, University of Cape Town, South AfricaSearch for more papers by this authorAndreas Mojzisch, Andreas Mojzisch Department of Psychology, University Hildesheim, GermanySearch for more papers by this authorLucas Monzani, Lucas Monzani Ivey Business School, University of Western Ontario, London, CanadaSearch for more papers by this authorStephen Reicher, Stephen Reicher School of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of St Andrews, UKSearch for more papers by this authorAdil Samekin, Adil Samekin Department of Psychology of Religion and Pedagogy, International Islamic Academy of Uzbekistan, Tashkent, UzbekistanSearch for more papers by this authorValerie A. Schury, Valerie A. Schury Department of Social Psychology, Justus-Liebig-University Giessen, GermanySearch for more papers by this authorNiklas K. Steffens, Niklas K. Steffens School of Psychology, University of Queensland, Brisbane, AustraliaSearch for more papers by this authorLiliya Sultanova, Liliya Sultanova Department of Psychology, Branch of Moscow State University Named for M.V. Lomonosov in Tashkent, UzbekistanSearch for more papers by this authorDina Van Dijk, Dina Van Dijk Department of Health Systems Management, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beersheba, IsraelSearch for more papers by this authorLlewellyn E. van Zyl, Llewellyn E. van Zyl Department of Social Psychology, Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany Human Performance Management, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands Optentia Research Focus Area, North-West University, Vanderbijlpark, South Africa Department of HRM, University of Twente, Enschede, The NetherlandsSearch for more papers by this authorRolf Van Dick, Rolf Van Dick Department of Social Psychology, Goethe University Frankfurt, GermanySearch for more papers by this author

10.1136/bmj.n2022

As some intensive care units fill up once again, the patients with covid-19 feel almost familiar. Not all, but many, of them are overweight; similarly, many have diabetes or high blood pressure. The difference this time, however, is that another common factor has been added to our lists: patients who are unvaccinated. Certainly not all, but many. How does it feel to care for someone at the edge of life when you know that it didn’t necessarily have to be this way?Some health professionals may feel angry at having to care for patients who have made unwise decisions. But we all make poor choices at some points in our lives. You may eat too much, you may have texted while driving, or perhaps you drank too much at the office party. And perhaps you got away with it. Through luck rather than judgment, you didn’t crash your car or break your ankle. We are so much more than our worst decisions, and so are the patients who made poor choices and were less fortunate.Many of the people who turned down having the vaccine are thoughtful and intelligent. Yet the world is full of bad ideas and bad incentives, and people are often influenced by them. Untangling the net of influence is difficult, and often the harder other people try to help, the tighter the knots become. Even exposing bad science to help explain the faulty logic behind it can reinforce those very same false beliefs, through quirks of human psychology that are hard to understand.And so, what should we do? How should we feel about it all? For one thing, we should continue to explain how the vaccine is safe. We should say that, even if you accept the vaccine’s potential risks—which may have been inflated through bad science—the vaccine is still far safer than actually having covid.We should also say that choosing a disease filled with risks and uncertainties over a vaccine with far fewer risks and far less uncertainty is still an individual choice, but it’s a choice I find impossible to understand when viewed in this way. However, we should resist continually poking fun or shaming bad science or bad ideas, even if we do so only to expose them. In this increasingly polarised world, repeated exposure only serves to strengthen beliefs, even after they’re dismantled through logic.And yet, I still feel angry and cheated. But not at the patients; rather, at the people promoting, fuelling, and exploiting the bad ideas and bad incentives that influence so many people. I am angry with the liars, not those who have been lied to.

Matt Morgan: Caring for unvaccinated patients

10.31234/osf.io/y6wm4

The political discontent triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic – including public protesting and the airing of anti-elite sentiments – is reminiscent of discontent often associated with populism. Research on populism has highlighted a sense of vulnerability and loss of control as drives of populism. Similarly, health authorities and researchers have highlighted “pandemic fatigue” as a central psychological consequence of the pandemic, which may fuel political discontent. On this basis, we ask how pandemic fatigue developed over the course of the pandemic and whether it fueled populist sentiments. Utilizing longitudinal and panel surveys collected from September 2020 to July 2021 in eight Western democracies, we analyze: (1) fatigue over time at the country level, (2) associations between pandemic fatigue and discontent, and (3) the effect of pandemic fatigue on political discontent using panel data. We find that pandemic fatigue significantly increases with time and the severity of lockdowns but also decreases with COVID-19 deaths. When triggered, fatigue elicits a broad range of discontent, including protest support and conspiratorial thinking. The results demonstrate the importance of distress for the activation of populism and discontent. As discussed, the results also highlight a need for distinguishing between aggressive and submissive aspects of populism.

Pandemic Fatigue and Populism: The Development of Pandemic Fatigue during the COVID-19 Pandemic and How It Fuels Political Discontent across Eight Western Democracies

10.1101/2021.08.15.21261243

Schools were closed extensively in 2020-2021 to counter COVID-19 spread, impacting students’ education and well-being. With highly contagious variants expanding in Europe, safe options to maintain schools open are urgently needed. We developed an agent-based model of SARS-CoV-2 transmission in school. We used empirical contact data in a primary and a secondary school, and data from pilot screenings in 683 schools during the 2021 spring Alpha wave in France. We fitted the model to observed school prevalence to estimate the school-specific reproductive number and performed a cost-benefit analysis examining different intervention protocols. We estimated RAlpha=1.40 (95%CI 1.35-1.45) in the primary and RAlpha=1.46 (1.41-1.51) in the secondary school during the wave, higher than Rt estimated from community surveillance. Considering the Delta variant and vaccination coverage in Europe, we estimated RDelta=1.66 (1.60-1.71) and RDelta=1.10 (1.06-1.14) in the two settings, respectively. Under these conditions, weekly screening with 75% adherence would reduce cases by 34% (95%CI 32-36%) in the primary and 36% (35-39%) in the secondary school compared to symptom-based testing. Insufficient adherence was recorded in pilot screening (median ≤53%). Regular screening would also reduce student-days lost up to 80% compared to reactive closure. Moderate vaccination coverage in students would still benefit from regular screening for additional control (23% case reduction with 50% vaccinated children). COVID-19 pandemic will likely continue to pose a risk for school opening. Extending vaccination coverage in students, complemented by regular testing largely incentivizing adherence, are essential steps to keep schools open, especially under the threat of more contagious variants.

Screening and vaccination against COVID-19 to minimize school closure

10.1080/10410236.2021.1994910

The COVID-19 pandemic has made it clear that effective public health messaging is an indispensable component of a robust pandemic response system. In this article, we review decades of research from the interdisciplinary field of communication science and provide evidence-based recommendations for COVID-19 public health messaging. We take a principled approach by systematically examining the communication process, focusing on decisions about what to say in a message (i.e., message content) and how to say it (i.e., message executions), and how these decisions impact message persuasiveness. Following a synthesis of each major line of literature, we discuss how science-based principles of message design can be used in COVID-19 public health messaging. Additionally, we identify emerging challenges for public health messaging during the COVID-19 pandemic and discuss possible remedies. We conclude that communication science offers promising public health messaging strategies for combatting COVID-19 and future pandemics.

Public Health Messaging during the COVID-19 Pandemic and Beyond: Lessons from Communication Science

10.1139/facets-2021-0018

COVID science is being both done and circulated at a furious pace. While it is inspiring to see the research community responding so vigorously to the pandemic crisis, all this activity has also created a churning sea of bad data, conflicting results, and exaggerated headlines. With representations of science becoming increasingly polarized, twisted, and hyped, there is growing concern that the relevant science is being represented to the public in a manner that may cause confusion, inappropriate expectations, and the erosion of public trust. Here we explore some of the key issues associated with the representations of science in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Many of these issues are not new. But the COVID-19 pandemic has placed a spotlight on the biomedical research process and amplified the adverse ramifications of poor public communication. We need to do better. As such, we conclude with 10 recommendations aimed at key actors involved in the communication of COVID-19 science, including government, funders, universities, publishers, media, and the research communities.

Let’s do better: public representations of COVID-19 science

10.1016/j.copsyc.2021.10.007

One piece of the puzzle to prosocial behavior is understanding its underlying cognitive and affective processes. We discuss how modeling behavior in social dilemmas can be expanded by integrating cognitive theories and attention-based models of decision processes, and models of affective influences on prosocial decision-making. We review theories speaking to the interconnections of cognition and affect, identifying the need for further theory development regarding modeling moment-by-moment decision-making processes. We discuss how these theoretical perspectives are mirrored in empirical evidence, drawn from classical outcome-oriented as well as contemporary process-tracing research. Finally, we develop perspectives for future research trajectories aiming to further elucidate the processes by which prosocial decisions are formed, by linking process measures to usually unobservable cognitive and affective reactions.

Cognitive and affective processes of prosociality

2111.07144

Online platforms experience a tension between decentralisation and incentives to steer user behaviour, which are usually implemented through digital reputation systems. We provide a statistical characterisation of the user behaviour emerging from the interplay of such competing forces in Stack Overflow, a long-standing knowledge sharing platform. Over the 11 years covered by our analysis, we find that the platform's user base consistently self-organise into specialists and generalists, i.e., users who focus their activity on narrow and broad sets of topics, respectively. We relate the emergence of these behaviours to the platform's reputation system with a series of data-driven models, and find specialisation to be statistically associated with a higher ability to post the best answers to a question. Our findings are in stark contrast with observations made in top-down environments - such as firms and corporations - where generalist skills are consistently found to be more successful.

2111.07250

What is scientific knowledge, and how is it created, accumulated, transformed, and used? If we want to know the answers to these questions, we need to be able to uncover the structures and mechanisms of science, in addition to the metrics that are easily collectable and quantifiable. In this review article, we link metrics to mechanisms, by demonstrating how emerging metrics not only offer complementaries to the existing metrics, but also shed light on the underlying mechanisms related to ten key quantities of interest in the Science of Science, including discovery significance, finding replicability, knowledge cumulativeness, and beyond. We classify existing theories and findings into three fundamental properties of science: hot and cold science, soft and hard science, fast and slow science. We suggest that curiosity about structure and mechanisms of science since Derek J. de Solla Price, Eugene Garfield, Robert K. Merton, and many others complement the zeitgeist in pursuing new, complex metrics without understanding the underlying processes.

Metrics and Mechanisms: Measuring the Unmeasurable in the Science of Science