Twitter CENSORED this HARVARD epidemiologist's shocked tweet but thanks to Democratic Underground,

[pnwmom]

and to ***Dennis Donovan***, his words have been preserved.

https://upload.democraticunderground.com/100212907959

Here is the censored tweet from January 24th that Twitter blocked:

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding @DrEricDing

HOLY MOTHER OF GOD - the new coronavirus is a 3.8!!! How bad is that reproductive R0 value? It is thermonuclear pandemic level bad - never seen an actual virality coefficient outside of Twitter in my entire career. I’m not exaggerating... #WuhanCoronovirus #CoronavirusOutbreak

The other tweets in the series:

2/ “We estimate the basic reproduction number of the infection (R_0) to be 3.8 (95% confidence interval, 3.6-4.0), indicating that 72-75% of transmissions must be prevented by control measures for infections to stop increasing...

3/ ... We estimate that only 5.1% (95%CI, 4.8-5.5) of infections in Wuhan are identified, and by 21 January a total of 11,341 people (prediction interval, 9,217-14,245) had been infected in Wuhan since the start of the year. Should the epidemic continue unabated in Wuhan....

4/ we predict the epidemic in Wuhan will be substantially larger by 4 February (191,529 infections; prediction interval, 132,751-273,649), infection will be established in other Chinese cities, and importations to other countries will be more frequent. Our model suggests that..

5/ travel restrictions from and to Wuhan city are unlikely to be effective in halting transmission across China; with a 99% effective reduction in travel, the size of the epidemic outside of Wuhan may only be reduced by 24.9% on 4 February. Our findings are...

6/ ...critically dependent on the assumptions underpinning our model, and the timing and reporting of confirmed cases, and there is considerable uncertainty associated with the outbreak at this early stage. With these caveats in mind, our work suggests that...

7/ a basic reproductive number for this 2019-nCoV outbreak is higher compared to other emergent coronaviruses, suggesting that containment or control of this pathogen may be substantially more difficult.”!!!! #wuhanvirus #CoronavirusOutbreak #ChinaCoronaVirus ...

11:06 PM - Jan 24, 2020

What you now see if you look for post #1:

Link to tweet

This Tweet is unavailable. Learn more

Here is Twitter's list of reasons for blocking a post. NONE of their reasons seem to fit this situation.

https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/notices-on-twitter

[malaise]

1. K & R

He was right

[pnwmom]

2. He was absolutely right. I wonder when that tweet got deleted and who decided n/t

[malaise]

4. See they do police tweets

but the wrong ones

[AtheistCrusader]

7. It just takes a sufficient number of people to click alert, and the algo kicks in.

It gets reviewed, maybe, by a human later. Twitter conveys around 6,000 tweets per second. No human is monitoring this stuff. It's keyword traps and alert algorithms. (And when reviewed, it's by a human with probably no expertise in the subject, with a time goal of tweets to review for the day.)

[SunSeeker]

3. Why would Twitter block it? There don't appear to be any grounds.

[malaise]

5. Twitter is owned by ReTHUGs

Hoax hoax hoax and all that

[JHB]

24. MAGAts and bots going on "report this tweet" sprees...

...on anything that makes Trump look bad.

The account for the political cartoon group CounterPoint had bee suspended for a while for similar opaque reasons. It has since been restored.

[pecosbob]

6. I recall when a thread circulated about the tweet here on DU

and I recall being alarmed by it.

[pnwmom]

8. This might be the thread that you read -- the one I"ve linked to in the OP. n/t

[pecosbob]

9. Good catch

[muriel_volestrangler]

10. That notice also shows if people delete their own tweets

and as that DU thread noted, the paper it quoted was preliminary, and revised the value. So it's much more likely that the doctor decided that since the paper had changed, he should change his tweet too. At your "notices on Twitter" link, it does say "There are some instances when a Tweet is unavailable to view, such as a Tweet from an account you do not follow that has protected Tweets, if the account has blocked you, the Tweet was deleted, or if the Tweet is from a deactivated account." above the "This Tweet is unavailable" message.

[pnwmom]

11. ALL the other tweets in that series remain, so those possible reasons don't explain

why the first one was blocked.

[muriel_volestrangler]

21. No, there's no logic to what you say

You still have no evidence that it was "blocked"; given the list (which you linked to) for that (or similar) messages is:

"such as a Tweet from an account you do not follow that has protected Tweets, if the account has blocked you, the Tweet was deleted, or if the Tweet is from a deactivated account."
and we can see others from him, the only one left is "the Tweet was deleted". We know that actual "censoring" by Twitter gives different messages.

Here's what Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding said in early February:

The R0 number (the number of persons one infected patient can pass on the virus to) of SARS varied from 2-2.5, at some places even 4. That of this outbreak is nearly 2.6.

https://www.downtoearth.org.in/interviews/health/coronavirus-difficult-to-talk-of-trajectory-but-should-die-down-by-may--69194

So, yes, he did not think 3.8 was right, a short time later. Everything points to him deleting the "holy mother of god - r0=3.8!" tweet.

[pnwmom]

13. It turns out that the actual number, based on more information, was even HIGHER

than this professor had predicted. So there goes that excuse for deleting his tweet.

We found R0 is likely to be 5.7 given our current state of knowledge, with a broad 95% CI (3.8–8.9).

[FakeNoose]

12. My guess - somebody high up in gov't asked to have it blocked

It looks like Twitter didn't do the censoring, they were compelled to do this by another person or entity. Somebody with political cojones.

Just sayin'

[Celerity]

14. this study was very early and flawed, the R0 value of 3.8 is overstated by around 50% or so

some of the other very early Chinese studies had it pegged even higher, which led to mass hysteria. There were some here on this board who early on were hard pushing a flawed early CDC-published (based off the early Wuhan numbers) study that put the R0 at a vastly overrated 5.7. Same modus operandi as others who were saying the death counts would be close to 10 million in the US alone.

this tweet

HOLY MOTHER OF GOD - the new coronavirus is a 3.8!!! How bad is that reproductive R0 value? It is thermonuclear pandemic level bad - never seen an actual virality coefficient outside of Twitter in my entire career.

is OTT fear mongering IMHO

I have no issues with it being taken down


it is also disinfo

the new coronavirus is a 3.8!!! How bad is that reproductive R0 value? It is thermonuclear pandemic level bad - never seen an actual virality coefficient outside of Twitter in my entire career.

see this table of R0 values from the CDC for other historic infectious diseases

https://web.archive.org/web/20160510161824/http://emergency.cdc.gov/agent/smallpox/training/overview/pdf/eradicationhistory.pdf




https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/23/world/europe/coronavirus-R0-explainer.html

In practice, there is no such thing as a fixed R0. It’s better to think of this number as a starting point for the virus’s behavior in the absence of real-world human or environmental factors.

New figures are coming out all the time. But, generally, studies now estimate that the pathogen that causes Covid-19 has an R0 of 2 to 2.5.

That’s significantly higher than the flu and within lower-end ranges for SARS, another coronavirus.

To know how quickly a virus spreads, you also need its serial interval, or average time between each successive infection. Some studies estimate the coronavirus’s at 4 to 4.5 days. That’s almost twice as fast as SARS, which is why the coronavirus spreads so much more quickly.

snip



https://abcnews.go.com/Health/r0-covid-19-virus-key-metric-opening-plans/story?id=70868997

snip

Measles, which is one of the most infectious diseases that scientists know of, has an R0 of about 15. (While there's some dispute about this number, measles is frequently cited as having an R0 between 12 and 18 in scientific literature.) With an R0 of 15, every person infected with measles will go on to sicken 15 additional people. On the other end of the spectrum, MERS, or Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, another type of coronavirus, has an R0 lower than 1, meaning on average, each infected person infects less than one other person. Because of that low reproductive number, MERS does not usually result in large disease outbreaks.

For now, scientists have calculated the R0 of the novel coronavirus to be between 2 and 3, meaning each infected individual will infect to two to three additional people, on average.

snip


R0 is also not fixed, and is going down in many nations. R0 is not based solely on the virus but is affected by the environment and by the behaviour of the population.

Link to tweet

R0 also matters for herd immunity. If the R0 value of COVID-19 is between 2.0 and 3.0 then HIT it is somewhere between 50 and 66% of the population depending
on the (reproductive ratio) An of 2.5 would mean 60% would need to be exposed. An of 2.0 would mean 50% would be the number. An of 3.0 would mean 66% is needed.


Some estimates

https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-comments-about-herd-immunity/

Prof Willem van Schaik, Professor of Microbiology and Infection, University of Birmingham, said:

“Herd immunity describes the phenomenon that at-risk individuals are protected from infection because they are surrounded by immune individuals. The spread of the virus is thus minimised. Currently, we talk mostly about herd immunity in the context of vaccines. If a sufficiently high number of individuals in a population are vaccinated, they will provide herd immunity to the small number of people that are not vaccinated (e.g. for medical or religious reasons). We have recently seen cases of measles outbreaks where herd immunity was not sufficiently high because children were not vaccinated out of completely unfounded fears against vaccination.

“Herd immunity exists for flu. If large proportions of the population would get a flu vaccine that could protect non-immunised individuals. The problem with flu is that it is difficult to know which strains of flu (think of strains as variations on a theme: it is flu but just a little bit different) will be causing infections at any given point in time and so that is why the flu vaccine is not always 100% effective. The major problem with coronavirus is that this is a novel virus that has never spread before, which means that everyone is at risk for infection. Herd immunity can only be reached by widespread vaccination (but there is currently no vaccine, and it may take a long time before an effective vaccine becomes available) or by individuals falling ill and recovering thereby developing natural immunity against the virus.

“Unfortunately, a very rough estimate suggests that we will only reach herd immunity to Covid-19 when approximately 60% of the population is immune (and remember that immunity is currently only reached by getting the infection as we have no vaccine!). The major downside is that this will mean that in the UK alone at least 36 million people will need to be infected and recover. It is almost impossible to predict what that will mean in terms of human costs but we are conservatively looking at 10,000s deaths, and possibly at 100,000s of death. The only way to make this work would be to spread out these millions of cases over a relatively long period of time so that the NHS does not get overwhelmed. Social distancing might contribute to this. Clearly the government believes that this process is manageable and building up herd immunity is the most effective way to stem Covid-19. I note that the UK is the only country in Europe that is following this strategy. Other countries also use scientific advice to guide their research and it is unclear to me why the UK is alone in their laissez-faire attitude to the virus. Perhaps the government has access to modelling data that suggests that the numbers I quoted above in numbers of cases and deaths are unavoidable in any scenario (e.g. even with prolonged social distancing strategies) but unfortunately these data, if they exist, have not been made available to the wider academic community so it is difficult to comment. However, last night’s U-turn banning large events suggests that the government’s policy is still very much subject to change. This change was perhaps influenced by the unprecedented outcry of scientists on the lax containment policy of the government.

snip



Prof Paul Hunter, Professor in Medicine, UEA, said:

“Immunity is when an individual has acquired resistance to infection with a particular pathogen (a virus, bacterium or parasite that causes disease) because they have already had an infection with that pathogen and recovered or have been immunised. Herd immunity occurs when a large enough proportion of a population are immune that an infection does not spread so easily or it can actually die out.

“In determining what level of herd immunity is necessary to stop the spread of infection we need to know the R0 (or reproductive ratio) this is the number of people that are likely to be infected by a single case when a new pathogen appears in a community with no prior immunity.

“So assume a pathogen with an R0=2, this means that after the first case there will be 2, then 4, then 8, etc. But by the time half the population is immune, on average half the people exposed from a single case will be immune and therefore only one person per infected person gets the infection.

“So the sequence 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256 ….. becomes 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1 and the disease will actually die out fairly quickly. Estimates of the R0 for COVID-19 vary somewhat but are in the order 2.0 to 3.0. Assuming that R0=3 then after about 66% of the population becomes infected then the virus will die out in the population.



Prof Matthew Baylis, Institute of Infection, Veterinary and Ecological Sciences, University of Liverpool, said:

“What is herd immunity? In a nutshell, everyone in a population is protected from infection before all of them are immune. The reason is that at a certain level of immunity (i.e., a proportion of people are immune, from having had the disease or having been vaccinated), the point comes when – on average – one infected person does not manage to contact and pass the infection on to one other person. Most of their contacts are already immune. The occasional contact is still susceptible, and the odd transmission event happens, but not often enough to sustain the disease. Transmission grinds to a halt, even though some or even many people have still not had the disease. This is herd immunity. It is one of the reasons boys are vaccinated against rubella: by vaccinating boys, boys are less likely to transmit to girls (an effect of immunity), and by vaccinating boys, girls are less likely to transmit to girls (an effect of herd immunity). For herd immunity, it does not matter whether the immunity comes from vaccination, or people having had the disease; people just need to be immune.

“A key question is how much immunity is needed before we get herd immunity? It varies per disease, depending on how transmissible it is. For a highly transmissible disease, like measles, on average one person might infect up 20 others, and herd immunity kicks in at 95% immune – and so, the target coverage for MMR vaccine is 95%. For flu, on average one person infects just 1.3 others; in this case herd immunity kicks in at about 25% immune or less; and so the target coverage for flu vaccine is much less than it is for measles (three quarters of over 65s).

“So what about COVID-19? Estimates are that one person may infect as many as 2-3 others, on average, meaning herd immunity should kick in at 50 – 67% of the population immune. And so in the absence of a vaccine, there would appear to be nothing to stop the spread of the virus until 50-67% of us have had it; and at that point herd immunity will kicks in and transmission will decline or stop. This is where the 60% of the population statistic has come from. And this is deeply concerning – taking the low fatality rate estimate of 1%, even 50% of the UK population infected by COVID-19 is an unthinkable level of mortality.





Dr Simon Gubbins, The Pirbright Institute, said:

“For a viral disease “herd immunity” refers to the indirect protection an uninfected individual receives if a proportion of the population is immune to infection. This could be achieved due to previous infection with the virus or more likely due to vaccination. The protection comes about because in a partially immune population infected individuals are less likely to encounter uninfected ones and so transmit the virus to them. Consequently, infection chains are interrupted and spread is stopped or slowed.

“The proportion of the population that needs to be immune for the number of new cases to decline depends on the basic reproductive ratio of the virus, known as R0. This is the average number of secondary cases that arise from each primary case when a virus is spreading in a wholly susceptible population.

“For SARS-CoV-2 estimates for R0 are around 2.5, so the proportion of the population that needs to be immune to achieve herd immunity is around 60%.

“Herd immunity acts as an evolutionary pressure for a virus to adapt so that it can escape immunity and can spread more easily. Influenza viruses are very good at this and frequently mutate to produce new strains to which people are not immune. This is the reason the seasonal flu vaccine needs to be updated annually. There is no information to show whether something similar will happen with SARS-CoV-2.”



Dr Ed Wright, Senior Lecturer in Microbiology, University of Sussex, said:

“Herd immunity is the required proportion of a population that needs to be immune to a pathogen to stop it from spreading within that same community. This immunity can be stimulated by vaccination or recovery following infection. The level of herd immunity required depends on how transmissible the pathogen is.

“This can be gauged from its basic reproduction number (R0) – the average number of people a positive case will go onto infect. For instance, to stop measles virus spreading within a population requires upwards of 90% of people to have immunity because the R0 for the measles virus is high (12-18) – it’s an airborne virus. The latest R0 for SARS-CoV-2 puts it between 2 and 3 so estimates suggest around 60% of the population would need immunity to stop the virus from taking hold in a community.”


snip

[pnwmom]

15. The CDC is STILL reporting it as 5.7.

https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-0282_article?fbclid=IwAR1EPp8f6WoAv-GEp2_Dugz74PuwjgUypoOHKrRxtiBDPkdS9cQ-jvNrjOU

[Celerity]

16. that study is no longer considered valid at all, for the reasons I laid out, sorry, it is wrong

[pnwmom]

18. Maybe tell that to the CDC. n/t

[Celerity]

19. I do not have to tell them, the current corpus of scientific evidence has already refuted it

[pnwmom]

20. Well, the professor was much more correct in the bottom line. We could have used

a LOT MORE "hysteria" instead of many voices dismissing the serious of the coming pandemic (as evidenced in many comments on DU at the time.). If the professor had been in charge of the response to the novel coronavirus, instead of the Trump administration, we would have been infinitely better off.

[Celerity]

23. obviously Trump completely cocked-up the US response and cost tens of thousands of needlessly

lost lives. He is a complete and murderous piece of dogshit.

That is not the point of my post, which is strictly limited to the scientific data and further studies, plus the OTT nature of the tweet.

This is from the CDC link you cited (the early study)

Although it is still up on the CDC website, it is from a very (January) early and very small sample (137 cases from China, 3 outside, and then further broken down, in some cases to a sample of only 24 cases for some calculations) The R0 values that they extrapolated out have not held up over time.

[Loubee]

17. You need to follow him on Twitter

He is a leading expert, one of the best sources of information available raising the alarm about federal negligence and malfeasance.

[mopinko]

22. always knew this place was the modern version of gabriels trumpet.

[Tarc]

25. Tagging the tweet with "#WuhanCoronovirus" may have been the reason for censure

As some feel linking the virus to China by name is racist.

[pnwmom]

26. No, that wasn't it. If it was, they wouldn't have left the tweets by James Woods

and many others.

[Ms. Toad]

27. From the conversations around the time,

I believe the author deleted it.

Things were happening pretty quickly - and my recollection was that he withdrew it as a result of the conversation among epidemiologists and replaced it with a different - slightly less "hair on fire" tweet.

He's such a prolific tweeter that I couldn't easily find it.

ETA: Around the time of the tweet, the authors he was relying on for his numbers withdrew their publication. Pretty sure it was a self-delete, not a block.