Another note on 4: A friend of mine contracted Covid at EAGx and says that she knows of many people how have. That’s just one pick from almost a thousand people. Her bubble may be unusually Covidious due to being a bubble with Covid though. So I don’t think Microcovid overestimates the risk of infection.
I’ve so far used the individual’s risk of infection and multiplied it with the number of individuals. But of course these people infect each other, so they are very much not independent. I would imagine that an EAG has either very few or very many infections. So that would require tracking the number over the course of several events to be able to average over them.
But a relatively Covid-conscious event like the Less Wrong Community Weekend may also cause or be correlated with more people afterwards reporting their Covid infections. A more Covid-oblivious EAG probably suffers underreporting afterwards. Maybe 10x from the same source that causes people not to fill in feedback surveys unless they are strongly coerced to and maybe another 10x from bad tests and bad sample-taking.
Some people don’t have the routine figured out of rubbing the swap first against the tonsils and then sticking it through the nose all the way down into the throat. Plus there are order-of-magnitude differences in the sensitivity of the self-tests. Bad tests and bad sample-taking can easily make a difference of 10x among the people who think they just had a random cold. So maybe a follow-up survey should ask about symptoms rather than confirmed positive tests, be embedded in various other feedback questions (so that it’s not just filled in by people with Covid), and then be used as a sample to extrapolate to the whole attendee population.
I’ve been trying to find studies on medical conferences but the only one I could find had various safety mechanisms in place, very much unlike EAGx, so it’s unsurprising that very few people got Covid. (I’m assuming that the vaccination statuses of the attendees are similar between a medical conference and an EAG.)
Another note on 4: A friend of mine contracted Covid at EAGx and says that she knows of many people how have. That’s just one pick from almost a thousand people. Her bubble may be unusually Covidious due to being a bubble with Covid though. So I don’t think Microcovid overestimates the risk of infection.
I’ve so far used the individual’s risk of infection and multiplied it with the number of individuals. But of course these people infect each other, so they are very much not independent. I would imagine that an EAG has either very few or very many infections. So that would require tracking the number over the course of several events to be able to average over them.
But a relatively Covid-conscious event like the Less Wrong Community Weekend may also cause or be correlated with more people afterwards reporting their Covid infections. A more Covid-oblivious EAG probably suffers underreporting afterwards. Maybe 10x from the same source that causes people not to fill in feedback surveys unless they are strongly coerced to and maybe another 10x from bad tests and bad sample-taking.
Some people don’t have the routine figured out of rubbing the swap first against the tonsils and then sticking it through the nose all the way down into the throat. Plus there are order-of-magnitude differences in the sensitivity of the self-tests. Bad tests and bad sample-taking can easily make a difference of 10x among the people who think they just had a random cold. So maybe a follow-up survey should ask about symptoms rather than confirmed positive tests, be embedded in various other feedback questions (so that it’s not just filled in by people with Covid), and then be used as a sample to extrapolate to the whole attendee population.
I’ve been trying to find studies on medical conferences but the only one I could find had various safety mechanisms in place, very much unlike EAGx, so it’s unsurprising that very few people got Covid. (I’m assuming that the vaccination statuses of the attendees are similar between a medical conference and an EAG.)