I don’t think the OP was talking about interventions that require action from participants, like masks and testing, but rather about ones that the organisers deploy independently.
Testing everyone might be good for COVID prevention, but again I think the point of the OP is about preventing airborne infections in general and not just COVID.
I wasn’t in the last EAG London but I think there were ~1500 people. I did go to the previous one, which had ~1000 people.
That EAG London that I attended published details about every COVID case discovered in some time period after the conference (10 days or so?). I think there were <20 infections out of those 1000 people. Does that match your model?
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.)
Yeah, but I can see Guy’s point that there’s some threshold where an event is short enough that a social intervention is cheaper than a technical one, so that different solutions are best for different contexts. But I don’t really have an opinion on that.
Hmm, true. Testing for fever maybe?
Thanks!
My model (based on Microcovid) would’ve predicted about 9 cases (3–26) for a 1,000-person event around nowish in Berlin. I don’t have easy access to the data of London back then, but the case count must’ve been higher. With these numbers we “only” lose about a year of EA time in expectation and have less than one case of long-covid.
Thanks for spending the time thinking about this! My focus had not been masks because, insofar as they would make EAG safer in a cost-beneficial way, I don’t think increasing mask adoption at EAG would have strong follow-on effects on other actors/the personal protective equipment (PPE) field in general. On the other hand, interventions to clean the air directly (ventilation, filtration, and UV light) seem to require better piloting on the critical path to wide adoption. Since a world with clean indoor air has both near-term health and long-term existential safety benefits my hypothesis is that piloting them in EA spaces is uniquely attractive compared to masks.
I know a lot of EAG biosecurity groups are excited about next-gen PPE and insofar as prototypes become available where EAG could serve as a useful testing ground, I’d become much more excited about implementing PPE there.
That said, I acknowledge your arguments that the direct benefits to EA health may justify masking. I personally do tend towards the “I dislike wearing masks; I think they impose real burdens that likely outweigh the health benefits for EAs” side of things, but I don’t feel like my view on that is particularly well-justified.
Sorry that I only have time for a short reply:
I don’t think the OP was talking about interventions that require action from participants, like masks and testing, but rather about ones that the organisers deploy independently.
Testing everyone might be good for COVID prevention, but again I think the point of the OP is about preventing airborne infections in general and not just COVID.
I wasn’t in the last EAG London but I think there were ~1500 people. I did go to the previous one, which had ~1000 people.
That EAG London that I attended published details about every COVID case discovered in some time period after the conference (10 days or so?). I think there were <20 infections out of those 1000 people. Does that match your model?
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.)
Yeah, but I can see Guy’s point that there’s some threshold where an event is short enough that a social intervention is cheaper than a technical one, so that different solutions are best for different contexts. But I don’t really have an opinion on that.
Hmm, true. Testing for fever maybe?
Thanks!
My model (based on Microcovid) would’ve predicted about 9 cases (3–26) for a 1,000-person event around nowish in Berlin. I don’t have easy access to the data of London back then, but the case count must’ve been higher. With these numbers we “only” lose about a year of EA time in expectation and have less than one case of long-covid.
Thanks for spending the time thinking about this! My focus had not been masks because, insofar as they would make EAG safer in a cost-beneficial way, I don’t think increasing mask adoption at EAG would have strong follow-on effects on other actors/the personal protective equipment (PPE) field in general. On the other hand, interventions to clean the air directly (ventilation, filtration, and UV light) seem to require better piloting on the critical path to wide adoption. Since a world with clean indoor air has both near-term health and long-term existential safety benefits my hypothesis is that piloting them in EA spaces is uniquely attractive compared to masks.
I know a lot of EAG biosecurity groups are excited about next-gen PPE and insofar as prototypes become available where EAG could serve as a useful testing ground, I’d become much more excited about implementing PPE there.
That said, I acknowledge your arguments that the direct benefits to EA health may justify masking. I personally do tend towards the “I dislike wearing masks; I think they impose real burdens that likely outweigh the health benefits for EAs” side of things, but I don’t feel like my view on that is particularly well-justified.
I see! Yeah, I don’t have an overview of the bottlenecks in the biosecurity ecosystem, so that’s good to consider.