[pezzana]

> All staff members preparing to depart to the station had to undergo a PCR test in Belgium two hours before leaving for South Africa, take a PCR test five days after their arrival in Cape Town, where they also had to quarantine for ten days. Another test was required when leaving Cape Town for Antarctica and another PCR test had to be undergone five days after arrival.

This is clear evidence that the current paradigm for dealing with the pandemic is ineffective at best.

[Jabbles]

> ineffective

I don't think it's clear evidence of this, but you could definitely say it's not 100% effective. Whether it is useful is not something that you cannot determine from this story alone.

[Gigachad]

The problem is being 99.9% effective just isn't good enough. One person slips through and it's all over. It isn't realistically possible to keep covid out of areas.

[midasuni]

New Zealand has done a pretty good job over the last two years. Whether the costs outweigh the benefits is a separate question

[lostlogin]

Economically or in terms of mortality/morbidity, it’s not obvious that there was a better strategy for New Zealand.

The article claims that covid is in all Antarctic bases, but I wasn’t aware that Scott base had any. I can’t find any reports of it either.

Edit: Their report from August had it covid free. https://www.antarcticanz.govt.nz/media/news/antarctica-new-z...

[midasuni]

That’s beside the point. It is possible to keep covid out. There are costs and benefits to that.

The ISS has remained covid free. Kiribati has too. Tonga had one person arrive with covid but it didn’t progress.

[TeeMassive]

They had 1000 community cases today https://www.health.govt.nz/our-work/diseases-and-conditions/...

[throwaway788]

Thats over the last 21 days. There was 47 community cases yesterday.

[midasuni]

Since vaccinating they’ve relaxed restrictions

[lostlogin]

And poorly behaved DJs aside, it’s going ok.

Time will tell if the policies in place will deal with Omicron, though.

[pen2l]

It is understood that it's not 100% effective, we enforce these restrictions upon ourselves in part so that we just slow it down and spread it out over time, so that medical centers are not overwhelmed and unable to provide care to those who really it, so that we have time to create better and better therapeutics.

[baxtr]

What is good enough though?

I always thought the whole prevention thing is because we want to “flatten the curve”, remember? Not to prevent every single infection, which is impossible.

[jerlam]

Different places, different goals.

If you're on an Antarctic base where medical facilities are meager and the time and cost for evacuation is high, zero infections is likely the goal.

As an extreme example, the US grounded an astronaut for being exposed, not infected, by measles:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Mattingly#Apollo_13

[mattkrause]

As another fun example, the doctor (and only the doctor) overwintering in Antartica needs to have had their appendix out.

Medical evacuations are tricky, especially in the winter, and the logic is that the (single) doctor could remove someone else's appendix, but it would much harder for them to remove their own. Leonid Rogozov did remove his own in the 1960s, but I think most stations would prefer to avoid a repeat of that.

It did make for a fascinating BMJ Christmas Article though, written by his son: https://web.archive.org/web/20100925041337/http://www.bmj.co...

[tonfreed]

China is still pursuing a zero case strategy and locking down huge sections of the country. Apologies for daily Mail

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10349531/China-Covi...

[jdavis703]

In the US there are literally thousands of different public health agencies headed by health officers with strategies ranging from herd immunity by any means necessary to attempting COVID 0. Vague gripes about public health tag lines in such a fractured environment is unproductive.

[lostlogin]

Isn’t that in itself a big problem? You need a united strategy for public health initiatives to be effective.

[vl]

You need correct strategy for public health initiative to be effective.

[ashtonkem]

That’s really not true though. 99.9% effective might not be good enough for an Antarctic research base, but that’s a pretty unusual circumstance. We’d be thrilled if our current countermeasures against Covid were 99.9% effective; we would’ve ended this in 2020 if that were the case.

If I understand correctly, you can mathematically model how effective countermeasures have to be in order to suppress a virus with a given R0. Given that the measles vaccine is 93% effective and sufficient to suppress one of the most infectious diseases we’ve ever seen (R0 of 12-18), I think 99.9% would be in the overkill category.

[_0w8t]

Can you give a source for that 93% efficiency of measles vaccine? Accuracy for 2 digits is very suspicious. Measles symptoms depend strongly on nutrition deficiencies with insufficient vitamin C being especially bad. If that is not the case, one can be asymptomatic and then we never know about infection.

[eesmith]

https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/measles/index.html

> The MMR vaccine is very safe and effective. Two doses of MMR vaccine are about 97% effective at preventing measles; one dose is about 93% effective.

Prevention of Measles, Rubella, Congenital Rubella Syndrome, and Mumps, 2013 Summary Recommendations of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) at https://www.jstor.org/stable/24832555

> One dose of measles-containing vaccine administered at age ≥12 months was approximately 94% effective in preventing measles (range: 39%–98%) in studies conducted in the WHO Region of the Americas (141,142). Measles outbreaks among populations that have received 2 doses of measles-containing vaccine are uncommon. The effectiveness of 2 doses of measles-containing vaccine was ≥99% in two studies conducted in the United States and 67%, 85%–≥94%, and 100% in three studies in Canada (142–146). The range in 2-dose vaccine effectiveness in the Canadian studies can be attributed to extremely small numbers (i.e., in the study with a 2-dose vaccine effectiveness of 67%, one 2-dose vaccinated person with measles and one unvaccinated person with measles were reported [145]). This range of effectiveness also can be attributed to age at vaccination (i.e., the 85% vaccine effectiveness represented children vaccinated at age 12 months, whereas the ≥94% vaccine effectiveness represented children vaccinated at age ≥15 months [146]). Furthermore, two studies found the incremental effectiveness of 2 doses was 89% and 94%, compared with 1 dose of measles-containing vaccine (145,147). Similar estimates of vaccine effectiveness have been reported from Australia and Europe (Table 1) (141).

No mention of vitamin C. Given that "After exposure, up to 90% of susceptible persons develop measles", it seems very unlikely that differences in vitamin C play an important role.

What are your sources? I found nothing on PubMed nor Google Scholar, though I did find that vitamin C is promoted to antivaxxers (eg, http://www.amcli.it/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/bmj-measles-f... ).

You write "depend strongly on nutrition deficiencies", which my cited article describes as "In low to middle income countries where malnutrition is common, measles is often more severe and the case-fatality ratio can be as high as 25%".

That's calorie deficient, but not specifically vitamin deficient.

[_0w8t]

Thanks for the links. “About 93%” is much more sensible then 93%. As for vitamins there was an old study [1] :

Child mortality due to measles is 200 to 400 times greater in malnourished children in less developed countries than those in developed ones. In addition, measles brings about consumption of nutrients in marginally nourished children, so they will also do worse if not supplemented during infection.

[1] https://www.karger.com/Article/Abstract/413843

[pessimizer]

Seeing people very critical of vaccine studies of a successfully eradicated disease that has had a long time since to evaluate that success aside a really generous benefit of the doubt given to vague claims about vitamin supplements makes me sad.

We can be observant and suspicious about the healthcare industry while also admitting that there is science being done. They manufacture vitamin C supplements, too. They make money whether you buy the regulated stuff or the unregulated stuff.

[taurath]

I think if you take the strictest possible quarantine and test paradigms and even those are failing, its certainly fair to call them ineffective.

[GaylordTuring]

I don’t know. If a medicine cures 99 % of all cases (or even 10 %) would you say it’s ineffective? I’d say it’s effective, but depending on the your overall goal, not effective enough (if you’d like to call it ineffective, it would be ineffective with respect to a certain macro outcome, not with respect to individual cases). At some minuscule percentage (let’s say 0,1 %) I would probably be tempted to actually starting to call it ineffective.

[trompetenaccoun]

It would be to anyone thinking about this logically, but belief in the measures seems to have become like a religion to some. The craziest discussion I had about this was with a friend who insisted the number of administered tests for a given location hadn't risen in 2021. I showed them the official government stats but they still claimed there hadn't been a rise. When I sent them a graph they said they'd looked at it and it confirms there was no rise. The graph showed a clear rise, like line going straight up!

How do you even deal with this? I can have more rational discussions with fundamental Christians.

[decebalus1]

Right. Because something needs to be airtight 100% successful with 100% compliance and 100% enforcement or nothing at all. As with American politics, there is no gray area ever.

I completely disagree with your statement. The goals of the current paradigm of dealing with the pandemic is to minimize the strain on various processes from a public health perspective. Anything moving the needle is effective. That's why guidelines are like 'gatherings of 20 people or more'. It's to minimize spread, not completely obliterate it.

Comparing this incident with public health directives is disingenuous at best. It's the exact same line of thinking about masks. Oh, masks aren't 100% effective in preventing infection. Therefore, they're useless so nobody should wear them, ever.

We've also sent some people to the IIS and they didn't test positive. What does that say about the current paradigm?

[freetinker]

I’m not so sure; respectfully disagree. This only talks about process stricture, not efficacy or process compliance/lapse. Plausible hypothesis, but needs more data.

[yosito]

If I've learned something about people during the pandemic, it's that the average person is far less intelligent and far less compliant than I previously believed. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to find out this was caused by people not complying with protocols. Or at the very least, not having an understanding of the fact that COVID transmission is aerosol, and that breathing reshared air even for a few seconds is a high risk activity.

[leppr]

I would call that uneducated rather than unintelligent. Not everyone is an expert on Covid-19, most people here aren't. We look for and rely on trusted sources to get our information about it.

But many mainstream trusted sources have been carrying out misinformation/divertion campaigns by focusing prevention on hand hygiene and vaccination, instead of explaining the actual mechanism of transmission. So unless they're curious and proactive about searching for neutral information (which is orthogonal to intelligence), many people by default believe transmission happens by touching surfaces, or cannot happen when one has taken vaccines, for instance.

[WalterBright]

Reminds me of the fact that you can fool people into believing the school system is effective, that a record number of tractors was produced, that the leader got elected with 96% of the vote, but you simply cannot fool people into thinking they aren't starving to death.

[austinjp]

Not sure I follow. Haven't Trump and Bolsonaro et al done surprisingly well at convincing people they aren't dying?

[christophilus]

Scientists heading to the Belgian station are probably fairly smart. As for compliance, my experience with highly intelligent people is that they tend to be less compliant or predictable than others, so you may be right that this was due to a lapse in compliance.

[wreath]

When things don't make any sense, or show poor results, it's hard to comply to, which has been the case in the last two years with our betters on a power trip.

[dustintrex]

Intelligence does not necessarily imply compliance, or vice versa.

[csunbird]

Human error/non-compliance is a thing, to be honest. Although, this can also mean the procedures do not work as well.

[freetinker]

Good point. However, one can’t conclude that with any reasonable certainty from the article.

[KennyBlanken]

Yep. Likely self-supervised isolation/quarantine and someone broke the rules.

That said, omicron is apparently insanely infectious, so it could have been something as simple as a member of the ground crew being inside the plane for a bit to stock or check something.

[avereveard]

Or some asymptomatic carrier administering a set of the test, or some of the cleaning staff coughing in the room before the tests.

That they focused on the person action (quarantines, tests) and not the environment (transfer shuttles, testing rooms, bathrooms and dressing rooms) kids hints the latter as a source. After all, you drop your mask during testing, and I've seen places doing it in a small, unventilated room with no pause between each person.

[jobe_br]

Two options: quarantine bubble failure or incubation longer than .. 15 days?

Both are possible, though the former is more likely. 5 day intervals for incubation seem too short for 100% safety. I believe omicron has some data points of longer incubation already.

[ssl232]

Third option: flawed hypothesis. Swabbing the nose or throat and performing subsequent RT-PCR analysis is not an infallable indicator of whether or not someone is free from the virus SARS-CoV-2 or infected with or likely to become infected with the respiratory disease COVID-19. Before 2020 such tests were typically only used as a part of a diagnosis by a medical professional upon consultation, typically also alongside symptoms. The limitations of testing were well understood before 2020 but somehow that all got lost in the panic.

Another point is that there are animal reservoirs for SARS-CoV-2. We've known this since well before the zero-covid debacle, making such a plan was doomed to fail, as it did. It's likely that the virus can live in intestinal tracts of animals, including humans, for long periods without being detected and destroyed by the host's immune system. This makes the use of negative nose/throat swab tests as a guarantee of no subsequent infection a fallacy.

The way we deal with COVID is to stop testing asymptomatic people and use the plethora of effective early treatment protocols we've developed since as early as December 2019 to vastly reduce the need for hospital treatment in those that do develop symptoms.

[KennyBlanken]

Nose swabs reveal whether you're shedding the particles and thus infectious. It doesn't matter if you're infected if you're not shedding the virus.

They are also exceptionally reliable. The home test kit I used had a sub-1% false negative rate.

[timr]

> Nose swabs reveal whether you're shedding the particles and thus infectious. It doesn't matter if you're infected if you're not shedding the virus.

No, they really don't. Swabbing for RNA picks up gene fragments that may or may not be from infectious virus -- it's why we see positive tests for months after infection in some people.

Swabbing for viral protein is debatably more likely to detect the thing of interest (the virus itself, in some semblance of functioning order), but these tests also have a high false-negative rate (around 10% for the better tests I've seen; I have never heard of a test with a sub-percent FN rate, as you claim). You can be shedding live virus and these tests won't pick it up, either because you're not shedding enough, or because the antibodies in the test don't bind to the protein in your sample for whatever reason.

Either way, you're measuring a proxy for what you really care about. A true test of infection involves taking a sample and incubating in cell culture. Nobody does this, except to validate the original tests and provide clear positive and negative samples. It's slow and orders of magnitude more expensive than even PCR testing. But this is the direct test for infectious virus. Everything else is an approximation.

(Let me be clear, though: I wholeheartedly support the use of antigen tests -- even ones with low sensitivity -- over the insanity we're doing now in the US. It's just bad to misrepresent what they're actually doing.)

[refurb]

Agree with all of this. PCR literally involves amplifying segments of genetic material so it can be detected. All you need is a segment of genetic material, not the whole virus.

However, I’m not sure the value in antigen testing? Sure, when you’re traveling or have to into a higher risk situation.

But Singapore decided to freely give out antigen tests and what happened was people who tested positive showed up at the ER. And the antigen tests weren’t reliable, so PCR had to confirm. And they have a high vaccination rate so after all that testing the answer was “go home and if you get really sick, come back”.

It finally dawned on them that could just be the message anyways - if you don’t feel bad, don’t worry. If you do, you can test but don’t seek medical care unless you have severe symptoms.

[timr]

The value of cheap, ubiquitous antigen testing is that you can be pretty sure that you don't have the virus, which allows scared people to have some sense of control. Even though these tests have a high false-positive rate, it's pretty unlikely that you'll test negative on multiple independent tests, so the cheap and ubiquitous part is important. Scared people can fixate their fear on a metric that actually correlates with transmission. Negative test? No need to freak out about going to the store.

That said, your point is well-taken that people can be idiots about testing positive. We do need to get over this fear and accept that the virus is endemic, and that vaccines work to prevent serious illness. We're now talking about miniscule risks that we would have rightfully shrugged off in any previous year, but folks have been terrorized, and they're desperately looking for control. Any tool that can calm that fear is a good tool.

[ssl232]

> Nose swabs reveal whether you're shedding the particles and thus infectious.

On the "shedding" point, not necessarily. The virus can be present in but contained by the immune response from the mucosae of the upper respiratory tract in such a way that it is unable to spread into the lungs and cause COVID-19, yet not shed in large enough quantities to infect others. Given time, a healthy immune system will deal with the virus in the nose and throat, often without the host even noticing. Such a situation would set off a PCR or rapid test but not present a meaningful COVID-19 infection risk to the others. (In fact, one hypothesis for why positive cases rise soon after vaccination and booster campaigns start is because of the well understood phenomenon of reduced immune response for a short time after vaccination, giving such virus already present in the upper respiratory tract at time of vaccination the edge it needs to get into the lungs.)

And the cycle thresholds on PCR tests are often set nonsensically high making them sensitive to quantities of virus and viral debris far lower than the quantity required to meaningfully infect either the host or someone else via shedding. They can also trigger positive on not just virus but viral debris for months after recovery from COVID-19 infection. (A test can be too sensitive, especially when used as the only evidence to force someone and their contacts to isolate and in some cases not earn an income for weeks.)

> It doesn't matter if you're infected if you're not shedding the virus.

I agree, but I'm not sure if the Belgian authorities, who seem to use PCR positives as a COVID-19 diagnosis, and PCR negatives as a guarantee of safety from infection risk to others, would. The article does what most articles these days do, conflating presence of SARS-CoV-2 debris on a swab with COVID-19 disease diagnosis. It incorrectly claims 2/3rds of the 25 staff have COVID-19, when given that none seem to have symptoms of the disease it's likely a case of oversensitive tests. Let's not also forget that these tests are mostly (at least all the ones I've seen) called COVID-19 tests.

[chana_masala]

> Given time, a healthy immune system will deal with the virus in the nose and throat, often without the host even noticing.

Ah ok, so that might explain why there's a significant number of people who say that they had covid without difficulty, at least of they didn't test false positive.

Thanks for explaining the nuance - I've heard a lot of this before but it's refreshing how succinctly you captured it.

[mattkrause]

Not sure there are many animal reservoirs in Antartica, where the only mammals are seals and cetaceans, neither of which have much human contact.

[ssl232]

There are humans in Antarctica though. As I said, humans can carry the virus and not set off a test.

[baxtr]

Most probably people not staying in quarantine or still get infected in transit somehow.

[qbasic_forever]

There's a weak link somewhere--I wonder if it's flight crews in this case. If the pilot and other crew for the leg from South Africa to Antarctica weren't also isolating 10 days and tested at the same time, then there's your infection vector.

[tcoff91]

There’s also the factor that some people have a longer incubation period. Early on in the pandemic there were reports of some people having 21-27 day incubation periods before testing positive and getting sick. I think it’s less common now with delta and omicron but likely still possible in rare instances.

[micromacrofoot]

it’s only clear if they can verify 100% compliance

[Someone]

Not even then. If they can verify 100% compliance, we can adjust our estimates about the false negative rate of these tests (which we already know not to be perfect)

(And maybe not even that. There could have been an infection between the tests “when leaving Cape Town for Antarctica” and actual departure)

[tandymodel100]

I'd say "overkill" over ineffective. I do think that if all of these scientists were dying of the virus it was extremely ineffective, but thankfully they are not.

[aix1]

What are some realistic alternatives?

[pezzana]

One would be to stop sending groups of people to that station.

Whether or not that's "realistic" is another question. It really depends on what's at stake, which is not clear yet. But the point is that governments around the world may face a very similar question in the weeks ahead.

[leishman]

Going back to normal and stopping the theater.

[tomrod]

Everyone wants this. We should do it slowly, but we should do it.

In the US, omnicron is going fast. Hopefully, and I say this with week old information in a huge information-differential environment that evolves hourly, omnicron itself is a step towards mitigation.

[makk]

Define normal.

[bmeski]

No mandates.

No vaccine passbooks or apps.

Return jobs to employees lost because of vaccine compliance/rebuild small businesses (If this is somehow possible but the damage is already done).

No mask requirements.

Covid-19 Vaccines are available and treated in the same way as flu vaccines once FDA approved.

Yknow, normal.

[qbasic_forever]

Mandatory vaccines and boosters, plus testing for antibody titer levels.

[keyle]

It only takes one slip...