YouSaid · the spoken record

Jay Bhattacharya

lines on the record: 142
first: 2022-01-04
most recent: 2022-01-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Yeah, so just the studies that follow coerced people who were infected for a year and the reinfection rate is something like somewhere between 0.3 and 1%. And like a pretty fantastic study out, Italy's found that there was one in Sweden, I think. There's a few studies that found similar things. And the reinfections tend to produce much milder disease, much less likely to end up in the hospital, much less likely to die. So the end state of COVID is it's circulating the population forever and you get it multiple times”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think, so we can talk about the end state of COVID. The end state of COVID is it's here forever. I think that there is good evidence of immunity after infection. Such that you're protected both against reinfection and also against severe disease upon reinfection. So the second time you get it, it's not true for everyone, but for many people, the second time you get it will be milder, much milder than the first time you get it.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was not ground. It wasn't. At the same time, this is way more deadly than the flu just overall. And especially to older people.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. I mean, the 1918 flu, the H1N1 flu, the Spanish flu in the US, killed millions of younger people. And that is not the case with COVID More than, I'm going to get the number wrong, but something like 70, 80% of the deaths are people over the age of 60.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the flu is a very serious thing. It kills 50, 60,000 people a year, something like that order, depending on the particular strain that goes around. That's in the United States. The primary difference to me, there's lots of differences, but one of the most salient differences is the age gradient and mortality risk for the flu. So, the flu is more deadly for two children than COVID is. There's no controversy about that. Children thank God have much less severe reactions to COVID infection than they do to flu infections.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and it spreads in a similar way as the H1M1 flu did. I mean, it spreads via solidization via person-to-person breathing kind of contact up. Maybe some by film ice, but it seems like less likely now. In any case, it seemed really important to me to speed up the process of having those seroprevalence studies so that we can better understand who was at risk and what the right strategy ought to be.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Over the course of a couple more years, a whole bunch of serapalin studies, zero prevalent studies of H1N1 flu came out. And it turned out that there were 100 or more times of people infected per case. And so the mortality rate was actually something like 0.02% for H1N1, not the hundred-fold difference.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Okay. Actually, can I go back one more thing for that? Because that's really important. And I should have started with this. What led me to do those studies was a paper that I had remembered seeing from the H1N1 flew epidemic. There, there was actually the same debate over the mortality rate, except it unfolded over the course of three years, two or three years. The early studies of the mortality rate in H one N one counted the number of cases. In the denominator, kind of the number of deaths in the numerator, cases meaning people identified as having H1N1 showing up the doctor tested to have it. And the early estimates of the H1N1 mortality were like 4%, 3%, really, really high”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We can talk about that in a bit. That's the Great Barrington Declaration. You don't have to let the virus go through the population. You can shield preferentially. The policy we chose was to shield preferentially the laptop class, the set of people who could work from home without losing their job. And we did a very good job at protecting them.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The main problem with our result as far as that strategy was concerned wasn't the death rate, it was the 40 to 50 times more infections than cases. It was the 2.5% or 3% or 4% prevalence rate that we identified of the antibodies in the population. If that number is right, it's too late. The virus is not going to go to zero. And no matter how much we test and trace and isolate, we're not going to get the virus level down to zero.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think catastrophic results. And if that study was right, if our study was right, that meant we'd made a mistake. And not because the death rate was low. That's actually not the key thing there. The key thing is that we had adopted these policies, these test and trace policies, these policies, these lockdown policies aimed at suppressing the virus level to close to zero. That was essentially the idea. If we can just get the virus to go away, we won't have to ever worry about it again.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In economics, actually, that's quite normal. It takes years to get something published, so there's a very active debate over or discussion about papers before they're peer-reviewed in this sort of working paper way, much less normal, much newer in medicine. And so I think part of the perception about what process happens in open science when you release a study, that got people confused. And you're right, it was a very important result because we had just locked the world down in middle of March.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The LA County study we went through the traditional peer review process and got it published in the Journal of American Medical Association sometime in like July, I think. I forget the date of 2020. The Santa Clara study released in April of 2020 in this sort of working paper archive. The reason was that we felt we had an obligation we had a result that we thought was quite important. And we wanted to tell the scientific community about it and also tell the world about it. We wanted to get feedback. I mean, that's part of the purpose of sending it to these kinds of places. I think a lot of the problem is that when people think about published science, they think of it as automatically true. And if it goes through peer review, it's automatically true. If it hasn't gone through peer review, it's not automatically true. And especially in medicine, we're not used to having this access to pre-peer-reviewed work.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, we were pretty sure we were right. And it turns out we were right. So, like, when we released the Santa Clara study via this open science process and this server called Med Archive, it's designed for releasing studies of not yet been pre-reviewed in order to garner comment from the scientists before peer review.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. I was surprised by the reaction, both by regular people and also the scientific community in response to those studies, those early studies in April of 2020. To me, there were studies. I mean, they're the kinds of not exactly the kinds of work I've worked on all my life, but kind of like the you write a paper and you get responses from your fellow scientists and you change the paper to improve it. You hopefully learn something from it.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Primarily thinking of, but I can think of other things. But that also we've learned over time how better to manage patients with the disease. So you have all those things combined. So that's where the controversy over this number is.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The heterogeneity. I'm like, if you have situations where there's lots of intergenerational interactions. Then you have a very different risk profile than if you have societies that where generations are more separate from one another. Okay, so let me just finish real fast about this. You had in New York, you have a population that was infected in the early days that was very likely going to much higher likelihood of dying if infected. And so New York City had a higher IFR, especially in the early days than Africa has had. The other thing is treatment, right? So the treatments that we adopted in the early days of the epidemic, I think actually may have exacerbated the risk of death. Using ventilators, like the over reliance on ventilators is what”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Especially in the early days of the epidemic in New York City, the older populations living in nursing homes were differentially infected based on because of policies that were adopted to send COVID-infected patients back to nursing homes to keep hospitals empty.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm thinking mainly just about the person. If I'm going to think about it, the most simplest way to think about it is age. Age is the single most important risk factor. So, older places are going to have a higher IFR than younger places. Africa, 3% of Africa is over 65. So in some senses it's not surprising that they have a low infection fatality rate.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, of course. So these higher quality studies say tend to produce higher. But the problem is that if you want a global infection fatality rate, you need to get seropalin studies from everywhere. Even places that don't necessarily have the infrastructure set up to produce very, very high quality studies. And in poor places in the world, like places like Africa, the infection fatality rate is incredibly low. And in some richer places like New York City, the infection retaliation rate is much higher. There's a range of IFRs, not a single number. This sometimes surprises people because they think, well, it's a virus. It should have the same properties no matter where it goes. But the virus... Kills or infects or hurts in interaction with the host. And the properties of both the host and the virus combine to produce the outcome.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is. So, if Professor Johnny Anidis, who's a colleague of mine to Stanford, is a world expert in meta-analysis, probably the most cited scientist on Earth, I think, at least living. He did a meta-analysis of now 100 or more of these serapalence studies. And what he found was that that 0.2% is roughly the worldwide number. In fact, I think he cites a lower number, 0.15%, as the median infection fatality rate worldwide. So we did these studies and it generated an enormous amount of blowback by people who thought that the infection rate is much higher. And there's some controversy over the quality of some of the other studies that are done. And so there are some people who look at this same literature and say, well, the lower quality studies tend to have lower IFRs, the higher quality studies.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, there's testing problem. There weren't so many tests available people didn't know. A lot of them, we asked a set of questions about the symptoms they faced. And most of them said they faced no symptoms, or 30-40% of them said faced there are no symptoms.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To the public health authorities, we found 40 or 50 other infections with antibodies in their blood that suggested that they'd had COVID and recovered.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where we put out an ad on Facebook soliciting people to volunteer for the study, a randomly selected set of people, we were hoping to get a random selection of people from Santa Clara County, but it tended to, the people who tended to volunteer were from the richer parts of the county. Like I had Stanford professors writing, begging to be in the study because they wanted to know their antibody levels. So we did some adjustment for that. In LA County, we hired a firm that had a pre-existing representative sample of LA County, but it didn't include nursing homes, it didn't include people in jail, things like that, didn't include the homeless populations. So it's representative of a community-dwelling population, both of those. And there we found that both in LA County and Santa Clara County in April 2020, something like 40 to 50 times more infections than cases in both places. So for every case that admit reports”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so that's actually a real important question too. So the Santa Clara study, we did this Facebook sampling scheme. Which is, I mean, not the ideal thing, but it's like it was very difficult to get a random sample during lockdown”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But there's a formula to adjust for that. You can adjust for the false positive false negative rate. We did that adjustment. And those studies found in a community population, so leaving aside people in nursing homes who have a higher death rate from COVID, that the death rate was 0.2%. In Santa Clara County and in LA County,”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You tried against this kit, and 0.5% of the time, 2018, there shouldn't be anybody's there for COVID. So if it turns positive, it's a false positive. It's 0.5% of the time. And then like a false negative rate about 10%, 12%, something like that. I don't remember the exact number. But the false positive rate is the important thing there, right? So you have a population in March 2020 or April 2020 with very low fraction of patients having been exposed to COVID. You don't know how much, but low. Even a small false positive rate could end up. Biasing your study quite a bit”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I view them as very high quality studies. In Santa Clara County, what we did was we used a test kit that we obtained from someone who works in Major League Baseball, actually. He had ordered these test kits very early in March 2020 that measures very accurately measures antibody levels in the bloodstream. These test kits were eventually approved by the EUA by the Emergency Use Authorization by the FDA sort of shortly after we did this. And it had a very low false positive rate. False positive means if you don't have these COVID antibodies in your bloodstream, the kit shows up positive anyways. That turns out to happen about 0.5% of the time. And based on studies, a very large number of studies looking at blood from 20”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think there's some disagreement over this. And the disagreement is about the quality of the seroprevalent studies that were conducted. So as I said earlier, I was a senior investigator in three different seroplin studies very early in the epidemic.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you're under the age of 70, it's lower 0.05. But there's not a single sharp cutoff. It's more like, I have a rule of thumb that I use. So if you're 50, say the infection fatality rate from COVID is 0.2%, according to the seroprevalence data. That means 99.8% survival if you're 50. And for every seven years of age above that, double it. Every seven years of age below that have it. So, a 57 year old have a 0.4% mortality, a 64 year old would have a 0.8% and so on. And if you have a severe chronic disease like diabetes or if you're morbidly obese, it's like adding seven years to your life.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the deadliness of COVID depends on not just the virus itself, but who it infects. So probably the most important thing about the deadlines of COVID is this steep age gradient in the mortality rate. So according to these zero prevalence studies that have been done, now hundreds of them, mostly from before vaccination, because vaccination also reduces the mortality risk of COVID. The seropre prevalence studies suggest that the risk of death if you're, say, over the age of 70 is very high. 5%, if you get COVID.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think that's the suffering, that isolation. We're not meant to live alone. We're not meant to live apart from one another. That's, of course, the ideology of lockdown is to make people live apart alone, isolated, so that we don't spread diseases to each other, right? But we're not actually designed as a species to live that way. And what you're describing, I think, if everyone's honest with themselves, have felt, especially in places where lockdowns have been sort of very militantly enforced, has felt deep into their core.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you walk down the street, or if you ever, if you did this during COVID, I'm sure you had this experience where you walk down the street if you're not wearing a mask, or even if you are, people will jump off the sidewalk that you walk past them, as if you're poisoning. Even though the data are that COVID spreads indifferently outdoors, if at all, really outdoors. But it's not simply a biological or infects disease phenomenon, epidemiological phenomenon. It is a change in the way humans treat each other. I hope temporary.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something that psychologists are going to have a field day with for generation trying to understand. I mean, I think what you say is right, but piled on top of that is also this sort of... This impetus to empathy, to empathize compassion toward others, essentially militarized. Right. So I'm protecting you. By some actions. And those actions, if I don't do them, if you don't do them, well, that must mean you hate me. It's created this like social tension that I've never seen before. And we have started. We looked at each other as if we were just simply sources of germs rather than people to get to know people to enjoy, people to learn from. basically almost every human interaction for every human on the planet.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We spent the better part. Infectious diseases. And the notion was we'd essentially conquered them. It was something that happens in faraway places to other people That's true for much of the developed world. Life expectancy were going up for decades and decades. And for the first time in living memory, we have a disease that can kill us. I mean, I think we're effectively evolved to fear that, like the panic centers of our brain, the lizard part of our brain takes over. And our central focus has been avoiding this one risk. And so it's not surprising that people, when they're filling out death certificates or thinking about what led to the death, this most salient thing that's in the front of everyone's brain would jump to the top.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's almost always multifactorial. It's not always just the bus hits you. The bus hits you that you get a brain bleed. Was the brain bleed that killed you? Would it have burst anyway? I mean, you know, the bus hit you, killed you, right?”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think a lot of times what's happened is people have erred on the side of signing is COVID. Now, what's the evidence of this? There's been a couple of audits of death certificates in places like Santa Clara County where I live in Alameda County, California, where they carefully went through the death certificate that said, okay, is this reasonable to say this was actually COVID or was COVID incidental? And they found that about 25%, 20-25% of the deaths were more likely incidental than directly due to COVID. I personally don't get too excited about this. I mean, it's a philosophical question, right? Like ultimately, what kills you, which is an odd thing to say if you don't, you're not in medicine, but like really it's a...”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But there is this sort of like complicated, you know, when you fill out a death certificate for a patient with a lot of conditions, like let's say a patient has diabetes, a patient, while that diabetes could lead to heart failure. You have a heart attack, heart failure, your lungs fill up, then you get COVID, and you die. So what do you write on the death certificate? Was it COVID that killed you? Was it the lungs filling up? Was it the heart failure? Was it the diabetes? It's really difficult to disentangle.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that did provide an incentive to sort of have a lot of COVID patients in the hospital because your financial success of the hospital, or at least not lack of financial ruin, depended on having many COVID patients. The other thing on the death certificates is that reporting of deaths is a separate issue. I don't know that there's a financial incentive there.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's some truth in some of that. Let me just talk about the incentive. So in the United States, we passed this CARES Act that was aimed at making sure hospital assistance didn't go bankrupt in the early days of the pandemic. A couple things they did. One was they provided incentives to treat COVID patients Of thousands of dollars extra per COVID patient. And the other thing they did is they gave a 20% bump to Medicare payments for elderly patients who are treated with COVID. The idea is that there's more expensive to treat them at, I guess, at the early days.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. Yeah, exactly. So the idea is that We don't know exactly the number of people with COVID just by counting the people that present themselves with symptoms of COVID. COVID has, it turns out, a very wide range of symptoms, possible, ranging from no symptoms at all to this deadly viral pneumonia that's killed so many people. And the problem is, like if you just count the number of cases, the people who have very few symptoms often don't show up for testing. We just don't, they're outside of the can of public health. And so it's really hard to know the answer to your question without understanding how many people are infected because you can probably tell the number of deaths. That's even though there's some controversy over that. But the numerator is possible. But the denominator is much harder.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the best evidence for COVID, the deadliness of COVID, comes from a whole series of seroprevalence studies. I was part of the very first set of seraphin studies, one in Santa Clara County, one in LA County, and one with Major League Baseball around the U.S.”
2022-01-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #254 – Jay Bhattacharya: The Case Against Lockdowns · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source