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Nobel Prize Chemist / Stanford Biophysicist - Hopeful Words? (1 Viewer)

Joe Bryant

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Thoughts on this?

Couple of things:

I realize it's a non-standard source. I've only seen it published in another Israeli website and it references this article and interview. I checked Snopes and didn't see anything. But I can't verify the quality of the source.

The author, absolutely is in favor of people isolating and staying home. He says, "China did great work and managed to gain complete control of the virus, Levitt said. “Currently, I am most worried about the U.S. It must isolate as many people as possible to buy time for preparations. Otherwise, it can end up in a situation where 20,000 infected people will descend on the nearest hospital at the same time and the healthcare system will collapse.” 

He's a nobel prize winner for Chemistry. And a biophysics professor at Stanford. 

He also looks like John Clayton.

What do you guys think of this?  Apologies if the paragraph breaks are messed up. When I copied and pasted it formatted in one big paragraph and I went back and added breaks. 

And I mean what I say here - I'm not saying this is right. I'm asking you guys what you think of this. 

https://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/articles/0,7340,L-3800632,00.html
 

Interview

Corona Is Slowing Down, Humanity Will Survive, Says Biophysicist Michael Levitt

Nobel laureate and Stanford professor Michael Levitt unexpectedly became a reassuring figure in China at the peak of the coronavirus pandemic. Now he assures Israelis: statistics show the virus is on a downturn
 

Nobel laureate Michael Levitt, an American-British-Israeli biophysicist who teaches structural biology at Stanford University and spends much of his time in Tel Aviv, unexpectedly became a household name in China, offering the public reassurance during the peak of the country’s coronavirus (Covid-19) outbreak. Levitt did not discover a treatment or a cure, just did what he does best: crunched the numbers. The statistics led him to the conclusion that, contrary to the grim forecasts being branded about, the spread of the virus will come to a halt. 

The calming messages Levitt sent to his friends in China were translated into Chinese and passed from person to person, making him a popular subject for interviews in the Asian nation. His forecasts turned out to be correct: the number of new cases reported each day started to fall as of February 7. A week later, the mortality rate started falling as well. He might not be an expert in epidemiology, but Levitt understands calculations and statistics, he told Calcalist in a phone interview earlier this week. The interview was initially scheduled to be held at the fashionable Sarona complex in Tel Aviv, where Levitt currently resides. But after he caught a cold—”not corona,” he jokingly remarked—the interview was rescheduled to be held over the phone. 

Even though he believes the pandemic will run its course, Levitt emphasises his support of all the safety measures currently being taken and the need to adhere to them. Levitt received his Nobel prize for chemistry in 2013 for "the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems." 

He did not in any way intend to be a prophet foretelling the end of a plague; it happened by accident. His wife Shoshan Brosh is a researcher of Chinese art and a curator for local photographers, meaning the couple splits their time between the U.S., Israel, and China. When the pandemic broke out, Brosh wrote to friends in China to support them. “When they answered us, describing how complicated their situation was, I decided to take a deeper look at the numbers in the hope of reaching some conclusion,” Levitt explained. “The rate of infection of the virus in the Hubei province increased by 30% each day—that is a scary statistic. I am not an influenza expert but I can analyze numbers and that is exponential growth.” At this rate, the entire world should have been infected within 90 days, he said. 

But then, the trend changed. When Levitt started analyzing the data on February 1, Hubei had 1,800 new cases each day and within six days this number reached 4,700, he said. “And then, on February 7, the number of new infections started to drop linearly and did not stop. A week later, the same happened with the number of the deaths. 

This dramatic change in the curve marked the median point and enabled better prediction of when the pandemic will end. Based on that, I concluded that the situation in all of China will improve within two weeks. And, indeed, now there are very few new infection cases.” Levitt compared the situation to bank interest—if on the first day a person receives an interest rate of 30% on their savings, the next day of 29%, and so forth, “you understand that eventually, you will not earn very much.” 

The messages his friends translated quickly made waves in China and people wanting to make sure he did indeed write the information attributed to him started contacting Levitt. “That is how I knew I needed to continue,” he said. 

“I could have said, yes, that’s what I said,’ and left it at that.” New numbers were being reported every day by various entities, such as the World Health Organization (WHO). Levitt started sending regular reports to his Chinese friends, and their popularity led to interviews on Chinese television, for example on CNN-equivalent CGTN. 

Based on the diminishing number of infection cases and deaths, he said, the virus will probably disappear from China by the end of March. Initially, Levitt said, every coronavirus patient in China infected on average 2.2 people a day—spelling exponential growth that can only lead to disaster. “But then it started dropping, and the number of new daily infections is now close to zero.” 

He compared it to interest rates again: “even if the interest rate keeps dropping, you still make money. The sum you invested does not lessen, it just grows more slowly. When discussing diseases, it frightens people a lot because they keep hearing about new cases every day. 

But the fact that the infection rate is slowing down means the end of the pandemic is near.” There are several reasons for this, according to Levitt. “In exponential growth models, you assume that new people can be infected every day, because you keep meeting new people. But, if you consider your own social circle, you basically meet the same people every day. You can meet new people on public transportation, for example; but even on the bus, after some time most passengers will either be infected or immune.” 

Another reason the infection rate has slowed has to do with the physical distance guidelines. “You don’t hug every person you meet on the street now, and you’ll avoid meeting face to face with someone that has a cold, like we did,” Levitt said. “The more you adhere, the more you can keep infection in check. 

So, under these circumstances, a carrier will only infect 1.5 people every three days and the rate will keep going down.” Quarantine makes a difference, according to Levitt, but there are other factors at work. “We know China was under almost complete quarantine, people only left home to do crucial shopping and avoided contact with others. In Wuhan, which had the highest number of infection cases in the Hubei province, everyone had a chance of getting infected, but only 3% caught it,” he explained. “Even on the Diamond Princess (the virus-stricken cruise ship), the infection rate did not top 20%.” 

Based on these statistics, Levitt said, he concluded that many people are just naturally immune to the virus. The explosion of cases in Italy is worrying, Levitt said, but he estimates it is a result of a higher percentage of elderly people than in China, France, or Spain. “Furthermore, Italian culture is very warm, and Italians have a very rich social life. For these reasons, it is important to keep people apart and prevent sick people from coming into contact with healthy people.” 

China did great work and managed to gain complete control of the virus, Levitt said. “Currently, I am most worried about the U.S. It must isolate as many people as possible to buy time for preparations. Otherwise, it can end up in a situation where 20,000 infected people will descend on the nearest hospital at the same time and the healthcare system will collapse.” 

Israel currently does not have enough cases to provide the data needed to make estimates, Levitt said, but from what he can tell, the Ministry of Health is dealing with the pandemic in a correct, positive way. “The more severe the defensive measures taken, the more they will buy time to prepare for needed treatment and develop a vaccine.” Levitt avoids making global forecasts. In China, he said, the number of new infections will soon reach zero, and South Korea is past the median point and can already see the end. Regarding the rest of the world, it is still hard to tell, he said. “It will end when all those who are sick will only meet people they have already infected. The goal is not to reach the situation the cruise ship experienced.” Related stories:

The Diamond Princess was the worst case scenario, according to Levitt. “If you compare the ship to a country—we are talking 250,000 people crowded into one square kilometer, which is horribly crowded. It is four times the crowding in Hong Kong. It is as if the entire Isaeli population was crammed into 30 square kilometers.” Furthermore, he said, the ship had a central air conditioning and heating system and a communal dining room. “Those are extremely comfortable conditions for the virus and still, only 20% were infected. It is a lot, but pretty similar to the infection rate of the common flu.”

 As with the flu, most of those dying as a result of coronavirus are over 70 years old, Levitt said. “It is a known fact that the flu mostly kills the elderly—around three-quarters of flu mortalities are people over 65.” To put things in proportion: “there are years when flu is raging, like in the U.S. in 2017, when there were three times the regular number of mortalities. And still, we did not panic. That is my message: you need to think of corona like a severe flu. It is four to eight times as strong as a common flu, and yet, most people will remain healthy and humanity will survive.”

 
Thanks for posting this. 

One question I have: in his discussion of Italy, he points out that Italy has very warm weather. There’s been a lot of talk that warm weather would make this situation better if this virus imitates the flu. So is that theory incorrect? 

 
Thanks for posting this. 

One question I have: in his discussion of Italy, he points out that Italy has very warm weather. There’s been a lot of talk that warm weather would make this situation better if this virus imitates the flu. So is that theory incorrect? 
I'm pretty sure he means "warm" as in lots of touching and handshaking and kissing.

I have a good friend in the UK and he said the same thing. He said he couldn't imagine a culture more likely to spread a disease transmitted by touch than the Italians as it's such a huge part of their culture. 

“Furthermore, Italian culture is very warm, and Italians have a very rich social life. For these reasons, it is important to keep people apart and prevent sick people from coming into contact with healthy people.” 

 
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I'm pretty sure he means "warm" as in lots of touching and handshaking and kissing.

I have a good friend in the UK and he said the same thing. He said he couldn't imagine a culture more likely to spread a disease transmitted by touch than the Italians as it's such a huge part of their culture. 
Ah OK. I completely misunderstood that. Thanks 

 
I don’t really see much new here.  China did slow down the virus.  They’ve practically eliminated it. That can be replicated with strict quarantine measures that replicate what they did.

 
I really hope the stay at home part of the equation helps. The toughest part I will have is my boys. They’ve got no school and friends want to hang out. They won’t be going far, just neighbors around the corner. I guess if our area starts getting bad, I might keep them in more. I am definitely feeling more stressed even though there are only 4 positive cases in all of Charlotte. I’m glad we closed schools and I’m glad I prepped, couldn’t find any hand sanitizer, don’t keep any on hand but actually found some N95 painting masks that I forgot about. Hopefully, we’ll be an area where we haven’t had a big outbreak and did the social distancing in time.

 
I was one that thought this was just a form of “flu” originally. But then thought about the bad cough we had after coming home from Hawaii in mid Nov.  But we had no shortness of breath nor fever. Now it seems there is less effect on younger people and more severe for older people.  I thought a few weeks ago we should shut the world down for a couple weeks. Never thought we would actually do that. EU and countries are shutting borders now also.  Totally support the isolation effort.

 
Bright guy but not qualified to make such sweeping generalizations.  Like many have said, if everyone hunkers down and does what we are supposed to, it will look like a big overreaction.  

 
Nice share Joe.

It's a tough balancing act for our medical professionals.  Obviously they want to be honest and forthcoming with their thoughts and data.  They want to provide us with the best practices for reducing the chance of transmission.  They can't paint too sunny of a picture or else people think it's no big deal.  They can't paint too cloudy of a picture lest people panic.

Unfortunately we have a news media in this country that is in the 'if it bleeds it leads' business.  Without regard to the panic it will cause, they push the narratives that will generate clicks to their sites or eyeballs on the screen.  "Trump tells governors they are on their own" was the eyeroller from yesterday.

As a result, fairness and truth are a lot more difficult to come by.  We need more stories like the one you posted Joe, but I sadly feel like that's not the narrative the media wants to push.

Side note: I have no idea how the cruise ship industry continues to survive.  Nothing seems to kill that beast.

 
Bright guy but not qualified to make such sweeping generalizations.  Like many have said, if everyone hunkers down and does what we are supposed to, it will look like a big overreaction.  
Can you be more specific on which generalizations? Thanks. 

 
Bright guy but not qualified to make such sweeping generalizations.  Like many have said, if everyone hunkers down and does what we are supposed to, it will look like a big overreaction.  
Generally agree about most of his generalizations, but I think he makes one very good and overlooked statistical point. Leavitt wrote:

“In exponential growth models, you assume that new people can be infected every day, because you keep meeting new people. But, if you consider your own social circle, you basically meet the same people every day.”

On the one hand, in this statement he seems to forget the role of fomites (publicly-touched objects) in transmission.

But on the other hand, the idea that you generally run across the same people every day is a good one to consider. I kind of think the "crowded-big-city folks crammed into mass transportation jamming up against strangers" folks are fairly exceptional in the U.S. Maybe 1/6 of the U.S.? Plenty of folks, just not the ones to build generalized statements around -- and Leavitt didn't.

And in the end, Leavitt does strenuously recommend hunkering down and staying isolated as a means to weaken the transmission cycle.

 
chet said:
Thinking about it a little more, I actually think this guy will do more harm than he does good.  People listen to him because he's a Nobel laureate but his words are encouraging complacency rather than vigor even though he says he supports all of the safety measures.

I am on the board of a molecular diagnostics company.  Our CEO was the Director of Virology at the Stanford Medical School.  He believes he has discovered the mechanism of action for COVID-19 and submitted a treatment protocol to the FDA.  He's the type of person we should be listening to. 
Thanks. I guess the bolded is the part I don't get. 

I read it as people feel hopeless and he's saying if we do the safety measures, we can beat this.

And for sure I'm all for talking about a treatment protocol from your company and how it will cure this. Do you have a link to where we can listen / read what is happening there and how people can use that for actionable advice? Thanks. 

 
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chet said:
Thinking about it a little more, I actually think this guy will do more harm than he does good.  People listen to him because he's a Nobel laureate but his words are encouraging complacency rather than vigor even though he says he supports all of the safety measures.
If I'm following you correctly, you're saying that Leavitt is being too subtle and equivocal. That's one of the potential dangers of being highly intelligent and evaluating a situation like COVID. Your intelligence leads you to adopt the idea that complex truth is never absolute, so you do a lot of painting of the rhetorical corners. People at or near your level pretty much grok the overall message, while others will cherry-pick bits favorable to their worldview and thus erroneously appeal to perceived authority.

 
Thanks. I guess the bolded is the part I don't get. 

I read it as people feel hopeless and he's saying if we do the safety measures, we can beat this.

And for sure I'm all for talking about a treatment protocol from your company and how it will cure this. Do you have a link to where we can listen / read what is happening there and how people can use that for actionable advice? Thanks. 
There will be a public filing later this week which I will share.  For the moment, let's hope the treatment works--many lives could be spared!

 
There will be a public filing later this week which I will share.  For the moment, let's hope the treatment works--many lives could be spared!
Awesome. Please post here when ready. I think lots of people, myself included, love seeing some hopeful and reasonable news. Thanks. 

 
It's sort of hard to understand what Leavitt is saying.  Yes, aggressive measures can slow the spread of a pandemic over a relatively short time.   But until you either develop a treatment, a vaccine or herd immunity you have to keep those measures in place to keep it at that rate.   He seems to be implying that it's a months-long solution, when in reality it's a year or more.   Unless we're willing to take the hit of the death toll from an unrestrained virus, we're going to take the social and economic hit instead, and not for just a couple of months.

 
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It's sort of hard to understand what Leavitt is saying.  Yes, aggressive measures can slow the spread of a pandemic over a relatively short time.   But until you either develop a treatment, a vaccine or herd immunity you have to keep those measures in place to keep it at that rate.   He seems to be implying that it's a months-long solution, when in reality it's a year or more.   Unless we're willing to take the hit of the death toll from an unrestrained virus, we're going to take the social and economic hit instead, and not for just a couple of months.
We don’t know that.

 
Awesome. Please post here when ready. I think lots of people, myself included, love seeing some hopeful and reasonable news. Thanks. 
Cytodyn announced this morning that they treated two patients with their drug yesterday.  I am on the board of a company that is partnering with Cytodyn in this effort.  Our CEO designed the treatment protocol.  We should know if it's effective within a few days.  

Press Release

 
Cytodyn announced this morning that they treated two patients with their drug yesterday.  I am on the board of a company that is partnering with Cytodyn in this effort.  Our CEO designed the treatment protocol.  We should know if it's effective within a few days.  

Press Release
Great. Thanks for keeping us posted. 

Let's assume best case and it's proven to be effective. For a timeline, what roughly are we looking at for when it's available to public?

If results are promising, we have leronlimab available for immediate use and the ability to scale production. We are open and willing to work with government agencies and pharmaceutical partnerships to assist in serving those in dire need of a treatment option for this devastating disease. We appreciate the FDA’s prompt response and are working in full support of the treating medical team.”
Are we talking weeks or months or many months? Thanks. 

 
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Great. Thanks for keeping us posted. 

Let's assume best case and it's proven to be effective. For a timeline, what roughly are we looking at for when it's available to public?

Are we talking weeks or months or many months? Thanks. 
All depends on the FDA--best guess is 1 month.

 
Joe Bryant said:
Awesome. I had no idea the FDA could move that fast even in an emergency. That's great. Thanks for keeping us posted. 
I think there is political pressure for the USA to be seen as a leader and as such, any effective treatment will be fast tracked.

 
Thanks. I guess the bolded is the part I don't get. 

I read it as people feel hopeless and he's saying if we do the safety measures, we can beat this.

And for sure I'm all for talking about a treatment protocol from your company and how it will cure this. Do you have a link to where we can listen / read what is happening there and how people can use that for actionable advice? Thanks. 
For those who are really interested, there is a presentation today at 12:30 EST to describe the treatment.  Link

 

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