Valid mRNA has a start codon and a stop codon. Without these mRNA will be broken down and untranslated. However without translation the vaccine will be useless. So while unintended translation is unlikely it is possible that efficacy would be impacted.
This is not really correct. CI means we are 95% sure that the true result falls somewhere within the range of -50 to 60. What this really means is that the study lacks statistical power to say anything interesting at all about vaccine effectiveness.
We do not know the Lombardy hospitalisation rate because we do not have an accurate count of how many people have been infected in Lombardy.
To get such a count we would need 100% serological testing which has not been done. We know how many were infected at the time of testing but the whole point of the Oxford model is that we do not know how many have been infected, not shown symptoms, and recovered.
Once again, the core point of the Oxford model was to emphasise the need for serological testing.
To call the Oxford study "utter rubbish" is foolish.
Your "example" of bad data is the only quoted data in that article and it doesn't even mean anything since the implicit assumption of the Gupta model is that we do not know how many asymptomatic cases of COVID exist (even WIRED concede this point). Testing in Italy is insufficient to tell us this. 1 in 1000 infections requiring hospitalisation could be a realistic number if a high percentage of infections are asymptomatic.
> we just won’t know the true proportion of people who have contracted the disease without showing any symptoms, but it is likely a much lower number than the Oxford study assumes.
Epidemiology is not done by "it is likely much lower than the study assumes" since that is pure guess work without the tests.
What the Oxford study offers is a strong argument that antibody testing is vitally important and nobody is doing it.
As I say this is a very long way from utter rubbish.
I completely agree. The biggest issue here is that we are losing a neutral player as the top comment says. The tech world is that much more monopolistic without an independent GitHub.
There are so many ideas here for how computer systems could be improved. It reads like an argument against the computer in a medical setting (or at least a move away from current, perceived, over-reliance) and yet systems could so easily fix 99% of these problems.