Spread slows down rapidly long before reaching 100%. People hear “5x as infectious” and reason that due to the nature of exponential models, that much more than 5x people will be infected. This is extremely incorrect. In truth, far fewer than 5x people will be infected over the long term. And again, no, this is not because it’s hitting the upper limits of 100% of the population or anywhere near that.
I won’t be so bold as to say it’s probable, but given this is not a novel virus, it’s entirely believable to say that omicron could go on to infect fewer people than delta due to the past two years of vaccination and immunity and die off. Presuming data about lower severity holds, it would be surprising to me if hospitalization or deaths aren’t noticeably lower than delta; which, in turn, was noticeably lower than the original.
Now we are at the point where fully vaccinated people and people with immunity from a previous infection have a low rate of death or serious illness. People who are very old or have a compromised immune system should lay low and take precautions now and during every flu season when it spikes. Those who choose not to get vaccinated and die, that is still on them.
So yes the vaccine has already saved million of lives, but I sure hope that this is not the new normal this winter or we are going to cross 1 million deaths fairly soon.
It wasn't a cakewalk but it was nowhere the nightmares of many other places.
Or Italy where they had to call in the military to cart away corpses:
* https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/19/italian-army-moves-coronavir...
First and foremost, we can only make predictions based upon the data we have. The data we have is mostly based upon people going for voluntary testing. Given the variability in symptoms that motivate testing, varying levels of awareness to potential exposure, varying willingness to get tested, and the availability of testing, the number of known exposures will make it look like we're in an exponential growth phase even when things are tapering off. It is hard to blame public health organizations for accepting this data at face value since the potential consequences of not doing so are extremely bleak.
The other consideration is that people will modify their behaviour based upon perceived risk, whether or not restrictions are imposed. People will tend to comply with restrictions, go about life as normal, follow some sort of middle path, or impose tighter restrictions upon themselves. It takes a truly special person to put themselves into a position of greater risk. Even then, there is a good chance that they are doing little more than translating one high risk circumstance into another (more or less balancing out the growth). We are facing a situation where scientists can make predictions based upon what is known, e.g. the outcome of restrictions, or making predictions based upon anticipated behaviour. Given there is not enough data to model anticipated behaviour, the natural response is to rely upon models that use expected behaviour (e.g. compliance with restrictions or no response). Since the average actual response will prefer over compliance, more bleak predictions are made.
Finally, everyone has a different understanding of life now as compared to life before the pandemic. I remember when the coronavirus first caught my attention: it was when major U.S. universities started shutting down. I remember when I first started taking it seriously: it was when my provincial government issued a shelter in place style order. Since that time, I have paid attention to what is happening and thinking about how I should respond. Sometimes it is in an acute manner. Sometimes is in a cursory manner. Either way, I am more likely to notice and respond preemptively to outbreaks. I suspect that many, if not most, people are the same even if their only actions are stocking up to prepare for the worse. Again, this will affect outcomes.
We all will get sick from flu. Do we keep harping the potential of Spanish flu return? If we treat everything with utmost cdc-lab4 kind of safety, a lot of things we can't do and even earn a living. Up to a point, people need to realize we have to live with Covid just like everyone living with the virus descendent of Spanish flu.
And Omicron should be viewed as blessing to some extend as it is less severe and is one way nature provide immunity to us. A lot of people would want natural immunity than constantly getting jab every couple of months (Israel going for 4th right now).
But more importantly it's well established that diseases that those diseases spread most widely that don't kill rapidly (or that more generally don't have severe symptoms) and that have a longer period between the start of infectivity (= shortly after infection) and the onset of identifiable symptoms. So you would indeed anticipate that any disease that runs sufficiently long in the population becomes more mild and has a later onset of symptoms as variants with these features outcompete thr others.
In other words: it is expected that covid mutates over time to become more mild on average. But that doesn't mean that everyone survives. Infection rates in many countries are higher than ever, which even if the % of severe cases is lower than with other variants, delta and omicron will still kill and have severe long-term effects on many.
I didn’t say every one was going to survive omicron. I said the spread was unlikely to be materially higher than its predecessor and likely have a lower negative impact.
A disease that spreads twice as fast is unlikely to infect twice as many people (over the long term). A disease that causes fewer adverse effects, let’s say half as often, needs to, by definition, infect twice as many people over the long run in order to cause the same amount of harm.
As a dumb mental model, if omicron is 30% less dangerous, then omicron needs to infect 42% more people to be as harmful to society. That is very difficult to achieve, especially given our collective immunity achieved so far. I would say there is little chance of this occurring.
Virus evolution tends to optimize for replication and transmission, and not reduced severity. If a particular mutation causes a virus to replicate better than other variants, but it ends up killing hosts more often, it doesn't really matter what happens to the host afterwards, evoluntionarily, as the virus has already spread it genes more than it did before it mutated.
I told my friends: "I'll breathe a huge sigh of relief if this thing turns over before it's infected most of us." In fact it's probably hard to speculate why it turned over, but behavioral measures are probably an important factor.
That’s the big assumption in R0.
And yet, you can go from a few rare cases in your country to hospitals overflowing in a couple of weeks. That's because of exponential growth, obviously.
1) exponential growth has consistently ceased before the hospitals overflowed too bad
2) exponential growth confuses readers into thinking that a small boost in spread rate means many more will be infected. This isn’t true because the exponential phase is brief and is a progression towards a ceiling defined by the graph, not an arbitrary period of time. Like what we are seeing in South Africa right now.
The big problem is that people think an increase in the spreading rate will cause an exponentially higher number of infected. But it won’t. The model is not appropriate.
Here on vaccinated Denmark this is the truth. But we’re actually approaching last years levels regardless because of just how many people are getting covid this year. It’s more manageable thanks to the very high vaccination status, but we seem to have been too slow with the 3rd hit for a major part of the population. I have two shots myself, and my family is all in covid isolation all tested positive and “looking forward” to spend Christmas with ourselves and not our families. It’s not too bad for any of us, it’s not pleasant either, but the biggest thing for me is how much we’re having to shut down despite the high vaccination percentage.
You can’t go to a movie or actual theatre. Bars close at 22:00. Most major Christmas parties (this is a big thing here) have been cancelled. But the biggest impact is on culture business like the theatres, concert houses, Christmas markets, museums and so on. If covid is going to be a recurrent thing every winter, then I think that we’re going to see some drastic changes to those aspects of society.
I mean technically the lockdowns possibly make sense as a way to control the spread until a spread controlling vaccine (the existing mRNA ones aren't such) is widely applied - ie. that seems to be the case in China where initial spread was effectively controlled and they use inactivated covid virus vaccine instead of mRNA - though we don't know for sure because Chinese government info can be very different from reality.
But I've heard some claims that it already has started to displace Delta, though not from a source I'd feel confident citing. But just looking at it, if you believe the CDC estimate of 73% Omicron the other day, Delta must have dropped a lot despite it being winter. Appears like displacement happening.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function#Modeling_ear...
E.g. let’s say there is an office where everyone works in person and a bar with a group of regular customers. If someone in the office gets Covid, everyone in there has some decent chance of getting it. Similarly, if a bar regular gets Covid, each of the others has a decent chance to get it. But if only one person who works at the office is also a regular at the bar, then for the infection to hop from one cluster to the other, that person needs to get it from the initial outbreak, and they need to continue going into the office during their infectious period, and folks need to catch it from them, none of which is certain.
So, my guess is that after enough of these clusters get seeded to start a wave, “R” is initially high, but R decreases massively once enough of the infected clusters are saturated, possibly low enough to make the growth visibly non-exponential, even if the entire population infected rate is nowhere near the point where growth rate would decline in a simple logistic model.
The exponential part is easy and that works, but it's more complicated with isolation of the infectious, refractory periods, etc
While this does appear plausible, doesn't this depend to some degree on what exactly is the immunity conferred by vaccination or past infection? If vaccines and past infections are effective against severity of case/symptoms but ineffective against new/re-infection, then you could still see greater numbers with omicron than even with delta. No?
Still not forever exponential, of course.
Well, that should always be true: the people that are most at risk are already dead from earlier variants, and our treatments are light years ahead of where they were 18 months ago, reducing hospitalizations (and death) for everyone else.
Mathematical models are difficult because we don’t know the real inputs and fitting a curve in retrospect is easy to get a compelling looking answer which is wrong.
You can gain an intuition for it just imagining a random walk on a social network graph though. Just jump from friend to friend randomly on Facebook. Early on it is easy to spread to new people. Later on it’s very difficult to find new people. You get stuck in the same cohorts.
More simply just look at past covid outcomes. Or pretty much any epedemiological model. All of them claim only the initial period is exponential. It’s the issue of how to determine the slowdown period that’s tricky and frankly impossible without more data than we have. But assuming that the slowdown state will look similar to previous slowdown states is a good idea.
The graph of human social contacts is not even close to uniformly random, so it makes sense that simplistic formulas would not work.
I think it’s a bit silly to fixate on the base stats of the virus rather than it’s actually efficacy against the human population.
Take a look at these two charts. Omicron cases spiked in SA. Deaths didn't budge. At all.
https://i.imgur.com/TgRmz4F.png [1]
Omicron is a good thing, if your baseline is Delta. But I'm still waiting for the US media stop hyperventilating about it.
1. https://graphics.reuters.com/world-coronavirus-tracker-and-m...
It does seem like Omicron is less deadly than Delta. The big concern is that because it's so significantly more contagious, that even though a smaller percentage of infected people will require ventilators, the absolute number will be high enough to overwhelm hospitals.
Sources: Dr. John Campbell, Dr. Larry Brilliant (WHO) https://youtu.be/YdVymGK3OzM https://youtu.be/ltXkJTSBeaE
This is a legitimate theoretical concern, however empirically it looks like South Africa's hospitalizations are peaking at slightly more than half their previous wave, with deaths on pace to peak even lower[1][2]
[1]https://twitter.com/thehowie/status/1473642495095496704 [2]https://www.nicd.ac.za/diseases-a-z-index/disease-index-covi...
Sure, I'd rather we didn't have Covid at all, but that's not been a realistic option for quite some time now.
That's not panic, that's justifiable concern about a new strain of a virus that has killed millions of people around the world already.
The denominator is higher than if, let’s say, delta was let loose in the same population at the same time.
There's no indication that the first world, with much higher vaccination rates won't fare better than South Africa, which seems to be faring exceptionally well relative to other case spikes.
Omicron was first reported to the WHO on 11/24 and wasn't categorized as a variant of concern until 11/26. It hasn't even been a month since it was acknowledged much less has become the dominant variant in most places.
I think we'll see total hospitalization and death rates peak at anywhere from 50-100% of the Delta wave, but over a much shorter time period, commensurate with higher infectiousness but lower severity. The severity may be simply because it's no longer an immunologically naive population.
> https://i.imgur.com/TgRmz4F.png [1]
Death always lag infections. That chart is a horrible representation because it doesn't give a good sense of the intermediate dates. But you can still tell with the "7-day average" string.
On the first/infection chart you see the graph touching the word "average" while the second/death chart you can clearly see the graph shifted away from the word "average".
By the same reasoning, the death count could still spike albeit not as high.
https://graphics.reuters.com/world-coronavirus-tracker-and-m...
I have a little SVG "badge" that gets rendered each day. It's green, unless any of the following four benchmarks are exceeded for my local area, in which case it's red:
- RT > 1
- Cases/100k > 10
- Test Positivity > 5%
- ICU Usage > 85%
If any of them are over, it's red. For me, red has meant I limit my social activities. This seemed about right to me for Delta. For Omicron, I'm holding steady with that strategy for now, but if it turns out that Omicron isn't as severe for unvaccinated people, I might relax the strategy to only look at ICU usage.
What's been interesting over the past six months is that it has tended to turn red when everyone was partying, and it'd turn green again when people were still freaked out.
At any rate, it means I can ignore a lot of the rhetoric, because if Omicron subsides quickly, it just means my benchmark will turn green sooner.
instead, the better factors to consider are age, weight[0], comorbidities, household size, job duties (e.g., public-facing or not), and sociability. these also tend to be more stable and consistent, meaning you don't need to reconsider your personal mitigations very often. that'd indicate who generally needs personal mitigations and who doesn't (exceptions like a holiday family gathering would still need to be handled exceptionally).
[0]: i'd suggest 'overall health' is the more accurate (if more vague) factor, but weight tends to inversely correlate with general health (overweight ==> weaker immune system, less efficient pulmonary/cardiovascular system, lower muscle tone, more visceral fat, higher diabetes risk, etc.).
So if you're seeing many cases, that's a bad sign for the future, and it takes a while to figure out for sure.
In a global pandemic, it's best to be safe on these things, because the alternative is that you celebrate early and look like a tit (not to mention all the deaths).
I played along, now they’re done.
edit: the responder assumed something that wasn’t said, and then wrote an essay about something thats not happening and an example from Mississippi. Maybe to save time from having a natural flow of conversation, maybe its what they actually beleive. Either way this is called a strawman argument.
Am I correctly understanding that you intend to move to a different region for the sole purpose of voting against restrictions that otherwise would not apply to you? You’re literally trying to be a problematic immigrant.
I remember when I was in college a bunch of people did exactly this. They registered for residency in the state solely so they could vote a single issue in a state election. Specifically they registered so they could vote for Mississippi to keep the confederate flag as part of the state flag. So you’re in great company.
Honestly, isn’t the whole “state’s rights” thing about telling other people to fuck off and let them manage themselves? And here you are thinking you should meddle in someone else’s self-governance.
The plot doesn't show that. You're looking at the moving average which doesn't move much, but the underlying data (daily, presumably) shows a drastic increase in the last one or two data points, in line with the expected lag time.
Others have already pointed out the other major issue with your comment, that the situation in South Africa doesn't transfer to many other places in the world due to the exceptionally high pre-existing immunity rate there.
"Overall, we find evidence of a reduction in the risk of hospitalisation for Omicron relative to Delta infections, averaging over all casesin the study period. The extent of reduction is sensitive to the inclusion criteria used for cases and hospitalisation, being in the range 20-25% when using any attendance at hospital as the endpoint, and 40-45% when using hospitalisation lasting 1 day or longer or hospitalisations with the ECDS discharge field recorded as “admitted” as the endpoint (Table 1)"
[1] https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/m...
I think Omicron offers a possible explanation. An even more infectious variant with lower mortality should out-compete the deadly variant over time. After a few mutations like that it should be no worse than the seasonal flu--which has its own death toll each year, remember.
But when it comes to bad news, no evidence needed at all.
Some people just want the world to continue burning.
Those that want to report that omicron is milder focus on overall stats and average symptoms, and gloss over confounding factors.
Those that want to report that it’s just as severe as delta seem to be just picking up the status quo of poor science journalism, and equating “insufficient evidence” with “conclusive there’s no difference”.
This preprint from today out of SA lays out some prospective good news, but still with a lot of uncertainty over how much the lower severity is intrinsic vs mediated by prior infection/vaccination. And there are plenty of limitations, not least of which that their study only includes confirmed omicron infections up to the end of November (they study hospitalizations, and even had to prune their dataset because some patients are still in hospital).
There is just legitimately not enough data yet to answer the questions that most need answering.
But it seems unwise to be certain that will be what happens. Worst case scenario is omicron running wild mutates into something much more lethal and a bit more contagious.
With a variety of uncertainties imaginable, it's understandable that authorities are currently taking omicron as a serious threat even if it seem like there's a significant chance it will be a "good thing" as you say.
Look around this thread and you will find many links to data that indicates Omicron might have less severe outcomes, but it's really still a bit early to really have confidence in that data because there are a lot of confounding factors.
> What’s the hospitalization rate and long term effects from Omicron COVID?
Hospitalization could be about the same. While we see decreased hospitalisations in South Africa, the assumption is that this is due to widespread immunity from exposure to earlier waves and vaccinations. For the last two weeks, Omicron has been hitting populations that have higher shares of naive subjects. Now the first results on hospitalizations are coming in. Refreshing my tabs constantly :-)
I assume that long-term damage is related to immediate severity, so it's likely not going to be worse. But I'm out on a twig here.
> Do we have sufficient data to suggest that it’s milder than Delta etc?
Suggestive evidence of mildness is being discussed. No conclusions.
Yes from a low base, but they have still done multiple doublings.
Fortunately they are on track to only rise 50% this week.
This time last year it was over 400.
Literally all data has shown that omicron is a non-issue for triple vaxxed individuals, with a baseline being the standard flu.
If someone has data showing that triple vaxxed people are dying at rates similar to March 2020 I’d love to see.
If someone vaxxed and boosted dies of COVID, the media spins it as "Look how deadly..."
If someone is on Ivermectine and dies of COVID, they're villified as spreaders.
As I understand, we don't know much about whether omicron has worse, same, or better outcomes in relation to long-term consequences and persistent symptoms. Pls do share if you've heard otherwise
The Epstein-Barr virus for example can make you tired for months or years.
I am not saying long Covid isn't a thing, but it is not 'special' in any way.
Virus infections can cause damage. Years ago I had an infection that damaged a nerve. So virus infections can leave marks. But most of the time, as with Covid, you will recover from it.
But isn't COVID novel in the damage it poses to microvascular systems (importantly brain and lungs), compared to other viruses? E.g., https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7556303/
My understanding is that this is still different from other viruses.
So if large swaths of a country get that damage from delta vs omicron vs some future weaker variant, that could have very different public health consequences in the coming decades...
Disclaimer: In tech for over a decade, but once upon a time I did an honours degree in biochemistry, so I'm only maybe half-capable of musing my way through some of these papers :)
Original tweet: https://twitter.com/ShamezLadhani/status/1472622893154639876
Link to study: https://www.journalofinfection.com/article/S0163-4453(21)005...
I mean, I hope this pandemic comes to a close as much as anyone but so many of the recent news articles about the omicron variant being our collective way out of this pandemic seem a bit premature. I understand the theory that viruses become more contagious and less deadly over time but is there an real, peer reviewed science that backs up the idea that omicron is going to be our "savior"?
It's time to return to actual real normal. Let people make their own risk assessments.
Life is very, very short and we just spent 2 years of it acting as if the only point of our existence was to stop the spread of exactly one specific illness to the exclusion of basically everything else.
Move on.
In the case of covid, one important thing to consider is that people are the most infectious before they develop severe symptoms. Therefore, there is less selective pressure towards making it less severe.
It would be odd if this is the one, the permanently deadly respiratory virus that just never gives humanity a break, for ever and ever.
The sensationalist flip-flopping media reports have been mostly unhelpful. I've been swinging between "this is wishful thinking and it's going to be really bad" to "this is overly dramatic and it's going to be ok" for the past few weeks. I've been feeling more of the latter recently, but I'm still not 100% certain. Call it cautious optimism.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.21.21268116v...
Of course, it's not yet peer-reviewed, and doesn't model the possible outcomes based on the conclusions, but it certainly seems to be great news.
There is a wrinkle though: the 80% reduction in hospitalizations is compared to this summers delta infections, but they found no difference in hospitalizations compared to non-omicron infections this November (the time period of the study).
They have some discussion of maybe if that’s due to prior immunity or something, but it seems like things are still just not clear, and more data is coming down the pipe.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/south-afri...
https://www.nicd.ac.za/diseases-a-z-index/disease-index-covi...
This is direct from the SA government including archives of all the daily data for the duration of the pandemic.
Pay attention to the data lag. But it isn't _that_ laggy.
I mean, not saying your strategy wouldn't be the better strategy in the end, just think it's hard to know the risk equation at this moment.
edit: not sure why someone downvoted this, I'd love to hear your thoughts if you did
The faster we get everyone infected the faster old people who didn't get vaxxed will either recover or die and after that the ones who die we can't do anything for them.
Trump was right (by chance) all along, that's just some kind of flu, the only difference is that it's the first time our body sees it.
At the time of the breakout of Covid-19 in Jan/Feb 2020, the reports on the ground in Wuhan and Italy were pointing to a catastrophic failure of healthcare systems leading to significantly enhanced death rates, CFR of 10% or so was being observed in Wuhan. Yes, everyone knew that not everyone was being tested, but having 10% of everyone you tested died... well that ain't good. And China has a powerful government and can mobilize resources when they feel like it. Witness the building of hospitals in Wuhan in 10 days. Turns out they were probably more like convalescent centers, but they were fighting the multi-generational housing problem where younger sick people would get their parents/grandparents sick (who lived with them, and weren't able to isolate in their apartment/houses).
Back then, people noted "if we do this right, then we will be accused of over-reaction", and sure enough that is what we are seeing. Fun fact: by the time the first lockdowns in SF/bay area were announced, domestic flights were down... 97%. All major conferences had been cancelled. Tech companies were already allowing/requiring WFH. If that seems like an overreaction, imagine if Google Search went down in spring 2020... that isn't an impossible situation, after all if staff were spreading covid to each other readily without being aware and having a 1% death rate as a result... that is devastating. The notion that life would have been fine if we just ignored it is kinda nuts considering we had 800,000 deaths to date, and yet our mask effort resulted in the extinction of a strain of the flu, and reducing the pediatric flu deaths from 200 -> 1. Yet still 800,000 deaths.
In Germany some hospitals are postponing "planned operations" and as much as this sound like no big deal, every operations that is not an emergency is "planned" so this affects cancer removals as well. People are dying of cancer because covid patients saturate ICU beds.
Are these hospitals doing this because they've currently run out of ICU beds to staff COVID patients, or in anticipation of a future influx of COVID-19 patients?
Also over 90% of people who die with COVID-19 have co-morbidities. For example, Colin Powel recently died with COVID-19 in his system, but he also had myeloma (blood cancer) and was 84 years old.
In any case it's been 2 years now since COVID-19 started. At this point if hospital systems still can't manage this, then that's a failure of the governments and the healthcare systems.
The people I know who have been doing this have all contracted covid at this point, unless they are a recluse who doesn't go outside.
South African businesses, however, almost all have air conditioning.
Each wave is less deadly because: a) we're getting better at treating it b) the most vulnerable populations have been killed off in previous waves. c) through vaccination and prior infections our individual immune systems are primed to deal with it.
If this one spreads super fast, has generally more mild effects... it will ramp up faster, infect all, and may get more severe so that it can last longer in the host and spread more.
But the combo of high infectiousness and more mild side effects might be a net negative for this one. If we get a good amount of herd immunity, it may be a few weeks of heavy spread and then very little.
"Farr's laws is a law formulated by Dr. William Farr when he made the observation that epidemic events rise and fall in a roughly symmetrical pattern. The time-evolution behavior could be captured by a single mathematical formula that could be approximated by a bell-shaped curve."
South Africa has a population of about 60 million, fairly dense compared to the US. Compared to the US, their spike and fall would be expected to come on faster (and drop faster). The US is more spread out but with many more people. So its great to know that local spikes would come and go fast, it still is a very acute strain likely to be spread over months as it travels around the country.
Omicron is already so yesterday it isn't even a memory.
Why aren't you upset with your governments for not making this a non-issue? You gave them 2 years to figure it out and all I hear are excuses like "you can't just spin up new staff". Bullshit. These governments have virtually unlimited resources to build healthcare capacity to deal with covid. If there was a will to do so, they could have built capacity specific for covid that includes proper staffing.
The fact that entire regions of 17 million people get thrown into month-long lockdowns and asked to cancel christmas because the region can only support like 400 people in the ICU is a travesty.
People should be furious with their governments continuing to blame the public for "possible healthcare collapses". We paid with 2 years of our short-ass lives waiting for them to fix capacity issues. There are zero excuses.
I will stop wearing one much sooner. I hate the muffled voices. I can't see anyone smile. It's dehumanizing.
- Infected Mushroom in the Midway: hardly anyone wearing masks, irregardless of if they are drinking or not
- Chvrches in the Civic Auditorium: most people wearing masks, maybe 20% of the audience unmasked. Even people with drinks mostly just removing it drinking and putting it back on.
- Spiderman in the AMC Kabuki: mostly everyone wearing masks
- Karaoke bar in Japantown after Spiderman: no one wearing masks, not even the barman and the owner of the bar that were of course not drinkingReal talk, wth is going on in your head...
My point is that COVID and heart disease are largely preventable at an individual level if you have ability to eat healthy foods and take the vaccine and/or practice social distancing.
There are at least some people who have figured out the right covid policies, because some of them are running NFL. NFL has ruled that asymptomatic players who received the initial round of vaccinations don't need to be regularly tested. With the rise of omicron, populations of healthy young people whose families have access to health care don't need to fear infection and don't need "boosters". Of course, many families in USA lack access to health care because capitalism. NFL can't directly be held responsible for that, although many NFL owners are billionaires so they can. [0]
[0] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...