Palantir's Plan to Decipher the Mysteries of Long Covid:
65 million people are still suffering from long Covid, the mysterious cocktail of symptoms that persist in some patients more than 12 weeks after an initial infection. Researchers are still working to understand this illness, but it's been slow progress so far.
This is because long Covid is not just a medical problem—it's also a data problem, says Indra Joshi, director of health, research, and artificial intelligence at Palantir, which specializes in analyzing big data.
Before the pandemic, US hospitals kept their data to themselves, Joshi told WIRED Health this March, making it difficult for policymakers and researchers to identify patterns of disease occurring across the country. That's why Palantir worked with the US medical research agency, the National Institutes of Health, to create what Joshi describes as one of the largest collections of Covid-19 health records in the world.
The National COVID Cohort Collaborative, aka N3C, is essentially a giant, collaborative database, enabling clinicians and researchers to study the deidentified data of people suffering from Covid-19 or related conditions. "If you're diagnosed with Covid now, your data goes into this enclave," says Joshi, explaining that N3C now includes 2.1 billion clinical observations. The data enclave also encourages clinicians to enter data in a standardized format, making it easy for their insights to be compared with data collected from other US hospitals.
By harmonizing all this data, the N3C acts as a collective pool of information that researchers can dip into to try to find consensus on the ongoing mysteries of long Covid: What exactly are the symptoms? What treatments are people receiving? And how are they responding to those treatments? Already the N3C data has helped better define the symptoms that make up long Covid. It has also revealed that Black and Hispanic Americans, in comparison to white patients, appear to experience more symptoms and health problems related to long Covid, but are less likely to be diagnosed.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 10 2023, @03:08PM (3 children)
It's the CIA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palantir_Technologies [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 10 2023, @03:57PM
More specifically a supplier to the CIA, other gov't agencies and some large companies.
Maybe it takes a spy mentality to get data out of hospitals and assemble it into "actionable intelligence"?
(Score: 2) by driverless on Tuesday April 11 2023, @06:05AM (1 child)
That was my reaction too, giving Palantir your medical records would be like hiring Jimmy Savile as your babysitter, it's pretty much the last company you'd want with access to a mountain of medical records.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday April 12 2023, @01:15PM
I think in large part that's because they could actually do something with your mountain of medical records. If you want state-of-the-art sifting of data (medical or otherwise), you'll have to go to the intelligence services and their contractors.
Here, not trusting Palantir really is not trusting the intelligence community of the US government (sorry, still don't buy that corporations are magically powerful especially when it comes this particular part of the US government). Justifiable but doesn't get you anywhere. Anyone doing the contract will be equally suspect for the same reasons.
Here's the real question. Is the value of the work worth the risks? I'd have to say yes. Long covid is a genuine problem that billions of people may well suffer from, now or in the future, to some degree.
(Score: 0, Insightful) by VLM on Monday April 10 2023, @04:58PM (19 children)
How will they deal with the mandatory political filters that the C19 vax is the first vax in the history of mankind to never have a complication or long term side effect?
I mean, you can't do science "for reals" if the conclusion was already determined before the study started.
The only politically permissible opinion is its literally safer than injecting saline solution.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by darkfeline on Monday April 10 2023, @05:30PM
Same as before, manipulating the data and reporting. Censor, threaten, deplatform, discredit anyone exhibiting wrongthink.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 5, Insightful) by khallow on Monday April 10 2023, @06:00PM (10 children)
Probably by not worrying about that. It's a very overrated problem. I'll note also that there's probably a bunch of other vaccines out there (polio, smallpox, measles, etc) for which side effects were downplayed. It didn't stop those vaccines from being effective.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Entropy on Monday April 10 2023, @10:13PM (9 children)
What's the odds of getting "polio, smallpox, measles" when you're vaccinated against those? The
COVID and Flu vaccine are the only vaccines that come to mind that you still get and spread
the thing you're supposedly vaccinated for.
(Score: 4, Informative) by khallow on Monday April 10 2023, @10:17PM (7 children)
Less. You can still catch and spread the diseases (all of them!) in question, but you are much less likely to catch and spread than an unvaccinated person, and the diseases are more survivable when you do catch them.
(Score: 2) by Entropy on Tuesday April 11 2023, @05:14AM (6 children)
Well..you're not wrong. "less" is a general term. I would submit it's "incredibly less". Polio was basically eradicated in many countries due to the vaccine which works great. COVID vaccine? Not even in the same ballpark. Flu vaccine? Same.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by khallow on Tuesday April 11 2023, @05:50AM (5 children)
From here [npr.org]:
Covid vaccines don't need to be extremely effective. They just need to create a situation where the number of new infections for a given infection is on average significantly less than one for the price of modest side effects.
My take is that if we had aggressively near full vaccination, we could have eliminated covid throughout the developed world in a year. But a large population of people who refuse to vaccinate means that the disease will continue.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by coolgopher on Tuesday April 11 2023, @06:42AM (2 children)
We didn't even need vaccines to get rid of it, we just needed to stop the spread everywhere for 2-3 weeks to starve it out. Here in Victoria, Australia we successfully eliminated covid from the entire state several times. Yes, the lockdowns sucked, but they were demonstrably effective. And I'd by far prefer another month stuck in lockdown than the years of covid waves we'll have instead.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Tuesday April 11 2023, @12:59PM (1 child)
Completely agree. It was all a bit half-assed. But it seems to me it got into too many different countries early on to be contained. They weren't all able to contain it even if they'd been willing. Then you have to consider the possibility of it surviving in animal populations and passing back to humans again later.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 3, Informative) by coolgopher on Wednesday April 12 2023, @12:49AM
Yeah, which was all the more reason to jump on it early, and hard. If you wait to see how bad it actually is, you've squandered your best opportunity. Did we overdo it here in Melbourne, as the most locked down city in the world? Quite possibly, but it also did buy us the time to get 96+% of our population vaccinated, and spared some 60k lives on the recent estimate I saw.
(Score: 2) by Entropy on Tuesday April 11 2023, @04:50PM (1 child)
The vast majority of folks I know that got COVID were vaccinated. It's easy to say their infections were less severe(1 was on a ventilator) than they would have been, but it's also pretty hard to prove. Over half of them spread COVID to other people during that period. COVID itself has gotten quite a bit less severe because lets face it: A disease that annihilates it's host is going to be worse at self-survival than one a bit more friendly.
A lot of the less severity of COVID is being credited to vaccines but again: I'm not convinced.
The other vaccines you mentioned in my opinion are vastly superior at suppressing the diseases they vaccinate against. In most cases those diseases are not running around rampant like the Flu, and COVID.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday April 11 2023, @10:24PM
Wasn't the case over here. The first people to get covid were pre-vaccine and most of them got it through refusing [soylentnews.org] to follow the usual protective procedures. When vaccines came out in 2021, we did pretty well, but again most of the people who ended up catching it were unvaccinated and sloppy at best with those procedures. In 2022, I caught covid in the early summer from an unvaccinated person. That also was the first season that I saw a high number of covid infections as well as infections among vaccinated people.
(Score: 2) by inertnet on Wednesday April 12 2023, @07:52AM
The vaccines are not inferior, but covid19 and the flu are RNA viruses. They mutate [wikipedia.org] much faster than DNA viruses like polio etc.
(Score: 5, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 10 2023, @06:41PM (2 children)
The most likely thing they'll do is use all that straw to build a scarecrow.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Beryllium Sphere (r) on Monday April 10 2023, @09:55PM (1 child)
Here's the reality. The side effects from COVID vaccines are published, in detail.
We know the risks quantitatively. We know how many times per million vaccinations myocarditis comes up, for example.
Just one published study, with peer review and a control group, is at https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2110475. [nejm.org]
(Score: 5, Touché) by khallow on Monday April 10 2023, @10:35PM
So are the side effects [mayoclinic.org] from COVID infection. Not much point to thinking about this in a vacuum.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Beryllium Sphere (r) on Monday April 10 2023, @10:03PM (1 child)
We have hundreds of years of experience with vaccines. Observation has taught us that side effects show up in days or weeks, with six weeks or two months being outliers.
Here's something with some vaccine history, for anyone curious.
https://www.chop.edu/news/long-term-side-effects-covid-19-vaccine [chop.edu]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Monday April 10 2023, @10:37PM
In other words, observation bias. For all your talk, we haven't looked for centuries for long term side effects to either the vaccines or the diseases they treat. That's a new thing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2023, @06:36AM (1 child)
They might be doing science for real but not for your benefit and probably not really for what they publicly claim.
Palantir is effectively the CIA. So if you believe them, I've got a bridge to sell you.
There's probably some science involved but the CIA is doing science as much as they were doing vaccinations or deep sea mining.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(14)60900-4/fulltext [thelancet.com]
Similar for the CIA and art: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-weapon-1578808.html [independent.co.uk]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday April 12 2023, @01:18PM
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 10 2023, @08:13PM (3 children)
I am currently experiencing all the symptoms of long Covid, and l am anxiously concerned about any protocols that seem to be effective in treating this condition. Neither the story nor any of the comments above seem to be helpful in this regards. I am sure I am not the only one here with this problem. I would love to hear if any other soylentils have found a protocol that provides relief.
A pox upon insensitive clods and their stupid conspiracy theories!
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 10 2023, @08:18PM
IANAD (I am not a doctor) but one thing you could do is to twist the arm of your hospital and other caregivers to make sure your data makes it into the national study.
As long as the data remains silo'ed (within individual medical practices, hospitals, and possibly even states) it's going to be hard to study the problem on a big scale.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by hendrikboom on Monday April 10 2023, @08:40PM
I had a bout of long covid for a few months last year. Covid in December, 2021. For the first few months of 2022 I could not read math books I had been reading the previous November. I mean, I could read the words, and look at the equations, but none of it went in.
About halfway through the year, I started to be able to make sense of them again.
I suspect other parts of my brain took over from the parts that had been damaged.
Mind you, I didn't have a severe case of either Covid or of long covid. I may have been lucky, and my vaccinations were up-to-date. It could easily have been a lot, lot worse.
-- hendrik
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 10 2023, @11:56PM
You have contracted infinity covid. You are already dead.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Tuesday April 11 2023, @12:53PM
The narrative being pushed by most of the media is if you don't experience serious symptoms then there's nothing to worry about, hence so many people talking about the pandemic in the past tense and no longer taking precautions when out in public.
It ignores the fact that an infection could still damage multiple organs in mild cases. The organ damage might not be severe enough to notice in the short term, but there's a risk that repeated reinfections could have a cumulative effect. I'd speculate we may see shortened life expectancy in the long term.
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/long-covid-even-mild-covid-linked-damage-brain-months-infection-rcna18959 [nbcnews.com]
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04569-5 [nature.com]
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?