Thanks for looking into this. Did you happen to model this in log-odds space?

Researchers should 1) survey participants regarding their possible exposure risks, and 2) ask them whether they think they got the placebo, and with what degree of confidence. Adjusting for these should reduce the problem.

This postmortem is so impressive. Someone should collect all the pandemic related postmortems. I'd be particularly interested in those written by people in the field (broadly construed).

Note: the CDC now recommends public mask-wearing, even DIY cloth masks, (reversing their previous advice): https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-sick/diy-cloth-face-coverings.html

Please promote #Masks4All wherever you can: https://twitter.com/thatMikeBishop/status/1251609042860023814

Is this more (or less) comfortable than cloth masks? I support any/all masks but my inclination is to focus on whatever we can get people to adopt. I doubt I'm doing what I can, including tweeting #Masks4All once per day https://twitter.com/thatMikeBishop/status/1246501797512056834

You have experience wearing a mask like above and are telling us it's awful to wear more than 30 minutes?

Is there any reason to worry copper tape might be less effective than the copper used in experiments? (I haven't read methods to see if they describe the source of the copper) For example, a lot of copper is designed to be resistant to oxidation - does that matter?

[UPDATED, thanks to various people who caught errors in V1 and pointed out V2] New NIH study of COVID half-life in aerosol or on surfaces V1 with errors: https://medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.09.20033217v1 , V2 hopefully error free: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.09.20033217v2.full.pdf (H/T @AndyBioTech)

2.4-5.11 hours on copper, in contrast to 10.5-16.1 on steel or 13-19.2 on plastic

What does it mean for a probability not to be well defined in this context? I mean, I think I share the intuition, but I'm not really comfortable with it either. Doesn't it seem strange that a probability could be well defined until I start learning more about it and trying to change it? How little do I have to care about the probability before it becomes well defined again?

+1 and many thanks for wading into this with me... I've been working all day and I'm still at work so can't necessarily respond in full...

I agree that these problems are a lot simpler if reducing my uncertainty about X cannot help me affect X. This is not a minor class of problems. I'd love to have better information for a lot of problems in this class. That said, many of the problems that it seems most worthwhile for me to spend my time and money reducing my uncertainty about are of the type where I have a non-trivial role in how they play out. Assuming I do have some causal power over X, I think I'd pay a lot more to know the "equilibrium" probability of X after I've digested the information the oracle gave me - anything else seems like stale information... but learning that equilibrium probability seems weird as well. If I'm surprised by what the oracle says, then I imagine I'd ask myself questions like: how am I likely to react in regard to this information... what was the probability before I knew this information such that the current probability is what it is... It feels like I'm losing freedom... to what extent is the experience of uncertainty tied to the experience of freedom?