ingrid_STO said:

The mechanism and the magnitude are separate questions.

Fair, and it stops being fair at the extremes. The middle of the range is well understood; the ends are where the honest answer is that nobody knows.

stefan_berlin said:

Agreed, with a caveat about community reputation: it is a lagging indicator.

This is exactly what I could not find anywhere else.

ingrid_STO said:

The mechanism and the magnitude are separate questions.

Pushing back on ingrid_STO here. This treats a plausible mechanism as a demonstrated one. Plausible is where you start looking, not where you stop.

Happy to go further on any of that.

Adding the numbers, since they settle part of this. Give anything pharmacological four weeks before you judge it, and give anything measured weekly a four-point rolling average before you call it a trend.

Moderator note: good thread. Keeping it here rather than moving it, because the question is general enough to be useful.