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A (possible) solution to Covid-19

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Re: A (possible) solution to Covid-19

#401
post #151
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, there are two ways out of this, herd or vaccine. The above is a variation of herd that may result in less deaths. The real problem is that waiting until a vaccine is just not even remotely realistic for so many reasons that it's not even funny. We could end up causing more indirect deaths with social isolation than we could possibly imagine, worst case being a huge collapse in the economy results in a larg…

Do you have any evidence that social isolation will cause more deaths than an unchecked pandemic? That makes no sense.

Indeed, CDC's numbers for March indicate that social isolation is reducing non-ncovid-19 deaths by twice as much as sars-cov-2 is adding them. That's short term, so not what GP was talking about, but very significant numbers nonetheless.

Re: A (possible) solution to Covid-19

#402
post #349

This reminds me of a story 20 years ago when Pittsburgh Steelers (American football) announcer Myron Cope ran into head coach Bill Cowher... Myron said, "I see that Lee Flowers is playing today after a high ankle sprain 2 weeks ago. But I thought that high ankle sprains took 4 weeks to heal. What gives?" Coach Cowher replied, "4 weeks is true, Myron, for the first high ankle sprain. But if you recall, Lee had a high…

I understand the metaphor you’re using, but for the sake of clarity I feel compelled to explain that there is a big difference: ankle-spraining significantly increases in likelihood with each subsequent instance. So “spraining ‘em all” even once would literally result in long-term degradation and increased frequency of injury. They would take less to heal, but would also get injured so often that the aggregated result would be worse than before.

Sadly joints tend to work a bit differently from the immune system (with some exceptions).

Re: A (possible) solution to Covid-19

#403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then it turns out similar to "Ethics", where the virologist's work is questionably founded and potentially quite dangerous, we get a Picard speech about how sacrificing some to save others is wrong, Data and Crusher technobabble up a treatment that doubles as a vaccine, the photogenic kid gets saved at the bottom of the fourth act, Admiral Nechayev and Picard fence a bit, credits. Pretty wild to count Enterprise…

> And then it turns out similar to "Ethics" Perhaps, but that's Star Trek. It wasn't always obvious how the episode would end. > Pretty wild to count Enterprise as "real Trek", but not Discovery. Why? TNG, DS9, VOY and ENT, together with movies from TMP to NEM, form a certain coherent whole - both artistically, with themes, styles, pacing, and story-wise with a shared universe. Both Discovery and Picard, as well as J…

I mean, yes, Berman/Braga era Trek has a fairly consistent style both visually and thematically because that's how they wanted it, but to privilege that style as "real" (or "proper", as you have it) requires considerable justification as yet not provided. Even from that era, First Contact not only used a largely horror/action-movie style then unprecedented in Trek, but went far out of its way to cast doubt on the Federation's - and the TNG era's - doctrinaire self-congratulation about its "more evolved" ethical ideal, in the shape not only of Picard's desire to exact vengeance upon the Borg, but also of the lack of self-awareness that blinded him to it very nearly unto catastrophe. Was First Contact therefore less "real"?

And if we're going to talk about ethics, we could do a lot worse than to talk about the Picard series's accidental but very real point that Picard's own moral absolutism and blind righteousness is as much of its time, as contingent, as any other ethic, and when taken out of a context where it's able to be effective, it does as much harm as any other, too. The point isn't explicitly made, because Kurtzman and Chabon are a couple of hacks just like Berman and Braga were, but it's easy to draw from the text on the basis of an almost trivial engagement - Picard's quixotism managing to ruin just about everyone it touches, and the writers having to fall back on a Bond-villain plot to try to make him come out looking good, is enough all by itself for that.

That's the kind of thing I mean when I talk about TNG showing its age. The remasters look pretty good, sure. But the Trek fandom has ever qualified their shows as especially worthy not for the quality of their visuals, but for that of their ideas. From that perspective, a lot of TNG, and of its era more generally, struggles today.

Re: A (possible) solution to Covid-19

#404

I'm not qualified to assess the risk, but if the there's indeed ADE (antibody dependent enhancement),[1][2] people once infected with a milder strain may suffer from more severe symptom from the deadlier strains, thus killing more people in the end. I'm wondering how we may rule out this worst case scenario. [1] Is COVID-19 receiving ADE from other coronaviruses? https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S128…

Article [1] is dated Feb 12, and contains the sentence:

"Instead, it [SARS-CoV-2] appears to be no more concerning than the influenza virus." The citation for this claim is an article in Canada's National Post.

Re: A (possible) solution to Covid-19

#405
post #292

I see one potential drawback to this (as opposed to a vaccine), and that is the impossibility to protect immunodeficient subjects: if you have an effective vaccine you can be fairly certain that people with leukemia or full blown AIDS can be protected by herd immunity when surrounded by people who have been vaccinated. In this case it's not clear to me whether this would work. I have to say I'm no virologist, but I f…

Right now it is also impossible to protect immunodeficient subjects, but herd immunity could help. I don't think the author ever says, "We should do this and only this in lieu of a vaccine." The argument is, "This can be done now, or soon, while a vaccine will take 12 - 18 months, if not longer."

It's not quite the same ethically: for all of this to work you should make this attenuated virus spread faster than the more deadly ones, so there is a positive act to be made which goes directly against the Hippocratic oath (do no harm).

Immunodepressed subjects right now are protected by isolation and by the fact that right now a smallish percentage of the general population is an asymptomatic carrier, if we were to start spreading this actively those variables would change.

Re: A (possible) solution to Covid-19

#406
This is why scientists and mathematicians never make it as politicians in the USA

You may have the best idea in the world, but your presentation is terrible, the rambling is terrible, the assumption you are the only person to think of this is terrible and the urge to get the attention of someone important to pay for it is terrible.

The sad truth is you need to fit your idea into the size of a tweet, write the long version elsewhere linked. If you can't do that, someone else can and will and their idea will win over yours because you can't get attention rambling like that

And governments are never going to purposely infect their populations, if you think anti-vaxers are bad, imagine when people in the USA have the choice not to get the injection, 99% of the fox news viewers will refuse and the president will say "well you can if you want but I won't" (I mean he won't even stop shaking hands or wear a mask)

Re: A (possible) solution to Covid-19

#407
post #336

This entire article is a waste of time from the beginning. The “two strain” theory was debunked the very next day as bad science. http://virological.org/t/response-to-on-the-origin-and-conti... I can’t believe that a month later, this bad science is still being circulated, by a purported PhD and former professor.

Thanks for saying that. It is super flawed. I was planning to go through all of his replies to other posters and debunk them one-by-one.

> I was planning to go through all of his replies to other posters and debunk them one-by-one.

If you disagree strongly with someone, there are much better tools you can use like the down-vote button. Down-voted posts are harder to read and especially bad contributions get collapsed out of view.

Going out of your way to hound someone would only lower the S/N ratio here, which is not why we are all here; intellectual curiosity is why we keep coming back here not witch hunts.

Re: A (possible) solution to Covid-19

#408
post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the attenuated live viral vaccines spread. This is one of the reasons they are so effective since they keep herd immunity up. For example, every kid that gets the live polio vaccine spreads it around to their peers and parents.

I call BS on this. Viral shedding is a myth.

Not according to the CDC: https://www.cdc.gov/cpr/polioviruscontainment/diseaseandviru...

Re: A (possible) solution to Covid-19

#409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. What we really want is a strain that has infected a whole lot of people and all of them have had a mild case.

You probably won't find that... You might find a strain where 99.9% of people get a mild case. Who is going to be the person to recommend deliberately spreading that strain to the world population, knowing that 0.1% of the world, 7 million people, will end up in a hospital and die? Sure, overall, fewer people might die, but the reality is whichever world leader makes that call has effectively just signed a death warr…

You would infect on purpose the 80% of the less vulnerable population for herd immunity
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