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Deep Frozen Arctic Microbes Are Waking Up

scientificamerican.com

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Re: Deep Frozen Arctic Microbes Are Waking Up

#61

Post by strogonoff »

trhway wrote: post #55
voqv wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pictures of the September Moscow marathon make me think even the government are some kind of anti-maskers

a good mask will help when you're occasionally visiting an infectious patient in a hospital. There is nothing, short of full bio-defense suit, that can help in the densely packed Moscow (or any other large Russian city) subway or bus, and the people in the country have no resources for any prolonged lockdowns. Add to that that the top people in Russia, like in any other country, receive highly personalized healthcare…

> There is nothing, short of full bio-defense suit, that can help in the densely packed Moscow (or any other large Russian city) subway or bus

A mask is very effective and is worn for others, not yourself. At any point in time you might be carrying asymptomatic or not-yet-symptomatic COVID. Your mask prevents your saliva from flying in the air around you, protecting people near you and their parents/susceptible relatives this might get passed on to.

And if it’s against your interest when emergency healthcare can’t help your sick child because they have not enough resources due to COVID patients, then over long term wearing a mask is actually for yourself, too.

Re: Deep Frozen Arctic Microbes Are Waking Up

#62

Post by sterlind »

est31 wrote: post #14
randycupertino wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps we'll do better for the "next" pandemic now that we have the infrastructure in place and learned some lessons from COVID? Maybe I'm grasping for silver linings and being too optimistic towards humanity...

It's gonna come sooner rather than later. Humans encroach on the natural habitats of animals all over the world, which increases the number zoonoses dramatically. Most such spillovers don't cause any further human to human spread. Think of MERS. But there are spillovers that do spread between humans, like in the case of SARS-Cov-2. While the COVID pandemic is a major catastrophy, we were still quite lucky. MERS has a…

I hope that the new mRNA technology the Pfizer and AZ vaccines are based on will help us develop and manufacture more quickly. The delivery mechanism will be well-understood, the pipeline will be there, the limiting factor would still be knowing what to target and screening for safety/efficacy but it should still help.

I hope similar things can be done with rapid antigen/PCR testing equipment.

Re: Deep Frozen Arctic Microbes Are Waking Up

#63

Post by jakear »

trhway wrote: post #42
randycupertino wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps we'll do better for the "next" pandemic now that we have the infrastructure in place and learned some lessons from COVID? Maybe I'm grasping for silver linings and being too optimistic towards humanity...

>lessons from COVID what in our response to COVID was better and more effective than our response to Black Death and Spanish flu? I don't see any improvement despite 700 and 100 years of accumulated knowledge and technology development since then. There has so far been no indication that the only things we were able to muster - archaic lockdown and masks - can prevent it from reaching the 20-30% spread, basically the…

Many orders of magnitude fewer deaths, for one?

Re: Deep Frozen Arctic Microbes Are Waking Up

#64

Post by ISL »

rriepe wrote: post #58
ethbr0 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thankfully, life has a way of selecting against people who fail to act to preserve their own. (Said as someone whose fiance is an ICU nurse)

Social Darwinism, alive and well on HN...

This is actual Darwinism.

Re: Deep Frozen Arctic Microbes Are Waking Up

#65

Post by wuschel »

est31 wrote: post #56
hef19898 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since this thing started, I re-read various publications about the black death. And the social reactions are so strikingly similar.

Do you have a list? I'm interested. I was surprised that even in 2020 you have people making up straight lies about covid, while I believed that the wild theories that people had about the plague back in the day (e.g. the one that blamed the jews for it) were born from the fact that these people haven't went to school and were badly educated. But now they can write and relevant parts of the population claim similar t…

I second that - this is very interesting, I would love to see some sources, too.

Re: Deep Frozen Arctic Microbes Are Waking Up

#66

Post by [deleted] »

Misdicorl wrote: post #53
sorokod wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Place your faith in natural selection.

In addition to being ugly, this sentiment is pretty misguided. The selection pressure is far too mild to have any evolutionary impact. To whit: covid selects primarily against individuals beyond their reproductive age, selects far too small of the population (unless we see these deaths continue for decades), and is only mildly selecting for anti mask populations.

[deleted]

Re: Deep Frozen Arctic Microbes Are Waking Up

#67

Post by trhway »

strogonoff wrote: post #61
trhway wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a good mask will help when you're occasionally visiting an infectious patient in a hospital. There is nothing, short of full bio-defense suit, that can help in the densely packed Moscow (or any other large Russian city) subway or bus, and the people in the country have no resources for any prolonged lockdowns. Add to that that the top people in Russia, like in any other country, receive highly personalized healthcare…

> There is nothing, short of full bio-defense suit, that can help in the densely packed Moscow (or any other large Russian city) subway or bus A mask is very effective and is worn for others, not yourself. At any point in time you might be carrying asymptomatic or not-yet-symptomatic COVID. Your mask prevents your saliva from flying in the air around you, protecting people near you and their parents/susceptible relat…

>A mask is worn for the others, not yourself.

so, imagine one "other" without a mask and everybody around in masks (actually "face coverings" which allow air in/out from sides) commuting everyday in a densely packed bus. Do you think that "other" has much improved chances when aggregated over several months? (again, i'm not arguing against proper mask's efficiency during occasional exposure)

Re: Deep Frozen Arctic Microbes Are Waking Up

#68

Post by lalos »

trhway wrote: post #42
randycupertino wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps we'll do better for the "next" pandemic now that we have the infrastructure in place and learned some lessons from COVID? Maybe I'm grasping for silver linings and being too optimistic towards humanity...

>lessons from COVID what in our response to COVID was better and more effective than our response to Black Death and Spanish flu? I don't see any improvement despite 700 and 100 years of accumulated knowledge and technology development since then. There has so far been no indication that the only things we were able to muster - archaic lockdown and masks - can prevent it from reaching the 20-30% spread, basically the…

Maybe not the USA but Asians countries which one could argue will carry the torch of progress did improve.

Re: Deep Frozen Arctic Microbes Are Waking Up

#69

Post by nojs »

lixtra wrote: post #52
echelon wrote: post #5

> Permafrost thaw in Siberia led to a 2018 anthrax outbreak and the death of 200,000 reindeer and a child. This is terrifying and not hypothetical.

To be precise, the 200,000 reindeer were culled [1]. [1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10393-020-01474-z...

Full paper: https://sci-hub.se/downloads/2020-02-04/2c/10.1007@s10393-02...

This presents some alternate hypotheses for the outbreak and claims Anthrax is fairly unique in its ability to survive repeated freeze-thaw cycles.

Re: Deep Frozen Arctic Microbes Are Waking Up

#70

Post by 411111111111111 »

rriepe wrote: post #59
Misdicorl wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In addition to being ugly, this sentiment is pretty misguided. The selection pressure is far too mild to have any evolutionary impact. To whit: covid selects primarily against individuals beyond their reproductive age, selects far too small of the population (unless we see these deaths continue for decades), and is only mildly selecting for anti mask populations.

Anyone who treats science as a religion ends up with a pretty terrifying morality.

You can remove science from that statement and it'll still be true. Whoever derives their morality from religion will at times behave pretty abhorrently.

Thankfully nowadays even people claiming they do so often actually don't. I.e homosexuality is amoral according to the texts, but society moved on for the most part.

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