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New coronavirus variant: What do we know?

bbc.com

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Re: New coronavirus variant: What do we know?

#161

Post by agildehaus »

anonunivgrad wrote: post #135
thatguy0900 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We will have some very interesting textbooks about the mainstream public response to this in 50 years, I'm sure.

Doubtful. The victors write the history. The Church of “If It Saves Even One Life” and “Anti-Lockdown and Anti-Maskers are Murderers” are clearly the victors in this timeline. Your children and grandchildren will be taught about the backwards racists who were willing to sacrifice old people in the name of money, but how the fascist Donald Trump was finally defeated by the forces of democracy and justice and health wa…

At what point AREN'T you contributing to the deaths if at the very least you can't even wear a piece of cloth over your face?

Re: New coronavirus variant: What do we know?

#162

Post by jacobsenscott »

jmnicolas wrote: post #119
LatteLazy wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting that no one seems to give a shit about real freedoms like free speech or democracy, detention without trial or access to lawyers. But when you close the pubs (or the artisnal pasta makers), suddenly we're on a dictatorship.

This is so unjust: you don't know me but you basically reduce me to an angry guy that can't get drunk with his friends. ALL our freedoms are attacked: the social media censorship reached crazy levels lately, and let's not talk about democracy given the disgusting spectacle the US has shown this year (my country doesn't fare any better). When someone is condemned to financial ruin because her shop is not allowed to op…

There was never a "freedom to post" on social media, so you haven't lost that. The idea of "freedom of speech" was formed during a period of time when there were natural barriers to speech such that bat shit crazy qanon conspiracy theories and other such nonsense couldn't propagate widely. Nobody ever intended "freedom of speech" to equal a right to use a frictionless machine to propagate lies to billions.

Prior to the internet you could for the most part visually distinguish between the crazy and the legitimate - the crazy was in crayon on cardboard scraps, full of misspellings. The higher quality crazy was type written on a misaligned sheet of paper, thick with whiteout, still full of misspellings. The legit was professionally edited and published. Not 100% of the time, but a good fraction of the time.

Now we have spell checkers and grammar checkers and blog services like medium that make everything look really really good. That visual heuristic is gone. We need a way to invert our current equilibrium of "it is easy to get bad information out, and hard to get good information out" at least back to how it was: "it is hard to get good information out, but it is even harder to get really bad information out." That isn't censorship.

As for democracy in the US, as a US citizen I can tell you it is on the ropes, mostly due to social media, but it is better off today than it was four years ago just because people are at least starting to think about how to get social media under control.

Every freedom my parents, grandparents, and great grandparents had I have, and more. I'm hard pressed to identify a single one that is under attack.

Re: New coronavirus variant: What do we know?

#163

Post by wonnage »

gorgoiler wrote: post #153
detritus wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On my walk to work this morning, I detoured down a local main street, curious to see what shops were considering themselves 'essential' and remaining open. Apparently this time around, travel agents and jewellery sellers have added themselves to the list, with a few barbers clearly operating illicitly behind half-drawn shutters. I was bemused by the very chi-chi local middle class deli near my home insisting they'd b…

Am I right in saying that the goal of any lockdown is not to completely stop the spread of the virus, but to instead merely keep hospitals from filling up? The health of the population, in general, is not the primary concern. We just need to stop the hospitals from collapsing. We live with all manner of sickness and disease every day of the year without trying to eradicate them. Covid is only different from heart dis…

The West simply has not demonstrated the ability to enact an actual lockdown. So we're stuck with these half-measures, that rely on minimum-wage store greeters for enforcement, and even those get protested.

Re: New coronavirus variant: What do we know?

#164

Post by jtbayly »

jschwartzi wrote: post #151
jtbayly wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your sugar example is no good. Sugar doesn’t take people’s freedoms away. It has no agency and doesn’t enforce anything. Like any action, eating sugar may have consequences good or bad for the individual, but that has nothing to do with freedoms unless the government starts telling people they may not eat more than x grams per day or something like that.

In the case of masks and lockdowns the "freedom" in question is more analogous to drunk driving. This is in the sense that exercising the freedom could cause the people around you some severe life-altering problems, and you're imposing that risk without their consent or knowledge.

Without their knowledge or consent? You can’t tell whether people are wearing masks and make a decision about whether to be around them? I suspect that even a blind person could do so the moment somebody started talking.

I’m sure there are still better comparisons than drunk driving. If you are under 55, the risk is about the same as dying from a car accident.

Re: New coronavirus variant: What do we know?

#165

Post by wonnage »

read_if_gay_ wrote: post #150
onion2k wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When someone is condemned to financial ruin because her shop is not allowed to open, this is not a matter of self entitlement, yes I think these are the beginnings of dictatorship. On the other hand, people are actually dying of Covid. Given the choice I'd take financial ruin over death.

Frankly, people are always dying. Deaths don't automatically outweigh everything. This logic quickly breaks down once you apply it consistently. Traffic accidents are a huge cause of deaths, yet we don't ban all vehicles. There are massive costs associated with lockdowns, most of which we can probably only judge accurately once everything is over, and certainly there are second order effects which cost lives also. Su…

How many of those suicides are from people who are broke for pandemic-related reasons, and could've been prevented had we controlled the pandemic early (i.e, with a strict lockdown)?

Re: New coronavirus variant: What do we know?

#166

Post by anonunivgrad »

agildehaus wrote: post #161
anonunivgrad wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doubtful. The victors write the history. The Church of “If It Saves Even One Life” and “Anti-Lockdown and Anti-Maskers are Murderers” are clearly the victors in this timeline. Your children and grandchildren will be taught about the backwards racists who were willing to sacrifice old people in the name of money, but how the fascist Donald Trump was finally defeated by the forces of democracy and justice and health wa…

At what point AREN'T you contributing to the deaths if at the very least you can't even wear a piece of cloth over your face?

The places with the strictest mask orders are having surges in cases just the same. E.g. California hospitalizations per capita are now far outpacing Florida. Masks work, kind of, I’m sure, under very particular conditions. But the net effect seems to be minimal.

Re: New coronavirus variant: What do we know?

#167

Post by motohagiography »

shalmanese wrote: post #118
detritus wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On my walk to work this morning, I detoured down a local main street, curious to see what shops were considering themselves 'essential' and remaining open. Apparently this time around, travel agents and jewellery sellers have added themselves to the list, with a few barbers clearly operating illicitly behind half-drawn shutters. I was bemused by the very chi-chi local middle class deli near my home insisting they'd b…

> I was bemused by the very chi-chi local middle class deli near my home insisting they'd be staying open when I enquired on Saturday evening. I mean, sure they sell food, but really - I'm unsure how vital to survival artisanal cheese and pasta is! Let's not repeat the mistakes of the first lockdown. If you close down too many places, all that causes is everyone cramming into the same few places still open, causing s…

In the march/april stage of the pandemic, I chose to shop at such "shi-shi" places exclusively because a) there were no lineups, b) their non-frozen supply chain meant they had to sell meat or it would rot, c) they were owned by people with families in the neighbourhood/city, and d) the higher prices kept out hoarders, panic buyers, and the mentally ill.

On the last point, there was almost always some psycho causing problems in the regular supermarket because it appealed to their sense of drama and got them attention. The extra %15-20 was worth avoiding the risk of an altercation.

The contempt some people have for local shopowners who provide services that are actually worth a premium is shocking, albeit typically british.

Re: New coronavirus variant: What do we know?

#168

Post by kodah »

robhu wrote: post #16

Ewan Birney (deputy directory of EMBL European Molecular Biology Laboratory)'s Twitter is a really good source of first class scientific information on this. You need to scroll back about 2 days to get the latest info (and he refers to the Twitter accounts of others in the field who can give more information). His Twitter profile is @ https://twitter.com/ewanbirney/ (Ewan is awesome - he is also (co)director of EMBL-…

I realize that this is probably an unpopular opinion among techies but I really wish people would post information on a website and then link to it from Twitter. At the very least, double post it. I don't use Twitter and actively block it and Facebook's various websites from my router and VPN. Additionally, reading long threads on Twitter or back and forth replies for a non-regular Twitter user is taxing.

Re: New coronavirus variant: What do we know?

#169

Post by timr »

occamrazor wrote: post #21
robhu wrote: post #16

Ewan Birney (deputy directory of EMBL European Molecular Biology Laboratory)'s Twitter is a really good source of first class scientific information on this. You need to scroll back about 2 days to get the latest info (and he refers to the Twitter accounts of others in the field who can give more information). His Twitter profile is @ https://twitter.com/ewanbirney/ (Ewan is awesome - he is also (co)director of EMBL-…

Direct link to the thread where he explains why the evidence, although not conclusive, strongly supports a higher infectivity of the new variant: https://mobile.twitter.com/jcbarret/status/13407169016101724...

This is a perfect example of mixing science and opinion, and we should be scolding "scientists" who do this without clarifying which is which, not lionizing them.

The only definitively factual statement he makes is in the first tweet:

"One of the key questions about the new variant (B.1.1.7) is whether there is conclusive evidence that it is more transmissible. I don't think we are absolutely certain yet"

Everything else is speculation. He says that founder effect is not likely because the virus is spreading widely, nationwide: this is a hypothesis, not a statement of fact. He says that there are reasons to believe that the mutations are associated with structural regions known to be important to transmission: this is a hypothesis, not a statement of fact.

He then says that because of these two unproven hypotheses (which he implicitly believes), one should "change your priors" on how likely it is that this strain is selectively advantaged. Certainly, one can "change their priors" based on personal opinion, but that doesn't mean that other informed scientists don't have different opinions.

What this guy is doing is citing the (limited, non-definitive) evidence that we know, and then saying he has an opinion about what it all means. That doesn't make it factual.

Without well-controlled cell-culture or animal studies that show that this strain is out-competing other strains in vivo, we don't have solid evidence either way. Trying to predict the organism-level impact of point mutations is a fun parlor game, but no more or less definitive than asking a sports fan which team is going to win on Sunday.

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