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A coronavirus epidemic hit 20k years ago, new study finds

nytimes.com

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Re: A coronavirus epidemic hit 20k years ago, new study finds

#141

Post by moralestapia »

vlovich123 wrote: post #136
moralestapia wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, no. But it's some sort of technical heritage/baggage.

I actually dug into it, & it's not clear. Rust & many C libraries do outperform Perl if you can stick to an NFA regex. If you like backtracking & lookaround, then it's not clear that Perl loses that much in performance. The language itself is definitely better suited to writing those regexes all over the place, so if you have two axes of performance & regex usability, I wouldn't discount Perl for those use-cases. I d…

I actually programmed it, for that exact scenario, and there's some really nice C++ libraries that outperform Perl, even in the cases you mentioned. Sure, Perl it's easier, but not necessarily faster.

You can downvote this comment as well, code is code at the end of the day :^)

Re: A coronavirus epidemic hit 20k years ago, new study finds

#142

Post by asveikau »

WalterBright wrote: post #105
UncleOxidant wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I didn't quite understand why it should make us worry. We do have a lot more tools at our disposal than people had 20,000 years ago - vaccines, antivirals (in a few years), knowing to social distance, etc.

Other things we have today that mitigate spread: 1. sanitation 2. hand washing 3. understanding of how the disease spreads (not swamp gas) 4. knowing that throwing virgins into volcanoes does not work 5. clean water

Have we really done a thorough scientific test of #4?

Re: A coronavirus epidemic hit 20k years ago, new study finds

#143

Post by refurb »

cyberlurker wrote: post #119
tablespoon wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They absolutely did but how frequently? The first villages in China are attested 7500 BCE, that's 10 kyr later, if the dating is correct. There were obviously viruses before urbanization (especially given there are viruses that spread in wild animal populations), they probably just spread more slowly. At the minimum, there was probably regular deliberate contact/mixing between adjacent groups to avoid too much inbr…

Nitpicking here, but there probably wasn’t anything we would define as “marriage”. That Wikipedia article says “copulate” instead. Now I want to go down the wiki rabbit hole about the history of human marriage. Also, I’d imagine there were at least far fewer viruses before urbanization. My understanding is early civilization was really good for diseases.

Early civilization would have been brutal in terms of diseases compared to today.

There are plenty of diseases where humans are a part of the reproduction cycle - malaria is a good example. You don’t need groups of humans together.

Then add in human-animal transmission and you have endemic malaria, tuberculosis, parasites, disease causing bacteria. If you look at remote, isolated tribes today they have a very heavy burden of non-fatal (but quality of life decreasing) diseases.

Re: A coronavirus epidemic hit 20k years ago, new study finds

#144

Post by lamontcg »

LocalPCGuy wrote: post #113
lamontcg wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it is still a (low) possibility. It really isn't. An escape mutation which completely evaded T-cells would write a whole new chapter in immunology. It on par with worrying about a jet engine falling on my head right now. There's risks that are low enough that they aren't worth worrying about or particularly acknowledging.

From what I've read, the possibility is higher than some other random virus popping up at this moment in time. That's all I'm saying. That could be on par with the jet engine example, but if so, then all the people saying we need to learn from Covid and adjust our immunology strategies are worrying about low possibility items also. Anyways, I'll defer to you on this, I'm definitely not an expert, and you were willing…

> From what I've read, the possibility is higher than some other random virus popping up at this moment in time.

I've read literally nothing credible that suggests that immune escape will ever be complete.

There are people who are "concerned" or "worried" about it or will argue that "we can't say"

But they're basically the same people who were arguing that the vacccines that we were producing that produced strong neutralizing titers might not work.

Or that vaccinated people might transmit the virus just as strongly as unvaccinated superspreaders, even though they have reduced symptoms and lower viral loads and we know that the household attack rate of fully asymptomatic disease is lower by nearly an order of magnitude.

The "well, we haven't proven it can't, so we have to assume the coronavirus could assemble and detonate a nuclear warhead in an American city" people have been solidly fucking wrong for the past 12 months.

They had a brief glimpse of correctness at the start of it all when people thought it would go away relatively quietly like SARS-1 + MERS. But those people were probably all the ones looking at the early ~20% case fatality rate and assuming that 20% of the coworkers were going to die.

And it isn't happening, and the messaging is horrible, and there's a cost to worrying about the literal worst case imaginable. It doesn't make you smart to consider literally all the possibilities, it gets in the way.

Re: A coronavirus epidemic hit 20k years ago, new study finds

#145

Post by newacct583 »

eplanit wrote: post #126
newacct583 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the evidence seems to be accumulating, not diminishing It really isn't. We have one good report, and a lot of conspiratorial dot connecting and string tying that is not good evidence and never was. It's enough to keep you guys going, but you're never going to win this at this rate. Consensus sits on the mechanism that produced a thousand other diseases. And FWIW: of course it's desirable to reach a consensus. And i…

You were making a good rebuttal until "To wit: Lab Leak Trutherism is of the same cloth as Big Lie election fraudurism, and climate denial, ...". I think we have nothing left to discuss.

And I genuinely can't tell if it's because you're offended that I likened your opinions about a lab leak to other conspiratorial nonsense, or because you believe that other nonsense and don't want to be forced to defend it.

Doesn't it strike you as perhaps notable that to people in the more mainstream scientific community, your opinions look like those of a flat earther?

Re: A coronavirus epidemic hit 20k years ago, new study finds

#146

Post by asveikau »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #127
justapassenger wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, it's a theory that has so far no basis in science - it's speculations, mostly by people who have no virology background. They maybe even PhD in other biology fields, but having them present their opinions, with no actual data to back it as facts, is as valid as database experts applying their intuition to reason about how to build ML models. Meanwhile, viruses jumping spices is extremely well document behavior…

Virologist here : https://news.cnrs.fr/articles/the-origin-of-sars-cov-2-is-be...

I feel like "unintentionally escaped from a lab that was studying coronaviruses" is a lot different from the conspiracy theory type talk about being maliciously engineered. It's unfortunate that this distinction seems to get lost a lot.

Re: A coronavirus epidemic hit 20k years ago, new study finds

#147

Post by kazinator »

> What is going on right now might be going on for generations and generations.

Because, why? The vaccines hand sanitizer, soap, masks and social distancing didn't work 20K years ago, so why would they now?

Can someone please write something this topic without the fear mongering?

> But whatever happened in East Asia seemed to have been limited to that region.

Because the WHO recognized the problem sooner, and countries shut down international air travel sooner than we did this time around.

Re: A coronavirus epidemic hit 20k years ago, new study finds

#148

Post by nomel »

f6v wrote: post #63
subsubzero wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think whats going on here are people are fatigued with covid related news and in the news in general. News publications are terrified and putting out these scaremongering stories to get people hooked again. Just like the 1917/1918 swine flu didn't last for "generations"(meaning the potency of the virus was extremely deadly) this covid virus will do the same. It will def. be around but not in the same potency as whe…

The last thing we should do is to be laid back about this or next viruses. If we don’t use the momentum to reduce vaccine rollout times among other things - we failed.

> If we don’t use the momentum to reduce vaccine rollout times among other things - we failed.

I don't think we can use the luck we had with this vaccine to justify risky releases in the future.

Re: A coronavirus epidemic hit 20k years ago, new study finds

#149

Post by tablespoon »

cyberlurker wrote: post #119
tablespoon wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They absolutely did but how frequently? The first villages in China are attested 7500 BCE, that's 10 kyr later, if the dating is correct. There were obviously viruses before urbanization (especially given there are viruses that spread in wild animal populations), they probably just spread more slowly. At the minimum, there was probably regular deliberate contact/mixing between adjacent groups to avoid too much inbr…

Nitpicking here, but there probably wasn’t anything we would define as “marriage”. That Wikipedia article says “copulate” instead. Now I want to go down the wiki rabbit hole about the history of human marriage. Also, I’d imagine there were at least far fewer viruses before urbanization. My understanding is early civilization was really good for diseases.

> Nitpicking here, but there probably wasn’t anything we would define as “marriage”. That Wikipedia article says “copulate” instead.

That specific passage was talking about chimpanzees.

Re: A coronavirus epidemic hit 20k years ago, new study finds

#150

Post by manwe150 »

lamontcg wrote: post #144
LocalPCGuy wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I've read, the possibility is higher than some other random virus popping up at this moment in time. That's all I'm saying. That could be on par with the jet engine example, but if so, then all the people saying we need to learn from Covid and adjust our immunology strategies are worrying about low possibility items also. Anyways, I'll defer to you on this, I'm definitely not an expert, and you were willing…

> From what I've read, the possibility is higher than some other random virus popping up at this moment in time. I've read literally nothing credible that suggests that immune escape will ever be complete. There are people who are "concerned" or "worried" about it or will argue that "we can't say" But they're basically the same people who were arguing that the vacccines that we were producing that produced strong neu…

Someone get this guy a snickers bar.
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