131–140 of 291 posts
Has there ever been any genomic sequencing done to pinpoint what made SARS and especially MERS so much more deadly than SARS-CoV-2?
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What do you find objectionable about Taiwan's Covid response, taking into account its success, not to mention the cost (in a general sense) of quarantining whole countries (which means restricting the freedom of millions of health citizens), and then not being successful, unlike Taiwan? In 2020, my mother (and millions of other citizens) spent more time at home quarantined than she would have spent in prison, had she…
Taiwan (and some other countries) used phone surveillance location-tracking to enforce quarantines: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-taiwan... That is like using ankle bracelets for tracking people under quarantine, just worse.
What happens if the world gets into a situation where the virus mutates rapidly and we find the vaccines becoming less effective? We assume the drug companies will be able to adapt the vaccine quickly to the new variants. If this happens then it creates a few problems.. One problem is having to continuously distribute a new vaccine to people indefinitely. Another problem is only certain countries are capable of manuf…
The vaccine creates broad protection against the virus’s spike protein structure. If the virus mutated enough to evade this protection, it would have to develop a structure so radically different that it would likely no longer be able to attach to the ACE2 receptor. What is going on right now is mass anxiety. The vaccine is out, so humanity is imagining how things could still go wrong. The easiest thing to imagine is…
What happens if the world gets into a situation where the virus mutates rapidly and we find the vaccines becoming less effective? We assume the drug companies will be able to adapt the vaccine quickly to the new variants. If this happens then it creates a few problems.. One problem is having to continuously distribute a new vaccine to people indefinitely. Another problem is only certain countries are capable of manuf…
The vaccine creates broad protection against the virus’s spike protein structure. If the virus mutated enough to evade this protection, it would have to develop a structure so radically different that it would likely no longer be able to attach to the ACE2 receptor. What is going on right now is mass anxiety. The vaccine is out, so humanity is imagining how things could still go wrong. The easiest thing to imagine is…
Sure, spike ain't hemagglutinin and corona ain't no influenza, but let's not pretend there's no precedent at all for proteins mutating to the point that vaccines become ineffective.
How is this news at all? The virus has been mutating and throwing off different strains all along. There are entire websites devoted to tracking these, e.g., [1] Perhaps this is just the normal operation of American media to exaggerate the negative side of the situation? [2] [1] https://nextstrain.org/sars-cov-2/ [2] PDF link: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w28110/w281...
It's news if there's anything notable about the strain. More deadly, faster spreading, potentialy resistant to the vaccines. So far UK and South Africa have two strains that are faster spreading (and hopefully that's the only difference). If there's nothing special about the one from Japan, I bet that this is just getting attention because the other two are in the news. Either news orgs jumping on a bandwagon or HN r…
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>> What is going on right now is mass anxiety. The vaccine is out, so humanity is imagining how things could still go wrong. Not enough anxiety, in my opinion. Tons and tons of people are still behaving as if everything is normal, or that they are somehow special.
So you think we need more irrational anxiety to control behavior? Mental health is just as important as physical health.
Disordered anxiety is reacting when there is no threat.
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There must be some very special political reason for keeping borders with UK open, so even Fauci seem to approve it. I wonder what is it?
Makes it harder for doctors to get supplies if all the borders are closed. The UK has an upcoming COVID vaccine (the Astra-Zeneca/Oxford one) that may prove useful in the near future. Cut off the UK from the rest of the world and the rest of the world can't benefit from it. Also, it's almost certain that the UK strain is in the US already, and the US is shit at dealing with pandemics once they're on our soil. Border…
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What could we be doing differently beyond what we already should be doing? Are you referring to things like border closing?
Copy Taiwan. No country has been dealing better with Covid than Taiwan. No lockdown, and > 200 days without new Covid case [1]. Taipei had daily direct flights from Wuhan, and the Diamond Princess mooring near Taipei. They told the world early on [2] how they did it. Summary: Border closure, contract tracing, testing and controlled quarantine for those testing positive . It's worth reading [2] to realise how swiftly,…
- It is an island
- It has an effective, well centralized surveillance network
- It has (presumably) an obedient population, or at least, one that don't think personal freedom includes the right to spread the disease
- They were well prepared thanks to the their experience with SARS
- A good enough welfare system to allow people to quarantine without starving or getting ruined
- A good enough police force to make sure they stay quarantined
- Enough masks and hand sanitizer, with domestic production
This is pretty much the opposite of the US. Which is highly connected, with a loosely connected government that has little control over the private sector that runs the country and a highly individualistic population.
Also, maybe there are some populations that just do better for a mix of reasons: climate, race (genetics), culture, average age, health and population density,...
Final note: closing borders is only effective if you contained the epidemic and others didn't.
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> The problem is that action now is way more valuable than action in 1-2 months [...] If there is a substantially more transmissive variant around, that will make it much harder to buy that time. But which action? I can see two class of possible cause that do not entirely overlap in response: A singular cause such as a strain; or fluctuations as the emergent behavior of a complex dynamic system. If incorrectly attrib…
Don’t you think this reflects a bias in the opposite direction? Systems are dynamic and complex, but that doesn’t make them unknowable . If complex systems were impossible to model science wouldn’t be a thing. Sure, the “new variant” narrative is an easy one to pick up because it’s superficially understandable; but what other complex interactions are resulting in a new strain becoming dominant over an existing one? D…
Not quite. It can makes them unpredictable, not unknowable... more specifically it can make them computationally irreducible which means we cannot find a simplified description of their behavior without having to compute every step, even when we understand the underlying rules that govern them. In fact we often cannot model them very well, an easy every day example is the weather, which we desperately want to know, but our methods are a significant compromise - that may seem like an unfair analogy but it really isn't, the atoms of society may be fewer but they have far more dimensions and more complex individual interactions.
It doesn't always apply, even within the same medium, it depends on the context e.g predicting weather requires some kind of simulation of fluid and pressure, yet in a different, more narrow context it's not necessary to attempt simulating the underlying mechanisms in any way or form, instead the overall behavior can be simplified to a set of descriptive equations (Bernoulli's).
It's funny because this does touch on a core issue for science - we still mostly hold this traditional view of it based on a history of going after the more easily obtainable nuggets of behavior with nice manageable reducible descriptions, but we have been unwittingly selective.
> what other complex interactions are resulting in a new strain becoming dominant over an existing one?
It does not need to result in a new _variant_, this right here is the misunderstanding. These two things can happen and not be related.
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What do you find objectionable about Taiwan's Covid response, taking into account its success, not to mention the cost (in a general sense) of quarantining whole countries (which means restricting the freedom of millions of health citizens), and then not being successful, unlike Taiwan? In 2020, my mother (and millions of other citizens) spent more time at home quarantined than she would have spent in prison, had she…
Taiwan (and some other countries) used phone surveillance location-tracking to enforce quarantines: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-taiwan... That is like using ankle bracelets for tracking people under quarantine, just worse.
To the extent mandatory quarantines are justifiable, this method of enforcement seems reasonable and minimally invasive given the purpose.
I don't see why it's worse than ankle bracelets.