211–220 of 309 posts
I wonder if we will find out, as time goes on and the studies are finished, that parents of school-age children were significantly less likely to come down with severe COVID.
adults average 2-4 colds per year; kids even more so (6-8) Think about all the natural immunity we squandered by locking everyone down.....not only did we miss out on herd immunity, but now it seems that even the common cold would've acted as a defense system experts are to be doubted. always. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_cold
especially when it comes to children. It has already been established that the too sanitized modern existence leads to increase of allergies/autoimmunes/etc. Now the lockdowns and masks (which judging by the numbers haven't so far helped much with Covid) denied to children the early immune system "cross-pollination" of kinder-gardens/schools/etc. , thus one can expect even more immune system related issues down the road.
>experts are to be doubted. always
different experts were saying different things (like those epidemiologists saying that blocking people from beach is meaningless to say the least - i mean it is obvious even for non-experts, yet politicians still did it in order to "Do Something"). The key here is the choice of an expert to listen to, the choice made by the politicians and the populace scared by them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Reproducible, testable science demonstrates that in the primordial oceans, self-replicating molecules which were slightly better at self-replicating produced globules of matter capable of inheritance." Hang on. Are you implying that science created artifical life from just elements? Because that would be news to me.
We don't understand how abiogenesis happened exactly but we do know that electricity from lightning is liable to be able to produce amino acids from simpler chemicals and we have theories as to how the early earth would have been amenable to such formation in a way the current earth is not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment Given the history of shamanistic figures explaining the natural wor…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a concept in domestication that it's not always clear in a symbiotic relationship as to which party is in 'control' of the relationship, especially when one party gets a huge boost in reproductive rates from the other. Did humans domesticate dogs, or did dogs domesticate humans? Viruses are specialized. They won't attack aliens. Bacteria might. It's the fungi in many respects that are the masters of this plan…
Viruses will attack anything they can successfully reproduce in, they have absolutely no preferences. They are binary, they survive and thrive or they don't. That's why some viruses can sucessfully jump species, and some can't, some viruses are able to survive in multiple hosts through dumb luck. Yes, they all need specific types of conditions in their hosts to survive, but they don't care if it's a big, a dog, a hum…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I didn't mention it because it's not addressed by this article, which is specifically about competitive inhibition. That said, if you're going to claim that all of these things we have done have eliminated the flu, you should take at least a few moments to reflect on the fact that they have done ~nothing to rhinovirus.
> That said, if you're going to claim that all of these things we have done have eliminated the flu, you should take at least a few moments to reflect on the fact that they have done ~nothing to rhinovirus. Why do you keep saying these measures have done nothing to rhinovirus? The link you've shared does not support that. It shows relative percentages - and you're confusing that for absolute infection counts. Unless…
Because they haven't.
> The link you've shared does not support that. It shows relative percentages - and you're confusing that for absolute infection counts.
I am not confusing it. It shows you the percentage of samples they test that come up positive for rhinovirus (and other things. They test for all of the things listed, in parallel.)
Influenza A & B, RSV, and some other viruses have been virtually eliminated across their sampled population. The rate has dropped to zero. Rhinovirus has not -- the rate of detection is unchanged.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because it's beyond the realm of space and time. We can't go back before t=0 when the universe was created.
Life is believed to have emerged at ~t=9 billion why couldn't we formulate a theory of how it emerged?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
He means to say that science does not have the tools to reproduce the beginning of the Universe. If it's not reproducible it's not Science. Confident assertions non-withstanding, the Human mind is a slave to nature, in that can never hope to uncover it's deepest secrets and thus, it's true.....nature?
By that definition science is entirely unreal because we can't reproduce an apple pie from scratch without first creating the universe. We explore geology including theories about the formation of the earth without making new planets. What is supposed to be reproducible is the act of collecting and processing data to ensure that your conclusion isn't based on error, falsehood, or happenstance. What he is promoting is…
tl;dr At some depth, you ask questions beyond the scientific method itself.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The data I linked to covers the winter -- the same "hygiene measures" were in place in the winter, and clearly affecting both viruses differently. If you're saying that rhinoviruses are more contagious than the flu because they're less seasonal...there's really no evidence to support that. They're more-or-less the same [1]. It's possible that influenza is more sensitive to heat, light, etc. My point is, the story isn…
This covers the bases. There isn't a huge mystery here, although there are some unknowns that need more research. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03519-3 R0 rates are just an indicative estimates. They don't account for different modes or vectors of transmission. So it's not a given that mask wearing, social distancing, temperature, UV, humidity, and hand washing would necessarily all have identical effect…
There's a pretty decent coverage of the level of uncertainty involved, but the reporter still can't resist the urge of "crafting a narrative" that bypasses the uncertainty. For example:
> In May...when some of the strictest lockdowns were in place, health workers noted an abrupt and early halt to the 2019–20 flu season in the Northern Hemisphere. That might partly have been an artefact caused by fewer people coming to a clinic for testing, experts say, but it was also attributable to the effectiveness of policies such as social distancing.
Pretty definitive statement, there. But not even two paragraphs later:
> “Some South American countries haven’t done such a good job controlling COVID, but even there flu is low,” says virologist Richard Webby at St Jude’s hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. “I don’t think we can put it all down to mask wearing and social distancing.” He suspects that the dearth of international travel played a part.
So...yeah. We don't know the answer. The article makes it sound like we do. The headline and photo captions really makes it sound like we know.
Reporters are constantly putting their thumb on the scale by crafting editorially convenient narratives. Richard Webby's opinion doesn't properly emphasize the impact of of social distancing? Bury it under a vaguely definitive-sounding lede, and quote some other "expert" who does agree.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Life is believed to have emerged at ~t=9 billion why couldn't we formulate a theory of how it emerged?
Life connects back to time zero because everything prior was an important boundary condition, e.g. heavy metals made through exploding stars supporting elemental composition of life, etc.
You can say we can't possibly understand how the heart works because we do not understand the entire evolutionary tree leading up to the human race and how the circulatory system evolved over billions of years and ergo heart transplants are impossible. This is trivially false and its false for the same reason parent posters assertion is false. Everything is how it is because of initial conditions ergo everything connects back to time zero but we can still use the abstract understanding we do have to make models and predictions.
Maybe this could be an explanation for the most unexpected dip in COVID-19 infection around January. Does data for rhinovirus infections get collected to such an extent that it would be possible to compare curves?
I thought the January dip was from the end of holiday travel.