Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

BioNTech-InstaDeep Early Warning System to Detect High-Risk SARS-CoV-2 Variants

investors.biontech.de

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–73 of 73 posts

Re: BioNTech-InstaDeep Early Warning System to Detect High-Risk SARS-CoV-2 Variants

#71

Post by DangitBobby »

dfsegoat wrote: post #50
jdavis703 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the kind of education that needs to be done in high school during health and biology classes. We can’t hope the general public will become epidemiologically literate on 240 character tweets and 30-second television quotes. Heck, my old high school biology teacher remains a source of coronavirus FUD, so maybe that’s not even enough.

I think most high school (USA) biology courses probably touch on the concept of viruses? This level of detail was certainly taught in high school Advanced Placement (AP) Biology when I took it many years ago.

We didn't learn much about bacteria and viruses, we learned much more about cells with human DNA. We definitely didn't touch on rapid evolution of microscopic life, even in courses where we did spend a little bit of time talking about viruses.

Re: BioNTech-InstaDeep Early Warning System to Detect High-Risk SARS-CoV-2 Variants

#72

Post by brianmcc »

jdavis703 wrote: post #47
spuz wrote: post #18

> More than 10,000 novel variant sequences are currently discovered every week and human experts simply cannot cope with complex data at this scale This is interesting. I think the Greek alphabet naming system would lead some people to believe the virus only mutates once every few months. Of course, the reality is that every infected individual will produce hundreds of mutations within their body. I think there's a g…

This is the kind of education that needs to be done in high school during health and biology classes. We can’t hope the general public will become epidemiologically literate on 240 character tweets and 30-second television quotes. Heck, my old high school biology teacher remains a source of coronavirus FUD, so maybe that’s not even enough.

I don't disagree with you, but I think the more root cause thing is - people should be more humble in listening to the advice and guidance of epidemiologists, and indeed other experts and specialists.

We as a society tacitly "outsource" the task of becoming an expert to a bunch of mostly smart and well-meaning folks, in all sorts of areas, because we cannot all know "everything" - and for some reason on vaccines and epidemiology great swathes of the population, including senior leaders politically, now choose to ignore their clear guidance on how best to act.

Post reply on HN