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

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

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 177 posts

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

#81

Post by noduerme »

lamontcg wrote: post #78
binarymax wrote: post #29

“It should make us worry,” said David Enard, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona who led the study, which was published on Thursday in the journal Current Biology. “What is going on right now might be going on for generations and generations.” Should it though? Seems like we've survived this many times as a species, and now have the technology to combat it! I'm more optimistic with this information…

> Should it though? Fuck no. I'm really tired of these stories. (this is all directed at the author that put that "it should make us worry" quote in the NYT piece, not at any HN poster, but I really need to vent) The 1918 pandemic turned into seasonal influenza one we had enough herd immunity, enough people had T-cells that recognized H1N1 and the virus was forced into making sacrificial choices in order to spread. T…

"If you look at what happened in 2019 the H1 envelope protein..." was that date a typo?

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

#82

Post by justapassenger »

autokad wrote: post #30
avs733 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

calling out stupidity is not censorship. Removing stupidity from a conversation on a private website is not censorship. discussing 'agenda' is not a neutral comment or a meaningful contribution to discourse on this topic, it is stupidity.

the idea that the universe started from an arbitrarily small size and expanded was once considered stupidity. the idea that Iraq might not have WMD was once considered stupidity (even by those on the left). "BUT THE UN INSPECTORS SAID SO!" The idea that we might want to wear masks to protect ourselves in crowded public places was considered stupidity. "THE WHO SAID MASKS DONT WORK! FOUCI SAID!" calling something stup…

> the idea that the universe started from an arbitrarily small size and expanded was once considered stupidity.

So was an idea that it was created by some supernatural being in 7 days. If you present theory without hard data - it's very rightly to call it stupidity.

Scientific process isn't free pass to throw random theories, without data backing them.

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

#83

Post by HarryHirsch »

f6v wrote: post #68
tinus_hn wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how did they ever survive, without masks, lockdowns and vaccines?

We also survived the Black Plague.

And people locked down and quarantined themselves. (Also Marseilles where a merchant wanted to unload a cargo of wool early, and that's how plague came to town.)

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

#84

Post by xmly »

hulitu wrote: post #4
nradov wrote: post #3

Another coronavirus epidemic probably hit 132 years ago. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7252012/

And another 10000 years ago. They found some human and bat remains in a cave.

And they were best friends by then?

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

#85

Post by lamontcg »

noduerme wrote: post #81
lamontcg wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Should it though? Fuck no. I'm really tired of these stories. (this is all directed at the author that put that "it should make us worry" quote in the NYT piece, not at any HN poster, but I really need to vent) The 1918 pandemic turned into seasonal influenza one we had enough herd immunity, enough people had T-cells that recognized H1N1 and the virus was forced into making sacrificial choices in order to spread. T…

"If you look at what happened in 2019 the H1 envelope protein..." was that date a typo?

Yeah I used 2019 the paragraph before and had a mental bit flipping mistake.

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

#86

Post by LocalPCGuy »

wahern wrote: post #76
whimsicalism wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am generally surprised by the inability of journalists to grok research papers, but I think the age thing goes the other direction than what you suggest. General scientific/numeric literacy among people who don't work in science seems higher in the younger generation than the older to me.

Younger people will remember their college education better, which will also happen to be more up-to-date with contemporary perspectives and techniques. But that's knowledge, not a skill. Good journalists rely on experts, and better journalists rely on multiple experts (for a topic, but also over time) to derive a sense of what's unknown and uncertain in a field. On social media nothing is ever unknown because there'…

I don't think it's only just an age thing, although that probably is a large part of it. I also think media outlets have gotten to what seems like a more partisan stance as a reaction to the other networks pulling farther and farther away from truth and hard science. And I'm not saying they haven't changed, that it's only the far right fringes pulling farther away, but that the changes are reactionary and pull left-ward because of that action.

Add in that youth tend to skew left and you get a bit of a perfect storm. I want to believe that the ecosystem is ripe for some sort of centrist, fact-based news reporting, but not sure there is a big enough audience, unfortunately.

And partly that is because the mainstream media outlets actually do a decent job of conveying the facts. It's just that it's 5min of every hour while the other 35 is talking heads "interpreting it for the layman". So if you're able to mentally sift through the bias and are willing to dig deeper yourself into other sources, you do get the basic information you need to become relatively fully educated. And I don't think that's the case these days with some of the more extreme networks.

edit to add: I fully support your main point of encouraging people to read papers for themselves!

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

#87

Post by xaduha »

safarii wrote: post #79
xaduha wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Load the page fully 2. Press reload button 3. Press Esc a few times before overlay shows up 4. ... 5. Profit

4. It doesn't work because much of the article is missing. It's not just an overlay, it's behind a paywall. 5. Google what "paywalled" means 6. ... 7. Profit

Works just fine, I can read it all and post a screenshot as proof, you gotta use it properly. But it might depend on location and IP.

Did you register just to leave this remark? How odd.

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

#88

Post by ArkanExplorer »

For COVID to have an impact on the gene pool, it would have to be killing people within reproductive age.

As of February 2021, only 11,000 people in the USA under 45 died of COVID - and most would have been very sick with existing health conditions and unable to reproduce anyway.

There are 193,000,000 people in the USA in this age range, so the death risk from COVID is 0.006%

COVID is of no threat to young and healthy people so there will be no impact visible genetically.

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

#89

Post by throwaway4pooxi »

f6v wrote: post #72
hatware wrote: post #59

I'd love to never hear about another coronavirus again. We went too far prescribing a certain agenda in the last year, and it's time to reflect on that. In my opinion studies and articles like this are doing more to fuel the fear porn than they are at teaching anything substantial.

> I'd love to never hear about another coronavirus again. We should definitely hear about coronavirus again and again until everyone learns that millions of people might die unless we completely master immunology. Public awareness, safety measures, and vaccine development should get as much attention as possible until we have a pipeline that allows to develop and distribute vaccines in a matter of months. We never kn…

Or ya know, stop creating them in labs.

I'm down for working on some viruses, but it seems down right irresponsible to put a corona spike on a virus that would otherwise be hard to transmit.

That's allegedly what happened, lets keep talking about it until we find out incase we're still doing it.

I'd like to know whether we need to increase health measures, or clamp down on making these altered viruses that may have never occurred in nature.

I'm more scared of bioweapons than nukes. The spread is much further.

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

#90

Post by UncleOxidant »

breck wrote: post #38
nonameiguess wrote: post #10

People keep posting archive links to "non-paywalled" copies, but the study itself has freely available full-text not behind a paywall. No need to read the NY Times at all. Just go straight to the source: https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(21)...

Here is the source code, AFAICT: https://github.com/DavidPierreEnard/Gene_Set_Enrichment_Pipe... I've been involved in GWAS before, so have an inkling of what's going on. I love the creativity in this paper. The stuff is super fascinating, but the pipelines are still very primitive—so I encourage programmers to get involved in bioinformatics if you like this stuff! In the future I expect we see work like this accompa…

It's written in Perl.
Post reply on HN