I think the Telegraph article ( https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-diseas... ) that this blog post is based on is a better read. It makes clear that the idea that the outbreak will become "out of control" is from an anonymous source, not the leaked documents.
The outbreak in Uganda is troubling, but a forecast that goes out 6+ months is silly. No professional infectious disease modeler will forecast out more than a few weeks because the trajectory of the outbreak changes in response to interventions and behaviors.
I guess as it transformed from epidemic to pandemic to endemic, it became increasingly predictable. The duration and peaks of the last waves could even be predicted by months indeed, as measures and behaviors remained practically unchanged. Not one of these predictions encompassed six months, though.
I stand corrected if that was the case. I followed WHO and Mexican predictions, and more speculative ones if the authors were honest about the speculation.
Why not? It's the most efficient way I could think of, to display the sheer quantity, timeline, and content of the "Covid predictions" that we were shown in the UK. They are easily clickable, to show the original context (typically a news story or press release). You'll also note that practically all of them extend for at least 6 months.
Also, you "asked for some". There they are - there's a lot of them.
Reminding ourselves that you asked to be "pointed to some (graphs predicting more than 6 months)":
It is not clear when the image in first result was published, but given that it includes error bars for dates from March 2020 onwards, I would assume this is the result of modelling performed earlier than March 2020. It covers until October 2020.
How've I not noticed this? I've instead seen a whole lot of graphs with no prediction whatsoever and lots and lots of people in positions of authority who seem totally unable to extrapolate from those in their heads, resulting in idiotic back-and-forth on various restrictions for the first 18 or so months of the pandemic.
Shit like schools releasing plans ahead of the school year that they then immediately ignore because otherwise they'd have to close in the first two weeks of school, when it was fucking obvious the numbers would be like that around that time, just from looking at the graph and knowing more-or-less how disease spreads. Or "Ok stop masking and open up restaurants wait oh shit it's going up again I thought the tiny dip we saw would continue forever, for no good reason". Just baffling levels of data-illiteracy.
But not a lot of long-term prediction graphs. Who was publishing those?
[EDIT] Wait, I did see total-deaths-at-time-X predictions with/without measures, and with/without vaccination at high rates. That's true.
[EDIT EDIT] Is there a tone issue or is my having seen vanishingly few graphs for all of COVID that tried to predict trends more than a week or two out an outlier experience, and those were in fact extremely common in, perhaps, media I didn't look at? Truly, the main problem I saw locally was an astonishing near-complete failure to consider trends and likely projections, over and over again and often by the same people, who seemed weirdly incapable of learning a very clear lesson, rather than too many projections looking too far out.
I didn't take in much news, and now avoid it more than ever, but what little I did was wall-to-wall with projections complete with big scary peaks and steep rises in numbers. I dread to think of the state of mind of someone who watched more like the average number of TV hours (for me it is zero), and took in all of this with an uncritical mind.
My guess is a tone issue. It’s hard to even tell that you’re saying you haven’t seen long term graphs - the first sentence comes across as sarcastic when followed by long sentences complaining about other problems.
> I've instead seen a whole lot of graphs with no prediction whatsoever
made it pretty clear, but maybe not. And the rest was expressing that the actual on-the-ground problem I saw, and the single biggest problem with my state & local-level response to the whole thing, was a complete lack of attention to future trends, not too much. But perhaps that doesn't come across very well. Mea Culpa.
Then it's a scenario model, which asks what-if questions usually for planning purposes (e.g., what's the most hospital beds we might need?). Scenario models can have longer time horizons than forecasts, but 6 months is still quite long.
It's the same thing. Just the latter implies you're identifying an assumption or two as variable and modeling outcomes of some of them changing. They're all forecasts. To argue otherwise is semantic pedantry.
So you're in charge of making decisions. Hypothetically. Your epidemiologists believe that if no action is taken, 10 people will die in the next two weeks, 100 people will die in the next 4 weeks, and 1,000,000 will die in the next 6 months.
Which forecasts would you prefer they keep to themselves?
Starting an implication with “if no action is taken after 100,000 deaths” is the same as “if false” — you can put anything in the “then” and have the statement be logically sound - that doesn’t mean it’s in any way useful.
End of the day that kind of talk just damages trust in the scientific process, which has to be at an all time low with regard to epidemiology, as a result of the stream of certified lies that have been presented as public policy over the past few years. (“Masks don’t work” being the first of many)
> Starting an implication with “if no action is taken after 100,000 deaths” is the same as “if false” — you can put anything in the “then” and have the statement be logically sound - that doesn’t mean it’s in any way useful.
1) Not when YOU are the person who determines if action should be taken!
2) You seem to be implying that action can be taken at 100,000 which will be effective at preventing the spread to 1,000,000 which may be true or may be false, but it's going to be far easier to stop it at 10 regardless.
> “if no action is taken after 100,000 deaths” is the same as “if false”
Is useful as the higher bound and for judging the results of actions.
But still... I think you're too sure about people in charge following reasonable behaviours. We don't even have to go as far as the great famine. There's lots of things going wrong now where people responsible explicitly do not address the issue.
Update, this comment refers to the original blog post submission, which pulled out forecasted numbers with no context. The Telegraph article is better.
That doesn't make sense. I'm no epidemiologist, but have friends who work in disease modeling, and used to follow some virology blogs/podcasts. They usually make lots of models, each with different assumptions, specifically to guess what the intervention of different public health measures would do.
That's not quite the right way of phrasing that question. Models are made with and without interventions taken into account, and the lockdowns were a reaction to models showing reduced deaths and hospital strain if lockdown measures were in place. I'm not sure what that guy is talking about.
But if you're actually interested, you should go and read the papers used for modeling yourself, since the odds of finding a rando on hacker news who is an actual epidemiologists is zilch. The ones who were public communicators that I followed over COVID were the podcast "This Week in Virology" which is just about the best resource you're going to find, and the blog "your local epidemiologist", who is also fantastic
The fear with COVID was mutation of the disease into something more deadly and more contagious. What looks like fearmongering now was cautious behavior around mutation at the time. Conversely, Ebola isn't likely to mutate now, so we don't need that same level of caution.
You travel back to 2016 and tell people we'll have a pandemic in the US, 1 million people will die, and then large groups of people will attempt to shrug that off as "nothing to get concerned about", people would find that incomprehensible.
If I were to post a comment on HN in 2016 suggesting that people would shrug off 1 million deaths due to a pandemic because it doesn't align with their worldview I would have been downvoted into oblivious for holding such a laughably ridiculous and cynical opinion.
Same could be said of the countless other climate related impacts that people in the very near distant past would consider horrific and impossible.
The power of the "this is fine" culture to not see reality is terrifying.
quite a lot of people do and have seen obesity as an urgent issue needing addressing. People at many levels of government, in both political parties, and for many years....
They didn't need much more than noting Rt and experience of Wuhan, if you're thinking "IMHE!", sort of a red herring: yeah, they predicted X million of deaths, but it wasn't anymore complicated than take Rt, use in formula, and yeah we should probably see if we can eradicate this thing locally, early. Was never a global decision.
I mean it could evolve to be airborne in the wild or in a research lab doing intentional gain of function research (a practice for which funding was temporarily halted by Obama) and hybridization much like has been done at BSL-4 facilities worldwide unchecked including by EcoHealth alliance with bat coronaviruses via US funding at the WIV prior to the Covid outbreak in Wuhan.
But it's probably fine and we probably shouldn't worry about the possibility of a global pandemic or of mutation of Ebola into a more transmissible form.
I'll go: because while the parent comment is (loosely, tangentially) based in fact, it's an enormous leap to go from the kind of differences we're talking about with SARS-CoV2 engineering, and the differences of type required to aerosolize a filiovirus.
Is it "possible"? Yes, theoretically. But it's not at all trivial, and far down my worry list. It's bit like worrying that sharks are going to evolve wings and start flying around eating people.
> The lab leak theory is pretty mainstream these days.
Mainstream, and conceivably true, but lacking in evidence. Personally I find it rather implausible due to a lack of motivation for why the lab in question would be doing secret work on coronaviruses.
> fucking insane
I don't think this is a helpful way to have this debate. I don't know enough to have a strong opinion on this, but a majority of virologists seem to think it's necessary, so I wouldn't automatically label them as lunatics.
> a plausible way we would have a true captain trips style pandemic
Other plausible ways are a mutation from an existing pathogen or another zoonotic spillover event, which gain of function research could potentially predict or help mitigate.
The new report by pro publica and vanity fair is about as close to evidence as we are likely to get. The big issue here is that we didn’t get to hear real investigation of it until 2 years after the fact aside from whistleblowers with varying level of credibility.
China was never going to let a legitimate investigation happen, no matter what. They have nothing to gain by letting people know exactly what happened (because they think they can manage things on their own) and everything to lose by letting someone prove that wet markets are horrific or that bio labs in china have terrible safety.
> why the lab in question would be doing secret work on coronaviruses
what was secret about it? the lab in Wuhan was literally doing research in 2015 on how bat coronaviruses could adapt to spread in humans vs ACE2 receptors and developed their own strain:
https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985
from the linked study:
"Using the SARS-CoV reverse genetics system, we generated and characterized a chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone. The results indicate that group 2b viruses encoding the SHC014 spike in a wild-type backbone can efficiently use multiple orthologs of the SARS receptor human angiotensin converting enzyme II (ACE2), replicate efficiently in primary human airway cells and achieve in vitro titers equivalent to epidemic strains of SARS-CoV. Additionally, in vivo experiments demonstrate replication of the chimeric virus in mouse lung with notable pathogenesis.... On the basis of these findings, we synthetically re-derived an infectious full-length SHC014 recombinant virus and demonstrate robust viral replication both in vitro and in vivo. Our work suggests a potential risk of SARS-CoV re-emergence from viruses currently circulating in bat populations."
Thanks, that's exactly what I mean. They were publishing their work and making public what viruses they were working on with collaborators and public databases etc. There doesn't seem to be a plausible explanation for why they'd be working on a related but entirely new virus and keeping it secret.
I suppose they could have just received some samples and then that triggered an immediate outbreak before anyone heard of it, but having an instant spillover event from a handful bat samples with workers using biosecurity measures doesn't seem to me especially likely compared to the many more interactions humans have with animals outside lab settings. (For example, the tens of thousands of live animals kept caged in extreme proximity with each other and unprotected humans in the huge Wuhan wet market).
I'm totally trying to be good faith here, but are you aware of the recent admissions by NIH that EcoHealth (the funders of the research at WIV) basically did exactly this?
"On Wednesday, the NIH sent a letter to members of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce that acknowledged two facts. One was that EcoHealth Alliance, a New York City–based nonprofit that partners with far-flung laboratories to research and prevent the outbreak of emerging diseases, did indeed enhance a bat coronavirus to become potentially more infectious to humans, which the NIH letter described as an “unexpected result” of the research it funded that was carried out in partnership with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The second was that EcoHealth Alliance violated the terms of its grant conditions stipulating that it had to report if its research increased the viral growth of a pathogen by tenfold."
Further in the article:
"As scientists remain in a stalemate over the pandemic’s origins, another disclosure last month made clear that EcoHealth Alliance, in partnership with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, was aiming to do the kind of research that could accidentally have led to the pandemic. On September 20, a group of internet sleuths calling themselves DRASTIC (short for Decentralized Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating COVID-19) released a leaked $14 million grant proposal that EcoHealth Alliance had submitted in 2018 to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
It proposed partnering with the Wuhan Institute of Virology and constructing SARS-related bat coronaviruses into which they would insert “human-specific cleavage sites” as a way to “evaluate growth potential” of the pathogens. Perhaps not surprisingly, DARPA rejected the proposal, assessing that it failed to fully address the risks of gain-of-function research."
Thank you for saying this. We know xenophobic racist right wingers are saying that COVID came from China. But WHO-China investigation definitely proved that COVID came outside of China. Even western virologists have been supporting Chinese scientists. [1]
It's really not mainstream amongst virologists.. as has been demonstrated by repeatedly debunking the latest gish gallop papers, there's literally zero evidence for lab manipulation of the sars cov2 virus. It's vaguely plausible that the virus could have been captured in the wild and then leaked, but even that seems extremely unlikely given the two separate market lineages and timeline of the earliest cases.
Stricter control of GoF makes a lot of sense but the reason everyone was studying coronavirus pandemics in the first place is because we'd had several near misses and everyone in the virology community knew it was only a matter of time before the right circumstances allowed a spillover to do exactly what Covid19 did.
I think there is a lot more controversy than you’re implying, even among serious scientists, but an HN comment thread is probably not the right place to litigate a complex issue that is also a partisan political football.
I’ll leave it at this: I would encourage everyone to do their own research on this and try to look past the elephant in the room of the politics angle.
I've got a busy day so don't want to get into it again -- but I cannot express how incapable the average (even educated!) person is to "do their own research" on something as complex and nuanced as molecular engineering and the probabilities of covid genetic engineering.
Even some expert 'pre-reviewers' that received the advance of the most recent bombshell paper that supposedly proved an unnatural virus with lab origin missed obvious tells that completely invalidated the authors' claims. E.g. this thread; https://twitter.com/BallouxFrancois/status/15870905072887767...
If people do want to make up their own minds on this - I'd encourage you to track down people making falsifiable claims and then changing their priors based on the results of that research instead of people jumping from one conspiracy theory to the next to avoid changing their views.
As one data point, several prominent "lab leakers" on Twitter are now insisting that prior strains are fake and were invented by virologists since those strains disprove recent papers instead of considering that maybe those recent papers were flawed. It's bizarre to watch. (One of the authors of the most recent 'bombshell' LL paper claiming that two related field-collected coronaviruses are fake / manipulated: https://twitter.com/VBruttel/status/1584920770605621248)
No layperson is qualified to understand any advanced technical field these days. Semiconductor fabrication is utterly out of reach for the typical voter, but they still have to form an opinion on the CHIPS act. Most of us aren’t lawyers, but still sometimes need to hire them. This is the dilemma inherent in not having a /u/PhdInEverything.
But the answer isn’t “go away and let the grownups decide”, the answer is to try to learn what constitutes an expert, try to understand what degree of consensus does or does not exist amongst those experts, try to ferret out some obvious biases (e.g. red team / blue team idiocy) and be as informed as possible.
The standard model of particle physics, or Wiles FLT proof, or 1000 other things are every bit as technical as anything in virology, but you’ll notice the mathematicians all agree: the layperson doesn’t have to look very hard to know what the takeaway is there.
It’s medicine’s (including virology’s) job to get its shit together on the public’s behalf, not the other way around.
This kind of condescension infuriates me, I’m working hard to be as polite as possible here.
It sounds like you and the other person agree (edit: regarding the need to trust experts). You've just chosen to trust different sources of information than the other person.
I agree with the other person though, there is a correlation between people I've heard say "do your own research" and people with less reasonable beliefs. (Hi, mom).
I’m aware that “do your own research” is a common phrase among people who want to believe that “9/11 was an inside job” or whatever (also Hi Mom).
I meant it in the more nuanced sense of trying to actually do research. A layperson who wants to be informed has to start somewhere, and when the stakes are as high as with global public health, I think it behooves the person in the street to try to at least read the abstracts of some papers, try to identify experts on both sides of a controversy, and be aware that credentials are no guarantee of reasonability.
Shockley played a big role in the transistor, IIRC got the Nobel, and later spent years advocating for racist eugenicist horseshit: credentials are a good guideline, but they can’t be blindly trusted.
I really wish the medical community just agreed about all this stuff: then my job would be easy, do what they say.
Unfortunately you seem to get one group of MD/PhD people saying those other MD/PhD people are cranks, we’re the “real” scientific consensus. This does not make it easy for the well-intentioned layperson.
You can be as infuriated as you'd like, but I consider HN to be one of the more responsible and educated forums for casual discussion and the level of straight up conspiracy-driven misinformation on everything related to Covid is astonishing. From origins to vaccines to treatments (remember all of the threads extolling HCQ and IVM?), it's as sophisticated as you'd expect from people "doing their own research" in fields they don't understand and apparently aren't equipped to develop an understanding of.
There's no political or financial implications to whether Wiles' proof of FLT is correct or not, and the proof can be checked with certainty by experts in the field -- so of course they can come to a consensus about something extraordinarily technical. Unfortunately with Covid, every question has turned into a political shibboleth so there will forever be FUD promoted by people who should know better. How is the average reader supposed to weigh the probabilities of some esoteric question like what the potential presence or absence of IIS restriction sites means when it's being promoted by people with advanced degrees as evidence of an artificial origin, even though it's nonsense?
So I retreat to my earlier advice for those trying to form an opinion here -- look into the history of claims from the various scientists, and see whether evidence is guiding their claims or if their claims are guiding their evidence.
Neither the GP nor myself said that SARS-COV-2 escaped from the Wuhan lab, let alone that it was the result of GoF research.
I called it a theory, as in, neither conclusively proven nor conclusively disproven. It’s a theory about which there has been significant controversy. I didn’t even say there was significant evidence for it.
Acknowledging the existence of a controversy is not the same thing as promoting a conspiracy theory, and as you yourself point out, basically everyone, from word-renowned virologists down to the man in the street, has skin in the game on this one.
The world’s medical community had a COVID response that was a fucking disaster: inconsistent and constantly changing guidance, conflicts of interest, geopolitical 4th dimensional warfare, rushed and sloppy-looking vaccine approvals.
It’s no wonder the public believes a bunch of crazy shit: the experts dropped the ball. Trying to blame that on the ignorance and gullibility of the layperson and flip the script like that set back the public’s willingness to take vaccines and listen to the authorities by 50-100 years.
Thank you for saying this. We know xenophobic racist right wingers are saying that COVID came from China. But WHO-China investigation definitely proved that COVID came outside of China. Even western virologists have been supporting Chinese scientists. [1]
> I've got a busy day so don't want to get into it again -- but I cannot express how incapable the average (even educated!) person is to "do their own research" on something as complex and nuanced as molecular engineering and the probabilities of covid genetic engineering.
I don't think you can claim to have consensus on this matter since Dr. Li-Meng Yan who worked at the lab and got the CCP scrub when she went public had been speaking out about this since 2020 after having been in hiding and then fleeing China for her claims. Moreover she detailed how people who worked at the lab in Wuhan have been in retrospect beholden to the CCP for not discussing the poor safety record of the lab.
And your position about how it's not worthy of discussion makes it very clear you speak with a sense of bias because ultimately a conclusive epidemiological study will prove impossible since the floods in Wuhan in 2020 took place that coincided with the CCP's abject refusal to have outside investigators come in and search for the possible origin of the COVID, and even accused the US of creating the virus and spreading it--much how Russia has made to justify it's illegal invasion into Ukraine to de-nazify it and now de-satanize it after claims of US COVID biolabs in Ukraine.
For what's it worth, I have a BSc in cellular and molecular biology, and I was also involved in the plight of the HK people since the Umbrella Revolution, and had people been actually abreast of that situation they would have known that something was going incredibly wrong by November 2019: the CCP/Lam regime forced the protests for the extradition bill (and possibly declare independence the way things were going since the Summer) in HK to be quelled altogether for a fear of contagion of what had been going around in order to prevent the calamity of the Avaian Bird flu that is still in recent memory for many in HK--which was much worse on the mainland than it was in HK because of the abysmal health and safety practices by the CCP.
And had people paid attention, the CCP not only arrested many dissenters and created a massive diaspora in one of the most affluent and well educated countries in Asia that served as an economic hub to the West it got the NSL to pass during this time, it also continued to arrest and intimidate Hong Kong into abject repression all under the pretense of COVID. when they themselves, via the Lam regime, kept the borders open and allowed mainland Chinese to enter HK and their were plenty of recorded footage of them violating covid practices (quarantine) and actively going into public areas and act as vectors (coughing and spitting on elevators), going into restaurants despite quarantine practices etc...
Lastly, Propublica released an investigative piece last month about the lab leak theory [0] under the auspicious of the US senate, which I'm not denying has glaring geo-political overtones; especially given the CCP's saber-rattling towards Taiwan and well documented tyrannical behaviour in Xinjiang and Hong Kong; the latter violated the Sino-British treaty and dismissed international Law which effectively mean it illegally annexed a territory imposed a repressive law (NSL) to suppress any dissent which was to operate autonomously until 2037--which can be seen as hostile as Russia violating both the Budapest Memorandum and the Minsk agreements when it invaded Ukraine in 2014 and illegally annexed and occupied Crimea/Lugansk/Donetsk and has led to full invasion and crimes against Humanity ever since with indiscriminate shelling on civilian areas under the aforementioned pretenses.
I'll leave it here because quite honestly I can't fathom anyone to be so brazenly reductionist in their thinking and claim to have the 'upper hand' when their is clear violations all the way which implicate not just the CCP but the US (via NIH funding) as well for funding the GoF research in Wuhan [1] despite repeated safety record violations.
And on a personal note: it's because the health sciences is filled with people like you that I had to turn to tech in the end. I was sent into such a forlorn depression after a short career in it when I found the Industry is was mainly filled with people who will cling on to any party-line in order to continue their work and research. In retrospect I wish I had chosen something else to give so much of my time, effort and passion had I known how quickly it becomes a way to legitimize the commonly held narratives of the State or a Corporation, and how quickly it willing compromise itself for such short-sighted goals in the process.
Me: "Doing your own research on this is very difficult due to people with credentials selling their reputations to service political goals."
You: "What about this Chinese scientist who lied about their experience and had no actual evidence of anything but who was working with Steve Bannon and Guo Wengui and repeatedly platformed on Tucker Carlson?![1] Oh and a Senate Republicans minority committee just released a report that mistranslates standard Chinese party doctrine as menacing![2]"
Admitting that Covid19 was very likely a spillover of a natural virus doesn't mean that you trust China, that you think their labs are run well or are incapable of accidents, that they've been transparent or helpful with the investigations, or that the possibility of new evidence pointing to a lab origin is foreclosed -- just that the actual physical evidence we have today about this virus and this pandemic overwhelmingly points to a natural origin.
Since you put the Twitter handle as an evidence for your argument. This particular Chinese jounalist is using Twitter and publishing articles in Western journals *while living in China*. What makes you think she is more trustworthy than Steve Bannon? Even if she is an honest and trustworthy person why would CCP let her publish anything that goes against their narrative?
> just that the actual physical evidence we have today about this virus and this pandemic overwhelmingly points to a natural origin
actual physical evidence *provided by China* FTFY. You don't think China will readily handover the data to you if it came from lab, do you? And what physical evidence? The evidences are just some early patient data and virus gene sequences. By that logic HIV spillover happened in US, not in Africa. Because early HIV cases have been detected in USA.
> overwhelmingly points to a natural origin
according to whom? The virologists who also have a history of covering up lab leaks. The virologists who will have the most to lose if lab leak is true. [1]
Why are you so insistent that there shouldn’t be a discussion on this?
For you to say, e.g. “My bona fides are such and such, I find this theory highly implausible for $REASONS” would be eminently useful and helpful and very much in the spirit of the site.
In case the multiple people saying this aren’t saying it clearly enough: you sound more like “Serious people all agree about this, only cranks disagree with us, and you plebs wouldn’t understand even if I explained it”.
> Serious people all agree about this, only cranks disagree with us
Mostly joking but if the shoe fits... As one example, one of the authors of the famous 'Viral' book pointing to a Lab Leak is a coal baron GW denier who chaired a bank that failed due to subprime loans and who previously claimed that HIV was a man-made virus derived from failed polio vaccination experiments[1]. How much credence should we give someone like that? How many hours of time should be spent debunking every new theory he promotes rather than just casting him aside and looking for non-morons to engage with?
It's just a smattering of grievances and debunked conspiracy theories. How would virologists begin to respond to that?
I mean I said it above, and I'll just copy/paste it here;
> Admitting that Covid19 was very likely a spillover of a natural virus doesn't mean that you trust China, that you think their labs are run well or are incapable of accidents, that they've been transparent or helpful with the investigations, or that the possibility of new evidence pointing to a lab origin is foreclosed -- just that the actual physical evidence we have today about this virus and this pandemic overwhelmingly points to a natural origin.
There are well-intentioned scientists testing theories that could point to a lab origin of Covid, it would be extremely interesting and important if they find something to indicate that's the case. Unfortunately to the casual observer of the actual state of science here, they'd be led to believe that there's consensus about a lab leak or at least a strong likelihood backed by evidence when that's not remotely true.
I'm not going to engage with the 'me vs you' narrative you have going here, because you are forcing this into the polarization tactics that social media uses: I presented not just sources to those claims but I also followed up with ACTUAL incidents that took place that you could research yourself that make it impossible to arrive to that conclusion that it's overwhelmingly of natural origin which has been at the core of the CCP's discourse (despite conflicting claims of it being a US bioweapon) which absolves everyone involved and will ultimately be the highly contentious but acceptable narrative if you want any funding in the future and don't want to rock the boat, or if you're a mainlander released from indefinite lockdown.
I'd rather question your claims than your position, because I know where you stand anyway, which is the crux of my response: so, where was it revealed that Dr. Yan lied about her credentials and her experience at the Wuhan lab? To date that has never been proven despite constant criticism, what has been proven is that she was scrubbed from the Internet when she went public and that the CCP targeted her family (she is a Chinese National) while she was still in HK. She continues to publish her work in peer-reviewed journals [0] and her work stands alongside her colleagues who continue to publish their work on other journals. I'm willing to review these sources that discredit her in order to contrast with my currently held position and arrive to a better informed position, which is something I'm not sure you are willing to do.
I will agree that those who ran with the story first have a clear and unscrupulous bias, but that is the very definition of shooting the messenger which never result in her claims being thoroughly vetted--she released her scientific papers after having arrived to the US and fleeing from China then HK and finally to the US. That takes resources she likely didn't have after the ordeal.
This has to be seen as dire as the exodus of Jewish scientists fleeing Nazi Germany for it to be seen in proper context, as that is what has happened in Hong Kong since the Summer of 2019 and ultimately what set the NSL doctrine in HK, but since so many dismiss things based on association then you're making my point for me that is continues even in the upper echelons of Academia as I presume you are given what you have said and how you have expressed yourself thus far.
> Admitting that Covid19 was very likely a spillover of a natural virus doesn't mean that you trust China, that you think their labs are run well or are incapable of accidents, that they've been transparent or helpful with the investigations, or that the possibility of new evidence pointing to a lab origin is foreclosed -- just that the actual physical evidence we have today about this virus and this pandemic overwhelmingly points to a natural origin.
Personally, I fully admit I do not have beyond an undergrads understanding of genetics/virology; my career was spent in the field of oncological diagnostics (specifically Leukemia and Lymphoma), so it's hardly the same field and I do not claim expertise. But, unlike most, I have a very clear and documented history laying out the violent hypocrisy of the CCP's held beliefs on COVID and it's actions in HK that coincided with the protests in 2019-2021.
But, it stands to reason that anyone who remains so adamant of the claims (Natural origin) and is coaxing it as much as you are the likely cause requires much more compelling evidence and is otherwise ignoring the simple fact that we will never know what happened due to the refusal of the CCP to allow investigators into the country in the onset while having cases in HK and still forcing the borders open to the mainland when it was in lockdown and that the subsequent floods removed any real evidence that could identify the origin (on either side) in order to create a consensus is done in order to get back to business as usual while simultaneously trying to absolve anyone guilt of this as something that needs to be accepted--which is ironic since this naturaly caused illness is still forcing people in China to be locked-down due to China's zero-covid policy.
These are the (many) mental gymnastics I underscored in my first post, and why I think it's deserving of such ire. You make claims, you cannot support and instead will play identity politics (entirely useless since I'm an anarchist and I have no political affiliation) rather than rebuttal with actual evidence and facts to support your claim. Which thus far include:
- COVID is of Natural Origin due the evidence (that's not conclusive)
- Dr. Yan is not a real scientist and lied about her experience and is puppet of the MAGA crowd
- Lab Leak is absurd and should be dismissed because reasons(?)
Again, I remain that any person with any shred of credibility would question all positions and realize we simply do not have, and will likely never have, enough information to conclusively arrive to either.
But it's this forced narrative and consensus MO (and the arrogance that follows with it) that is strikingly consistent in my experience--not to mention this need for a 'COVID amnesty' and the blanket immunity of pharmaceutical corps got early on.
Do I know it definitely leaked from a lab? Absolutely not, I felt it was rather convenient and compelling evidence to quell the HK revolts against the extradition bill (given who bird flu went down) and I saw to what length the CCP was willing to go to do so, and has continued on a belligerent war-path to achieve it's end thorough out it's bloody history and will disspaear, kill and enslave people who question it's position and supremacy clause on the one china policy.
And this is why I think it's not beyond reason that they used the pre-tense of a wet-lab based disease in order to achieve their end(s), which ironically was supported by the US via NIH grants to study GoF at the Wuhan lab until 2017 and had a documented lengthy history of safety violations and had reported cases of similar symptoms in the Fall of 2019 which was critical in suppressing the HK protests.
I find pretty often when people resolve conversations like this by saying 'do your own research', particularly when the research to be done requires any homework at all, it is shorthand for 'find a loud voice saying things that are compatible with the worldview you've decided on already'.
If "you do your own research" to confirm your own pre-existing ideas, then yes, you're going to get where you wanted to go.
I read "do your own research" differently. I think it can go two different directions.
In the positive direction, it can mean "Ignore all the loudmouths, all the liars, all the self-anointed experts. Even ignore me, the speaker. Find out who really knows what they're talking about, and listen to them." This assumes, though, that the listener can do that. Am I actually capable to discern truth from lies, or even real expertise from incompetence, in virology? Maybe, if I devote enough time to it. Do I have that kind of time for every topic on which someone tells me "do your own research"? Probably not. So what it really turns into is finding someone who at least sounds like they are doing their own research (and doing it well), and listening to them.
More negatively, I suspect that "do your own research" at least sometimes is a veiled way of saying "If you really knew, then you would agree with me" in a much less in-your-face way than just saying it. The person saying this may have done their research as you say, finding a loud voice that said what they wanted to hear, and now be totally convinced that they are right, and that if you did your research, you would wind up agreeing with them.
Most of controversy comes from scientists, often biologists and doctors, yeah. But not virologists. You know, people who actually know what they’re talking about.
Biology is such an enormously wide and diverse field that opinions of someone who’s not a virologist is often as relevant as an opinion of the software engineer.
It's like asking the DB admin about which machine learning framework to use for the new project, instead of your data scientist. Sure, the DB admin likely has an opinion, but it will almost never be as well formed an opinion as the one from your data scientist, even if their opinions are in agreement.
I mean if you seriously believe that theory you are probably going to either end, start thinking about how to end, or significantly change how you develop, your career as a virologist. Of course it's not mainstream.
It’s not common for virologists to work on GOF research or to do anything close to as dangerous.
It’s pure tin hat thinking to say that “my idea is correct and everyone who has any expertise is compromised”. I don’t know what is right or not, but I know a lot of virologists (through work) without any personal interest in the case who don’t put much stock in the lab leak hypothesis.
Thank you for saying this. We know xenophobic racist right wingers are saying that COVID came from China. But WHO-China investigation definitely proved that COVID came outside of China. Even western virologists have been supporting Chinese scientists. [1]
Side note, but is the moon landing hoax popular still? I got nostalgia when you mentioned it, boy howdy do I miss the x files days of conspiracy theories
Oh... they say they are still investigating it and that the theory should be left on the table... but I guess the British Medical Journal would say it's total nonsense right?!
Ah, they stay on the fence and say that it's plausible.
So it's not exactly like denying the moon landings, as I haven't heard NASA saying "the moon landings might have been faked, but we can't prove either way" anytime recently.
And this is the amazing leap so many people seem to make: If it is technically possible, then it must be true.
That's what baffles me here: "We cannot conclusively say it's wrong" so it must be right. When did that become a popular mode of reasoning? I can only assume people are so desperate to believe they will swallow this rather than accept reality.
That's not what I'm saying - Where did I say it must be true? I'm saying "We cannot conclusively say it's wrong, thus it's not in the same category as the moon landing".
In reality nobody knows the origin for certain, but IMO you seem to fall for the fallacy you are describing but with the opposite premise - i.e. "We cannot conclusively say that the lab leak theory is right or wrong, thus it cannot possibly be a lab leak".
Thank you for saying this. We know xenophobic racist right wingers are saying that COVID came from China. But WHO-China investigation definitely proved that COVID came outside of China. Even western virologists have been supporting Chinese scientists. [1]
Nature has no qualms about performing GOF research if we don't do it. How do we protect ourselves from future viral and biological evolution otherwise? Virus's evolve literally every day, and if we don't find a way to build tools, processes, and countermeasures, we will absolutely be strongly harmed by a future one.
This always feels like the "we can't afford to fix climate change so we just will ignore the problem" take.
I think everyone agrees that observing live virus in the lab is a critical (if dangerous) part of studying them.
Intentionally engineering them as high as possible on transmissibility and morbidity is bioweapon development being money laundered through conventional science: it’s an insane thing to do.
Leaving SARS-COV-2 out of it completely: there have indisputably been other leaks. It’s the height of irresponsibility and shortsightedness to engineer civilization-ending viruses, which is why it’s banned under multiple international conventions that GoF is a workaround for.
You don’t need a vaccine for the fucking superflu if you never develop the fucking superflu.
It's a hell of a leap to go from gain of function research has ever happened at all to gain of function specifically on Ebola is a near-term serious risk. Is there any evidence that gain of function has ever been conducted on Ebola? I've never heard of it, and don't know where to look other than a search engine, and conducting a search there returns exactly two sources making that claim, one called "scamdemic" and one called "goldismoney." Neither seems like a particularly reputable source.
He didn't say that ebolavirus is similar to coronavirus. He said that Nurgle worshiping virologists are probably hard at work trying to 'enhance' ebola to be more transmissible, which is probably true.
The point is, assuming that gain-of-function would have a viable path at turning a bloodborne pathogen into an airborne pathogen, rather than simply making an airborne pathogen more transmissible, is disappointing in its complete misunderstanding of virology. It de-legitimizes the point they're trying to make.
Lab leak theory is more than a big "what if", it has merit to it. To try to make an analogous argument toward how ebola might become more transmissible in a similar manner ruins their credibility.
"It's a long shot" except for the several times in the past few hundred years they have done just that? We can do statistics on how often this happens. We know that we should expect it periodically. Even Obama, while on his way out, was able to tell Trump "hey expect a pandemic event soon". We literally knew this was coming.
" it's super deadly which means it kills before it really has a chance to spread widely."
I generally agree. I believe there is some lag time before dropping dead. Fast air travel seems like a good way for this to spread over a wide range. If I remember correctly, CDC was involved in some Ebola cases about 10 years or so ago due to travellers. The manpower required for the precautions to prevent US spread for just 2-4 infected people was massive. I would guess we would be overwhelmed and it would start spreading here if the numbers were in the dozens.
I'm not saying that would be likely this time, but the likelihood would go up if there was a less deadly mutation. Operating on previously true beliefs is likely to cause the most damage.
I don’t know if you have read some of the tweets but it seems that ebola can remain dormant in some of the recovered individuals and then be transmitted(sexually in this case) years latter.
About a 2021 outbreak:
"The Ebola virus is known to persist in some survivors, particularly in places where it can lay low from the immune system, such as the testicles or eyeballs. A 2016 study reported resurgence of the virus in a survivor’s seminal fluid more than 500 days after the initial infection.
Still, the more than five-year span was “shocking” to many virologists and public health experts. And it raises a variety of concerns for the many survivors of past outbreaks, some of whom may have had mild cases of Ebola without realizing it. In particular, many people known to have survived Ebola face stigmatization, and the possibility of years-long persistence is likely to amplify that problem."
Right. Ebola spreads via contact with infected blood or body fluids. That's terrible for those infected, and we should definitely take steps to counter its spread. But that's not at all the same level of risk as airborne spreading.
Isn't it? Some viruses are airborne, and some are not. I'm not aware that it's "not all that hard" for one type of virus to become the other, but I'm no expert.
As far as I have heard, ebola outbreaks are almost exclusively in poor third world areas with generally bad sanitation and cultural practices (such as washing the recently deceased body) that contribute to transmission by contact with infected bodily fluids.
Basically, having universal or near-universal access to modern sanitation is the "program". If you're not in a community that has this, being a member of Doctors Without Borders is insufficient as a guard against getting infected. Conversely, having running water and flush toilets as the norm makes it far less likely for dieases like ebola to spread even among non-members of Doctors Without Borders.
So, while "lack of education" is not the right diagnosis here, lack of basic amenities certainly is.
That's entirely disingenuous, and you know it. There's a huge difference between the uneducated public in the developing world (or, clearly, everywhere really) and those that choose to enter into those challenging conditions to try and help people.
The virus apparently just wrecks the immune system right off the bat, allowing it to rampage throughout the body unchecked. Hence immune-system-support therapies are being worked on:
> "EBOV is able to evade innate and adaptive (both humoral and cellular) responses by encoding for multiple viral proteins that inhibit both type-I IFNs synthesis and response, by masking viral epitopes by glycosylation processes, by deregulating inflammatory response, by preventing DC maturation, thus resulting in a catastrophic failure of innate and adaptive immunity. Thus host factors have a key role for viral replication and release, and may represent good targets for therapeutic strategies."
The for-profit pharmaceutical system isn't that interested in this, as not many people or governments in Africa have the funds to pay for research, production, and what is it now, a guaranteed 15%+ profit margin?
It was handled well by global public health authorities, with education campaigns, targeted vaccinations, early warning, treatment, and growing immunity in the most at-risk populations.
Additionally, most of the most-at-risk population has lived through the AIDS horror. A good gay friend of mine roughly summarized it as "we gays know how bad diseases can get, and fuck it my dating life even after 2 years of pandemic is not as important as is my life". Once it was clear that MSM were (once again) a high-risk group, they all went back to either reducing contacts or at least wearing condoms.
In contrast, the last time the general public has had an issue with a pandemic has been so long ago that deniers and downplayers had an easy game with their bullshit. Had wearing fucking masks not been that politicized, I'd wager a very good portion of the 6.6 million people that died to COVID would still be alive. And to come back to my gay friend, at least in his community there were almost no COVID cases.
I started wearing a mask pretty early on. The first one was a fabric one my mother in law made as it was still at a time when PPE for healthcare workers was a bigger priority. I kept wearing a mask until the overwhelming majority of people around me had long given up. I believed it was the right thing to do regardless but I'm not sure I'm as optimistic as you regarding their effectiveness.
I've been wearing masks from early on and only recently stopped wearing them regularly. Now I only wear them when in a crowded situation. I feel how masks were handled was completely botched in many ways. There is the politicization and communication errors. However, I also remain somewhat shocked how we never made any effort to address the biggest, obvious issues with masks to make them more effective.
I saw so many studies that showed that a properly fitted mask makes a massive difference in how protective it is compared to other mask types. Where can I get a mask fitted? Never even saw anything about fitting masks other than "it makes a huge difference and we do this for nurses".
Clearly much of the air goes around the mask. Sure a little metal piece at the bridge of the nose makes this a little better, but why did nobody seem to work on a proper solution for this? How about a mask with a rubber seal that goes around it?
This kind of stuff could have saved thousands of lives, yet we seem to not even have tried.
I think the fatality of COVID was just right to create a societal mess. Fatal enough to kill tons of people. But not fatal enough to get everyone on the same page that some sacrifices need to be made to rein it in. At the same time some people also had practically no symptoms, creating more opportunity for disagreement.
They're relatively heavy compared to paper & fabric masks (not to mention expensive), but the gel seal made it quite comfortable and it was the only thing I found that I could wear all day without ever fogging up my glasses.
I still wear a mask when I go out. I'll probably stop eventually -- probably next summer when it gets hot again.
But I definitely agree that mask for should have been a big push. I'm not sure that sealing the gaps around the nose is that much of an issue from a transmissibility perspective, but it can make a significant difference in terms of comfort for those wearing glasses. And masks that are not comfortable don't get worn.
Think back to early 2020. A lot of the serious deaths/damage were not due to covid per se, but due to (1) covid being so novel we didn't know how to treat it very well, eg using ventilators in cases that could have just used O2 tanks (2) covid spreading so fast that it was effectively a denial of service attack against the local hospitals.
Both of these factors were improvable even by small measures that don't prevent infection but just reduce the severity or probability, slowing down ("flattening the curve") the pandemic and postponing more of the cases till later when there was more capacity as well as better treatment knowledge.
As someone who suffered a lot in 2021 due to an illness that was totally unrelated to covid, but that was only so bad because of insufficient medical care available due to the pandemic (literally, some simple better care and tests earlier on would have definitely caught and resolved it, but getting care during the pandemic was a shitshow), I take this aspect quite seriously. I think covid was best understood as a crisis for the medical system than for individuals (relatively speaking)
EDIT: fwiw I'm not even disagreeing with you on anything (yes, on HN, I know), just riffing :)
I’m glad the community was able to find a solution, and luckily monkey pox was not inherently deadly, but they did not comply with some efforts to mitigate the disease, particularly contact tracing
Contact tracing in the Covid context has worked horribly everywhere in the US, as far as I know, outside of more or less defined communities where penalties could attach. And even there is mostly failed when they didn't.
Did I miss an instance where it worked well enough to be worth the effort?
Add in the fact that the gay community has reasons to be less than thrilled with medical disclosure of this sort and I'm not the least bit surprised.
> Contact tracing in the Covid context has worked horribly everywhere in the US
Well yeah, it’s hard to recall the dozens or hundreds of people you may have interacted with over the course of days or weeks. It is however much easier to contract trace sexual partners, unless of course you’re engaging in repeated anonymous sexual encounters...
As a bisexual man I think the LGBT community is getting far too little credit for how they reacted to this. Men getting vaccinated essentially saved the world from more spread at a very critical time.
It wasn't just personal responsibility and willingness to get vaccinated and reduce number of partners. Gay men shouted from the rooftops at public health authorities to get them to step up testing, treatment, and vaccination campaigns very early, when many doctors were ignorant, unable or unwilling to take it seriously.
People are strange... good handwashing standards are likely as important as masks for preventing Covid transmission, but that never got politicized or became controversial for some reason. Also, wearing non-N95 masks appears to be most effective as a means of preventing aerosolized droplets from infected people from spreading to others in public situations. The full PPE system is more for protecting nurses and doctors working with severely ill patients from getting infected.
> People are strange... good handwashing standards are likely as important as masks for preventing Covid transmission, but that never got politicized or became controversial for some reason.
It's obvious isn't it? Handwashing isn't a badge you can wear. Meet somebody in public and you'll know if they're wearing a mask or not, but you won't know if they've washed their hands recently.
I don't know if that's enough to explain the hysteria... for example, people have published studies on the effectiveness of handwashing without fearing being attacked on Twitter as agents of misinformation (results are mixed, though generally beneficial, alcohol rubbing seems somewhat less helpful than soap and water, and a good scrubbing is better):
> "To develop clear and simple guidance for the public, further work should focus on identifying the specific times when HH should be performed in different communities and situations. In the meantime, current guidelines should be followed and should be based on evidence summarised here. Resources to support frequent hand washing, if hand washing facilities are available, or alternatively ABHR, should be provided in schools, workplaces, and public spaces and HH should continue to be promoted"
There are some more recent studies (2022) that take a similar evidence-based approach to masking effectiveness, noting for example:
> "The author pointed out that with active COVID-19 patients, who may contaminate the environment, a mask will not protect healthcare workers or other people if they are not accompanied by hand hygiene, eye protection, gloves and a gown."
The autopsy of the governmental and medical responses to the pandemic (and the original source of the outbreak) will make for interesting reading for years to come.
Another part of the puzzle is telling people to wash their hands has been a mainstream message for decades. It wasn't asking people do to something new and uncomfortable.
And predictably, about 30% of people utterly refuse to do it. Usually for stupid reasons. Some people are just so anti-authority that they would seemingly cut off their own leg to spite an authority figure telling them legs are important.
> they all went back to either reducing contacts or at least wearing condoms.
Also vaccination drives. I'm good friends with a few gay guys, and they all rushed to get vaccinated, even despite being in committed long term relationships. There was, metaphorically speaking, absolutely no fucking around with this one.
Masking was never inherently a political issue, even if some people tried to make it one.
From a purely scientific perspective, and regardless of one's political leanings or preferences, it was obvious from the start that widespread everyday masking simply isn't effective, nor is it practical.
If such masking was even just somewhat effective, the entire situation would have been over by mid-2020 at the latest. That clearly wasn't the case.
Even in large regions with strictly-enforced masking (even outdoors, in some cases!), combined with numerous other onerous restrictions, we still saw massive case number spikes. Those would not have happened if masking worked.
Of course, there are also the numerous harmful effects of masking that must be considered. It causes many accessibility problems, it causes childhood development problems, it causes social strife (including discrimination), it enables abusive policing, and so forth.
Hopefully, society as a whole has been reminded how masking just doesn't work, and that's exactly why we didn't bother with it until this recent debacle.
I'm curious, when you say "masking works" what do you mean?
Because you seem to mean it as "prevents 100% of transmission", and therefore anything less than that means masking isn't effective.
And that's simply untrue. Masking does, really, truly, assist with covid spread. It doesn't prevent 100% of transmission, because nothing does, especially something that requires active participation, but yeah it helps a lot if people actually do it.
It's likely a large part of the reason that I've never caught covid, despite a fairly active social life and continued in-person office work for almost a year now. And why the social events I attend, where you can have a hundred people in close quarters breathing on each other haven't had recorded transmissions, despite recorded isolated cases.
> It causes many accessibility problems, it causes childhood development problems, it causes social strife (including discrimination), it enables abusive policing, and so forth.
There's no evidence for any of these claims, and in fact you'll find the accessibility community strongly favors masks as immunocompromised people exist. Widespread seasonal masking has been common in other countries for decades (since SARS-1, two decades ago), and there's no evidence that it causes childhood development issues. There's, like, one academic paper whose conclusion is that mask wearing makes it difficult for preschoolers to detect the emotion of a person wearing a mask. But any extension of that to impacts on childhood psychological development isn't academic, it's you making things up.
As with other actions, it's the relationship between the benefits that something brings versus the costs associated with doing it that determine whether or not it's "working".
The costs associated with widespread everyday masking are severe. You even quoted the ones that I'd mentioned earlier.
Just to overcome those severe costs, masking would have had to consistently bring astounding benefits.
At a bare minimum, that should have been a nearly-complete end to the transmission of not just this virus, but others, as well.
Unfortunately, we didn't see that happen, because masking isn't effective.
We experienced the severe costs of masking, but without receiving any benefits from enduring those costs.
This was demonstrated by what's among the largest set of scientific experiments ever performed, involving many millions of people, in many nations, and over two years of masking in some cases.
> The costs associated with widespread everyday masking are severe. You even quoted the ones that I'd mentioned earlier.
Yes, and stated that they are, for the most part, not actually costs.
Masks don't cause accessibility problems, they don't cause child development issues, they don't cause social strife when consistently warn and enforced, and they don't cause abusive policing (police don't enforce mask mandates anywhere in the US, and consistently were one of the least compliant groups!).
You can't keep lying about these supposedly "severe" costs when anyone with eyes can see that they're made up. I mean you can, but it's your credibility lost.
Josh, I recommend that you do even just some basic research into this topic. It's quite complex, and I can't do it justice here.
Masking certainly does cause accessibility problems for many people.
For example, people with mobility and other issues involving their fingers, hands, arms, shoulders, neck, and ears can find it quite difficult, or even impossible, to put on, to wear, or to remove a mask.
Masking can also aggravate respiratory and cardiovascular-related medical issues.
Masking can aggravate PTSD and other psychological issues.
Masking can cause problems for those with hearing-related issues, as it can make it difficult to hear the muffled voices of others, as well as making lip-reading impossible.
In jurisdictions where accessibility is considered important, the forced masking bylaws or legislation typically had accessibility-related exemptions, because masking does cause severe accessibility problems for many people.
The harmful social impacts of masking take many forms.
Among the most egregious were when exempt individuals were denied service, reasonable accommodation, and in some cases employment.
Such people also faced significant harassment when in public, even in so-called "tolerant" societies. Sometimes this would involve verbal abuse. Sometimes it would involve having creeps take and share photos of them, in attempts to socially shame them. Sometimes it would unfortunately involve physical abuse, even with the police being the perpetrators at times.
A less-visible aspect to this very real threat of harassment was how some people just stopped participating in society as much as possible, even at the cost of financial, psychological, and social harm to themselves.
Forced masking, especially in schools, has definitely had a negative impact on the education and development of children. This manifests in various ways, including communication-related delays and difficulties, trust/fear-related issues, immune system deficiencies, and so on.
Perhaps you were spared the worst of this based on where you happen to live, and luckily didn't have to experience the costs of masking yourself.
Others, however, suffered significantly because of masking, even if you may not realize it.
> Josh, I recommend that you do even just some basic research into this topic. It's quite complex, and I can't do it justice here.
I have.
> For example, people with mobility and other issues involving their fingers, hands, arms, shoulders, neck, and ears can find it quite difficult, or even impossible, to put on, to wear, or to remove a mask.
This is minimal and solvable. If someone needs assistance putting on a mask, they need assistance with other daily activities and so can get that assistance as well.
> Masking can cause problems for those with hearing-related issues, as it can make it difficult to hear the muffled voices of others, as well as making lip-reading impossible.
This is also solvable, with for example clear masks that are used in speech therapy contexts.
> Masking can also aggravate respiratory and cardiovascular-related medical issues.
This is not true, there's no support for this in the literature. While full-face respirators can reduce airflow, facemasks like those commonly worn and recommended don't decrease airflow or O2 intake significantly enough to matter. As a rule of thumb, if you cannot breath through a mask either the issue is psychosomatic or you should be wearing a plastic face mask that provides you supplementary oxygen, because you are not sufficiently able to breathe on your own.
> In jurisdictions where accessibility is considered important, the forced masking bylaws or legislation typically had accessibility-related exemptions, because masking does cause severe accessibility problems for many people.
Please cite them.
> Among the most egregious were when exempt individuals were denied service, reasonable accommodation, and in some cases employment.
Please cite them. What is a reasonable exemption from mask wearing if a building requires all present to wear masks?
> A less-visible aspect to this very real threat of harassment was how some people just stopped participating in society as much as possible, even at the cost of financial, psychological, and social harm to themselves.
Lots of people do this for many reasons, for example the large swaths of people who (rightly or wrongly) still feel unsafe going out and about because of the dangers of Covid and the fact that most areas in society don't mask. Personally, I feel those people, even most with immunicompromisations, are overstating the risks associated with involvement in society. By the same token, I think the people you describe are overstating the risks of masking. I cannot conclusively say whether one faces a greater real issue than the other. What I can say is that masks to provide conclusive benefits, so the imagined risks of people who fear them are less of an issue to me than the imagined risks of people who overestimate the dangers of covid and other airborne infectious diseases.
> Perhaps you were spared the worst of this based on where you happen to live, and luckily didn't have to experience the costs of masking yourself.
Given where I live and my social circles, I and those around me masked far more aggressively and for far longer than the majority of the united states. I'll reiterate that there have been few to know real negative impacts from these policies.
Thank you for admitting that masks do cause accessibility and other problems, and as such have a severe cost associated with their use.
This brings us back to our cost/benefit analysis from earlier.
The repeated waves of infection in many regions when forced masking was in place show that the benefits of widespread everyday masking are minimal, and perhaps even non-existent.
Combined with the significant costs of masking, we can confidently conclude that masking is not effective, and therefore should not be considered to be a technique that works.
> Thank you for admitting that masks do cause accessibility and other
To the extent that I said there are accessibility concerns with masks, I have also claimed that all are solvable while continuing to wear masks. Further, the idea that someone, somewhere, might be inconvenienced isn't enough to suggest that they shouldn't be used or mandated, that's silly.
> and as such have a severe cost associated with their use.
I never stated this, please do not put words in my mouth. If you're going to not only lie about the science, but also lie about what I've said, I'll disengage. Your need to lie should demonstrate to anyone else following along how reliable your claims are.
You continue to hold masks to a comical standard, and lie about them to do it. Don't.
What about people who have difficulty breathing, and have to have their breathing hindered for hours by the mask?
I was in the hospital for 2 days when my wife gave birth, and I was supposed to wear the mask 24/7. Luckily they didn't enforce it strictly so I was able to sleep without the mask.
> What about people who have difficulty breathing, and have to have their breathing hindered for hours by the mask?
That is why vaccinating and wearing masks is so important: you're not just protecting yourself, but also those who legitimately cannot get vaccines (e.g. due to allergies), where the vaccines are ineffective (people with autoimmune disorders, on immunosuppressants or with a generally non-respondent immune system), or who cannot wear masks at all or for prolonged amounts of time (e.g. people with claustrophobia or weakened lungs).
> we gays know how bad diseases can get, and fuck it my dating life even after 2 years of pandemic is not as important as is my life
That's a nice sentiment I guess. Meanwhile my gay friend didn't stop "socialization" during the pandemic except first few early months. According to him he must've had COVID at least 4 times by now. If you add natural immunity, vaccine and asymptotic transmission he was getting exposed to COVID pretty much all the time.
This is nothing against gay community. This is against idolozation of certain communities and demonization of certain other communities to fit certain political narrative. Reality is more complex and nuance.
> Meanwhile my gay friend didn't stop "socialization" during the pandemic except first few early months.
Assuming he is a young man, then caution for the first few months meant he was cautious until mortality statistics revealed that the risk to himself, and presumably his partners, was minimal.
Monkeypox was always a money grab perpetuated by fear mongering media conglomerates. Those companies found some other "boogeyman" to chew on for the time being. And I'm not denying Monkeypox was real, it was just completely overblown and being used to scare people into clicking on spooky headlines.
I think this is needlessly pessimistic. A virus spreading uncontrolled in one of the world’s largest cities? It would be journalistic malpractice _not_ to report on it in the current climate
Tinfoil hat mindset? I never denied Monkeypox was real. Unless you're denying that the media consistently designs their content to scare people and spread worry. It's a tried and true business strategy - This fact isn't debatable.
Leaked documents show the Ugandan government is not expecting the current Ebola outbreak to be contained, but rather expect it to spread rapidly into the deadliest in Ugandan history, killing 500 and infecting at least 1200 by May of next year.
The 60 Minutes episode that aired recently where they traveled to the hot spots in Africa is fascinating. We know about the inevitable. It is up to us humans what we do with this information. Case in point: COVID mask hostility in spite of caring for the health of fellow humans or getting it and denying it until it kills them (source: nurse friend on a cardiac ward in the Midwest). YMMV.
1) The forecast appears to be "200 new cases per month" (i.e. Month 1 is 200 cases, Month 3 is 600 cases (3200) and Month 4 is 1200 cases (6200)). This is far too simplistic, and should probably follow an exponential/logistic curve if r>1.
2) The graph has simple stats failures like plotting a line between a bar chart.
Doesn't give me too much hope for the other 15 slides...
(The above isn't to say that it isn't a scary situation - clearly this is an awful situation which needs a huge amount of support. But the apparent quality of analysis does worry me that decision makers might not be working on great information)
Ebola is already out of control! There are reports of infectious people
collapsing all over the Kampala(on social media) but the government hasn't initiated any covid level precautions.
For anyone who may be working in the epidemic response space I read that there may be problems getting PPE for the health care workers.
There is a place that accepts products that are obsolete and reusable and they have a section dedicated to PPE since a lot of outfits obsoleted their PPE inventories once Covid was better controlled.
They also have a shit-ton or more of other things that can be repurposed from their original tasks.
You are right - the government analysis looks like garbage IMHO.
The slide shows that they are actually just forecasting (month * 200) cases which is obviously not the way you should do this. The slide also has a bar chart with a line between the bars, which is a stats-bad-smell too (at least shows that whoever pulled this together doesn't understand how to display data).
I know this is a developing nation that won't have the same level of availability of statisticians and epidemiologists, but it's worrying how basic this is.
They still have not identified the reservoir host (probably a fruit bat).
African traditions of caring for a sick person and then bathing the dead is not helping either.
