2019-2020 coronavirus pandemic (Vaccination 2021 Edition)

[tstorm823]

"which was not certified by peer review" On every single page for good reason.
The Cruise ship was not a scientific study. You do not know what measures were taken on the ship to keep people safe. You are not accounting for numerous variables that can impact infection rate. When the virus spread's it changes as it comes into contact with different people, animals, chemicals, plants, everything in the environment that it comes into contact with can affect how it adapts. You are not even comparing the different strains of SARS-CoV-2 that were spread at different rates. Having tunnel vision on a cruise ship when this has now spread all over this world is extremely short sighted and overlooking the many variables we have to examine to be able to keep up with an ever changing virus.

Investigators Say They’ve Found More Contagious Strain of SARS-CoV-2

Investigators say that they identified 14 mutations that affect the spikes on SARS-CoV-2.

www.infectioncontroltoday.com

COVID-19 May Be Much More Contagious Than We Thought

A critical scientific question that bears on policies for fighting the pandemic

harvardmagazine.com

Scientists say a now-dominant strain of the coronavirus could be more contagious than original

A mutation in the novel coronavirus has led to a new strain viewed as more contagious than the virus that emerged from China, according to a new study.

www.latimes.com

Much has changed since the cruise ship, and the strain on the cruise ship was not even the strain that spread through most of the US.

So, do you wanna bet?

 

[Avnger]

So, do you wanna bet?

Most of us would rather not bet when the currency is whether other humans live or die...

You do you though.

 

[tstorm823]

Most of us would rather not bet when the currency is whether other humans live or die...

You do you though.

Well, it's easy for me, I'm betting on things being less apocalyptic. I wouldn't be the one wagering that more people will die.

 

[Worgen]

Well, it's easy for me, I'm betting on things being less apocalyptic. I wouldn't be the one wagering that more people will die.

Really? I'm betting we will have a death toll by the end of this of at least 140k.

 

[Buyetyen]

I have better than a degree, I have no background at all. People with degrees in any subject know a lot more to begin with, but are slow to acknowledge answers that don't align with their years of research, and I frankly don't have that problem, which is advantageous in a novel situation.

Scientists once spent a lot of time mapping out the complicated movement of the planets and stars around the Earth, and were not particularly happy with Copernicus or Galileo making their field of expertise obsolete.

This explains much. Thank you for your time.

 

[Agema]

I have better than a degree, I have no background at all. People with degrees in any subject know a lot more to begin with, but are slow to acknowledge answers that don't align with their years of research, and I frankly don't have that problem, which is advantageous in a novel situation.

The thing is, few things are truly novel: they follow similar rules to, or are based on, other known things. This means that knowing something of that subject makes a person more likely to be able to exclude improbable answers.

What you are in essence congratulating yourself on is merely that your answer is more of a guess than an expert; whilst this means more openness to the improbable, it also means a greater likelihood of being wrong.

Scientists once spent a lot of time mapping out the complicated movement of the planets and stars around the Earth, and were not particularly happy with Copernicus or Galileo making their field of expertise obsolete.

That's not remotely true.

Ancient philosophers created both a geocentric and heliocentric model of the solar system. The geocentric one became dominant not because of scientists, but through Christianity, because the Bible said the Earth was the centre, and men of learning were men of religion, particularly in the Christian world. Astronomy basically disappeared for a few centuries.

Copernicus and Galileo did not suddenly tear down geocentrism. It was the work of centuries of study. Muslims started serious astronomy going again after the classical era, and very quickly started poking holes in the existing geocentric model of the solar system. Back in late medieval Europe with the flow of knowledge spreading westwards, astronomy restarted and natural philosophers moved on, also refining and improving... and also in some cases, beginning to question geocentrism and propose heliocentrism, even before Copernicus. Copernicus's model itself - whist accurate in terms of heliocentrism - was otherwise flawed and no better at predicting planetary movement than existing geocentric models: alone, it did not end the debate. Decades more study - Brahe, Galileo, Kepler - plus the invention of the telescope for improved accuracy ensued.

All those astronomers didn't find their field obsolete. They carried on as normal: took in the new information, carried on measuring, carried on hypothesising, gradually tested their advances against geocentric and heliocentric models, updated those models, and eventually geocentrism critically failed and had to be discarded. The only person who pretty much lost his job was Galileo, and as we all know, that wasn't because his studies were proven wrong. There was never one, great, seminal "Eureka" moment and everything suddenly changed, as people often seem to imagine.

 

[Phoenixmgs]

There's no great evidence Zn2+ is the mechanism by which chloroquine is effective, it's just a hypothesis.

Viruses like CoV are taken into cells by a process called endocytosis, which puts them in small organelles called endosomes (basically, think of it them like little cargo crates). Endosomes are then usually merged with other organelles called lysosomes, which are full of catabolic enymes that break down complex biological molecules like proteins - and which will also destroy viruses. Viruses must therefore exit the endosome before it merges with a lysosome. They then "hijack" cellular machinery within the cytosol (the general fluid interior of the cell excluding its organelles) to replicate.

The evidence we have suggests chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine do increase cellular concentrations of Zn2+, but specifically it localises in lysosomes. This makes it unlikely that Zn2+ is interfering with the viruses, as it's in the "wrong" part of the cell. Furthermore, we can see from that same paper measuring the change in cellular Zn2+ uptake from 10-300micromolar, and the effects, particularly at lower concentrations, are modest. However chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine appear to be effective against viruses at much lower concentrations, where the impact on Zn2+ entry is likely to be trivial, even if it were in the "right" part of the cell.

To get an idea how much hdroxychloroquine is in a cell from therapeutic treatment, mice on a 30mg/kg dose for 28 days showed cellular concentrations of hydroxychloroquine in non-liver tissues around 1-2 micromolar. The maximum tolerated dose of hydroxychloroquine in humans is about 1200mg a day, or 20mg/kg for a 60kg human; but 200-400mg doses are more likely (~3-7 mg/kg for someone 60kg) so around 5-10 times less than the mice in that study.

The first two papers (there is other literature out there along the same lines) are using cultured cell lines so there is always the possibility that human cells in vivo may be more responsive to the drugs in terms Zn2+ entry, and that there's more Zn2+ in the cytosol. But as there are other known effects of the drugs on cellular activity (specifically, altering the pH of organelles) which may be more effective, they look more probable.

I got my info from the following thread, which has a link to a study that shows it worked in SARS-CoV.

 

[Phoenixmgs]

You cannot expect people to wear masks when they are unable to buy masks.

Here, in Illinois, you must have a mask to go into any store. There hasn't been anyone that can't get a mask. Hell, I haven't even had to buy a mask to get a mask yet, Micro Center gave me one.

"which was not certified by peer review" On every single page for good reason.
The Cruise ship was not a scientific study. You do not know what measures were taken on the ship to keep people safe. You are not accounting for numerous variables that can impact infection rate. When the virus spread's it changes as it comes into contact with different people, animals, chemicals, plants, everything in the environment that it comes into contact with can affect how it adapts. You are not even comparing the different strains of SARS-CoV-2 that were spread at different rates. Having tunnel vision on a cruise ship when this has now spread all over this world is extremely short sighted and overlooking the many variables we have to examine to be able to keep up with an ever changing virus.

Investigators Say They’ve Found More Contagious Strain of SARS-CoV-2

Investigators say that they identified 14 mutations that affect the spikes on SARS-CoV-2.

www.infectioncontroltoday.com

COVID-19 May Be Much More Contagious Than We Thought

A critical scientific question that bears on policies for fighting the pandemic

harvardmagazine.com

Scientists say a now-dominant strain of the coronavirus could be more contagious than original

A mutation in the novel coronavirus has led to a new strain viewed as more contagious than the virus that emerged from China, according to a new study.

www.latimes.com

Much has changed since the cruise ship, and the strain on the cruise ship was not even the strain that spread through most of the US.

If you're going to chastise someone for posting something that wasn't peer reviewed, can you then not post things that aren't peer reviewed (all 3 of those articles are not peer reviewed)?

There isn't more than one strain of the virus yet, a mutation doesn't make a new strain of something. Most mutations actually are disadvantageous.
“Until there is some evidence of a change in virus biology, we cannot say that there are new strains of the virus. It’s important to appreciate that mutations are a normal byproduct of virus replication and that most mutations we observe won’t have any impact on virus biology or function.” - Professor David Robertson (literally from an article posted today).

The chances of any one of the bad things you're posting articles about have a very low chance of actually happening. The numbers we do have don't point to really any of these things actually being trends. Just going by the numbers we do have, you have a 2x greater chance of dying in a car crash in your lifetime than you do during this pandemic if you're under 65 (and that's IF you actually get INFECTED). This virus, in the grand scheme of things, is pretty weak vs what a much more deadly virus pandemic would be like. It should actually take pretty simple and basic guidelines (which, yes, the government hasn't provided) to keep the virus spread slow and away from at-risk people. Just look at Japan's super simple strategy. It's also on the people to follow through, which if you look at how people are behaving in malls in Texas, there isn't much follow through.

 

[tstorm823]

Ancient philosophers created both a geocentric and heliocentric model of the solar system. The geocentric one became dominant not because of scientists, but through Christianity, because the Bible said the Earth was the centre, and men of learning were men of religion, particularly in the Christian world. Astronomy basically disappeared for a few centuries.

Yes, I see when I look at history that common Christian name Ptolemy popping up. It was definitely the Christians that popularized geocentric models. And certainly not scholars heavily involved in the Catholic Church that are credited with popularizing the heliocentric model.

(You might this one 100% backwards, my friend)

 

[Trunkage]

Really? I'm betting we will have a death toll by the end of this of at least 140k.

Wait... are we doing a deadpool? If so, that despicable and disgusting.


180k

 

[Kwak]

I’m assuming that ‘they’ said stop on a forum or the media somewhere.

I think they should keep testing, if I remember correctly the VA was just the malaria drug. If I remember that study correctly, there were lots of health complications that skewed results, thus it might work in more ‘healthy’ people

No benifit according to study in The Lancet based on 90000 patients.

96 032 patients (mean age 53·8 years, 46·3% women) with COVID-19 were hospitalised during the study period and met the inclusion criteria. Of these, 14 888 patients were in the treatment groups (1868 received chloroquine, 3783 received chloroquine with a macrolide, 3016 received hydroxychloroquine, and 6221 received hydroxychloroquine with a macrolide) and 81 144 patients were in the control group. 10 698 (11·1%) patients died in hospital.

We were unable to confirm a benefit of hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine, when used alone or with a macrolide, on in-hospital outcomes for COVID-19. Each of these drug regimens was associated with decreased in-hospital survival and an increased frequency of ventricular arrhythmias when used for treatment of COVID-19.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31180-6/fulltext

Wait... are we doing a deadpool? If so, that despicable and disgusting.


180k

You mean like how multiple government and health organisations have tried to estimate the death rate in countries around the world? Why is that disgusting?
{oh, probably a joke, sorry missed that)

 

[Phoenixmgs]

Wait... are we doing a deadpool? If so, that despicable and disgusting.


180k

 

[Thaluikhain]

That's not remotely true.

According to people with degrees, you mean. You need to listen to more uninformed people.

 

[happyninja42]

According to people with degrees, you mean. You need to listen to more uninformed people.

....I'm hoping your being sarcastic with this, but, seeing as there is someone in this very thread who touts their expertise on a subject, by stating they have no such knowledge in the subject, and apparently isn't joking, I'm not sure anymore.

 

[Agema]

Yes, I see when I look at history that common Christian name Ptolemy popping up.

Ptolemy is a Greek name, and you might notice the Greeks are mostly Christian (also the Italian derivative Tolomeo, and they are mostly Christian too).

It was definitely the Christians that popularized geocentric models. And certainly not scholars heavily involved in the Catholic Church that are credited with popularizing the heliocentric model.

(You might this one 100% backwards, my friend)

No, I'm fine. The classical astronomer Ptolemy was (almost certainly) not Christian. Nevertheless, it was Christianity that introduced religious dogma into the matter, and which led to the eventual resistance (by Catholics and Protestants alike) to heliocentrism on the basis of heresy, irrespective of the fact that individual astronomers may have been Christian. Some Protestants were and still are of course in ways worse than the Catholics on such matters, because they are weighed down with the absurdities of Biblical literalism, e.g. creationism.

 

[Agema]

I got my info from the following thread, which has a link to a study that shows it worked in SARS-CoV.

Not wanting to be too harsh, but I don't find that the credentials of many people opining in that thread inspire me with confidence. This zinc hypothesis is certainly plausible, but the discussion in that thread makes it look a lot stronger than it actually is. Hydroxychloroquine has a wide range of actions within cells - there are least three other known mechanisms by which it might feasibly impair Coronavirus entry or replication and by my (far from comprehensive) reading around, two are generally considered more likely.

I have a particular concern because I think there's a strong movement - some within science and medicine itself - of people who would have us believe good diets save us from everything, right up to to the extremes of Mattias Rath who tried to argue his vitamin supplements cured AIDS and carried out illegal clinical trials to that effect. This zinc hypothesis is the sort of thing they leap on with excess enthusiasm.

 

[lil devils x]

So, do you wanna bet?

That only having 7% of the population in a heavy hit area showing to have any antibodies to this virus will have any real impact on the slowing the spread of the virus? And even with that 7% we still do not know what immunity is provided by those antibodies, or how long it will last, as we still have people succumb to viruses all the time that they have antibodies for due to those antibodies not being enough to effectively fight off the virus? Even with antibodies, viruses can still manage to win the war. We have people dying from COVID-19 that have antibodies to the virus as we speak here.

Of course we are hopeful that less people will become seriously ill, but we do not make policy on hope. We should always be prepared for the worst and hope for the best, that is what increases everyone's best chance for survival. That is how policy should always be made so that we are not caught unprepared. Saying " I wish we had done this different" after the fact does nothing to keep it from happening in the first place. This is not something you can retroactively fix.

In addition, when we are looking at 100,000 dead Americans already, and you treating it like that is somehow acceptable, and also finding it acceptable to have even much more die from this, what would be an unacceptable death toll for you here? Can you imagine the outcry if 100,000 people died in a terrorist attack, or biological warfare? No one would think that acceptable, and I have no idea why anyone would be willing to do the same now. Trump originally thought 15 was an acceptable outcome, then 60,000, now he seems to think he is doing a good job as long as we don't lose 2 million Americans. Meanwhile criticizing the number of troops lost in wars under Obama. Go figure. American lives only seem to matter when someone else is responsible for their deaths and not our own government's actions. It isn't like anyone dying from this actually wants to die here and they are being sacrificed against their will. It would be one thing for only the people who find this acceptable to be the ones who die here, but that isn't how this works. Their decisions are putting other's lives at risk, not just their own. This may be a game to bet on for you here, but I for one am not willing to gamble my life, or the lives of my family, friends, neighbors, coworkers. Playing Russian roulette with the lives of millions of Americans isn't something anyone with a conscience should be so willing to do.

 

[tstorm823]

No, I'm fine. The classical astronomer Ptolemy was (almost certainly) not Christian. Nevertheless, it was Christianity that introduced religious dogma into the matter, and which led to the eventual resistance (by Catholics and Protestants alike) to heliocentrism on the basis of heresy, irrespective of the fact that individual astronomers may have been Christian. Some Protestants were and still are of course in ways worse than the Catholics on such matters, because they are weighed down with the absurdities of Biblical literalism, e.g. creationism.

And Aristotle, whose argument against heliocentrism stuck for a millennium before technology could thoroughly counter it, certainly wasn't Christian.

Geocentrism was never a matter of Catholic dogma. Copernicus dedicated his work to the Pope, the Vatican funded Galileo, and the controversy in the Church only happened because Galileo used his book as a vehicle to call the pope an idiot. Protestants aren't just worse about these things, the Catholic Church has followed the Augustinian directive to not take the Bible as historical fact at any time it conflicts with God-given reason since, well, St. Augustine. Who was alive when the canonic Bible was decided. Which is to say, the Catholic Church has never cared about Biblical literalism.

The feud between religion and science is like 30% Protestants, 0% Catholics, and 70% atheists looking for reasons to call people stupid. See flat-earth theory for example.

 

[tstorm823]

Of course we are hopeful that less people will become seriously ill, but we do not make policy on hope. We should always be prepared for the worst and hope for the best, that is what increases everyone's best chance for survival. That is how policy should always be made so that we are not caught unprepared. Saying " I wish we had done this different" after the fact does nothing to keep it from happening in the first place. This is not something you can retroactively fix.

We do not make public policy based on worst case scenarios. We do not prepare for the worst. Preparing for the worst would freeze the world in fear and destroy civilization in sunk cost preparing for crises that never happened. People have speculated that covid wouldn't have an antibody reaction, that people couldn't be immune to it, that there can't be a vaccine, that it's unaffected by climate and seasons, that it's far deadlier than other diseases, etc. Did anyone anywhere enact policy to counter the perpetual super-death plague that would have been the worst case scenario? I know you can honestly say no, I know you think everyone should have done more, but that's not how policy is done. You put a degree of safety in from the most likely scenario, because the worst case will very rarely occur, and you're guaranteed to fail if you enact the wrong policy the other 99.9% of the time.

In addition, when we are looking at 100,000 dead Americans already, and you treating it like that is somehow acceptable, and also finding it acceptable to have even much more die from this, what would be an unacceptable death toll for you here? Can you imagine the outcry if 100,000 people died in a terrorist attack, or biological warfare? No one would think that acceptable, and I have no idea why anyone would be willing to do the same now. Trump originally thought 15 was an acceptable outcome, then 60,000, now he seems to think he is doing a good job as long as we don't lose 2 million Americans. Meanwhile criticizing the number of troops lost in wars under Obama. Go figure. American lives only seem to matter when someone else is responsible for their deaths and not our own government's actions. It isn't like anyone dying from this actually wants to die here and they are being sacrificed against their will. It would be one thing for only the people who find this acceptable to be the ones who die here, but that isn't how this works. Their decisions are putting other's lives at risk, not just their own. This may be a game to bet on for you here, but I for one am not willing to gamble my life, or the lives of my family, friends, neighbors, coworkers. Playing Russian roulette with the lives of millions of Americans isn't something anyone with a conscience should be so willing to do.

What would be acceptable? It is what it is, it's not my choice to accept it or not. You think people chose for those 15 to die? You think people chose for 100,000 to die? Nobody could have prevented most of these deaths. The were going to happen. Accept that. You think basically every nation on the planet was like "eh, we could stop this pandemic, but man that would be expensive". That's not what's going on. People dying of a virus isn't a measure of failure. On an average day, like 7500 people die in the US of any cause. That's not a failure, nobody chooses for that to be the case, it just is.

Encouraging you to bet on it isn't about encouraging you to gamble with people lives. Frankly, just by circumstance, I'm probably better quarantined than the vast majority of people. I'm not gambling with people's lives. The point was for you to assess the situation by how likely your worst case scenario is to being real. Because you're taking a moral high ground only by suggesting that reality is an incredibly unlikely worst case scenario, and pretending the government could have put us in an even less likely best case scenario. And if you were to gamble on it, you'd have to assess what you think is most likely to happen, rather than espouse what you know you can browbeat people with.

 

[Buyetyen]

Encouraging you to bet on it isn't about encouraging you to gamble with people lives.

It's still pretty crass. You're putting ego ahead of what's actually important here: making it through this with as few deaths as possible.

Here's the problem, dude. Your argument is that you say you want to follow the facts, but your conclusions are not informed by actual knowledge and facts and in fact you constantly question the validity of the data from people who have spent their lives training for this because you assume that they care more about the money than anything else. You say that preparing for the worst would paralyze the world, but that's nonsense. We have insurance. We have hospitals. We have FEMA. Whole sections of our society are dedicated to preparing us for when things go sideways. You then act like we're being unreasonable when really until Trump were were trying to prepare for the fact that epidemiologists had been warning us for years that outbreaks are becoming more common and the odds of a pandemic are going up. We were preparing for that, and then Trump axed it. So yeah, we were making policy based on the facts. But the Trump administration isn't. You say we can't do more, but we were doing more.

You say nobody could have prevented the huge death toll. But that's not true. Had the administration acted in time, with prudence and listened to the science, people still would have died, but the numbers would not be his horrific in this short period of time. And comparing it to daily deaths from literally every other cause is just an excuse not to care. If you don't care, fine. But some of us do.