Re: The Awesomesauce of Science Reply #100 – 2023-12-14, 19:49:41 Three posts same day (this one not included), that must be a recent record.
Re: The Awesomesauce of Science Reply #101 – 2023-12-14, 20:40:20 Quote from: OakdaleFTL on 2023-12-14, 18:24:42The "methods and policies deployed" turned out to be between futile and ruinous... You missed that? Oh, I forgot: You follow the party line! To say that the measures were futile and ruinous is the party line. Every country took the same measures. Every country without exception. Even Trump-led USA did it. You missed that?Well, of course you missed that. You do not do facts at all. You strictly toe the QAnon MAGA party line.Why did every country take the measures? Because a global pandemic is ruinous. It was the politicians' job to respond to it, but as people in general, they did not do their job very well. For example, in Sweden the main expert who jumped to the forefront (and was given the lead) suggested minimal measures expecting herd immunity to kick in quick this way, he was wrong. He missed that these pandemics had been recurring in Far East for decades and no herd immunity had kicked in.
Re: The Awesomesauce of Science Reply #102 – 2023-12-16, 11:46:35 I see covid-19 as an inoculation. Dangerous and deadly on its own, there will be more pandemics. Some will be even more deadly, particularly in a future where they may be engineered. Among the ABCs, biological weapons were least likely. The As gave a big bang, the Cs were cheap to make, but the Bs were practically impossible to control. You may devastate your enemy, but then the disease spreads. Anthrax was popular in the Cold War days precisely because it was spreading so weakly.That situation may change. There may come ways to control pathogens that a hostile actor, rightly or wrongly, would believe make them safe enough to use without risking own country or organisation. A bigger concern is when biotech develop enough that an Aum Shinrikyo type scenario is possible. Even the main pathway, people coming in close contact with an animal having come in contact with another, is more likely to happen with deforestation et al. For 35 years I have been spreading my life's motto: "Don't sneeze on a duck."So what do we do when faced with a new deadly epidemic? What we always have done: We panic and die. For modern epidemic there is a third phase: We panic, the health system breaks down as doctors and nurses get sick, and then we die. Trying to make the health system not break down has been a priority for a century. With exceptions of a few locales, we did reasonably well on the health system breakdown, but there are definitely room for improvements. Quite literally as many get sick simultaneously.Which leads to the first, and probably most important lesson: We must be much better at scaling up fast. That's not just the lesson from covid, but from most other recent crises, like the energy crisis, and scaling up defences after invasion of Ukraine. JIT is an excellent advancement in production and logistics, but must be complemented with scaling capabilities. There are two main companies in my home town. AstraZeneca shifted into vaccine business, not one of their product groups. Scania shifted from making trucks into making PPEs (when the emergency was over, the logistics logjam for building trucks again began). The local science centre 3D-printed ventilator components for the local hospital, which was one of the designated covid hospitals in the region. All good cooperation, but late and ad hoc. If prepared for a scale-up, it is fully feasible.Work from home, hazmat suits outdoors, and domestic services provided by machines will protect people for long enough.Test and trace couldn't keep up with the pandemic, so in that sense it was a failure. But it was also a great success, this could not have been done before. It took a year to produce a working vaccine, which is fast, but it only took a month to produce and distribute a working test (in Berlin, based on data from China, with global collaboration over the Internet). Tracing would not have been feasible in any epidemic before, and was only partially practical in this, but could work well in the next. Public monitors like sewer surveillance also became practicable. Disease models pre-covid were basically post-Spanish Flu ones. The potential for improvement with real-time data hasn't been fully realised. Perhaps next pandemic. 1 Likes
Re: The Awesomesauce of Science Reply #103 – 2023-12-23, 11:47:44 Despite the likelihood that CoV-2 was a lab experiment let loose and not a bio-weapon deployed, it was known quickly what its virulence was... And how to react, in the short term.Instead, a virtual panic ensued — for the benefit of the Bio-War Gamers?
Re: The Awesomesauce of Science Reply #104 – 2023-12-23, 11:55:43 You realise that any complaints that you have about the response to Covid in USA you should direct at Trump, don't you? Or are you so hypocritical as to never realise it?
Re: The Awesomesauce of Science Reply #105 – 2023-12-23, 12:39:15 At Trump and the bureaucracy at the CDC. More so, at Biden... But you wouldn't care about that: TDS is your bag! If it can be used against Trump, it's a good weapon. If not, it's worthless!
Re: The Awesomesauce of Science Reply #106 – 2023-12-23, 17:26:17 SARS-CoV-2 was not manufactured, but that story was. It has all the fingerprints of a desinformation campaign close to the US government (but not necessarily from the US government). Bit like the "Iraq got WMD" and "Saddam supported Al-Qaeda" stories, it never got much traction outside the US, and not among scientists, while the politically connected in the US (particularly on the Democratic side) believed in it and/or promoted it.Of course, neither of the counter-hypotheses, (1) there was an accidental lab leak and (2) the lab leak story was created and spread organically, can fully be discounted, but they are very implausible and growing ever more implausible over time. 1 Likes
Re: The Awesomesauce of Science Reply #107 – 2023-12-24, 01:52:33 Quote from: jax on 2023-12-23, 09:26:17It has all the fingerprints of a desinformation campaign close to the US governmentI've heard that line of argument before, somewhere... Remember when the emails, etc., from the Hunter Biden laptop were quasi-determined to be Russian disinfo, because -well, gee! it has all the earmarks of such? So said 50-some-odd current and former US intelligence officers, with enough weasel-wordage to absolve them of outright lying included.Likewise, Fauci's NIAID did indeed fund gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology...But don't presume malevolence when ineptitude will suffice!
Topic: The Awesomesauce of Science (Read 25640 times)
