CharonY

The big issue I think is that much of the world is hang out to dry, whereas in some countries the unvaccinated population is mostly so by choice. I do not understand why those countries are not putting more effort in to get vaccines into those that want it, globally. Just thinking in terms of national consequences is, as the pandemic has demonstrated, incredibly short-sighted.

From what I read, the demoralization basically started at least since the Doha agreement, where the US basically bypassed the Afghan government. Reading articles back to the beginning of the year man already predicted that this is going to weaken the Afghan government and embolden the Taliban. Leadership of the Afghan forces also saw the writing on the wall. At the same time, the Taliban basically got legitimacy, not only from the US but also Russia, China and Iran, which probably further weakened the position of the Afghan government. So if I take your comments together you seem to suggest that the plan should have been to turn half of Afghanistan into radioactive wasteland and then stay there until things become better? I think you are aware that the bases in Japan and Germany serve very different purposes and that due to the economic boosts of reconstruction as well as global post-war economy resulted in economic benefits and stabilization in less than two decades. But I do agree that building up Afghanistan would have been a much more complex and expensive endeavor and it clearly was not part of the plan (assuming there was on in the first place). Yet most of the money was spend on the military rather than building a country.

What should have happened is to process all the visas and relocate folks concurrent with the withdrawal deadline.

Except they did not pull out quickly out of Afghanistan...?

I think that is quite a naïve view. The Soviets tried mass killings in Afghanistan and you can see what happened. Also as far as I am aware of, there were no Afghani citizens involved, the Taliban provided sanctuary for a Saudi, and Saudi Arabia does not seem to be bombed to pieces, either. I am not sure that brutal suppression is what causes nations to stabilize, in fact I cannot think of an example where that alone has worked. And if you want to pull out post-war Japan or Germany as examples, both had strong central governments which were only partially dismantled and were rebuilt into strong economic entities. One of the issues seems to be that Afghanistan was seen as a military operation in the first place, and from what I have read from reports about 5% of the total spending was rebuilding the country whereas the rest went to military spending (including training and counternarcotics). Total expenditures in rebuilding programs and economy amounted to perhaps 50 bn total from what I gather. Japan and Germany received multiple of that amount for reconstruction. Afghanistan, already in a bad economic situation only benefitted partially and most rural centres did not benefit at all. In my mind, nation building only works if you can demonstrate that life is going to be better for a large swath of the population (inequality also fosters instability). It seems to be part of the issue. The government really had only power in some city centres and even then not a very firm grip. US air supremacy provided a kind of shield, but the real power was always decentralized and there was no real mechanism in place to pull it all together. Areas of Afghanistan are virtually isolated where officials barely show up and local elders hold power, the government does not really concern them in any tangible way. However, a local warlord with actual military presence (and who might be a relative) is a different matter.

Well, but also impractical for a range of purposes.

In some major cities alternatives (or cabs, which could be considered a shared car of sorts) are more popular or affordable than car ownership. I have read that in parts of New York City car ownership is down to 22% (which is quite significant as elsewhere in the US the average ownership is closer to two cars per household). In Singapore car ownership is so expensive that ownership is only around 10% though they also have a great transit system. While a transit system tends to be more efficient energy -wise, in some areas car sharing might work better. The benefits of the latter might be saved resources from production. Whether it saves operating emissions might depend on whether folks are willing to share the same drive.

I think that issue is that again folks did not understand how Afghanistan works and treated the problem solely as a military one. Outside of a few centres it is effectively ruled by local powers, from what I understand. Loyalties are complicated and apparently folks hedge their bets by e.g. sending their sons to join both, the army as well as the Taliban. Another aspect seems to be the agreement at Doha between the Taliban and the US. Apparently some saw it as a signal that the government is going to fall, which would explain the rapid surrenders rather than an armed conflict. That being said, the desperation of folks trying to flee Kabul is heartbreaking to see.

! Moderator Note If you make claims outside of established science, it is on you to explain how your model (or construct as you call it) has a better explanatory power than existing explanations. Just making claims without support and attacking established sciences, which actually do work, just does not cut it here.

President Ghani has fled and the Taliban have taken over the presidential palace. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/8/15/taliban-continues-advances-captures-key-city-of-jalalabad

As mentioned above, the mechanisms make it very unlikely that given current circulation rates we can vaccinate our way out of this situation. That is not to say that eradication is impossible in the long run. Continuous vaccination efforts with isolating infected individuals and other measures together can, over time drive the virus down to extinction. That being said, we would be likely looking at years at minimum for that to happen, if it happens. Polio eradication took decades and is still not complete, for example. It worked for smallpox, though (after close to two decades of efforts). So this is yet another thing that I cannot wrap my head around during this pandemic. Why the heck is there no patent waiver (at minimum)? Somehow folks seem to continuously forget the "pan" in pandemic. Also it demonstrates that no, humanity is apparently not able to pull together to face a common foe, and that zombie movies are in fact documentaries of human folly.

That is not how I read what you wrote: This to me implies that the resistance develops either in response or at least in the following generation. I.e. in your scenario exposure happens and only after that do you get mutations and new traits. I do not know what kind of answer you are looking for. What would you answer to the question "where do blonde folks come from"? That would help me figure out how yo think about these types of questions. I do not comprehend how you could take that from my answer. AI suspect you have something different in mind if you think about the term "intact particle". n intact particle is just that, a full functioning virus. An intact particle refers to a structurally intact virus (e.g. depending on the virus having the genetic material, capsid, potentially membrane, and other structural proteins). If it not intact, e.g. lacking these structures, it is not able to infect and replicate successfully. It does not matter what its host is, or whether it has a broad or narrow host range. Not sure what your wanted to know with regard to your question then:

That is quite possible. I mean technically UV would also accelerate degradation of a range of compounds, though I doubt that it would very useful as a general cleaning proecdure.

I might not have been sufficiently clear. SJ has provided the answer perhaps more succinctly, but overall they are already there because we have genetic diversity. Some genetic factors result in resistances to things (but may be detrimental with respect to other situations). So while I tried to answer the question, I was not clear what your basic assumptions are that I needed to address. Quite a few mammals are susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 (the virus responsible for COVID-19). The most dramatic examples are minks, as whole farms needed to be culled due to infections in the Netherlands and Denmark, and infections have been reported for dog, cats, pigs, voles, hamsters, ferrets, macaques and I am sure quite a few other animals. However, if an infection leads to disease as well as the severity of disease depends on a lot of factors, most of which are still unknown, though at the fundamental level the immune system and inflammation responses will play a crucial role (which is why in humans we have the whole range of asymptomatic to severe disease, for example). Obviously, biological differences can also play a role, a simple model is the abundance of the receptors targeted by the virus in different tissue types and organisms. Macaques, for example have effective replication in higher and lower respiratory tracts, a varied range of disease severity and have clear lesions, similar to humans. I think for cats deaths have been reported. Hamsters, whose ACE2 receptors are very similar to ours have also reported extensive lung injuries. SARS-CoV-2 is not related to viruses found in pigs, but is closely related to bat coronaviruses and somewhat related to those found in pangolins. Those coronaviruses tend to cause few symptoms in their respective hosts (similar to human coronaviruses in humans). From what I remember bats could get infected, but did not had any clinical symptoms, which is an expected finding for reservoir hosts. As noted elsewhere on this forum, often a long co-evolution between host and pathogen results in infections that are less lethal for the host, if the overall fitness of the pathogens increases that way. However, zoonotic outbreaks, where viruses jump hosts can sometimes lead to high lethality, in part because our immune system does not react well to the new disease (sometimes overreacting, resulting in cytokine storms). It is important to note that this is not always the case, though. As such, the assumption of a "perfectly tailored" virus does not make much sense to me from a scientific standpoint. What would be considered better tailored to a host? A virus that replicates very fast in its host but ultimately kills it? One that has bouts of dormancy but spreads slowly but steadily and is very hard to detect? How about a virus that integrates into our genomes but ultimately loses its ability to infect, but is now transmitted via offspring?

I would think it is more about drying clothes? While sunlight can accelerate deactivation of viruses and some bacteria do not like sunlight much, many bugs obviously survive sunlight (otherwise much of the planet would be dead). Overall it could reduce contamination rate somewhat via a combination of radiation and drying (i.e. at very high humidity I would assume that much more fungi and bacteria will survive and potentially thrive in clothing outside).

What he said.

Viruses are not perfectly tailored to anything. In fact, how would you measure that in the first place? The pathogens are piggybacking on many of our very conserved mechanisms, which are shared e.g. among mammals. In this case the first step is docking on the ACE2 receptors which many species carry. For soaps there are no known mechanisms. But if we take for example better known examples, such as antibiotics resistances, they have many different mechanisms. For some, it is simply a matter of having a point mutation, which changes the structure of the target protein of a given antibiotics (for example the ribosomes). Even in the absence of antibiotics those mutations occur. They could be neutral, but if they are not, they tend to be rare, as they may reduce the fitness of its carrier. However, in presence of antibiotics those mutations are now beneficial (are under positive selection) and they multiply more effectively than their counterpart. In other words, the strains come from mutations (but also via horizontal gene transfer for example) but it is because of positive selection they start to outcompete those that do not carry it. It is not that they develop those mechanisms as a response to a given stimulus. Quite possible, but the way you wrote it does seem to imply a Lamarckian mode of evolution. If that is not what you meant, an elaboration would be appreciated.

I think I posted something about herd immunity here somewhere, but cannot find the post, so a quick recap: The crux of the matter is the effective reproduction number, which is a function of the basic reproduction number (R0): R=R0xS, where R0 is the basic reproduction number and s is the proportion of sensitive folks in a population. At R=1 each infection will on average infect one other person. I.e. the infection will remain steady in a population. At R <1 we have a situation where herd immunity happens and the number of infections will decrease. In other words, based on R0 you need a certain threshold of folks which are immune (given as 1-S) to reach an R<1. So we can calculate the required herd immunity threshold (H) as: H=1-1/R0 The delta variant has a currently estimated R0 of 5-8 (some assume it to be as high as 10 but let's keep it at more conservative estimates for now). So the required proportion of immune folks to maintain infection rates steady would 80-87.5% and higher levels are required to make it drop. Now the most effective vaccines are about 88% effective against delta and if we assume that 80% of the total population (including kids) is getting vaccinated, we still would only be at ~70% immune folks in the population. Considering vaccine hesitancy, the values are likely to be even lower.

A few points here, viruses do not die, they are either intact particles, and capable of infections, or not. If they are degraded, they do not function anymore. Mutations occur when the virus replicates in their hosts, which, to re-iterated requires an intact particle to happen. I.e. it would require random mutations to change the viral structure significantly to make them more resistant. As pointed out earlier, viral particles are comparatively simple structures and there is not a ton of room to add functions in such a fundamental way. Also note that even if such mutations could occur, they do not rise in response to stressors such as soap. Rather, it would be a selective pressure and in which already resistant strains would propagate faster than their non-resistant peers.

It is uv light which is not gmo free and organically harvested.

I think at this point most already agree that herd immunity is not going to happen anymore. It was a bit of a pipe dream for a while (especially how things were going) and with delta it has become pretty much impossible.

Also it is important to note that it does not clean, just sterilize. But even then it is difficult as the clothing would have to be irradiated inside and out and as StringJunky mentioned, would involve harmful levels of radiation. There are basically only a handful of scenarios where this would have tangible benefits, such as in hospitals perhaps. That being said, I have heard that potentially driven by the pandemic there are efforts to produce and sell household versions of such devices. But realistically they are mostly money grabs.

Well in sports there will never be something like totally fair. After all, the way it currently is geared towards some kind of special elite and safety, well a lot of them have very serious injury risks (including some which the sport tries to hide). In other words, reasonable balance is all we can hope for in virtually all aspects of sports with acceptable levels of unfairness.

Thanks for that, as we discussed earlier, I was interested for empirical data rather than extrapolations. Some is probably inevitable due to the lack of data (the wiki article does not seem to provide more insights than even in this thread here. So it is interesting to see that at least in this Olympics the current state does not seem to have a huge impact. It is also good to see that folks are seemingly looking for a balanced a approach rather than outright exclusion.

I was too busy to follow the Olympics but given the worry in elite sports mentioned in this thread, does anyone know how man transgender athletes competed this year and where they ended up in the rankings?