CharonY

And did you mention the fact that the virus may have circulated before anyone (including China) realized that there was a new respiratory disease going around? In France there is some evidence based on stored blood analyses that positive cases might have been present around as early as November. Of course tests did not exist at that point and no one knew that there was a risk for asymptomatic spread. The first confirmed cases in France were two months later- in January. In Spain and Italy wastewater analysis indicated presence of the virus early December and January. Over a month before the first case was detected. In other words, even in those countries there was a significant delay before Covid-19 was diagnosed and there are good reasons for that. Symptoms are not specific and can be easily confused with other forms of pneumonia and we have got many asymptomatic or mild conditions that could spread but would not ring any bells. China reacted too late after clusters have formed. A part of it was because their monitoring system was too rigid. They had literally a form that included testing results for SARS. If that had been activated the full pandemic system would have reacted. But since folks were not flexible enough to account for diseases that need new testing methods, officials decided that it could not be something real (and as we learned elsewhere, once idiots in power decide on something stupid, a lot of people have to suffer, just so that those in power are proven right). While quarantine and contact might have worked (but if the study is right there would have been two months of potential community transmission already), most Western countries did a sloppy job with that. They either did not have a pandemic plan or it just never kicked into high gear in time (again, as opposed to several other countries who did just that). I mean, we are a year in and some countries only now start to levy fines for breaking self-quarantine. In Canada last year snowbirds came back from the US and straight waltzed into the nearest Wal-Mart. So yeah, no the response has not inspired me with a lot of confidence. Just to be clear, there is nothing wrong with having additional institutions and collaborations (and frankly, the US CDC always has been something of a reference point for EU responses). But none of those will be able replace a global platform. if anything, those should be strengthened.

While I agree that there has been a shift from self-improvement to a financial transaction, I disagree to some degree with the motivation. I do not think cheaters feel that they need to cheat is the only way to advance. Most of the cheaters I found were folks that generally did not even put minimal effort into class. I.e. frequently absent (I do not take attendance), rarely ask questions (beyond "what will the questions in the exam be" and "do I need to know what is written on all the slides"), I doubt that they have read a single page of any of the textbooks (all open access). I would understand cases if those folks e.g. had to work to finance their degree. But actually most seem to be fairly well off, wanting go to medical school as their parents are physicians. Or threatening faculty with their big lawyer daddy if they do not raise their scores. Others have basically flat out mentioned that the additional time they want because of their "learning disability" must be provided in a way that gives her benefits over others (I offered to give everyone more time to finish their assignment). And of course I provide folks months of time to prepare and ask about an assignment and obviously all questions only come in during the week it needs to be finished. Again, I think there is societal-wide change in the attitude of learning for its own benefit and in part that is likely to be driven by economic concerns. At the same time I also think that the personal enjoyment of learning new things has gone. I feel in part it is the way we consume information nowadays (tons of small bites, but never in-depth). Folks confuse hearing about a subject with mastery of it. And often I think that many students nowadays do not feel the excitement when things suddenly come together in ones mind. Every now and then I have a grad student where I see the lights go on during their work. But again, I feel it has been much rarer now than even 10 years ago. Reading a paper is for many not about the new and cool things that someone has done. It is almost just a thing you do and then immediately forget (i.e. shallow reading).

Yes sorry, I understood it as such, but I also wanted to comment on the fact on accountability which is also vulnerable in democracies. I kind of conflated the issues in my mind, sorry for the confusion. Or animals (birds, for example) or food. And considering how connected the world has become it is silly to assume that we can effectively control outbreaks, especially those with long incubation periods via border control. Unless of course you can see a way to lock borders the moment someone on the planet sneezes. I mean for Christ sake, most infections from the US came from Europe. Your arguments are basically undoing all the lessons we learned from this very ongoing pandemic. What chance do we have in a few years from now if the next one hit?

Well neither does the US. There are reports of at least attempts to manipulate data and one data scientist was allegedly removed for refusing to do so. But that is not the only issue. Whether you trust info from a particular region or not, global collaboration is absolutely needed to have any chance of combating outbreaks. Dictatorship are of course suspect but it does not mean that we can ignore them in the face of global threats. Again, it is based on the erroneous assumption that catastrophe somehow care for political borders. I will add that many African nations seem to be coping surprisingly well. Not fantastic in some cases, but at least most took serious efforts and until recently they outperformed expectations. A part of it is actually having some pan-African responses and plans, which curbed the first wave but has shown to become brittle during the sustained onslaught.

There is literally nothing that prevents some countries to form medical or other alliances (and they exist). But you forget the whole point of it. Many diseases are global problems. Just caring and coordinating in your neighborhood alone cannot control them. I mean, just look at the freaking situation right now. You are basically saying that without info from China somehow the West would have magically responded better. We have empirical evidence that the world needs to work more together on this matter not less.

I have not checked literature, but my own experience would suggest that cheating might be increasing and it is also dependent on the system. In North America, studying is viewed by most students as a financial decision. Especially among medical students there is a strong incentive to achieve high grades by whatever means. Students are also better informed than they used to be. They are much less afraid of potential repercussions by their profs and have developed strategies to maximize grades with the least effort. They are also more cynical and have less qualms of finding ways to (in their minds) beat the system. You have the weird situation where based on performance you might think that a student is lazy or stupid, but has the surprising ability to play the system to their advantage. It is incredible how many for example file doctor's note claiming to have ADHD, dyslexia or other conditions requiring them to have more time than their peers. And most are premeds!

I do not think that you made a lot of things clear, to be honest. For the most part it just read like a stream of thoughts that may be obvious to you but at least to me it is at best cryptic. Specifically in science there is a big risk if someone is found to be falsifying data. Once trust is lost in a researcher, their career is over. And also competition is fierce. The only folks who might have it easier are bigshots who already have a distinguished career and thereby may ultimately be given a bit more leeway. But again, actual fraud would be a career ender in either case. It seems we have to do more hammering, especially in undergrad given the massive spike in cheating related to online classes.

The metric is largely given in the proposal that you submit. I.e. you tell the reviewers exactly what you measure and within which timeline. If you don't, it is easy to spot. If your result fails metrics (e.g. no difference between case and control) then funding won't continue). Typically, funding specifically for treatments are only provided if you already got promising preliminary results.

Potentially not, however the effect in clinical settings seems to be actually fairly low. For example in the other cohort, African Americans, which likely have a lower frequency of these alleles are not more likely to get severely ill compared to white folks, once SES is taken into account. I.e. while it might (or might not) contribute to individual risk, other factors play a much higher factor. I.e. the issue always is that diseases and other conditions are almost always multifaceted. And the issue here is that many risk factors are stratified along racial lines (depending on country). To distinguish those from biological effects is really challenging. Especially because much of the research up and including the early 2000s really have only focused on the presumed genetics side of things and together with the then hot human genome sequencing hype oversold a lot of things. Unfortunately these studies have also been very influential until now. That is not to say that genetics can be ignored, of course. There are for example certain alleles known now that have been associated with certain drug outcomes (such as undesired side effects or lack of efficacy). But the correct impact needs to be assessed in order to guide health responses.

I can rather easily address that. Funding is highly competitive. If you propose to develop a treatment and do cannot provide evidence that it works as such, your funding will stop. I do not really get the rest of you argument, though.

The tax is based on carbon emitted, so obviously industries producing more are taxed heavier, making it more attractive to seek out strategies to reduce carbon footprint. I.e. the differential cost is baked into the system.

! Moderator Note There have been many, many threads on this topic on this forum, with pretty much the same arguments over and over again. As typically all of the discussion ultimately followed the same pattern, including eventually getting locked, I took the freedom to pre-empt the inevitable ending and invite OP to read through the existing discussions on this forum.

They did both. And PPE manufacturers in the US and Europe have reportedly tried to talk to officials to figure out whether they should also increase production and keep stock for domestic use. They never got an answer. So the issue still is bad planning. Unless of course you now want to blame China for taking away other folk's masks... Even worse, after some countries managed to either keep low counts for some time, especially over the summer months, it escalated badly almost everywhere due to community spread. Studies have calculated that travel spread accounted for at most 10% in some countries and 1% in others. The only effect of travel restrictions is to slow spread of the disease so that one can implement countermeasures. If you fail to do the latter, community spread will dominate. I think fundamentally disease outbreaks require community effort to combat them. There is no magic bullet, one should not expect the disease to magically stay in their place and most importantly, one needs to take them seriously and implement community-wide countermeasures. You are only safe if others around you help keep you safe. There is no hero to save us, there are no villains to doom us. It is just us and how we behave. If you think that a party is more important than keeping your friends safe, for example, well than you are the risk and not a random traveler. There is a reason why the major outbreaks happened after major holidays.

Not really. We have seen that shutting down travel only has modest effects. Again, it is based on the false assumption that we can just close borders as a primary control. As mentioned, there is information that the virus might have been spreading in Europe as early as October. However, authorities in Europe did not identify these as a novel disease. I mean of course, if China not only had correctly detected the outbreak and responded by enacting immediate quarantine (the failure in reporting happened on several levels and was at least seemingly not entirely a top-down decision), then it might have been contained. But again, a) potentially early infections outside of China were not detected in the earliest phases and b) even later on once the virus was sequenced and diagnostic kits existed, many countries did not have a proper idea about their circulation. Also note that countries such as Taiwan and Vietnam who controlled the virus did it not by shutting down borders, but by enacting their pandemic plan, which included ramping up in production for PPE, aggressive contact tracing, compliance to state measures and so on. Again, the ship has sailed for clamping down early which one could blame China for (but again, due to the high rate of asymptomatic circulation, which we were not aware of for a long time, it is a bit tricky), but for everything else, including the huge death toll throughout much of the Western World, that is all on us.

Fundamentally you can target any locus you want. You basically just need the right primers (which in turn requires that you have somewhat conserved sequences that those primers can bind to) and amplify the region for sequencing (technically you can also do direct sequencing without amplification, but there is still a step requiring primers to build the library, but anyway...). Assuming you sequence a locus and find sequence variation, depending on divergence you could estimate whether the sequence belongs to a given species (even if the variant has not been identified before). However, in order to look for duplication events, usually other, more traditional methods can be more suitable. Sequencing is really more helpful when you look at SNPs or other minor sequence changes.

Yes, while the US response was particularly bad, many other industrialized countries did far worse than most probably would have assumed. In part it is that countries with experience with SARS seemed to have measures in place that they were able to mobilize. Several African countries were also doing surprisingly well, although some numbers have been questioned due to potentially poor monitoring. But as a whole, (with exceptions such as South Africa) they were doing better than hoped for.

Not to mention that in many countries which failed to address the pandemic adequately were often also late in implementing such measures or simply never did. It sounds like a situation where we tried too little too late and then gave up. Whereas others managed to implement the right measures but for some reasons folks decided not to emulate them.

Not only that, in many of these studies the goal is to identify markers that allow regional separation, for example in order to detect migration patterns. I.e. you check for specific markers that are enriched in a region and make your classification based on that. Folks often confuse that with actual genetic divergence, mostly because they start off with a certain worldview and try to collect evidence to support it, rather than trying to understand the underlying science. If one were to add more and more genetic markers, these clusters would change, and variation would be dominated by samples within Africa, which also conforms to the known origin of the human species. Edit: I should also add that often biology and lifestyle/environmental factors are indistinguishable. For example certain minorities are more likely to live in neighborhoods with high levels of environmental contaminants such as heavy metals. This exposure correlates with poor health outcomes including neurological damages. Obviously, studies that only look at skin color might make the assumption that certain folks are more prone to certain conditions, and missing out things like e.g. childhood exposure. Stressful environments and worse health support, especially as children can also cause long-term health vulnerabilities and again, certain groups are more likely to exposed to these conditions. The big issue is that only fairly recently research has tried to look at these issues comprehensively, whereas previously cohorts were simply grouped based on self-reporting ethnicity and/or skin colour without taking the other factors into account. In fact, many factors that were at one point or another speculated to be related to genetics tend to vanish once a broader approach is taken. For example, in the US black folks have a higher propensity of cardiovascular disease. However, looking at global patterns, e.g. including groups in West Africa the Caribbeans and so on, the difference between black and white folks vanishes and in some cases reverses. Finding actual alleles associated with an increased risk in a certain condition has been proven to be really difficult which, as a whole, just re-iterates the known issue that genes do not act in isolation and for the most part depend highly on development and environment to result in a certain phenotype.

Alliances are often limited and not global like pandemics. The EU often worked well with the CDC. Except this time around the CDC was crippled and we know how bad things became. Clearly not a great blueprint. Because after China locked down everyone knew what was coming and they still messed up (plus the aforementioned possibility of earlier undetected spread in Europe). And after that of course the following waves which some countries managed to control but many did not. Saying that these poor responses are entirely caused by China's initial failures is just silly.

It is the only platform to at least bring governments together to address health risks. And has been crucial to address major outbreaks and persistent (but often overlooked) pandemics. Without this platform folks likely will fall prey to the common belief that diseases always come from elsewhere and one does not need to plan for outbreaks. But obviously governments such as China or USA (or any other) might not play ball if it is to their political disadvantage. Rather obviously you won't be able to create a body that actually has power over those governments. And even if the information is not perfect, it is better than the alternatives. Even if late and botched as it was, it is unclear how long counties outside China would have taken to identify the virus. There is at least partial evidence of community spreads before they were seen as such.

They used zipcodes (to calculate neighborhood socio-economic status), insurance status as well as health factors. After adjustment the racial disparities for SES, the differences for infection likelihood vanished. It is much less likely that folks with lower SES are less culturally inclined to distance, but likely have a job which makes it difficult. Comorbidities do not seem to fall along racial lines. Even adjusted only Asians were slightly more likely to get hospitalized than white folks. The higher infection rate seems to be the driver. The study is in fact specifically addressing this question. I.e. are there groups with higher susceptibility. And the answer so far is socioeconomic status is, but not membership in a racial group per se. In a broader sense, these types of studies are important to figure out whether there are in fact biological differences, as it is not uncommon that these are overestimated when looking at racial differences. These often result in racial stereotypes that negatively impact healthcare. Common examples include how especially black folks are treated when it comes to cardiovascular or pain treatments. This does include the Canadian health system (recent examples in the news were probably more about just regular systemic racism rather than the medically misguided practices but often they are somewhat connected). As a whole it is one of the newer studies which aim to deconvolute potentially genetic/biological factors and other confounding factors. The result of this study highly suggest a dominating effect of SES over genetic ones.

Well, it seems that is the most bipartisan vote for the indictment of a president then. The issue of course being whether trying to overthrow the government is considered an important matter. As it stands it opens the door to presidents being able to threaten the other branches of the governemnt.

Technically, it is worse than that. It is not that they only share the same ideology and/or party affiliation. Some senators (i.e. jurors) are actively coordinating with the defense.

Well, I do not think that they need to start doing that. After all they had that during start of the Obama's term and they were heavily criticized, especially from the left wing democrats. I mean the Reps, too, but much of it was on the ridiculous side (mostly because Obama was so moderate, it played quite into their hands).

Nope, simply because genes just are. We can measure how they contribute to fitness of a population, but it is not a fixed measure. I.e. changing environmental conditions would favour different set of genes. I.e. one allele being beneficial under one condition may be neutral or negative in another. The rest of our argument seems to be based on biology that is entirely non-standard knowledge so you would need to explain more what you mean.