CharonY

Well, she was probably the most qualified candidate. As you know that basically means low electability.

It is worse, they want to re-write existing data and suppress scientific guidelines.

Meanwhile, the White House is suppressing CDC guidelines for safe reopenings. And some officials want to dispute the actual death toll. It is telling that the US government is now engaging in practices that they accuse other governments of conducting. For now their control is more limited, but one could easily see how it would work out if they manage to compel e.g. states to join in on the message. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/07/us/politics/trump-cdc.html https://www.axios.com/trump-coronavirus-death-toll-d8ba60a4-316b-4d1e-8595-74970c15fb34.html

In short, they identified a singular (monoclonal) antibody that binds to a conserved area in coronaviruses and found that if it binds, it interrupts the ability of the viruses to invade cells. It is at this point more a mechanical/functional study showing that presence of antibodies could at least fundamentally disrupt invasion by viruses. This gives hope to convalescent serum treatment for example. Of course it is not ensured that folks producing antibodies (they are always a mix, or polyclonal) will develop something similar. It is unlikely to influence vaccination development much I think, most target the spike protein anyway. It does increase the likelihood that immunization is feasible though (I think).

So yeah, now we have that https://apnews.com/ae1ad252bb13490db2ceffc5d17b6d92 Woohoo time to rewrite reality.

I think it is too early to tell. There could be any number of reasons including a higher circulation than hitherto detected. Direct comparisons are difficult (and perhaps only meaningful in narrow way) Belgium is also seemingly an outlier with rather high deaths relative to the population.

Well, I have been publishing papers for quite a while and as an author you sign off to all changes being made. What you are offering are conspiracy theories. Also quite funny is the following under the published paper: Feel free to contact the authors to ask them why they left things off, but please do not offer wild speculations as facts. Also in the paper version you linked (I have not read either of them fully so cannot comment on it as a whole) the authors did declare that they have initiated the study before the moratorium.

Perhaps a just a minor aspect but how the heck are life forms in hydrovents separate from all other lifeforms on Earth?

I vaguely remember that someone was looking into outcomes of folks with seasonal influenza co-infection but I just cannot remember the author. The only thing that I took away is that there was no indication that co-infections had a significant impact on outcome per se. Once the cases become severe, however complications from other infections become more problematic. That being said, I doubt that we have enough information to have definite answers- many of these studies were small in scale and quickly published (for obvious reasons) so conclusion may change once new findings pop up rather rapidly.

Would not surprise me, to be honest. Getting students to concentrate for a certain stretch of time is like shoveling water. There was a paper perhaps 10 years back that found lower cognitive scores, including IQ in kids who used internet excessively. Now thanks to cell phones it is pretty much a constant distraction. But of course that is circumstantial. Perhaps there are more studies out looking at that.

Also the ideas make no sense to me. Easing the access to higher education is fine, but paying the equivalent of a salary does not amke sense to me (outside of graduate studies where folks actually work full-time). What is the benefit of studying in Uni for as long as possible? How does it benefit the student, the Uni and the society at large? This seems to stem from a weird obsession of a metric that has a narrow range of utility. Also, before wild speculations are made, it is helpful to read some articles on the topic. One those studies, published in PNAS ( Bratsberg was author forgot year but title was something about reversal of the Flynn effect) indicate that variations happen within family, indicating environmental factors are responsible (i.e. not the rather populist assumption of dumb folks having too many kids) . It also highlights that one should not wildly extrapolate and speculate based on incomplete data.

So a mutation can result in either of these cases or, more frequently does nothing to change the disease outcome. Most of the major mutations we have seen are either silent (i.e. not changing the amino acid sequence) or were at sites that appear less crucial for the pathogenesis. What generally happens is that strains that are less effectively transmitted or are too lethal tend to become a smaller proportion of the infections. So it is possible that less lethal ones outcompete more lethal mutations and become the dominant strain. But that is selection after the mutation, of course.

I honestly think that highlighting these things will always be secondary to political concerns. After all these things listed are not new. Similar strategies have been proposed at least since the last century and always come up again after a major outbreak. Then there are few years without them and folks start winding down measures to save pennies (obviously they are a waste, nothing happened) and then something happens and folks start re-learn known lessons.

It depends all on how it is handled. If folks are self quarantined for the duration of the incubation period and tested, it would be fairly straightforward to contain. Even with a certain circulation, the measure of isolating and contact tracing can curb spread long enough to stamp out outbreaks.

I think politicization is the reason for that response. Prior to this, China has ongoing international collaborations investigating viruses in bats and other animals, for example. Even during the outbreak there were signals for collaborative research but then it seemed to kind of fell apart. Politics unfortunately trumps science on a regular basis. But the answer with regard to how to avoid such a debacle, is quite clear on many levels. More international collaboration, more monitoring, international rapid response teams, tracking/isolation/quarantine plans and so on. For the most part it is not a mystery and we can at best slow circulation of viruses and other diseases (but not the fact that outbreaks will continue to happen in the first place).

The journals do not straight up edit, but they can make suggestions during the proof stage. Many journals do little than the bare minimum (e.g. if they spot typos or inconsistencies in numbering or such), Nature has copy editors doing quite more. But the author has to sign off every suggested change.

No that is not how it generally works. Reviewers may make suggestions, or the co-authors may decide to drop it because they feel references or sections are too weak or speculative. Sometimes new data arises during review which also may lead to further editing. Nature articles tend to be more polished. However, all the edits have to be made and approved by the authors.

Ha, does dreaming about that count?

If you look at the title you will note that there are changes there too. IOW these are manuscripts at different level of editing. Moreover, the articles in PMC are generally the pre-edit author copies (many journals including Nature do not allow the author to upload the edited full-texts). Between formal acceptance after peer-review there can be final edits (e.g. reviewers may request certain changes but they are minor enough that they do not want to see it again, which might include cleaning up or changing references or adhering to rules set out by the journal) as well as the final proofs. Nature is also one of the journals which actually make quite some efforts to improve the final manuscript so they could also be lost there. In short, it is the difference between an earlier author version and the final edit. The latter is generally considered to be the "real" published version.

Basically that would not work. Adaptive responses react to specific antigen presented by a given causative agent of disease. The only possible scenario would be e.g. another coronavirus that has an antigen that is very similar to one from SARS-CoV-2. But that would be highly unlikely as a whole. Also co-infection is a bad idea, immunity (if it happens) is built during later stages of the response. Theoretically having multiple diseases is not a good situation especially if they can make things worse for the patient. I.e. you would want the immunization happen before getting the disease (which is the idea of vaccines and why vaccines cannot be used as a treatmen).

Most studies focus on COVID-19 but looking at the papers it does not appear to be common at all. The reason mostly being that in mildly symptomatic cases the person still would be positive, though one can probably not be absolutely certain which virus is the actual cause (or their relative contribution). After all symptoms for infections of lower respiratory tracts are very similar. The only other thing I can think of are infection with bacteria, which often indicates treatment with antibiotics. But at this point we are looking at more serious symptoms.

It is hard to watch that so many folks approve of Trump's flailing response. https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/coronavirus-polls/ Considering that much of what worked out was more despite the interference of the WH rather than because of it. And with regard to the consultant:

I suspect the question is aimed at respiratory disease. I believe it has been asked and answered a few times, though knowledge is of course evolving. There are handful of studies who have tested COVID-19 positive patients for e.g. influenza, other coronaviruses an so on. In one study from Wuhan the co-infection rate was about 20%. In other regions such as Italy I have seen some higher estimates but with fewer tests. The general consensus seems to be that it co-testing does not change clinical practice and is probably not terribly helpful with few exemptions.

I posted the question as you seem to make the assertion that Ukrainians should have a similar success rate in claims as Syrians. You kind of ignored that more immigrate to the EU via other means that may not open to Syrians though. So if they are accepted for immigration (which arguably is a better path than refugee status) why should they got the refugee path instead?

Sorry, exchange one Ukraine with Syria.