CharonY

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.

As a side note, in Germany it is usually expected that votes normally are along party lines, only when the party leader makes it free to vote one's conscience (as it happened recently for a same-sex marriage) are major breaks expected and/or tolerated. This is quite different to what the US used to be. However, that implies that the GOP strategy is more to act like a party in parliamentary systems with stronger party control over votes.

There are no superior or inferior genes. Just genes. They interact with each other and (indirectly) with the environment. Whether the interaction is beneficial or not is a moving target. Inbreeding is a big issue, however as they increase the likelihood of genetic defects. It is not equal among all phyla, obviously as simpler organisms and plants tend to be more resilient. And of course there are asexually propagating organisms which play by somewhat different rules. Trying to split up human in-species diversity along the lines you do makes little sense. Our highest diversity is found within Africa, which is in line with our current understanding of human migration.

Pretty much the same everywhere. Process is not faster, just the approval due to the emergency. It also means we have led data than for regular vaccines. What it did, however was focus more efforts into a single disease, which otherwise would have spread across different research questions.

I think not recommending to self-medicate with random chemicals falls more under common sense rather than medical advice.

! Moderator Note While this is speculation, it is still part of the science forums. As there is no science to be discussed, the thread is locked.

It is a matter of concentration. Very very small amounts are can be harmless, but LD50 doses (i.e. concentration at which half of all animals died) is around 90 mg/kg, when taken orally. This is for acute effects and I am not sure about long-term issues. Perhaps more importantly, there is no evidence that drinking it has any protective or curative properties on the body. I.e. it is indeed a health risk without any known benefits.

What you are looking for is called circadian rhythms. The controls are complex, it is not that temperature directly accelerates or changes the rhythm, though. It would wreak havoc with our metabolism. Rather it is thermoregulation within our body that affects circadian rhythms on the cellular level. The archetypical master regulator is light, which sends signal via the brain but it also sends signals affecting thermoregulation (i.e. core temp increases with awakeness). Changes in core temperature the results in affects in the rest of your body, basically synching it up so that your whole body is within a given cycle of the rhythm. Edit: as iNow noted, there is a temperature sensitive element to it, however it is synched up in a mostly unknown way (at least AFAIK, it is not my area of expertise) to the mostly temp insensitive core body temp rhythms. I.e. the overall cycle remains constant, at different temperatures, but the timing can be shifted.

I think the implication is that it is based on the assumptions within a given theoretical framework. I.e. we are comparing biological hypotheses with each other for the most part. And even there, a molecular question will have different competing hypotheses than organismal or ecosystem-wide ones.

Fundamentally I think it does not matter who said it, it is just an attractive way to select among alternative hypotheses without having more data. The reductionist approach allows us to test least amount of parameters first and add more if it does not conform to the experimental outcome. In principle it is also related to the concept of falsifiability in science. We generally are not able to falsify all potential alternatives, thus we try to start with a minimal framework that we can test rather than going for more complex ones, if they do not have more explanatory power. However, I am not sure whether it is really a matter of true or not, there is no formal logic (that I am aware of) that underlies it. Rather it is one of the useful rule of thumbs that you can apply in complex situations.

In addition, folks are going to die from something. Also, folks react more to things that have (seemingly) quick strategies to address, whereas as issues such as cancer and coronary heart disease require long-term changes which most are uncomfortable doing. In addition chronic respiratory disease can be linked to air quality, but we are not really doing enough to improve that either. And even then, COVID-19 in the US has overtake coronary heart disease as cause of death for a few weeks and there are still folks denying its very existence. So there is that.

Which from an external viewpoint is pretty much the same (as usually diagnostic scoring improves). That being said, most folks engage to some level of masking and in many cases practice can make it slightly less energy consuming.

Well and there are reports that Trump might have been groomed as a Russian asset since the 80s. https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-cultivating-trump-asset-40-years-says-ex-kgb-spy-2021-1

I think it is important to acknowledge that autism itself does not reverse, and may not make a lot of sense to think of it that way. Autism is associated with a number of altered functions and to various degree these can improve or decline over time. For example, increased engagement can result in vastly improved verbal skills in persons with autism. It does not mean that they do not have the underlying cause anymore, they just improved their ability to the point where the symptoms are not visible anymore. E.g. they are often prone to faster decline under unfavourable conditions. Likewise what is often described as psychopathy is not merely a lack of empathy, rather lack of empathy is one of the various symptoms. The combination of these various symptoms are then often used to characterize folks into groups such as antisocial personality disorder, dissocial personality disorder and so on. So here again the question would rather be, can the symptoms be reversed. A few symptoms can be improved. For example, folks in this spectrum of disorders often have learning deficits (including short attention span). Training seems to improve these functions. Folks with antisocial personality disorder tend to have slightly different characteristics than those using the psychopathy diagnosis scheme (e.g. more issues with working memory). But again, as a whole the conditions are not reversible.

I think that shows how broken everything is. Violent insurrection with direct threat to GOP officials should have been the last straw. Instead, even slightly critical GOP officials are backtracking on all fronts. It is scary to think that for a particular segment there appears to be impossible to have any political consequences even for extreme actions anymore. It seems to legitimize (right-wing) extremism and I am wondering what long-lasting damages that is going to do.

The only thing I would object to is that starting date. Many aspects of science, including biomedical, have been politicized for much longer. As you mentioned vaccines, abortion, birth control, GMOs and so on have all been target of politicization for far longer. The issue was always if there science clashes with something that folks strongly believe in it takes a backseat. Political parties often have built identities around those issues (or it organically formed around them, depending on where you are).