CharonY

With regard to COVID-19, from epidemiological evidence some researchers think that high susceptibility of the elderly is not necessarily immune-driven. One reason is that children are seemingly not very susceptible to the disease and a second one is that among the elderly comorbidities (e.g.diabetes, respiratory/cardiosvascular issues etc.) seem to be more predictive. Again, this is all preliminary, but it appears that folks with existing health issues have a much higher propensity (estimates go up to ten-fold) to end up in critical condition or dying. With regard to spermidine, as with all supplements research is difficult and can result in conflicting results. I am a bit careful with interpretation as folks (which sometimes includes researchers) tend to overhype effects a bit. There is active discussion whether it can exert anti-aging effects on various levels. However, I am only aware of one clinical trial actually testing potential benefits, which was supposed to start last year (i.e. it is still ongoing and no data is available yet) and it is also only a relatively short intervention (12 months). So at this point is not clear how much info one can gleam from it.

Depending on discipline scientists are often slightly less religious than the average, with biologists often at the lower end of scale, it still makes a sizeable proportion of religious folks in science. But unless they are in press for some reasons you'll unlikely to know as Strange said. Francis Collins is another prominent example.

All of them? 😜

That is actually a pretty complex question, which level of assignment are we talking about? From your outline it does seem that you may want to discuss the topic in more general issues which could be easy to talk about on a high level, though there are a lot of unknowns to any specific system under investigation. For example, in many systems the relative contribution of a specific source (e.g. agriculture) to all other sources in a specific area may not be fully investigated, likewise the role of nutrient ratios (especially P) can have an important impact. There is the role of inorganic vs organic nitrogen and so on. And these are only some of the issues I picked up from various talks by aquatic people- it is really outside of my expertise. In other words, it really depends on the expectation how deep you need to go (e.g. high school vs 100-level uni vs advanced vs grad courses).

As a whole, washing hands has been shown to be one of the most effective measures of disease prevention. In addition, I do not thing that focusing on cigarettes is the most relevant metric (aside from preventing all the health effects of smoking itself). More commonly, everyone touches ones own face. Oberservational studies have shown that folks touch their faces roughly every 3-4 minutes, which can result in direct transmissions from their hands.

Could you provide details in which contexts that happens? I am somewhat aware that in regular influenza seasons clinicians often do not test for viral co-infection, which can be problematic as they actually do occur. However, it is not (or should not be) used as an exclusionary criterion. If they do it right now, I could only imagine that it is due to lack of a reliable test for the detection of SARS-CoV-2 but not sure why else it would happen. As a side note, several European countries have ramped up testing. So far over 7000 in UK, ~900 France. However, US is definitely lagging behind. Edit: there is a joint report by the WHO, which I finally got to read (together with some interviews and other articles). There is little fundamentally new, mostly a validation of what has been reported earlier, but with better validation: - Transmission are likely droplet based (little evidence of other means as potential drivers, but still under investigation) and most are family-driven (ca. 80%) - So far there is no evidence that folks are immune against it - Most infections of health care workers happened in the early stages, once defenses were deployed. In addition, many happened outside of the workplace (i.e. contracted at home from family members). - Children are barely affected (2.4% of all cases) -Conversely over 60 year-olds are at high risk with significant fatality risk, especially if comorbidities exist. - Many symptoms as in cold are found, most commonly dry cough and fever; running nose is not a symptom, however There is also a closer look at the responses and as a whole there is for example no evidence for internet-fueled speculation of mass-fudged numbers. Another, perhaps rather obvious observation was that the crude death rate was much higher at the beginning of the outbreak. This is mostly because mostly very sick folks were tested and tests had to be ramped up to get a better view on the actual ratio between infections and fatalities. We will see similar things pan out in countries with low test rates. This also contributes to the rather low fatality rates in South Korea (over 66k tested; 4,335 positive cases, 28 deaths). Some accessory information appear to suggest that despite being heavily overworked in many areas, most folks received good care (there is not information, however, regarding folks that may not have received the needed care due to illnesses not related to coronavirus). Looking at crude fatality rates, early cases had a higher crude fatality rate which declined over time. This has been discussed both in terms of increased detection (which reduces fatality ratios) as well as better handling of care. Various reports indicate massive efforts to track contacts in China combined with high-efficiency testing and same-day reporting. These efforts are apparently less pronounced in other countries so far, which could (in theory) allow broader spread before containment.

Whoops, somehow missed that. Must be getting old(er).

Well Buttigieg apparently just dropped out.

Mostly because often these events have only a short term impact. The release of the FBI letter just before the election hurt Hillary Clinton, as they were close to the election. But folks just tend to remember the last thing that circulated through the media (impeachment is ancient history by now). So unless there is a story connecting whatever recent thing is happening directly to Trump, I kinda doubt that it will have a huge impact. As you said, it would depend on the economy at the time of the election. It should also be added that the way Trump and his followers operate, there are no bad stories (because obviously they are are all fake).

I think you may overestimate the collective memory of folks.

A big issue with those polls is that without further analyses they are not really predictive of the election outcome due to the weird system. Really only a small subset of the population is going to determine the next president.

I may be wrong but I am under the impression that rehabilitation is a core element of virtual all criminal justice systems, even when created from different cultural backgrounds (including religious ones). However, public perception can change and with them, support for certain laws. While it could be considered cultural, I also think that these structural changes have a much shorter turnover. For example introduction of zero-tolerance policing is a structural change in criminal justice and while it arguably has developed from a certain cultural background (and also has a stunning impact on society). At the same time, it is a modern development and once in place, other countries (e.g. UK under Cameron) were looking at it as a model. I.e. this changes can happen due to specific events (say, spikes in crime statistics) rather than some deeply seated cultural contexts (though the latter may influence likelihood). I suspect I need to think about it a bit longer to give my thoughts some more coherence.

Is it sad that I cannot tell whether that is a joke or not...?

I have read the PNAS paper which is interesting, but by golly, I do dislike the blurbs some people come up with (and I was so sure that it would happen like this). Anaerobic multicellular life forms have been described earlier. As a matter of fact, about ten years ago, where it also went through the news and you can find frigging Wiki pages on them. The authors of the papers write: How hard can it be to write a blurb after reading at least a few sentences of the intro to get the context right? I should also add that this is a bit of a pet peeve of mine and may not be considered as critical as others. Many students and even young scientists have the tendency to only dig up and cite recent papers and as a consequence kind of re-invent the wheel multiple times. This creates a kind of community-based amnesia that sometimes publishes rather well known phenomena as something surprising or new. While it is rarely happening in the leading journals in the respective fields, I (subjectively) seem to find an increasing number of them in more multi-disciplinary areas, which I kind eminently disappointing.... (OK end of rant, I promise). This part is a bit trickier as laypersons often conflate, aerobic respiration, anaerobic respiration, breathing and similar terms. Part of it is because sometimes scientists like to use simple terms to make things more easy to understand and it is understandable that most folks probably do not learn much about anaerobic respiration (i.e. the use of electron donors other than oxygen). However, considering that the authors specifically mentioned aerobic respiration and made few assumption regarding how the organism obtains energy I would have welcomed it if the author of the blurb would have either stuck to the fact that without functional mitchondria (actually they specifically lack mitochondrial DNA; membrane structure remnants were still observed) they are unable to use oxygen and left the breathing part out, or used the space to explain the context in another one or two sentences or so. But I acknowledge that this is a minor issue.

Just wanted to point out that I got the data wrong. The above numbers are for the province of Hubei, not city of Wuhan. For Wuhan currently there are only 33530 active cases (47441 cumulative).

And also connected to the thread, lung damages and other comorbidities seem to be strongly connected with poor COVID-19 infection outcomes.

Yeah I have seen various articles regarding safety of shipment from China. Evidently that has folks concerned. Meanwhile, I tell students not to lick door knobs.

! Moderator Note Moved to speculations. Please take some time to familiarize yourself with the rules in the speculations forum. As a whole, we are a discussion forum here so threads should have something that allow for discussion. Just posting vague sentences and opinions would be considered soap boxing and are more appropriate for blogs or similar outlets.

Just to add numbers: The city of Wuhan had the highest number of active cases on 02-18 with 50.6k active cases and last numbers indicate 43.3k. Cumulatively they are at 64.7k cases.

Nope, it is a typical droplet infection with similar risks. Utensils are only a higher risk if they have been relatively freshly sneezed upon. It is unclear how high the risk for indirect exposure is, but is not considered the main route. Shipped products have even lower risk. Based on what is known based on SARS-CoV there is no real indication that dried droplets shipped over days post any risk. In order to further minimize risks I probably would not recommend putting random things into your mouth, though.

Well, of course. The study was modeling spread in Wuhan using numbers from Wuhan... There are also a few summary reports (e.g. Wu and McGoogan, Jama 2020): Based on Feb 11 data on the Chinese cohort: No deaths in those 9 or younger and no deaths among mild and severe cases. For a couple of days now the spread in China seems to be slowing; there are still new infections, but the number of cases reported as recovered is increasing, resulting in a net decrease of ongoing cases. It requires further monitoring, but if that trend continues the peak in Wuhan might be slightly lower than anticipated. On the other hand the question is how well containment will work outside of China. So far cases are still relatively low (compared to within China) but the occurrence of unsuspected cases has created worries about further spread.

Well that is then not something you can compare with the influenza data then. There hospitalization is only indicated in severe cases, which roughly corresponds to the ~20% of the case of covid-2019. It is not that they need to be taken care of, it is more that they are monitored to limit spread, which is not the case with influenza. As such it is not an apple to apple comparison. Or was your point not regarding the severity of the disease but regarding the personnel and medical effort put in place in order to contain them? In that case yes, folks are putting more effort into containing the disease than for flu.

Drinkable alcohol is usually not high enough for efficient disinfection (at least to common standards). Ideally you want 70-80%. However, it is not clear to me what you have as fuel. If it is e.g. methanol, you should not use it, due to its toxicity.

I just came across a paper modeling infection numbers in Wuhan under a number of assumption regarding the effectiveness of control measures. They predict that assuming effective intervention, the peak could be reached by late February (with up to 84k cases). Or conversely, if a peak is not observed at that point it could indicate insufficient control to reduce the effective reproductive number. (Wang et al. Cell Discovery 6:10 2020)

As a side note, from an co-evolutionary standpoint, diseases that have stuck around for a longer time in a population tend to become less virulent over time, due to an ongoing interplay between host and pathogen.