I respect your science background - but your answer made my point better then I could ever have. Not a single word you wrote had any certainly or science behind it. It is filled with maybes, minor chances and possibilities. That is not science. I am fully vaccinated but respect others rights. Once it was "proven" that as a vaccinated person I could still give the virus to someone else my view on mandates totally changed. And the ridiculous screening at the RU games is just another indicator of overreach based on politics. I could have shown a Costco card at the last game and would have gotten in. This needs to stop. Many unvaccinated people are safer to be around than me - that is the only fact that matters.
If you can't do it right, then do not do it all.
- Thread starter bac2therac
- Start date
It's all about relative risk reduction and there is some logic to those rules. When one is in line with strangers who might possibly be infected, wearing masks for all in line makes sense, especially since one can be within a foot or two of that person, which could result in a very high exposure if that person is infected and not masked. The folks sitting at tables with each other presumably know the infection status of their table mates (but not always, which can be a separate issue), so wearing a mask is much less important there, relative to each other and people at tables are typically at least 5-6 feet from any line, so the risk to folks on line from the unmasked table folks is far, far less than from the people in line. None of it is foolproof, but the relative risk assessments do make sense.
I wear N95's when I'm around people who may be vulnerable. I don't mind wearing one when I'm in close proximity to others, and Omicron is still going pretty strong here, so I don't mind it if I can help to keep others from becoming infected. And up until about 3 months ago I wore a multiple layer tight fitting cloth mask for a while when a mask was required, due to not having a more effective mask.
I also took care of my wife for ten days when she had covid in 2020 prior to vaccines being available and I wore a KN95 mask at the time, and I'm around her every day and she treats covid patients on a daily basis, always while wearing N95's.. She hasn't become infected again since her first infection in 2020, and I've managed to avoid becoming infected at all so far. She also just finished taking care of several Omicron positive relatives in their home for several days while wearing an N95 a few days ago, and she hasn't become infected, at least so far.. So I do believe that masks, proper sanitization of hands and involved surfaces, and social distancing do help.
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Problem is that Bob Garry acknowledged that it was a carbon copy of the wiv with the furin site too distinctly stuck in there in the S2 rbd for it to have evolved with no other significant mutations outside of that little doo dad. Highly unlikely it did not come from lab accident. They should not have allowed drinking slurpees in bsl lab. **** happens when you pass animal virus recurrently through human cell culture or inject into genetically modified mice.
Not that I have a problem with that kind of "gain of function" but the pros must weigh outweigh the cons in terms of the end game that you're striving for be it a universal flu vaccine or other. I don't blame the scientists for trying to steer attention away from the lab because of the conspiracy not jobs distort this kind of scientific method.
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Actually, science is filled with uncertainty, whether you like it or acknoweldge it. Fundamentally, with regard to transmissions and mitigations of those, unless we do controlled exposure studies of uninfected people being exposed to live virus in various masked/unmasked scenarios at various points and distances over time, we'll never know for sure the exact transmission rates from person to person (plus the amount of transmissible virus per infected person varies greatly) - and unfortunately from a science perspective, such experiments are simply unethical and not allowed, so we have to try to figure out what's happening from inferences.
Such experiments were done with macaques and hamsters, which showed the clear utility of masks in reducing infection, but these aren't humans so the exact extrapolations are uncertain to some degree. That's why you got an answer that was filled with hedging and uncertainty, but that's the language scientists have to use in situations like these - the people who say they are "100% certain" about such things are the ones you know are full of crap, usually.
These certain Covid loving states are beyond comical.
Wow - sorry but that is a lot of techno talk with very little substance. Let's get to the real impact of politics on Covid science. Question: After over two years of Covid why has the CDC not released any data or wont comment on these three questions: 1) What is the average age of those who have died of Covid 2) Of those who have died of Covid how many had a comorbidity. 2) What are the deaths rates for non-covid causes (heart disease, cancer etc) for the two years prior to covid compared to the two years with Covid. Any real data would be appreciated. Of course mumbo jumbo on why this basic information is not available will be met with scorn....
She probably hasn’t become infected due to having anti bodies from the first time.
It’s funny how Covid science is never settled and always evolving. Yet global warming, I mean climate change? Settled science!
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Original Research
Historically High Excess Mortality During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Switzerland, Sweden, and Spain
- Kaspar Staub, PhD*,
- Radoslaw Panczak, PhD*,
- Katarina L. Matthes, PhD,
- Joël Floris, PhD,
- Claudia Berlin, PhD,
- Christoph Junker, MD,
- Rolf Weitkunat, PhD,
- Svenn-Erik Mamelund, PhD,
- Marcel Zwahlen, PhD†,
- Julien Riou, PhD†
https://doi.org/10.7326/M21-3824
Eligible for CME Point-of-Care
Background:
Excess mortality quantifies the overall mortality impact of a pandemic. Mortality data have been accessible for many countries in recent decades, but few continuous data have been available for longer periods.Objective:
To assess the historical dimension of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 for 3 countries with reliable death count data over an uninterrupted span of more than 100 years.Design:
Observational study.Setting:
Switzerland, Sweden, and Spain, which were militarily neutral and not involved in combat during either world war and have not been affected by significant changes in their territory since the end of the 19th century.Participants:
Complete populations of these 3 countries.Measurements:
Continuous series of recorded deaths (from all causes) by month from the earliest available year (1877 for Switzerland, 1851 for Sweden, and 1908 for Spain) were jointly modeled with annual age group–specific death and total population counts using negative binomial and multinomial models, which accounted for temporal trends and seasonal variability of prepandemic years. The aim was to estimate the expected number of deaths in a pandemic year for a nonpandemic scenario and the difference in observed and expected deaths aggregated over the year.Results:
In 2020, the number of excess deaths recorded per 100 000 persons was 100 (95% credible interval [CrI], 60 to 135) for Switzerland, 75 (CrI, 40 to 105) for Sweden, and 155 (CrI, 110 to 195) for Spain. In 1918, excess mortality was 6 to 7 times higher. In all 3 countries, the peaks of monthly excess mortality in 2020 were greater than most monthly excess mortality since 1918, including many peaks due to seasonal influenza and heat waves during that period.Limitation:
Historical vital statistics might be affected by minor completeness issues before the beginning of the 20th century.Conclusion:
In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic led to the second-largest infection-related mortality disaster in Switzerland, Sweden, and Spain since the beginning of the 20th century.Primary Funding Source:
Foundation for Research in Science and the Humanities at the University of Zurich, Swiss National Science Foundation, and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious DiseasesAre you saying he is lying and covering up what he really thinks, as some conspiracy theorists have implied? Because he's one of the coauthors of the Cell paper in September 2021 that represents the perspectives of a host of top virologists, in which they clearly concluded (in great detail, including why GoF research would've been extremely unlikely to produce a SARS-CoV-2) that zoonotic origins are, by far, most likely, although they did acknowledge that a lab leak could not be ruled out, but that there was no evidence for it.
https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(21)00991-0.pdf
It is kind of sad when otherwise smart clear thinking people can never admit they were wrong and in this case most likely duped by a group of bureaucrats. Wouldn't is be refreshing to hear just one of the CDC followers after looking at the new info and obvious facts to say "wow - looks like I may have been wrong". Since we will never hear those words you can only reach one conclusion - they are not following the "science" but they are dedicated to the politics.
And the scariest conclusion is most don't even realize it - that is why we get nothing but rambling thoughts in response to simple questions.
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I have been wondering about the same exact thing.
I don't use words like cover up or conspiracy. But I do believe that benefit of the doubt is given to anything but the lab so as not to give ammunition to the nutty people out there. And I agree with fauci and any other scientists who would want to take the heat off the lab unless it was a 100% proven for obvious reasons.
I'm not sure what to make of it but these are allegedly transcribed notes obtained and reproduced from conference calls and emails in early 2020. Again they are allegedly remarks made by him but you have to admit they're pretty darn specific.
So what do you think?
From Mike Farzan (discoverer of SARS receptor): 1. The RBD didn’t look ‘engineered’ to him – as in, no human would have selected the individual mutations and cloned them into the RBD (I think we all agree) 2. Tissue culture passage can often lead to gain of basic sites – including furin cleavage sites (this is stuff they have seen with human coronaviruses) 3. He is bothered by the furin site and has a hard time explain that as an event outside the lab (though, there are possible ways in nature, but highly unlikely) 4. Instead of directed engineering, changes in the RBD and acquisition of the furin site would be highly compatible with the idea of continued passage of virus in tissue culture 5. Acquisition of the furin site would likely destabilize the virus but would make it disseminate to new tissues. So, given above, a likely explanation could be something as simple as passage SARS-live CoVs in tissue culture on human cell lines (under BSL-2) for an extended period of time, accidently creating a virus that would be primed for rapid transmission between humans via gain of furin site (from tissue culture) and adaption to human ACE2 receptor via repeated passage. …So, I think it becomes a question of how do you put all this together, whether you believe in this series of coincidences, what you know of the lab in Wuhan, how much could be in nature – accidental release or natural event? I am 70:30 or 60:40
"From Bob [Garry]: Before I left the office for the ball, I aligned nCoV with the 96% bat CoV sequenced at WIV. Except for the RBD the S proteins are essentially identical at the amino acid level – well all but the perfect insertion of 12 nucleotides that adds the furin site. S2 is over its whole length essentially identical. I really can’t think of a plausible natural scenario where you get from the bat virus or one very similar to it to nCoV where you insert exactly 4 amino acids 12 nucleotide that all have to be added at the exact same time to gain this function – that and you don’t change any other amino acid in S2? I just can’t figure out how this gets accomplished in nature. Do the alignment of the spikes at the amino acid level – its stunning. Of course, in the lab it would be easy to generate the perfect 12 base insert that you wanted. Another scenario is that the progenitor of nCoV was a bat virus with the perfect furin cleavage site generated over evolutionary times. In this scenario RaTG13 the WIV virus was generated by a perfect deletion of 12 nucleotides while essentially not changing any other S2 amino acid. Even more implausible IMO. That is the big if. You were doing gain of function research you would NOT use an existing close of SARS or MERSv. These viruses are already human pathogens. What you would do is close a bat virus th[at] had not yet emerged. Maybe then pass it in human cells for a while to lock in the RBS, then you reclone and put in the mutations you are interested – one of the first a polybasic cleavage site. "
Look at my list of predictions - I clearly acknowledged being wrong twice, but right a lot more than that. I make weather posts all the time and the forecasts I bring to the board (and usually agree with) are often quite wrong. Any good scientist should be able to admit being wrong and learn from it. On the Starbucks example, though, it makes the most sense to look at the situation through the eyes of relative risk reduction for a series of different behaviors and exposures. That's how the science works under significant uncertainty, since exposure and transmission variables include substantial uncertainty - it's certainly a bit messy and grey, not black and white and I explained why - if you don't like that, perhaps you don't really understand it.
I've seen all of those emails and I think one has to remember that they had only seen the structure says before this (and most were not coronavirus experts at the time) and between these emails and the time their paper came out a month later, presumably they learned a lot more, since that paper made a clear case for zoonotic origin and not a lab origin. I find it almost incomprehensible that a host of scientists are part of some suppression of the facts conspiracy aimed at not pissing off China or something like that, which they shouldn't have been.
I'm an Occam's Razor guy and the simplest explanation to me is that these folks learned a lot more and moved their scientific positions, as happens all the time, rather than them all being part of some conspiracy to mislead the world on SARS-CoV-2's origins. I can't know that, but it's my strong opinion. Also, Garry is not a coronavirus expert - he spent most of his career on retroviruses like HIV - it might've taken him some time to come fully up to speed on coronaviruses.
https://medicine.tulane.edu/departm...r-tips-advisory-committee-tips-mentor/faculty
I don't even think you understand half the scientific words you type, so forgive me if I generally dismiss just about everything you post on COVID. I might look at the links, but even those are mostly pulled from fringe scientists and Berenson/Rogan types who are clueless.
So i guess this means you don't have any information or data that answers those three simple questions I asked???
I do like your weather posts - but this is far far more important.
She was tested twice for Covid antibodies after she had Covid because she wanted to donate antibodies, but her antibody test was inconclusive both times. She didn't have a positive antibody test result until after she was vaccinated. Regardless, it's been 18 months since she was infected, and the current Omicron variant is much more successful than previous variants at infecting people who've had previous Covid infections and people who've been fully vaccinated. Because of that I'm sure that wearing an effective mask has been an important part of protecting her from new infection.
Just in case you didn't know, 3 is the number that comes after 2. (wink). Anyway, the total number of Covid deaths by age group in the USA is easily found with a google search as are statistics on causes of death per year in the USA. You can do your own footwork. I'm not sure how to find statistics on comorbidities in Covid deaths, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they don't exist IF hospitals, physicians, coroners, etc, are required to report them, but they may not have to, in which case there's no way to know.
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“My initial impression and that of others about the [furin cleavage site] was wrong. I changed my mind with new information/new data,” Garry wrote. “That’s how science works. No one was trying to mislead the public. What was in the Proximal Origins paper was our best analysis — it’s held up extremely well"
Its funny, when I reread the 2 papers, from Cell, & from Nature I feel that they're going out of their way to try to prove the evolutionary hypothesis.
Because it's "parsimonious". That does not mean that there's conspiracy to conceal a biological weapon. Lab leaks, errors happen all the time throughout history. They did not let us in there to get access to the earliest of cases from my understanding. I believe that the scientists handled it the right way and I would want the eyes off the lab unless implausible because they do scientifically vital work there. I don't need them getting shut down by the conspiracy nut jobs. But they also may need to be monitored a bit more closely and get their s*** together. My cousin spent years working, collaborating there in Wuhan off/on, back & forth. She was part of Baltimore's team when he won the Nobel prize for reverse transcriptase in chicken sarcoma virus.
Wow... just wow. I don't see a prediction of grind meat hoarding April 2020.
Disagree completely. I think they had zero confidence that people would make the right choice given all the facts. And they were right. It was never about healthy people. It’s about healthy people passing the virus to people who aren’t healthy enough to fight it.
Sorry numbers many virologists have refuted the claim about origins. One day we will find out exactly where it came from. For the far majority of the World’s people now believe it came from a lab induced gain of function experiment. You of all know this was going on and still is going on. Did this SarsCov2 escape by infecting an employee? There is a very good chance it did. I ‘m glad to see some sanity may be returning. Key is to protect the vulnerable and learn to live with and survive with this virus.
Your answer is exactly what im talking about
Plus Numbers defending a laughable mask when entering mask off when seated policy also says it all
It's hard to understand how (and why) certain people refuse to accept or understand this, and evidently don't give a rat's a$$ about protecting others who may be more vulnerable than themselves, even if protecting others only requires being slightly inconvenienced. I'm surprised that someone would mock or "laugh" at the above post.
like we stashed recovering patients in nursing homes...
look 2 years into this we know ALOT and we have known alot for over a years who is vulnerable. You are right, the vulnerable should be protected. That does mean enacting all kinds of silly feel good efforts that do not impact all that much but rather hurt. If you believe in the vaccine you should not be worried, should you. The fact is we were sold bad info on the vaccine. Yes it works but in the way that everyone thought it would so the vulnerable still are at great risk.
Masking children was awful...two years still...and for what, to make it seem like people were doing things, meanwhile all the elites and politicians dont follow the rules while the children, the working class and servents are forced to and the white collars sit back drinking their coffee while zooming and saying think of others.
Love Garry's quote from the Intercept article, as that is how science works - it sounds similar to what Baltimore said when he finally realized he was wrong about the uniqueness of the furin cleavage site on SARS-CoV-2 - people who aren't CV experts are going to learn things, especially in Garry's case, given how new everything was in early Feb 2020. Baltimore had no excuse for his erroneous lab leak statements over a year later, IMO.
I do agree that it's likely these scientists did discuss how best to frame the two papers to ensure people understood that the zoonotic path was by far most likely, since leaving a lot of doubt about non-natural origins would only feed the conspiracists - and they did make it clear that better controls were needed in labs like WIV. Interesting tidbit on your cousin - did she ever share anything with regard to her perspective on the Iminashi-Kari fraud case that implicated Baltimore in the late 80s at MIT?
https://theintercept.com/2022/01/12/covid-origins-fauci-redacted-emails/
I don't like debating this stuff because it never leads to anyone's opinion changing.
But...
I do also like to consider myself an Occam's Razor kind of guy. And to me it seems like such a more simple explanation that this thing originated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology than a zoonotic origin or whatever.
But also unlike most I'm very open to having my opinions changed on these issues and do like reading both sides (when they are actually speaking intelligently and not just name calling).
Not me - as I said about ending the need for masks at RU soon. I also agree with Wen almost completely. Below is what I wrote elsewhere on the school masking question, given where we are in transitioning from pandemic to endemic COVID, which will largely become a risk to just the few unvaccinated and uninfected people left.
At some point - and I think 3/7 is likely a good point - omicron cases will likely be much lower, as well as hospitalizations, so the risks to the health care system becomes very low (hosp are already much lower), plus parents will have had months to get their children vaccinated and every adult in the schools will have had months to get vaccinated and boosted, so those that choose that path will all be very well protected against severe COVID and I'm ok with dropping the mask requirements in schools and elsewhere and I think the CDC will lkely come out in favor of that in the next few weeks.
The virus is very likely going to remain endemic with some relatively low level of infections continuing to circulate forever, possibly, and I'm not willing to continue living restricted lives with masks forever. At some point, I'm done with worrying about the unvaccinated, especially since the vast majority of them have likely already been infected with omicron. Also, the risks of infection to those under 5 from omicron are no worse than for the flu and we weren't wearing masks for the flu. If things change markedly in the future (new variant?), of course we'll need to then reassess.
Tangentially
David was not a hands-on PI. He was [more of a] ‘come and talk to me about it when you have your final data and, you know, when it is almost ready for publication and we’ll talk about it’. [However] He was always open for if you were ever having serious problems or trying to figure it out. And of course, a half hour with him would be like talking a week with somebody else. He was so smart. He is really just so bright.”
gee some of us said this a year ago, we never needed to mask our children in schools
i find it fascinating that Wen and now some Dem politicians are touting natural immunity, i remember it was a conspiracy theory when Makarty and Rand Paul talked about. Imagine having to use the word conspiracy theory for everything you do not agree with
anyhow Numbers...so alot of the commentary on twitter are giving pushbacks about masks and restrictions being lifted. Do you see a problem with a subset of people refusing to go back to normal...I do
I understand your perspective, but disagree. I find it much easier to believe that zoonotic transmission is the source for the jump to humans, as has been the case for every other human virus in all of history, than to believe that WIV scientists have covered up years of work on a virus like SARS-CoV-2 (there's no evidence they've had such a virus in their possession) and then somehow accidentally released it to the world. In the risk assessment world, it's not considered a credible risk to assume two very low probability events, together, were responsible for a bad outcome.
We did then, we don't now - the virus and situation changed completely since then...
Europe said otherwise for the most part
and also i just have to roll my eyes at your flu comment given we have been saying that for a year too
and also i just have to roll my eyes at your flu comment given we have been saying that for a year too
As expected you go after me by calling me lazy in order to justify why the CDC is not publishing this basic information. Googling the internet? Oh yea - after all if it is on the internet it must be true.
So in conclusion, you think that after two full years of the most highly publicized pandemic in our lifetime the supposed gold standard for disease control can't publish this basic information. Could it be possible that the info is available but publishing it would contradict every policy they have forced on the country???
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