Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!
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@Carnage said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
Honestly, I thought it was about as bad as it turned out to be sometime in February/March. It worse than a bad flu. But not lock down everything and kill the economy worse.
Yeah, I think we saw what happened in a small part of Italy and panicked. And I definitely include myself in that "we."
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@boomzilla said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@Carnage said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
Honestly, I thought it was about as bad as it turned out to be sometime in February/March. It worse than a bad flu. But not lock down everything and kill the economy worse.
Yeah, I think we saw what happened in a small part of Italy and panicked. And I definitely include myself in that "we."
Yeah Italy looked bad. But it also looked like an outlier to me. Now, I'm not an epidemiolog so my opinion shouldn't be highly valued in these cases. But I think the epidemiologists also put themselves to shame for finding the highest rooftop and screaming wolf as loudly as they could.
It is not going to serve society when a properly dangerous pandemic comes rolling around.
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@Carnage said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@boomzilla said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@Carnage said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
Honestly, I thought it was about as bad as it turned out to be sometime in February/March. It worse than a bad flu. But not lock down everything and kill the economy worse.
Yeah, I think we saw what happened in a small part of Italy and panicked. And I definitely include myself in that "we."
Yeah Italy looked bad. But it also looked like an outlier to me. Now, I'm not an epidemiolog so my opinion shouldn't be highly valued in these cases. But I think the epidemiologists also put themselves to shame for finding the highest rooftop and screaming wolf as loudly as they could.
It is not going to serve society when a properly dangerous pandemic comes rolling around.Very much agreed.
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@Gąska said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
We're still at the stage where every few days it turns out there's been way more infections than previously thought.
Yes, and that's an argument in favor of reopening. With societal conditions being what they are, even the proverbial "person living under a rock" can't be ignorant of the disease anymore. We know about virtually all of the people who were sick, because they know the symptoms and know who to talk to.
All of these "way more infections than previously thought" are people that testing are finding had harmless cases. Every time a new bunch of them are discovered, it drives the lethality of the virus further downward. At this point, it's looking like the much-maligned folks who said "don't worry about it, it's no worse than the flu" at the start of the outbreak were right after all, and we still haven't found all of the asymptomatic people! Who knows how low the actual number will end up being once we get rigorous testing measures in place.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@Benjamin-Hall said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
And because the antibody tests are showing that lots of people have antibodies to it. So they must be getting at least some degree of immunity.
Do the antibodies work? If they do, are they being used for vaccination, and if not, why not? Honest question.
If they don't work, we don't understand immune response at all. So yes, they work.
That's... not exactly a convincing line of thought. But the other arguments are fine, so yeah, let's say from now, I'm more convinced that immunity works than that it doesn't (prevously I was 50-50 - or rather, 0-0)
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@Carnage said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
I think we had our first official cases on January 31, and the first confirmed case infected in Sweden on March 6. The first death on March 11, so we weren't that far behind. The government in Sweden is, for the most part, a pragmatic bunch. The people of Sweden is one of the most trusting of our government in the free world, so recommendations on serious matters tend to be followed.
That trust has been earned by previous governments on the whole being fairly pragmatic and stable when the chips are down so it's not entirely misplaced.Ok, fair. I'm following the situation in Sweden remotely, through friends & family, so it's difficult to get an accurate picture of what happened when. Anyway, I got the impression that the stay/work-at-home recommendations from various employers came a bit after other places in the EU introduced their more strict regulations, but maybe that wasn't the general case.
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@cvi said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@Carnage said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
I think we had our first official cases on January 31, and the first confirmed case infected in Sweden on March 6. The first death on March 11, so we weren't that far behind. The government in Sweden is, for the most part, a pragmatic bunch. The people of Sweden is one of the most trusting of our government in the free world, so recommendations on serious matters tend to be followed.
That trust has been earned by previous governments on the whole being fairly pragmatic and stable when the chips are down so it's not entirely misplaced.Ok, fair. I'm following the situation in Sweden remotely, through friends & family, so it's difficult to get an accurate picture of what happened when. Anyway, I got the impression that the stay/work-at-home recommendations from various employers came a bit after other places in the EU introduced their more strict regulations, but maybe that wasn't the general case.
I don't quite remember when they started recommending it, because I wasn't paying to close attention to what they were saying, but companies started asking employees to work from home before the government even asked for it. Not all companies, but I know if several that did.
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@boomzilla said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
the Federal Government should have taken over testing.
I thought they did, or at least production of the tests, and that the CDC tests were scarce, hideously expensive, and unreliable compared to the WHO's tests which were cheap, plentiful and relatively reliable. Or was that more WHO/Chicom propaganda?
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@HardwareGeek said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@boomzilla said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
the Federal Government should have taken over testing.
I thought they did, or at least production of the tests, and that the CDC tests were scarce, hideously expensive, and unreliable compared to the WHO's tests which were cheap, plentiful and relatively reliable. Or was that more WHO/Chicom propaganda?
Heh. Yeah, you can be sure that I pointed out that the initial Federal monopoly on response was part of the original problem.
As to the WHO tests, they were being offered to generally poor countries that had no capability to produce their own. They were not offered by the WHO to the US, contrary to several reports. I don't recall if they were any relation to the infamously poor tests that the Chicoms exported to various places.
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Hindsight is 20/20.
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@Rhywden said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
Hindsight is 20/20.
I'm pretty sure there are a lot of people who can't see that clearly, even in hindsight.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@Gąska said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
We're still at the stage where every few days it turns out there's been way more infections than previously thought.
Yes, and that's an argument in favor of reopening. With societal conditions being what they are, even the proverbial "person living under a rock" can't be ignorant of the disease anymore. We know about virtually all of the people who were sick, because they know the symptoms and know who to talk to.
All of these "way more infections than previously thought" are people that testing are finding had harmless cases. Every time a new bunch of them are discovered, it drives the lethality of the virus further downward. At this point, it's looking like the much-maligned folks who said "don't worry about it, it's no worse than the flu" at the start of the outbreak were right after all, and we still haven't found all of the asymptomatic people! Who knows how low the actual number will end up being once we get rigorous testing measures in place.
I'm in favor of careful reopening because a full lockdown is untenable and wasteful, but just because restrictions are being lifted doesn't mean that the "it's no worse than the flu" crowd is right. A bad analogy is of how a court case being settled is not an admission of guilt.
EDIT: Wait, I wad going to say something about the "hidden cases" but I completely forgot what. Need sleep...
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Why work and be productive?
House Democrats unveil new $3 trillion coronavirus relief bill
Democrats hope to vote on their latest coronavirus relief bill by Friday as Republicans downplay the need for more immediate spending.
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Just to gauge the level of failure in my communication - how many of you thought yesterday that I was advocating for a year-long total shutdown?
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If you need a new hobby:
Facebook ant colony roleplaying group grows to 1.8M members amid pandemic - UPI.com
A Facebook group in which users pretend to be an ant colony has grown to more than 1.8 million members since social distancing procedures to prevent the spread of COVID-19 were implemented in the United States.
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@Gąska said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
Just to gauge the level of failure in my communication - how many of you thought yesterday that I was advocating for a year-long total shutdown?
Wait, you weren't?
EDIT: Added link for funsies.
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@JBert 100% failure. Waiting for others...
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@lolwhat Why be compassionate and have a functioning social net?
You should add the
to your own post as well, by the way.
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@Gąska said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
Just to gauge the level of failure in my communication - how many of you thought yesterday that I was advocating for a year-long total shutdown?
I don't recall thinking that.
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@Rhywden said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@lolwhat Why be compassionate and have a functioning social net?
Spending 75% of federal budget on welfare doesn't sound like functioning...
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@Gąska said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
how many of you thought yesterday that I was advocating for a year-long total shutdown?
I didn't but I just skipped those posts anyway
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@Gąska said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@Rhywden said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@lolwhat Why be compassionate and have a functioning social net?
Spending 75% of federal budget on welfare doesn't sound like functioning...
Dude, the point is that the original statement already was Garage material. Why don't you go whine about that one?
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@Rhywden because that one didn't advocate spending 75% of federal budget on welfare.
Edit: literally one second after posting:
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@Gąska It's still Garage, dude. You guys always cry up a storm when I post something like that (because you don't agree with it) but when I point out the opposite stuff, no, then it's "Quick, shoot the messenger!" (because you agree with it).
Your post is a perfect example of that hipocrisy.
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@Rhywden protip: if you want your "take this to garage" post taken seriously, don't include garage content of your own in the same message. If you just whined without providing your own hot take, people would oblige. But you decided to paint a big red target on your back.
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@Gąska said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@Rhywden protip: if you want your "take this to garage" post taken seriously, don't include garage content of your own in the same message. If you just whined without providing your own hot take, people would oblige. But you decided to paint a big red target on your back.
Boring. Now you're just pedalling back furiously trying to justify your hipocrisy.
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@Rhywden no, I'm not. I'm being 100% hypocritical right now and I love it! It's just so easy to trigger you that sometimes I can't help myself. And your own hypocrisy doesn't help either.
Seriously. It's not that hard. "Go back to garage" is much more effective if you don't put garage content immediately before. That's all.
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@Gąska You're also obviously not asking the question why do those dastardly democrats think that a package of that ludicrous size is necessary in the first place.
Of course it's always easier to go "Yeah, they're democrates, derp!" and take the lazy way out.
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@Rhywden and you're obviously not actually concerned about keeping political flamewars contained in Garage. You hypocrite.
I am, so I won't reply to the point you're making.
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@Carnage said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
Yeah Italy looked bad. But it also looked like an outlier to me.
It wasn't an outlier at the time. It was a third or fourth larger outbreak and all of them showed rapid increase of cases. And since the outbreaks followed quite quickly, there was not enough time to judge effectiveness of measures applied in the preceding cases.
China went with very strict lock-down in the Wu-han hot-spot, while the surrounding countries that had experience with SARS and MERS, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore, went with quick testing, tracing those who might have potentially encountered it and specific quarantines. The later does seem to work, but Europe or USA had no experience with it, so general measures were applied first.
@Carnage said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
But I think the epidemiologists also put themselves to shame for finding the highest rooftop and screaming wolf as loudly as they could.
It is quite possible it was every bit as dangerous at the beginning and we certainly couldn't tell it isn't with the information back then.
I've read some time ago that a disease that spreads well in good hygienic conditions will always be less severe. The reason is that with good hygiene a lying patient can't infect anybody else, so the disease will primarily spread from the less affected people and that selects the less severe strains. This virus partially avoids that by starting to be infectious fairly early before the full symptoms develop, but I suspect the social distancing and more careful hygiene still did have that effect. So the disease might really be less severe now than it was in February.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
If they don't work, we don't understand immune response at all. So yes, they work. Perfectly? Nothing's perfect. Enough to sharply reduce severity? Almost certainly. And using them as a vaccine is...difficult.
Antibodies work. They prevent the virus from entering cells and mark it for destruction by macrophages. But
- They are not a vaccine, because they don't last. The memory cells that produce them whenever they encounter the antigen last, but you can't effectively transplant those.
- We don't have any process to mass-produce them for wide use as treatment.
Also, they are only part of the immune response, and against virii the less important one. Specific immunity is based on two kinds of lymphocytes, Tc and B, that work differently. The B-lymphocytes release large quantities of antibodies that bind to the free pathogens and coat them to limit their interaction with the body and mark them for swallowing by the non-specific phagocytes that engulf them and dissolve them. This is very efficient against bacteria, but against virii it only targets part of their lifecycle, when the virus is moving from one cell to infect another.
To address the other part, growth of the virus inside cells, the Tc-lymphocytes also produce (slightly different) antibodies, but use them as receptors to check the MHC on which all of the body's own cells present what they are currently working on. And if they detect a cell that is working on reproducing the virus, they terminate it with a dose of suitable venom.
Since the Tc-lymphocytes are more dangerous, their activation is more complex than that of B-lymphocytes, so the response takes even longer to start, which gives the virus a head start the first time you encounter it, but it is very efficient when you encounter it again. But they can't be shared. The only way is to activate them with something that looks close enough to the actual pathogen, a vaccine. But finding something that will trigger the complex activation process while not being dangerous is really difficult.
@Benjamin-Hall said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
But testing is hard. Like...really hard. Especially when the regulators have a 'one failure is too many' mentality like the FDA.
- We are looking for something that we want to give to at least 95% of people. It must be really, really safe, otherwise we might very easily do more damage than good. The ‘one failure is too many’ mentality is really founded here.
- It is really hard to judge the efficiency if we don't want to ask people to intentionally try to contract the disease to test it. We could do that if we had at least a reasonably efficient cure, but since we don't, nobody wants to risk that much.
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@Bulb said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
But finding something that will trigger the complex activation process while not being dangerous is really difficult.
This is why it took so long to get a chickenpox vaccine. There were plenty of attempts over a span of decades, but all of them either produced no immune response, or caused the chickenpox disease. Until they finally found one that didn't.
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@Bulb Yeah. That's why you can absolutely have lots of immune people yet not be able to really get a vaccine made.
I would say that in this particular case, a vaccine that worked well for younger/healthier people but was contraindicated for older or immunocompromised people would still be a huge help. Because you could vaccinate the medical personnel, cutting off a huge source of infection. But at least in the US, the FDA has large institutional biases against moving fast. Because they don't bonuses for approving good stuff, but do get slammed/penalized if things go wrong with something they approved. All the incentives are in the wrong direction for fast regulatory movement.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
All the incentives are in the wrong direction for fast regulatory movement.
Which has proven useful more than once. One of the most notable cases is the FDA dragging its feet on the approval of thalidomide long enough for its horrific side effects to become known, which is why we don't have "thalidomide babies" in the USA today.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
This is why it took so long to get a chickenpox vaccine. There were plenty of attempts over a span of decades, but all of them either produced no immune response, or caused the chickenpox disease. Until they finally found one that didn't.
The B-lymphocyte response is relatively easy to get, because dendritic cells will swallow and present almost anything they'll come across and then the B-cell only has to encounter it floating freely in the blood stream.
But the T-lymphocyte response, which is more efficient against virii, is more difficult, because the T-cells recognize antigens bound to the MHC, which means the vaccine has to either persuade some cells of the body to replicate the antigen, or trigger the detection with some trickery. The MHC with the antigen cannot be produced, because MHC is individual (this is how body rejects transplants—they have incorrect MHC).
That's why just dead virii usually don't work and they often have to resort to either weakening the virus (by damaging some of its genes while leaving the rest for the immune system to learn) or even using another, mostly harmless, virus and adding some gene from the target one to it. For smallpox the nature basically did that for us—vaccinia was a virus strain related to variola that shared enough proteins with variola to trigger immunity to both, but was otherwise not dangerous. Replicating it for other virii is, well, hard.
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@Gąska said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
Just to gauge the level of failure in my communication - how many of you thought yesterday that I was advocating for a year-long total shutdown?
I have long toyed with the idea of keeping a spreadsheet with the different positions of the various denizens, but have not yet done so, so I cannot remember what I thought you were advocating yesterday.
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@JBert said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
Facebook ant colony roleplaying group grows to 1.8M members amid pandemic - UPI.com
A Facebook group in which users pretend to be an ant colony has grown to more than 1.8 million members since social distancing procedures to prevent the spread of COVID-19 were implemented in the United States.
Aw, cute. They don't realize that Facebook is already an ant farm in the first place
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@Bulb said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
The B-lymphocytes release large quantities of antibodies that bind to the free pathogens and coat them to limit their interaction with the body and mark them for swallowing by the non-specific phagocytes that engulf them and dissolve them.
So, garbage collection...
@Bulb said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
The MHC with the antigen cannot be produced, because MHC is individual (this is how body rejects transplants—they have incorrect MHC).
...system-specific digital signatures...
@Bulb said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
And if they detect a cell that is working on reproducing the virus, they terminate it with a dose of suitable venom.
...and process killing.
Got it. The human body runs some sort of OS.
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@Zerosquare All managed by a neural net!
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@Zerosquare Only the quaternary system with 3-bit ‘bytes’ where only about 20 of the 64 values are used is a bit weird.
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@Bulb: must be for backwards compatibility with a
legacy system.
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@Bulb said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@Zerosquare Only the quaternary system with 3-bit ‘bytes’ where only about 20 of the 64 values are used is a bit weird.
But pretty rugged, going by how long it’s been in use by now, so I suppose that might be the point of the quirks?
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@Zerosquare The system is also clearly developed using the ‘sweep it under the rag’ approach to old cruft. Logic is regularly repurposed for use completely different from the original by running it and then running another on top of it to patch the results. There are several layers of such hacks on top of each other.
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@Gurth said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
But pretty rugged, going by how long it’s been in use by now, so I suppose that might be the point of the quirks?
It looks more like it's just been kicked into working condition over the millennia.
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@Bulb said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
only about 20 of the 64 values are used
All 64 possible values do have meaning, but some of them are redundant, doubtless as a form of error correction.Unless I misread your message and this was exactly what you meant to say.
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@aitap said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@Bulb said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
only about 20 of the 64 values are used
All 64 possible values do have meaning, but some of them are redundant, doubtless as a form of error correction.Unless I misread your message and this was exactly what you meant to say.
If you want to be resistant against a single error (so if ABC is a valid message, then XBC, AYC, ABZ with X≠A, Y≠B, Z≠C are not valid) I'm not sure you'd even get as far as 20.
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@PleegWat said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
I'm not sure you'd even get as far as 20.
True. But lifeforms not yet capable of discovering forward error correction had to evolve somehow, so they had to settle on most point mutations not changing the hydrophilicity of resulting amino acid too much.
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@Bulb said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
@Zerosquare The system is also clearly developed using the ‘sweep it under the rag’ approach to old cruft. Logic is regularly repurposed for use completely different from the original by running it and then running another on top of it to patch the results. There are several layers of such hacks on top of each other.
Self modifying code and overlaying data and code is often seen in demo scene hacks.
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