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Post by Dean Wormer on May 28, 2021 20:37:05 GMT -5
When this thread started I considered shutting it down immediately but decided to see if you could actually discuss the issue and if it would cool off the COVID talk infecting every other thread. It seemed to succeed on both of those counts as it has remained fairly civil and not spilled over into other threads.
That said, this thread has started getting a bit more obviously partisan in the last week. Watch what you are doing and I'll allow it the thread to continue. You know what will happen if you donb't.
And that does not mean it's OK to wade into other waters ripe for political partisanship.
Carry on.
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Post by hcpride on May 29, 2021 6:15:58 GMT -5
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Post by HC92 on May 29, 2021 6:19:16 GMT -5
I just thought it was a funny quip. I stopped at an outdoor farm stand to buy a plant yesterday, saw the couple of people there were wearing masks so I put mine on without thinking about it. I did the same thing at self service gas stations before being vaccinated. I guess it's the "When in Rome do as the Romans do" approach. OK, footnote this one. Within five years there will be a study that shows the deleterious effects of inhaled microfibers from mask wearing. Make sure you spell my name right and when I am mentioned be sure that it is said that I went to "Holy Cross", not "College of the Holy Cross, located in Worchester, Massachusetts." Thank you Anecdotal only, but my 12 year old developed some serious asthma-like symptoms over the last year after having none previously. They lasted for months. Now that he is not wearing a mask as much, particularly while playing sports, his breathing seems to have returned to normal. Hopefully he doesn’t have any long term issues. He was tested many times for Covid throughout the doctors’ efforts to figure out what was causing his problems and tested negative every time. Can’t prove it was the mask wearing and whatever fibers he was inhaling from them but it has always been a theory that seemed to fit the facts.
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Post by HC92 on May 29, 2021 6:48:14 GMT -5
I have consciously avoided this thread for the most part but it’s really odd and sad that people can’t just apply some common sense about the role of China and its lab here. I really struggle to understand the pains people go to in an effort to avoid admitting the obvious, i.e. that the virus started at the place where they’re investigating these viruses. Smart people here and in the media have spent so much time and energy digging around for any evidence to the contrary like lawyers seeking to create reasonable doubt in a criminal case where it’s pretty apparent that their client did the bad thing in question. China is not your client. Proof beyond a reasonable doubt is not the standard. China’s government does a lot of bad things and would love to destroy the US. That doesn’t mean they released the virus on purpose but they sure as hell released the virus on the world and killed millions of people and harmed innumerable others.
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Post by Pakachoag Phreek on May 29, 2021 7:07:48 GMT -5
A s of today, for Hubei province, the total number of COVID cases is 68,159, with 4,512 COVID-related deaths. Wuhan is located in Hubei. Hubei has a population of about 60 million. The most recent positive case for Hubei was one case on May 18th.
For all of mainland China, as of today, 91,061 total cases and 4,636 deaths. Case fatality rate of 5 percent.
The case count for all of China is less than the case count for Essex County Massachusetts. (Essex County's population is 1/13th of Hubei's, and Hubei has 4 percent of China's total population.)
The Massachusetts county with the highest number of confirmed and probable COVID deaths is Middlesex County with 3,755.
For the seven days ending May 19, HC had one positive case ( a student). So what explains this truly enormous disparity?
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Post by sader1970 on May 29, 2021 7:52:08 GMT -5
Using a technical phrase: “garbage in; garbage out.”
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Post by efg72 on May 29, 2021 8:04:42 GMT -5
What Breakthrough Infections Can Tell Us
Post-vaccination infections reveal how effective vaccines are—and which variants are sneaking past our defenses.
KATHERINE J. WU MAY 27, 2021 The Atlantic
A nurse inserts a swab into a person's nose to test them for a virus.
LISA MAREE WILLIAMS / GETTY
With 165 million people and counting inoculated in the United States, vaccines have, at long last, tamped the pandemic’s blaze down to a relative smolder in this part of the world. But the protection that vaccines offer is more like a coat of flame retardant than an impenetrable firewall. SARS-CoV-2 can, very rarely, still set up shop in people who are more than two weeks out from their last COVID-19 shot.
These rare breakthroughs, as I’ve written before, are no cause for alarm. For starters, they’re fundamentally different from the infections we dealt with during the pre-mass-vaccination era. The people who experience them are getting less sick, for shorter periods of time; they are harboring less of the coronavirus, and spreading fewer particles to others. Breakthroughs are also expected, even unextraordinary. They will be with us for as long as the coronavirus is—and experts are now grappling with questions about when and how often these cases should be tracked.
Breakthroughs can offer a unique wellspring of data. Ferreting them out will help researchers confirm the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines, detect coronavirus variants that could evade our immune defenses, and estimate when we might need our next round of shots—if we do at all. “The more complete and precise data we have about the pathogen and how it spreads through the community, the better off we’re always going to be,” Jay Varma, the senior adviser for public health in the New York City mayor’s office, told me.
But testing too often can sometimes cause as much damage as testing too little. The nation has yet to settle into its late-pandemic testing patterns, and decide which types of breakthroughs warrant the most attention. On May 1, after weeks of reporting all post-vaccination infections, regardless of whether they were linked to symptoms, the CDC narrowed its focus to cases involving hospitalization or death—a move that prioritizes investigations of “cases that have the most public-health significance,” Tom Clark, who leads the agency’s vaccine-evaluation unit, told me.
The decision sparked controversy. Although hospitalization and death are among the most serious consequences of a coronavirus infection—and reasonable priorities for a public-health system with limited resources—the agency’s decision may have been premature, experts told me. Most of the world remains unvaccinated, and will for a while yet; our knowledge of SARS-CoV-2 and its capacity to shapeshift is still growing by the day. One of the best hopes for staying ahead of the pathogen is to watch it closely, in its many iterations, across a diverse set of hosts. Stopping a small fire from spreading is far easier than erasing the damage a conflagration has left—but we’re still figuring out how many stray sparks we’ll need to track.
This early in our relationship with SARS-CoV-2, the perks of testing for breakthrough cases are clear.
The trio of authorized vaccines in the United States, made by Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson, proved spectacular at staving off symptomatic cases of COVID-19, especially in its severest forms, during clinical trials. In the real world, the protective punch of immunizations can take a slight dip, particularly in people who weren’t well represented in the vaccine makers’ studies. Certain people have naturally different susceptibility to infection, in the same way that certain types of bark catch fire more easily. The first round of vaccine vetting also didn’t formally look into the shots’ potential to curb asymptomatic infections, or transmission—data that are now being gathered in real time.
It’s because of breakthroughs—and how few of them we’re finding—that we know that the vaccines are performing well in a broad range of people, knocking back both disease and infection, even as the number of coronavirus variants carrying antibody-dodging mutations continues to rise. By the end of April, when more than 100 million Americans had finished their shots, the CDC had received documentation of 10,262 post-vaccination infections of all severities, according to a report published this week. (That’s a definite undercount of the true number, but breakthroughs are still a tiny fraction of the millions of SARS-CoV-2 infections that have been reported to the agency since the vaccine rollout began.) Breakthroughs could also eventually clue researchers in to how well the vaccines thwart very rare or late-appearing consequences of infection, including long COVID. And the future of COVID-19 booster shots hinges on carefully archiving breakthroughs. Clusters of these post-vaccination infections compelled public-health officials to alter the dosing schedules for measles and chicken-pox vaccines, for example.
A subset of the test samples collected from breakthrough cases can also be sequenced, as part of the search for unusual mutations in a pathogen’s genome. Genetic surveillance has, for months, been the pandemic’s bellwether for variants; more than 1.6 million SARS-CoV-2 genomes from around the world have been cataloged in an ever-growing database. Of those 10,000 breakthrough cases, 555—roughly 5 percent—came with sequencing data. Although that’s not a highly representative sample, dozens of those sequences turned up as coronavirus variants that can bypass certain immune defenders.
Across the country, the news on variants and vaccines seems mixed, experts told me. One recent study, out of Washington State, found that variants—including several known to stump certain antibodies in the lab—were dominating sequenced breakthroughs. But in Minnesota, post-vaccination infections “just reflect what’s circulating in the community,” Stephanie Meyer, the COVID-19 Epidemiology and Data Unit Supervisor at the Minnesota Department of Health, told me.
If a variant were to consistently pop up among the vaccinated, researchers would need to understand why. A new version of the virus might be more efficient at infecting people, or have a new way of eluding the immune system. To tease out those possibilities, researchers need data, the more comprehensive, the better. “Asymptomatic, mild symptoms, hospitalized, passed away—all that information is important,” says Ryan McNamara, a virologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he and his colleagues are sequencing samples from breakthrough cases across the spectrum of severity. “If you’re asking what variant is driving worse clinical outcomes, you need both ends of the data,” he told me.
Many public-health laboratories at the state and local level have been diligently tracking breakthroughs of all kinds for months, and are unsure of whether to mirror the CDC’s shifting priorities. “Previously, labs were sequencing all the breakthrough cases we could get our hands on,” Kelly Wroblewski, the director of infectious disease at the Association of Public Health Laboratories (APHL), told me. “Now states are scrambling, trying to sort it out.” Some states, such as Illinois and Tennessee, quickly followed the CDC’s lead. Others are hesitant. For now, “we’re not changing what we’ll be sequencing,” Myra Kunas, the director of Minnesota’s state public-health laboratory, told me.
Some of the same vaccine attributes that make breakthroughs rare also make them difficult to unearth and sequence. When sparks of virus do take hold in a vaccinated person, their fire still seems to burn extremely low—though infected, these people simply don’t carry much virus. That’s great news from a clinical standpoint, but not for someone hoping to identify a virus variant. Proper sequencing requires rounds of shredding and scanning pieces of the coronavirus’s genome, then cobbling them back together into a readable format. Sometimes, the samples from vaccinated people are barely enough to prompt a positive from a test, let alone yield a decent sequence.
Other barriers stand in the way of comprehensive sequencing. Antigen tests can catch breakthrough infections, but aren’t usually compatible with sequencing. And many of the labs that process coronavirus tests don’t have sequencing infrastructure, or enough storage to keep hundreds of samples on standby. In many parts of the country, researchers are having trouble tying vaccination records to test results, making it difficult to prioritize specimens for further genetic analysis. Sequencing only 5 percent of breakthroughs is low, experts told me. Minnesota’s lab, for instance, has been able to sequence about a fifth of its 2,500 or so breakthrough specimens. But processing all post-vaccination infections in this way isn’t a reasonable expectation.
Fervor for testing has also waned nationwide since the vaccine rollout began. Most vaccinated people don’t need to regularly seek out tests, especially if they’re not feeling sick. The CDC has loosened guidelines about quarantine and associated testing for fully vaccinated people, even after known exposures, and has also recommended that the immunized be “exempted from routine screening testing programs, if feasible.” In recent weeks, several college and professional sports organizations that had for months implemented routine testing for athletes and staffers announced that they were cutting back on screening for the immunized.
Programs like these might have otherwise revealed some breakthroughs. But hunting for these cases has other drawbacks. Earlier this month, the New York Yankees, a team that continued to regularly test its fully vaccinated personnel, recently reported nine positive tests—most connected to asymptomatic cases. Many experts framed the detection of mostly symptomless infections as proof that the shots were doing their job, but worried about rote reliance on testing as a security blanket, and wondered about the possibility of false positives. Vaccinated people are so unlikely to catch the virus that administering a bunch of tests wastes resources and increases the likelihood for errors, says Omai Garner, a clinical microbiologist at UCLA Health. Chasing constant reassurance about infections after vaccination could also send the wrong message, Saskia Popescu, an infection-prevention expert at George Mason University, told me. “If we’re telling people they can be unmasked and we’re still [frequently] testing them, what’s the signal we’re sending?”
Vaccinated people in high-risk settings, such as health-care workers and long-term-care-facility residents, might have more reason to test going forward, especially in areas where caseloads are high. Collecting data from these populations will lend itself to studies of real-world vaccine effectiveness—an endeavor the CDC is still engaged in. But “there’s no recommendation that you get tested randomly” if you’re vaccinated, says Kristen Ehresmann, the director of infectious-disease epidemiology, prevention, and control at Minnesota’s Department of Health.
This creates a strange bind for public-health officials who depend on the data that testing programs yield. As collective immunity around the nation builds, finding its weak spots is becoming harder. “We’re running into this potential of losing our pipeline for studying variants in the population,” Wroblewski, of APHL, told me.
The CDC’s revised guidelines on monitoring post-vaccination infections could, in some ways, be seen as pragmatic. More severe sickness is relatively straightforward to tabulate, and hospitalizations and deaths lend themselves to a more comprehensive census. (One big caveat is that the agency is including in its counts cases of hospitalization or death that weren’t necessarily caused by COVID-19, but simply involved a positive post-vaccination test.)
“With viruses, and with any infectious disease, there’s no end to how much work you can do,” Robin Patel, the director of the Infectious Diseases Research Laboratory at Mayo Clinic, told me. “You have to stop somewhere.”
The agency’s decision to shunt attention away from quieter breakthroughs could also help normalize mild or silent coronavirus infections—ones that have been effectively tamed by our suite of lifesaving shots—as a typical experience in the era of COVID-19 vaccines. Though the pandemic will eventually be declared over, SARS-CoV-2 is not exiting the human population anytime soon. Periodic liaisons with the virus will remain a part of everyday life; they might even remind our dormant immune cells to stay on guard.
In Minnesota, Meyer and Ehresmann, of the state’s health department, are continuing to collect data on breakthroughs and variants “at perhaps a more detailed level than what CDC is asking for,” Ehresmann told me. That’ll be the case, she added, “as long as that information is helping us in our decision making.” There’s no clear milestone for their team to meet—the virus, if anything, has proved unpredictable—but maybe they’ll change their criteria once caseloads are lower, and more information on vaccine effectiveness is available.
I asked Meyer when she thinks her job will get easier. She laughed. “If you figure that out,” she said, “can you let us know?”
A total moratorium on SARS-CoV-2 diagnostics isn’t in the cards. Pandemic or no, “we will always have to test for this virus,” Garner, of UCLA Health, told me. But “it is not sustainable to track and trace the way we have for over a year now,” Meyer said. Eventually, the nation will hit upon a more sustainable approach to testing that both helps individuals in clinical settings and serves public-health objectives en masse. The coronavirus will become, perhaps, another seasonal respiratory pathogen that flares up each winter, joining the rotating cast of usual suspects. Surveillance of the virus, in its many iterations, will be modeled on what’s done for the flu, with labs regularly soliciting specimens from around the nation and sequencing them. We will approach a reality in which our relationship with the virus settles into a tense but sustainable truce, in which small fires flare up every once in a while. We’ll be able to see many of them coming, because we’ll know where to look.
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Post by HC92 on May 29, 2021 8:07:53 GMT -5
A s of today, for Hubei province, the total number of COVID cases is 68,159, with 4,512 COVID-related deaths. Wuhan is located in Hubei. Hubei has a population of about 60 million. The most recent positive case for Hubei was one case on May 18th. For all of mainland China, as of today, 91,061 total cases and 4,636 deaths. Case fatality rate of 5 percent. The case count for all of China is less than the case count for Essex County Massachusetts. (Essex County's population is 1/13th of Hubei's, and Hubei has 4 percent of China's total population.) The Massachusetts county with the highest number of confirmed and probable COVID deaths is Middlesex County with 3,755. For the seven days ending May 19, HC had one positive case ( a student). So what explains this truly enormous disparity? China lies. About everything. Not complicated.
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Post by hcpride on May 29, 2021 8:31:31 GMT -5
A s of today, for Hubei province, the total number of COVID cases is 68,159, with 4,512 COVID-related deaths. Wuhan is located in Hubei. Hubei has a population of about 60 million. The most recent positive case for Hubei was one case on May 18th. For all of mainland China, as of today, 91,061 total cases and 4,636 deaths. Case fatality rate of 5 percent. The case count for all of China is less than the case count for Essex County Massachusetts. (Essex County's population is 1/13th of Hubei's, and Hubei has 4 percent of China's total population.) The Massachusetts county with the highest number of confirmed and probable COVID deaths is Middlesex County with 3,755. For the seven days ending May 19, HC had one positive case ( a student). So what explains this truly enormous disparity? China lies. About everything. Not complicated. I'm assuming some folks (including Dr. Fauci?) are shocked that our intelligence services have determined the Chinese Government's Bio Safety Level 4 Wuhan Institute of Virology has been a home for extensive Chinese Army research and experimentation since the day it opened in 2017. (WAPO reported that yesterday). Others, of course, always assumed Chinese bioweapons research would take place at the only Chinese Level 4 state lab specializing in viruses - and yawn at disclosures like that. And the idea that 'gain of function' research on viruses might be associated with that sort of thing is similarly unsurprising. (Which, of course, is why Senator Cotton offered the possibility over a year ago that the accidentally released virus - if it is an accidentally released virus as opposed to a naturally emerging one - might be associated with bioweapons research.)
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Post by Pakachoag Phreek on May 29, 2021 9:02:47 GMT -5
The virus genome that the Wuhan lab gave Fauci on January 11, 2020, the baseline or reference variant for this virus, did not have base-pairs from several virus variants that were subsequently identified later in 2020 in Europe. However, these base-pairs were present in the genome sequenced from the virus that infected the four-year old boy in Milan in the middle of November 2019. If these particular variant base-pairs were present in Wuhan in December 2019, they would have been included in the genome given to Fauci in January, 2020. I suppose it’s possible, but unlikely, that multiple variants were circulating in Wuhan simultaneously in Dec 2019, but the lab only sequenced the virus genomes of those who were seriously ill. It’s a safe assumption that the Wuhan lab sequenced more than one genome at that time, and the genomes were identical, or nearly so. The baseline genome given to Fauci was and remains the foundation of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. There were no other identified and confirmed COVID cases outside of China at that point. ------------------------- So from this, I have four basic scenarios (several permutations omitted): !. Originated in China, but was initially rather benign and went undetected. Spread elsewhere, e.g., Italy, in a benign form, and was undetected. Evolved into a more virulent form in China, and spread elsewhere. 1. B. Originated in China, initially benign and spread elsewhere. Evolved into a more virulent form elsewhere, and returned to China in a more virulent form, which led to the December outbreak in Wuhan. 2. Originated in China, evolved into a more virulent form in China, and then spread elsewhere as a virulent form. 3. Originated elsewhere in Asia, e.g., Vietnam, spread to China and elsewhere, was undetected, and concurrently evolved into a more virulent form in China and elsewhere; i.e., multiple variants arising in widely separate areas over a short period. ________________________________ I would be truly shocked if the Chinese military did not have a close relationship with the Wuhan lab. After all, it was a former scientist who worked on a vaccine for anthrax at a military biological laboratory in the United States (Fort Detrick) who took it upon himself to mail anthrax after 9/11. www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/01/06/anthrax.ivins/The CDC shut down a Level 4 lab Fort Detrick in 2019 because of unsafe practices. www.nytimes.com/2019/08/05/health/germs-fort-detrick-biohazard.htmlThat said, knowledgeable scientists all state it is impossible to weaponize a virus like COVID, in the sense of bio-manufacturing the virus.* And Sen. Cotton says if there was a release of the virus from the Wuhan lab, it was accidental. The Chinese themselves, are remarkably less than successful in creating a COVID vaccine, and China is accused of trying to steal Moderna's and Pfizer's secrets. One doesn't create bio-weapons without first having a defense against such * There is a synthetic biology company in Boston called Ginkgo Bioworks, trading symbol DNA, that might have the technology to create a coronavirus from scratch. However, I don't know whether the technology is adaptable to viruses, www.forbes.com/sites/johncumbers/2020/06/25/if-biology-can-build-it-they-will-come-ginkgo-bioworks-is-laying-the-foundation-for-the-4-trillion-bioeconomy/?sh=479c017641e0^^^ And which is why HC needs to beef up its curriculum in the sciences.
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Post by KY Crusader 75 on May 29, 2021 11:05:22 GMT -5
Pal-- you've done so much research--let me ask you this: do you believe that the lab in Wuhan played any role in the spreading of the virus? I'm not asking what can be proven beyond any doubt, just looking for what you believe.
edit: I meant "Pak" not "pal" which sounds unintentionally snarky. Sorry
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Post by HC92 on May 29, 2021 15:20:15 GMT -5
Went to a Home Depot, a Lowe’s and a 99 Restaurant in NW CT today. Almost no masks in any of the three. First time in over a year that I’ve been anywhere where masks were the exception rather than the rule. Felt a little strange.
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Post by nycrusader2010 on May 29, 2021 16:35:16 GMT -5
Went to a Home Depot, a Lowe’s and a 99 Restaurant in NW CT today. Almost no masks in any of the three. First time in over a year that I’ve been anywhere where masks were the exception rather than the rule. Felt a little strange. Definitely not the case in any public places in NYC. I was in Target this morning, one of the several corporate chains that are going by the CDC/Fauci guidelines and allowing for vaccinated patrons (and vendors) to forgo masks. I was not wearing a mask and definitely got a lot of the "double take" looks. 99% of everyone there was masking up. Same goes for doing anything in OUTDOOR public places in Manhattan. When I go into Riverbank State Park to play softball most people who are just walking around continue to wear masks. One thing I've noticed that's funny -- walking around in either of the 2 above setting masks, I got some incredulous looks from individuals shocked that my face was uncovered. But people people walking around wearing their masks as a chin strap don't get the same looks. Another thing I thought was funny in NYC -- the Knicks separated 1st round playoff attendees into "vaccinated" and "unvaccinated" sections. This absolutely defies logic. Given that the greatest risk for viral spread is between unvaccinated people and other unvaccinated people, wouldn't it make more sense to have the unvaccinated spread between the vaccinated? Seems like this would result in less transmission.
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Post by mm67 on May 29, 2021 17:16:07 GMT -5
Maybe, people were not shocked by your not wearing a mask but astounded by your handsome face. Why not? Aren't all HC alums good looking? Peace.
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Post by Pakachoag Phreek on May 29, 2021 18:42:58 GMT -5
Pal-- you've done so much research--let me ask you this: do you believe that the lab in Wuhan played any role in the spreading of the virus? I'm not asking what can be proven beyond any doubt, just looking for what you believe. I am not going to say it had no role, but I am pretty convinced that the virus was not introduced by the Wuhan lab, the so-called 'accidental release'. This virus is mutating constantly, and how a particular variant gets from one place to another is often a mystery that will never be solved. The R.1 variant is quite rare. Less than a 1,000 cases in mid-February, worldwide, mostly in two countries, United States and Japan. One prominent cluster was in a nursing home in Eastern Kentucky, which was of great interest to both the CDC and state health department. The R.1 variant was introduced into the home by an unvaccinated health care worker. How the virus traveled between Eastern Kentucky and Japan is unknown, and I suspect will never be known. One of Donald Rumsfeld's 'known unknowns'. www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7017e2.htmwww.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.16.21253248v1The Indian variants. Four variants, all initially identified in India, are listed below. These illustrate both how rapidly the virus mutates, and the difficulties that often occur when trying to categorize which came first. B.1.617 was first identified February 2021 B.1.617.1 first identified December 2020 B.1.617.2 first identified December 2020 B.1.617.3 first identified October 2020 www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/variants/variant-info.html?CDC_AA_refVal=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cdc.gov%2Fcoronavirus%2F2019-ncov%2Fcases-updates%2Fvariant-surveillance%2Fvariant-info.htmlAlthough B.1.617 was present in India before the other three it apparently went undetected for months. It has the fewest protein substitutions in the spike protein. And it was probably less virulent. The other three are derivative of B.1.617. B.1.617.2 is the most virulent of the four, and when people speak of the Indian variant, they are usually referring to B.1.617.2. B.1.617.3 has fewer substitutions than B.1.617.2, so as indicated it was around earlier, although the numbering nomenclature would suggest it appeared later. www.bmj.com/content/373/bmj.n1203/rr-0By May 29, with the growing threat posed by the emergence of B1.617.2 in the UK, where the government had deferred second shots of the vaccines, this: The computational biologists. A team at an institute at Temple University who harness computing power to calculate cancer mutations applied their technology and experience in a study of nearly 200,000 genomes of the virus. Unfortunately, virtually all the genomes date from 2020, which is a big constraint on how well one can look back in time. This summarizes what they found. academic.oup.com/mbe/advance-article/doi/10.1093/molbev/msab118/6257226Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution. This article references (in a linked pdf file with article text) my ‘problem child’ in Milan. The first paragraph refers to an early variant found in Washington state and China in January 2020 that was not the Wuhan variant. ------------------------------------------------- What would be a smoking gun at the Wuhan Lab that would make the initial release of the virus from that lab credible? A record of lab officials realizing in December 2019 that the Wuhan genome they had just sequenced was nearly identical to a virus genome they had sequenced months earlier, or, even better, a record of that early genome sequencing itself. Lacking that, your chasing known unknowns, and asking the Chinese to prove a negative. Increasingly, the scientific evidence is pointing to the virus already circulating on several continents prior to the first detected case in Wuhan in mid-November. The definitive proof of that appears to be unattainable, because this would require a preserved sample of the virus taken from individuals who were infected before November 1, and there appear to be no such samples. Thus, the look for antibodies in preserved samples of patient's blood from the fall of 2019. But you can't sequence genomes from antibodies.
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Post by hcpride on May 30, 2021 8:42:52 GMT -5
Some say there’s little likelihood that the intelligence community or Congress will be able to find a conclusive answer on the lab leak theory in 90 days — if ever. Biden alluded to this possibility in his statement, saying Beijing’s actions to cover up and conceal events in Wuhan early on “will always hamper any investigation into the origin of covid-19.”
Even if ironclad proof can’t be found, that doesn’t absolve us of the responsibility to keep looking. Along the way we need to completely rethink how we manage oversight of these Chinese labs and all the U.S. labs that work with them. The answers may be complicated. But if it should turn out that most of the evidence points to the Wuhan labs, are lab leak skeptics really going to propose we do nothing and just wait for the next pandemic?
Put simply, it has become amply clear that these Chinese labs, which have a record of safety lapses, operate with little transparency and zero accountability, which means they present an ongoing risk that must be mitigated. The intelligence community’s job is to collect intelligence. It’s the policymakers and the legislators who will have to use that intelligence to formulate a response in the form of policies and laws.
Some say pursuing the lab leak investigation risks upsetting complex and fragile U.S.-China relations. Well, if uncovering the truth about 591,000 American deaths doesn’t warrant risking offending the delicate sensibilities of the Chinese Communist Party, what would? There’s no statute of limitations on 3 million deaths worldwide. This is not going away. This is not about “blaming China.” This is about protecting our public health. [\i]
www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/05/27/bidens-announcement-is-beginning-not-end-real-covid-origin-investigation/?outputType=amp
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Post by Non Alum Dave on May 30, 2021 8:57:18 GMT -5
I'm just happy to be alive
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Post by ndgradbuthcfan on May 30, 2021 13:54:46 GMT -5
I watched and listened. I am certainly not in favor of a mandatory vaccine mandate (it will never happen) so she was preaching to a member of the choir in that regard. However, I found many of her arguments in opposition to one to be less than persuasive.
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Post by hcpride on May 30, 2021 14:35:35 GMT -5
Five months ago (JAN 4, 2021) New York Magazine published a perhaps-prescient and lengthy piece labelled: "The Lab-Leak Hypothesis". In it the author (Nicholson Baker) describes the political and scientific interests pushing back on what should be (in his mind) a common-sense theory regarding the start of the deadly Covid pandemic. Of course the article was attacked from almost all sides (this was back when the leading papers routinely smeared this sort of thinking with the words 'debunked conspiracy theory' and Facebook actually banned mention of the theory entirely). Interestingly, a few scientists confess to him in the article that the very first thing they thought of when they heard the word Wuhan connected with a bat coronavirus outbreak was a lab leak. nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-escape-theory.html
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Post by mm67 on May 30, 2021 16:26:15 GMT -5
Weren't there political interests promoting a Wuhan Lab leak or intentional weaponization of the coronavirus by the Chinese? I seem to remember the Kung Fu Flu, the China Virus. Many Chinese Americans were attacked as a result of this inflammatory rhetoric. Millions believed these epithets were part of a strategy to divert & deflect strategy away from errors made possibly in good faith by American leaders which cost thousands of lives. More than the message it was the messenger and the way the message was delivered. And, today many seem to be pursuing the the source not so much to unravel for the benefit of scientific knowledge but to blame and again to divert to protect various interests in the US. Let the scientists pursue for the benefit of public health. Follow the science and not the public commentariat.
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Post by hcpride on May 30, 2021 17:49:59 GMT -5
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Post by HC92 on May 30, 2021 18:13:23 GMT -5
The difference is when the CCP said such things about Trump, half the country was like, “Right on, CCP!” When they say it about Biden, the whole country sees the CCP for the dirty propaganda machine that it is.
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Post by hcpride on May 30, 2021 19:02:42 GMT -5
Today, one WAPO opinion piece reminds its readers: Beware of ‘expert’ consensus. The covid-19 lab leak theory shows why.People who believe the coronavirus was manufactured in a lab haven’t been allowed to say so on Facebook since February — until Wednesday, that is, when Facebook announced it was lifting the ban.
Presumably this has something to do with the wavering elite consensus on lab leaks. This consensus was never as monolithic as proponents claimed, nor as stifling as opponents now aver. But it did produce a Facebook ban and a lot of journalism dismissing the hypothesis as a well-debunked conspiracy theory with racist roots...
Yet the form this belief in science took was often positively anti-scientific. Instead of a group of constantly evolving theories that might be altered at any time, or falsified entirely, and is thus always open to debate, “science” was a demand that others subordinate their judgment to an elite-approved group of credentialed scientific experts, many of whom were proclaiming the lab leak unlikely in the extreme.
It seems that expert consensus was somewhat illusory, and it would have been well to remember that like the rest of us, scientists are prone to groupthink and nonscientific concerns can creep into their public statements. We all heard the confident pronouncements of support for Chinese scientists, but less about the quiet doubts that were apparently being expressed privately by people uninterested in a bruising public fight...www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/05/30/beware-expert-consensus-covid-19-lab-leak-theory-shows-why/
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Post by Pakachoag Phreek on May 31, 2021 9:27:31 GMT -5
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Post by hcpride on May 31, 2021 11:50:39 GMT -5
According to CNBC today “The 11,976 new Covid-19 cases reported Saturday were the lowest since March 23, 2020.” Also: “Friday also saw the TSA report the highest number of travelers since the pandemic began, with more than 1.9 million people taking to the skies for the long weekend. At the same point last year, the TSA counted just 327,000 passengers at its checkpoints.” www.cnbc.com/2021/05/30/us-covid-cases-lowest-in-a-year-as-memorial-day-travel-picks-up.htmlDidn’t see any maskers today going in and out of about 5 shops in our downtown so it seems many folks are back to normal in that regard.
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