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"Class Warfare "Towards a History of the Professional: On the Class Composition of the Research University" [Viewpoint Magazine]. From 2013, but it still looks interesting. By arrogating more power to the top layers of academic administrative elite, some in the academic profession saw the possibility of imbricating themselves into the same social class as capitalists, rather than simply serving them. Federal, state, and local laws changed to make students into consumers; courts ruled that public, non-profit universities could patent and own intellectual property; a new type of capital, venture capital, was developed to accelerate the transmission of research into products; and a sub-class of faculty, the adjunct, was formulated to teach the dregs of the expanding university system - those composing the massive undergraduate base, forced into higher education as a college degree became a de facto requirement for admission into any of the professions, and many other occupations. Graduate students and adjuncts took on the bulk of the teaching, freeing star faculty from the responsibility of lecturing to dullards for whom their words would be proverbial pearls before swine."

We think government lockdowns cause substantial collateral health damage. For example, hospital admissions in the USA for emergency treatment of acute ischaemic strokes have been substantially lower in February-March, 2020, than in February-March, 2019, resulting in delayed treatment.1 Compared with a historical baseline, UK nursing homes and hospices saw an increase in the number of deaths between February and June, 2020, associated with acute coronary syndrome (a 41% increase), stroke (a 39% increase), and heart failure (a 25% increase).2

In December 2019, the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), caused by a novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, emerged in Wuhan, Hubei province, China1 and soon spread across the world. In this ongoing pandemic, public health concerns and the urgent need for effective therapeutic measures require a deep understanding of its epidemiology, transmissibility and pathogenesis. Here we analyzed the clinical, molecular and immunological data from 326 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Shanghai. Genomic sequences of SARS-CoV-2 assembled from 112 quality samples together with sequences in the Global Initiative on Sharing All Influenza Data (GISAID) showed a stable evolution and suggested two major lineages with differential exposure history during the early phase of the outbreak in Wuhan. Nevertheless, they exhibited similar virulence and clinical outcomes. Lymphocytopenia, especially the reduced CD4+ and CD8+ T cell counts upon admission, was predictive of disease progression. High levels of IL-6 and IL-8 during treatment were observed in patients with severe or critical disease and correlated with decreased lymphocyte count. The determinants of disease severity seemed to stem mostly from host factors such as age, lymphocytopenia, and its associated cytokine storm, whereas viral genetic variation did not significantly affect the outcomes.