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Javier E

Opinion | Why Covid's Airborne Transmission Was Acknowledged So Late - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rus-airborne-transmission.html

who cdc transmission Covid-19 Science research psychology bias

shared by Javier E on 08 May 21 - No Cached
  • A week ago, more than a year after the World Health Organization declared that we face a pandemic, a page on its website titled “Coronavirus Disease (Covid-19): How Is It Transmitted?” got a seemingly small update.
  • The revised response still emphasizes transmission in close contact but now says it may be via aerosols — smaller respiratory particles that can float — as well as droplets. It also adds a reason the virus can also be transmitted “in poorly ventilated and/or crowded indoor settings,” saying this is because “aerosols remain suspended in the air or travel farther than 1 meter.”
  • on Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also updated its guidance on Covid-19, clearly saying that inhalation of these smaller particles is a key way the virus is transmitted, even at close range, and put it on top of its list of how the disease spreads.
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  • But these latest shifts challenge key infection control assumptions that go back a century, putting a lot of what went wrong last year in context
  • They may also signal one of the most important advancements in public health during this pandemic.
  • If the importance of aerosol transmission had been accepted early, we would have been told from the beginning that it was much safer outdoors, where these small particles disperse more easily, as long as you avoid close, prolonged contact with others.
  • We would have tried to make sure indoor spaces were well ventilated, with air filtered as necessary.
  • Instead of blanket rules on gatherings, we would have targeted conditions that can produce superspreading events: people in poorly ventilated indoor spaces, especially if engaged over time in activities that increase aerosol production, like shouting and singing
  • We would have started using masks more quickly, and we would have paid more attention to their fit, too. And we would have been less obsessed with cleaning surfaces.
  • The implications of this were illustrated when I visited New York City in late April — my first trip there in more than a year.
  • A giant digital billboard greeted me at Times Square, with the message “Protecting yourself and others from Covid-19. Guidance from the World Health Organization.”
  • That billboard neglected the clearest epidemiological pattern of this pandemic: The vast majority of transmission has been indoors, sometimes beyond a range of three or even six feet. The superspreading events that play a major role in driving the pandemic occur overwhelmingly, if not exclusively, indoors.
  • The billboard had not a word about ventilation, nothing about opening windows or moving activities outdoors, where transmission has been rare and usually only during prolonged and close contact. (Ireland recently reported 0.1 percent of Covid-19 cases were traced to outdoor transmission.)
  • Mary-Louise McLaws, an epidemiologist at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, and a member of the W.H.O. committees that craft infection prevention and control guidance, wanted all this examined but knew the stakes made it harder to overcome the resistance. She told The Times last year, “If we started revisiting airflow, we would have to be prepared to change a lot of what we do.” She said it was a very good idea, but she added, “It will cause an enormous shudder through the infection control society.”
  • In contrast, if the aerosols had been considered a major form of transmission, in addition to distancing and masks, advice would have centered on ventilation and airflow, as well as time spent indoors. Small particles can accumulate in enclosed spaces, since they can remain suspended in the air and travel along air currents. This means that indoors, three or even six feet, while helpful, is not completely protective, especially over time.
  • To see this misunderstanding in action, look at what’s still happening throughout the world. In India, where hospitals have run out of supplemental oxygen and people are dying in the streets, money is being spent on fleets of drones to spray anti-coronavirus disinfectant in outdoor spaces. Parks, beaches and outdoor areas keep getting closed around the world. This year and last, organizers canceled outdoor events for the National Cherry Blossom Festival in Washington, D.C. Cambodian customs officials advised spraying disinfectant outside vehicles imported from India. The examples are many.
  • Meanwhile, many countries allowed their indoor workplaces to open but with inadequate aerosol protections. There was no attention to ventilation, installing air filters as necessary or even opening windows when possible, more to having people just distancing three or six feet, sometimes not requiring masks beyond that distance, or spending money on hard plastic barriers, which may be useless at best
  • clear evidence doesn’t easily overturn tradition or overcome entrenched feelings and egos. John Snow, often credited as the first scientific epidemiologist, showed that a contaminated well was responsible for a 1854 London cholera epidemic by removing the suspected pump’s handle and documenting how the cases plummeted afterward. Many other scientists and officials wouldn’t believe him for 12 years, when the link to a water source showed up again and became harder to deny.
  • Along the way to modern public health shaped largely by the fight over germs, a theory of transmission promoted by the influential public health figure Charles Chapin took hold
  • Dr. Chapin asserted in the early 1900s that respiratory diseases were most likely spread at close range by people touching bodily fluids or ejecting respiratory droplets, and did not allow for the possibility that such close-range infection could occur by inhaling small floating particles others emitted
  • He was also concerned that belief in airborne transmission, which he associated with miasma theories, would make people feel helpless and drop their guard against contact transmission. This was a mistake that would haunt infection control for the next century and more.
  • It was in this context in early 2020 that the W.H.O. and the C.D.C. asserted that SARS-CoV-2 was transmitted primarily via these heavier, short-range droplets, and provided guidance accordingly
  • Amid the growing evidence, in July, hundreds of scientists signed an open letter urging the public health agencies, especially the W.H.O., to address airborne transmission of the coronavirus.
  • Last October, the C.D.C. published updated guidance acknowledging airborne transmission, but as a secondary route under some circumstances, until it acknowledged airborne transmission as crucial on Friday. And the W.H.O. kept inching forward in its public statements, most recently a week ago.
  • Linsey Marr, a professor of engineering at Virginia Tech who made important contributions to our understanding of airborne virus transmission before the pandemic, pointed to two key scientific errors — rooted in a lot of history — that explain the resistance, and also opened a fascinating sociological window into how science can get it wrong and why.
  • Dr. Marr said that if you inhale a particle from the air, it’s an aerosol.
  • biomechanically, she said, nasal transmission faces obstacles, since nostrils point downward and the physics of particles that large makes it difficult for them to move up the nose. And in lab measurements, people emit far more of the easier-to-inhale aerosols than the droplets, she said, and even the smallest particles can be virus laden, sometimes more so than the larger ones, seemingly because of how and where they are produced in the respiratory tract.
  • Second, she said, proximity is conducive to transmission of aerosols as well because aerosols are more concentrated near the person emitting them. In a twist of history, modern scientists have been acting like those who equated stinky air with disease, by equating close contact, a measure of distance, only with the larger droplets, a mechanism of transmission, without examination.
  • Since aerosols also infect at close range, measures to prevent droplet transmission — masks and distancing — can help dampen transmission for airborne diseases as well. However, this oversight led medical people to circularly assume that if such measures worked at all, droplets must have played a big role in their transmission.
  • Another dynamic we’ve seen is something that is not unheard-of in the history of science: setting a higher standard of proof for theories that challenge conventional wisdom than for those that support it.
  • Another key problem is that, understandably, we find it harder to walk things back. It is easier to keep adding exceptions and justifications to a belief than to admit that a challenger has a better explanation.
  • The ancients believed that all celestial objects revolved around the earth in circular orbits. When it became clear that the observed behavior of the celestial objects did not fit this assumption, those astronomers produced ever-more-complex charts by adding epicycles — intersecting arcs and circles — to fit the heavens to their beliefs.
  • In a contemporary example of this attitude, the initial public health report on the Mount Vernon choir case said that it may have been caused by people “sitting close to one another, sharing snacks and stacking chairs at the end of the practice,” even though almost 90 percent of the people there developed symptoms of Covid-19
  • So much of what we have done throughout the pandemic — the excessive hygiene theater and the failure to integrate ventilation and filters into our basic advice — has greatly hampered our response.
  • Some of it, like the way we underused or even shut down outdoor space, isn’t that different from the 19th-century Londoners who flushed the source of their foul air into the Thames and made the cholera epidemic worse.
  • Righting this ship cannot be a quiet process — updating a web page here, saying the right thing there. The proclamations that we now know are wrong were so persistent and so loud for so long.
  • the progress we’ve made might lead to an overhaul in our understanding of many other transmissible respiratory diseases that take a terrible toll around the world each year and could easily cause other pandemics.
  • So big proclamations require probably even bigger proclamations to correct, or the information void, unnecessary fears and misinformation will persist, damaging the W.H.O. now and in the future.
  • I’ve seen our paper used in India to try to reason through aerosol transmission and the necessary mitigations. I’ve heard of people in India closing their windows after hearing that the virus is airborne, likely because they were not being told how to respond
  • The W.H.O. needs to address these fears and concerns, treating it as a matter of profound change, so other public health agencies and governments, as well as ordinary people, can better adjust.
  • It needs to begin a campaign proportional to the importance of all this, announcing, “We’ve learned more, and here’s what’s changed, and here’s how we can make sure everyone understands how important this is.” That’s what credible leadership looks like. Otherwise, if a web page is updated in the forest without the requisite fanfare, how will it matter?
carolinewren

Brain-to-brain interfaces: the science of telepathy - 0 views

theconversation.com/the-science-of-telepathy-37926

science

shared by carolinewren on 09 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Recent advances in brain-computer interfaces are turning the science fantasy of transmitting thoughts directly from one brain to another into reality.
  • Studies published in the last two years have reported direct transmission of brain activity between two animals, between two humans and even between a human and a rat.
  • Cell-to-cell communication occurs via a process known as synaptic transmission, where chemical signals are passed between cells resulting in electrical spikes in the receiving cell.
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  • Because cells are connected in a network, brain activity produces a synchronised pulse of electrical activity, which is called a “brain wave”.
  • Brainwaves are detected using a technique known as electroencephalography (EEG),
  • The pattern of activity is then recorded and interpreted using computer software.
  • The electrical nature of the brain allows not only for sending of signals, but also for the receiving of electrical pulses
  • A TMS device creates a magnetic field over the scalp, which then causes an electrical current in the brain.
  • The connection was reinforced by giving both rats a reward when the receiver rat performed the task correctly.
  • By combining EEG and TMS, scientists have transmitted the thought of moving a hand from one person to a separate individual, who actually moved their hand.
  • including EEG, the Internet and TMS – the team of researchers was able to transmit a thought all the way from India to France.
  • Words were first coded into binary notation
  • Now that these BBI technologies are becoming a reality, they have a huge potential to impact the way we interact with other humans. And maybe even the way we communicate with animals through direct transmission of thought.
  • Such technologies have obvious ethical and legal implications, however. So it is important to note that the success of BBIs depends upon the conscious coupling of the subjects.
ilanaprincilus06

Pandemic Update: Vaccine Rollouts, U.K. Variant Fears, Extreme Lockdowns : Goats and So... - 0 views

www.npr.org/...ost-extreme-pandemic-lockdowns

Covid-19 USA UK

shared by ilanaprincilus06 on 16 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • The last Sunday of 2020 was ushered in with both promise and apprehension on the global pandemic front.
  • At the same time, some of the year's most severe lockdowns and travel restrictions are being implemented around the world, prompted by concerns that new variants of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, could lead to more rapid spread.
  • The U.K. variant, which is now the dominant strain in Britain, "may be more transmissible than previously circulating variants, with an estimated potential to increase the transmissibility of the virus by up to 70%,"
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  • On the domestic front, travelers arriving in the U.S. from the U.K. are now required to show proof of a negative COVID-19 test under new rules issued by CDC on Christmas day.
  • Despite such measures, the new strain has already been detected in mainland Europe, Israel, Canada and Japan, among other places.
  • compared to Hong Kong, which has put in place a "prohibition of group gatherings of more than two persons."
  • While some other places are shortening COVID quarantines from 14 days down to 10 or 7, Hong Kong is now requiring a mandatory 21 days.
  • Thailand, which had kept its daily tally of reported COVID-19 cases in the single digits for much of the pandemic, is grappling with its worst surge to date.
  • South Korea, which successfully contained two earlier waves of COVID-19, is facing record numbers of new cases and a spike in fatalities.
  • Given the high levels of transmission already occurring in the U.S., a more transmissible form of the virus could mean more even more dire numbers just as massive vaccine campaigns are starting.
ilanaprincilus06

How Soon Will The U.K. Variant Be Widespread In The U.S.? : Shots - Health News : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...-surge-in-the-u-s-experts-warn

B.1.1.7 Covid-19 UK

shared by ilanaprincilus06 on 14 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Scientists are sending the U.S. a warning: What's happening right now in the United Kingdom with the new coronavirus variant could likely happen in the U.S., and the country has a short window to prepare.
  • "I think a lot of countries are looking at the U.K. right now and saying, 'Oh, isn't that too bad that it's happening there, just like we did with Italy in February.
  • "But we've seen in this pandemic a few times that, if the virus can happen somewhere else, it can probably happen in your country, too."
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  • The new variant, called B.1.1.7
  • Last week, the U.K. reported a record-breaking 419,000 cases.
  • Studies suggest the new variant increases the transmissibility by about 50%.
  • Now scientists say the virus is already here in the U.S., and circulating widely-- albeit at very low levels
  • "A rough estimate, for across the U.S., would be a frequency of about 1 in 1000,"
  • In England, B.1.1.7 took about three month to take over and become the dominant strain in the outbreak.
  • having this new variant dominant outbreak could be very problematic, researchers say. It could fuel another surge on top of the already staggering surge the country is struggling to stop.
  • What's going to happen if a more contagious form starts to circulate widely, even dominate the outbreak?
  • Right now scientists don't believe the new variant is more deadly. But its increased transmissibility could, in the end, be even more dangerous
  • "Perhaps counterintuitively, I think that increased transmissibility is probably the worst of these two scenarios, because if something is more transmissible, then you just get it into a larger population,"
  • that each sick person could infect 1.8 people, on average.
  • the U.S. still has about two months to prepare for — and slow down — the variant.
  • Each week, more than 1.5 million people test positive for the virus across the country.
  • The U.S. needs to be thinking about how to minimize damage from this new variant, right now, Hodcroft says. "This is our early warning. Because by the time you have something spreading exponentially in your country, it is much harder to get it under control."
Javier E

The Masks Masquerade - INCERTO - Medium - 0 views

medium.com/...-masks-masquerade-7de897b517b7

masks pandemic response statistics decision-making forecasting

shared by Javier E on 18 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • Highlight
  • First error: missing the compounding effect
  • People who are good at exams (and become bureaucrats, economists, or hacks), my experience has been, are not good at understanding nonlinearities and dynamics.
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  • The WHO, CDC and other bureaucracies initially failed to quickly realize that the benefits of masks compound, simply because two people are wearing them and you have to look at the interaction.
  • Let us say (to simplify) that masks reduce both transmission and reception to p. What effect on the R0(that is, the rate of spreading of the infection)?
  • Simply the naive approach (used by the CDC/WHO bureaucrats and other imbeciles) is to say if masks reduce the transmission probability to ¼, one would think it would then drop from, say R0= 5, to R0=1 ¼. Yuuge, but there is better.
  • For one should count both sides. Under our simplification, with p=1/4 we get R0'= p² R0 . The drop in R becomes 93.75%! You divide R by 16! Even with masks working at 50% we get a 75% drop in R0.
  • Second error: Missing the Nonlinearity of the Risk of Infection
  • we are in the convex part of the curve. For example, to use the case above, a reduction of viral load by 75% for a short exposure could reduce the probability of infection by 95% or more!
  • Third Error: Mistaking Absence of Evidence for Evidence of Absence
  • “There is no evidence that masks work”, I kept hearing repeated to me by the usual idiots calling themselves “evidence based” scientists. The point is that there is no evidence that locking the door tonight will prevent me from being burglarized. But everything that may block transmission could help.
  • We have a) the salon story where two infected stylists failed to infect all their 140 clients (making the probability of infection for bilateral mask wearing safely below 1% for a salon-style exposure)
  • Fourth Error: Misunderstanding the Market and PeoplePaternalistic bureaucrats resisted inviting the general public to use masks on grounds that the supply was limited and would be needed by health professionals — hence they lied to us saying “masks are not effective”
  • Fifth Error: Missing Extremely Strong Statistical Signals
  • they fear to be presenting “anecdotes”, and fail to grasp the broader notion of statistical signals where you look at the whole story, not the body parts.
  • evidence compounds.
  • Unlike school, real life is not about certainties. When in doubt, use what protection you can
  • plus b) the rate of infection of countries where masks were mandatory
  • plus c) tons of papers with more or less flawed methodologies, etc.
  • Sixth Error: The Non-Aggression Principle
  • “Libertarians” (in brackets) are resisting mask wearing on grounds that it constrains their freedom. Yet the entire concept of liberty lies in the Non-Aggression Principle, the equivalent of the Silver Rule: do not harm others; they in turn should not harm you.
  • Even more insulting is the demand by pseudolibertarians that Costco should banned from forcing customers to wear mask — but libertarianism allows you to set the rules on your own property. Costco should be able to force visitors to wear pink shirts and purple glasses if they wished.
  • Note that by infecting another person you are not infecting just another person. You are infecting many many more and causing systemic risk.
grayton downing

Evolving Pain Resistance | The Scientist Magazine® - 1 views

www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/38012/title/Evolving-Pain-Resistance/

pain resistance science research

shared by grayton downing on 27 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Grasshopper mice of the southwestern US deserts (Onychomys torridus) have evolved to take advantage of a normally well-protected food source:
  • “The grasshopper mouse has found a way, very cleverly, to disconnect the pain pathway
  • results suggested that rather than blocking the binding of the venom altogether, the grasshopper mouse had evolved a strategy to block the transmission of pain when the venom was bound. Sure enough, when the team pre-treated the mice with venom, and then administered a painful formalin stimulus, the mice were protected from the pain.
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  • that are found on pain-transmitting neurons called nociceptors.
  • further investigate how the scorpion venom inhibits the transmission of pain, Rowe and her colleagues sequenced the Nav1.8 channel, replaced grasshopper mouse sequences with house mouse sequences, and expressed the mutant channels in a cell line to observe the effects of the genetic changes.
  • “a really small amount of variation—one amino acid—can actually produce these really profound physiological effects,” Rowe said. “Evolutionarily speaking, it allows this mouse to then feed on a chemically protected scorpion.”
lucieperloff

Covid-19: How Much Herd Immunity is Enough? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...mmunity-covid-coronavirus.html

coronavirus immunity science research bias knowledge

shared by lucieperloff on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Scientists initially estimated that 60 to 70 percent of the population needed to acquire resistance to the coronavirus to banish it. Now Dr. Anthony Fauci and others are quietly shifting that number upward.
  • It gives Americans a sense of when we can hope to breathe freely again.
  • And last week, in an interview with CNBC News, he said “75, 80, 85 percent” and “75 to 80-plus percent.”
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  • He is doing so, he said, partly based on new science, and partly on his gut feeling that the country is finally ready to hear what he really thinks.
  • Now that some polls are showing that many more Americans are ready, even eager, for vaccines, he said he felt he could deliver the tough message that the return to normal might take longer than anticipated.
  • We really don’t know what the real number is. I think the real range is somewhere between 70 to 90 percent.
  • not sure there will be enough voluntary acceptance of vaccines to reach that goal.
  • They also came with a warning: All answers are merely “guesstimates.”
  • Humans move around, so studying disease spread among them is far harder.
  • It took about two months to be certain that there were many asymptomatic people who had also spread the virus.
  • The more transmissible a pathogen, the more people must become immune in order to stop it.
  • Dr. Dean noted that to stop transmission in a crowded city like New York, more people would have to achieve immunity than would be necessary in a less crowded place like Montana.
  • If we can vaccinate almost all the people who are most at risk of severe outcomes, then this would become a milder disease.”
Javier E

Reasons for COVID-19 Optimism on T-Cells and Herd Immunity - 0 views

nymag.com/...t-cells-and-herd-immunity.html

immunity Covid-19 research science

shared by Javier E on 13 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • It may well be the case that some amount of community protection kicks in below 60 percent exposure, and possibly quite a bit below that threshold, and that those who exhibit a cross-reactive T-cell immune response, while still susceptible to infection, may also have some meaningful amount of protection against severe disease.
  • early returns suggest that while the maximalist interpretation of each hypothesis is not very credible — herd immunity has probably not been reached in many places, and cross-reactive T-cell response almost certainly does not functionally immunize those who have it — more modest interpretations appear quite plausible.
  • Friston suggested that the truly susceptible portion of the population was certainly not 100 percent, as most modelers and conventional wisdom had it, but a much smaller share — surely below 50 percent, he said, and likely closer to about 20 percent. The analysis was ongoing, he said, but, “I suspect, once this has been done, it will look like the effective non-susceptible portion of the population will be about 80 percent. I think that’s what’s going to happen.”
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  • one of the leading modelers, Gabriela Gomes, suggested the entire area of research was being effectively blackballed out of fear it might encourage a relaxation of pandemic vigilance. “This is the very sad reason for the absence of more optimistic projections on the development of this pandemic in the scientific literature,” she wrote on Twitter. “Our analysis suggests that herd-immunity thresholds are being achieved despite strict social-distancing measures.”
  • Gomes suggested, herd immunity could happen with as little as one quarter of the population of a community exposed — or perhaps just 20 percent. “We just keep running the models, and it keeps coming back at less than 20 percent,” she told Hamblin. “It’s very striking.” Such findings, if they held up, would be very instructive, as Hamblin writes: “It would mean, for instance, that at 25 percent antibody prevalence, New York City could continue its careful reopening without fear of another major surge in cases.”
  • But for those hoping that 25 percent represents a true ceiling for pandemic spread in a given community, well, it almost certainly does not, considering that recent serological surveys have shown that perhaps 93 percent of the population of Iquitos, Peru, has contracted the disease; as have more than half of those living in Indian slums; and as many as 68 percent in particular neighborhoods of New York City
  • overshoot of that scale would seem unlikely if the “true” threshold were as low as 20 or 25 percent.
  • But, of course, that threshold may not be the same in all places, across all populations, and is surely affected, to some degree, by the social behavior taken to protect against the spread of the disease.
  • we probably err when we conceive of group immunity in simplistically binary terms. While herd immunity is a technical term referring to a particular threshold at which point the disease can no longer spread, some amount of community protection against that spread begins almost as soon as the first people are exposed, with each case reducing the number of unexposed and vulnerable potential cases in the community by one
  • you would not expect a disease to spread in a purely exponential way until the point of herd immunity, at which time the spread would suddenly stop. Instead, you would expect that growth to slow as more people in the community were exposed to the disease, with most of them emerging relatively quickly with some immune response. Add to that the effects of even modest, commonplace protections — intuitive social distancing, some amount of mask-wearing — and you could expect to get an infection curve that tapers off well shy of 60 percent exposure.
  • Looking at the data, we see that transmissions in many severely impacted states began to slow down in July, despite limited interventions. This is especially notable in states like Arizona, Florida, and Texas. While we believe that changes in human behavior and changes in policy (such as mask mandates and closing of bars/nightclubs) certainly contributed to the decrease in transmission, it seems unlikely that these were the primary drivers behind the decrease. We believe that many regions obtained a certain degree of temporary herd immunity after reaching 10-35 percent prevalence under the current conditions. We call this 10-35 percent threshold the effective herd immunity threshold.
  • Indeed, that is more or less what was recently found by Youyang Gu, to date the best modeler of pandemic spread in the U.S
  • he cautioned again that he did not mean to imply that the natural herd-immunity level was as low as 10 percent, or even 35 percent. Instead, he suggested it was a plateau determined in part by better collective understanding of the disease and what precautions to take
  • Gu estimates national prevalence as just below 20 percent (i.e., right in the middle of his range of effective herd immunity), it still counts, I think, as encouraging — even if people in hard-hit communities won’t truly breathe a sigh of relief until vaccines arrive.
  • If you can get real protection starting at 35 percent, it means that even a mediocre vaccine, administered much more haphazardly to a population with some meaningful share of vaccination skeptics, could still achieve community protection pretty quickly. And that is really significant — making both the total lack of national coordination on rollout and the likely “vaccine wars” much less consequential.
  • At least 20 percent of the public, and perhaps 50 percent, had some preexisting, cross-protective T-cell response to SARS-CoV-2, according to one much-discussed recent paper. An earlier paper had put the figure at between 40 and 60 percent. And a third had found an even higher prevalence: 81 percent.
  • The T-cell story is similarly encouraging in its big-picture implications without being necessarily paradigm-changing
  • These numbers suggest their own heterogeneity — that different populations, with different demographics, would likely exhibit different levels of cross-reactive T-cell immune response
  • The most optimistic interpretation of the data was given to me by Francois Balloux, a somewhat contrarian disease geneticist and the director of the University College of London’s Genetics Institute
  • According to him, a cross-reactive T-cell response wouldn’t prevent infection, but would probably mean a faster immune response, a shorter period of infection, and a “massively” reduced risk of severe illness — meaning, he guessed, that somewhere between a third and three-quarters of the population carried into the epidemic significant protection against its scariest outcomes
  • the distribution of this T-cell response could explain at least some, and perhaps quite a lot, of COVID-19’s age skew when it comes to disease severity and mortality, since the young are the most exposed to other coronaviruses, and the protection tapers as you get older and spend less time in environments, like schools, where these viruses spread so promiscuously.
  • Balloux told me he believed it was also possible that the heterogeneous distribution of T-cell protection also explains some amount of the apparent decline in disease severity over time within countries on different pandemic timelines — a phenomenon that is more conventionally attributed to infection spreading more among the young, better treatment, and more effective protection of the most vulnerable (especially the old).
  • Going back to Youyang Gu’s analysis, what he calls the “implied infection fatality rate” — essentially an estimated ratio based on his modeling of untested cases — has fallen for the country as a whole from about one percent in March to about 0.8 percent in mid-April, 0.6 percent in May, and down to about 0.25 percent today.
  • even as we have seemed to reach a second peak of coronavirus deaths, the rate of death from COVID-19 infection has continued to decline — total deaths have gone up, but much less than the number of cases
  • In other words, at the population level, the lethality of the disease in America has fallen by about three-quarters since its peak. This is, despite everything that is genuinely horrible about the pandemic and the American response to it, rather fantastic.
  • there may be some possible “mortality displacement,” whereby the most severe cases show up first, in the most susceptible people, leaving behind a relatively protected population whose experience overall would be more mild, and that T-cell response may play a significant role in determining that susceptibility.
  • That, again, is Balloux’s interpretation — the most expansive assessment of the T-cell data offered to me
  • The most conservative assessment came from Sarah Fortune, the chair of Harvard’s Department of Immunology
  • Fortune cautioned not to assume that cross-protection was playing a significant role in determining severity of illness in a given patient. Those with such a T-cell response, she told me, would likely see a faster onset of robust response, yes, but that may or may not yield a shorter period of infection and viral shedding
  • Most of the scientists, doctors, epidemiologists, and immunologists I spoke to fell between those two poles, suggesting the T-cell cross-immunity findings were significant without necessarily being determinative — that they may help explain some of the shape of pandemic spread through particular populations, but only some of the dynamics of that spread.
  • he told me he believed, in the absence of that data, that T-cell cross-immunity from exposure to previous coronaviruses “might explain different disease severity in different people,” and “could certainly be part of the explanation for the age skew, especially for why the very young fare so well.”
  • the headline finding was quite clear and explicitly stated: that preexisting T-cell response came primarily via the variety of T-cells called CD4 T-cells, and that this dynamic was consistent with the hypothesis that the mechanism was inherited from previous exposure to a few different “common cold” coronaviruses
  • “This potential preexisting cross-reactive T-cell immunity to SARS-CoV-2 has broad implications,” the authors wrote, “as it could explain aspects of differential COVID-19 clinical outcomes, influence epidemiological models of herd immunity, or affect the performance of COVID-19 candidate vaccines.”
  • “This is at present highly speculative,” they cautioned.
Javier E

DeepMind uncovers structure of 200m proteins in scientific leap forward | DeepMind | Th... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ins-in-scientific-leap-forward

structure ai decipher protein science research

shared by Javier E on 28 Jul 22 - No Cached
  • Highlighter
  • Proteins are the building blocks of life. Formed of chains of amino acids, folded up into complex shapes, their 3D structure largely determines their function. Once you know how a protein folds up, you can start to understand how it works, and how to change its behaviour
  • Although DNA provides the instructions for making the chain of amino acids, predicting how they interact to form a 3D shape was more tricky and, until recently, scientists had only deciphered a fraction of the 200m or so proteins known to science
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  • In November 2020, the AI group DeepMind announced it had developed a program called AlphaFold that could rapidly predict this information using an algorithm. Since then, it has been crunching through the genetic codes of every organism that has had its genome sequenced, and predicting the structures of the hundreds of millions of proteins they collectively contain.
  • Last year, DeepMind published the protein structures for 20 species – including nearly all 20,000 proteins expressed by humans – on an open database. Now it has finished the job, and released predicted structures for more than 200m proteins.
  • “Essentially, you can think of it as covering the entire protein universe. It includes predictive structures for plants, bacteria, animals, and many other organisms, opening up huge new opportunities for AlphaFold to have an impact on important issues, such as sustainability, food insecurity, and neglected diseases,”
  • In May, researchers led by Prof Matthew Higgins at the University of Oxford announced they had used AlphaFold’s models to help determine the structure of a key malaria parasite protein, and work out where antibodies that could block transmission of the parasite were likely to bind.
  • “Previously, we’d been using a technique called protein crystallography to work out what this molecule looks like, but because it’s quite dynamic and moves around, we just couldn’t get to grips with it,” Higgins said. “When we took the AlphaFold models and combined them with this experimental evidence, suddenly it all made sense. This insight will now be used to design improved vaccines which induce the most potent transmission-blocking antibodies.”
  • AlphaFold’s models are also being used by scientists at the University of Portsmouth’s Centre for Enzyme Innovation, to identify enzymes from the natural world that could be tweaked to digest and recycle plastics. “It took us quite a long time to go through this massive database of structures, but opened this whole array of new three-dimensional shapes we’d never seen before that could actually break down plastics,” said Prof John McGeehan, who is leading the work. “There’s a complete paradigm shift. We can really accelerate where we go from here
  • “AlphaFold protein structure predictions are already being used in a myriad of ways. I expect that this latest update will trigger an avalanche of new and exciting discoveries in the months and years ahead, and this is all thanks to the fact that the data are available openly for all to use.”
Javier E

The Philosopher Whose Fingerprints Are All Over the FTC's New Approach to Privacy - Ale... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...254365

privacy norms context data social media technology

shared by Javier E on 31 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • The standard explanation for privacy freakouts is that people get upset because they've "lost control" of data about themselves or there is simply too much data available. Nissenbaum argues that the real problem "is the inapproproriateness of the flow of information due to the mediation of technology." In her scheme, there are senders and receivers of messages, who communicate different types of information with very specific expectations of how it will be used. Privacy violations occur not when too much data accumulates or people can't direct it, but when one of the receivers or transmission principles change. The key academic term is "context-relative informational norms." Bust a norm and people get upset.
  • Nissenbaum gets us past thinking about privacy as a binary: either something is private or something is public. Nissenbaum puts the context -- or social situation -- back into the equation. What you tell your bank, you might not tell your doctor.
  • Furthermore, these differences in information sharing are not bad or good; they are just the norms.
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  • any privacy regulation that's going to make it through Congress has to provide clear ways for companies to continue profiting from data tracking. The key is coming up with an ethical framework in which they can do so, and Nissenbaum may have done just that. 
  • The traditional model of how this works says that your information is something like a currency and when you visit a website that collects data on you for one reason or another, you enter into a contract with that site. As long as the site gives you "notice" that data collection occurs -- usually via a privacy policy located through a link at the bottom of the page -- and you give "consent" by continuing to use the site, then no harm has been done. No matter how much data a site collects, if all they do is use it to show you advertising they hope is more relevant to you, then they've done nothing wrong.
  • let companies do standard data collection but require them to tell people when they are doing things with data that are inconsistent with the "context of the interaction" between a company and a person.
  • How can anyone make a reasonable determination of how their information might be used when there are more than 50 or 100 or 200 tools in play on a single website in a single month?
  • Nissenbaum doesn't think it's possible to explain the current online advertising ecosystem in a useful way without resorting to a lot of detail. She calls this the "transparency paradox," and considers it insoluble.
  • she wants to import the norms from the offline world into the online world. When you go to a bank, she says, you have expectations of what might happen to your communications with that bank. That should be true whether you're online, on the phone, or at the teller.  Companies can use your data to do bank stuff, but they can't sell your data to car dealers looking for people with a lot of cash on hand.
  • Nevermind that if you actually read all the privacy policies you encounter in a year, it would take 76 work days. And that calculation doesn't even account for all the 3rd parties that drain data from your visits to other websites. Even more to the point: there is no obvious way to discriminate between two separate webpages on the basis of their data collection policies. While tools have emerged to tell you how many data trackers are being deployed at any site at a given moment, the dynamic nature of Internet advertising means that it is nearly impossible to know the story through time
  • here's the big downside: it rests on the "norms" that people expect. While that may be socially optimal, it's actually quite difficult to figure out what the norms for a given situation might be. After all, there is someone else who depends on norms for his thinking about privacy.
Javier E

Losing Our Touch - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...losing-our-touch

sense perception touch love sex carnality

shared by Javier E on 25 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Are we losing our senses? In our increasingly virtual world, are we losing touch with the sense of touch itself? And if so, so what?
  • Tactility is not blind immediacy — not merely sensorial but cognitive, too. Savoring is wisdom; in Latin, wisdom is “sapientia,” from “sapere,” to taste. These carnal senses make us human by keeping us in touch with things, by responding to people’s pain
  • But Aristotle did not win this battle of ideas. The Platonists prevailed and the Western universe became a system governed by “the soul’s eye.” Sight came to dominate the hierarchy of the senses, and was quickly deemed the appropriate ally of theoretical ideas.
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  • Western philosophy thus sprang from a dualism between the intellectual senses, crowned by sight, and the lower “animal” senses, stigmatized by touch.
  • opto-centrism prevailed for over 2,000 years, culminating in our contemporary culture of digital simulation and spectacle. The eye continues to rule in what Roland Barthes once called our “civilization of the image.” The world is no longer our oyster, but our screen.
  • our current technology is arguably exacerbating our carnal alienation. While offering us enormous freedoms of fantasy and encounter, digital eros may also be removing us further from the flesh
  • The move toward excarnation is apparent in what is becoming more and more a fleshless society. In medicine, “bedside manner” and hand on pulse has ceded to the anonymous technologies of imaging in diagnosis and treatment. In war, hand-to-hand combat has been replaced by “targeted killing” via remote-controlled drones.
  • certain cyber engineers now envisage implanting transmission codes in brains so that we will not have to move a finger — or come into contact with another human being — to get what we want.
  • We need to return from head to foot, from brain to fingertip, from iCloud to earth. To close the distance, so that eros is more about proximity than proxy. So that soul becomes flesh, where it belongs. Such a move, I submit, would radically alter our “sense” of sex in our digital civilization. It would enhance the role of empathy, vulnerability and sensitivity in the art of carnal love, and ideally, in all of human relations. Because to love or be loved truly is to be able to say, “I have been touched.”
Javier E

In Defense of Naïve Reading - NYTimes.com - 1 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...in-defense-of-naive-reading

literature education knowledge science naive theory

shared by Javier E on 11 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Clearly, poems and novels and paintings were not produced as objects for future academic study; there is no a priori reason to think that they could be suitable objects of  “research.” By and large they were produced for the pleasure and enlightenment of those who enjoyed them.
  • But just as clearly, the teaching of literature in universities ─ especially after the 19th-century research model of Humboldt University of Berlin was widely copied ─ needed a justification consistent with the aims of that academic setting
  • The main aim was research: the creating and accumulation and transmission of knowledge. And the main model was the natural science model of collaborative research: define problems, break them down into manageable parts, create sub-disciplines and sub-sub-disciplines for the study of these, train students for such research specialties and share everything. With that model, what literature and all the arts needed was something like a general “science of meaning” that could eventually fit that sort of aspiration. Texts or art works could be analyzed as exemplifying and so helping establish such a science. Results could be published in scholarly journals, disputed by others, consensus would eventually emerge and so on.
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  • literature study in a university education requires some method of evaluation of whether the student has done well or poorly. Students’ papers must be graded and no faculty member wants to face the inevitable “that’s just your opinion” unarmed, as it were. Learning how to use a research methodology, providing evidence that one has understood and can apply such a method, is understandably an appealing pedagogy
  • Literature and the arts have a dimension unique in the academy, not shared by the objects studied, or “researched” by our scientific brethren. They invite or invoke, at a kind of “first level,” an aesthetic experience that is by its nature resistant to restatement in more formalized, theoretical or generalizing language. This response can certainly be enriched by knowledge of context and history, but the objects express a first-person or subjective view of human concerns that is falsified if wholly transposed to a more “sideways on” or third person view.
  • such works also can directly deliver a  kind of practical knowledge and self-understanding not available from a third person or more general formulation of such knowledge. There is no reason to think that such knowledge — exemplified in what Aristotle said about the practically wise man (the phronimos)or in what Pascal meant by the difference between l’esprit géometrique and l’esprit de finesse — is any less knowledge because it cannot be so formalized or even taught as such.
sissij

How Does Expectation Affect Perception - 3 views

jonlieffmd.com/...-expectation-affect-perception

perception expectation brain science language

shared by sissij on 17 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • One important fact is that the brain works in some ways like television transmission, in that it processes stable backgrounds without much attention and moving parts more intensely and differently.
  • Recent research in babies shows that they respond most to unexpected events and use these to evaluate the environment and learn.
  • But, the over arching analysis of visual signals depends on what is expected.
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  • Picture of bright light causes eye pupils to react, as if a real light.
  • Good hitters in baseball view the ball as larger.
  • Large people judge the absolute measurement of a doorway as more narrow than others will.
  • Words and thoughts alter sensory information:
  • She kicked the ball” or “grasped the subject” stimulates the leg or arm brain regions related to kicking or grasping.
  • Experienced observers of ballet or classical Indian dance who have never danced, when watching a dance stimulate specific muscles of the dance.
  • The brain has many interacting pathways and loops that create expectations with different probabilities from our previous experiences.
  • sissij on 17 Nov 16
     
    I found this article very interesting because it explains some aspects of how our expectation can influence our perception. In this article, language is also mentioned that different vocabulary can alter our perception. I think this can be related to the definition of words we talked about recently. I think this article suggests that the definition of a word is the result of our expectation as we often define things differently in our favor if no clear definition is stated. This relationship can also be reversed as we use definitions to describe and organize our expectation. --Sissi (11/16/2016)
Javier E

Five months on, what scientists now know about the coronavirus | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...now-know-about-the-coronavirus

Covid-19 theory results research science Knowledge

shared by Javier E on 12 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • The Sars-CoV-2 virus almost certainly originated in bats, which have evolved fierce immune responses to viruses, researchers have discovered. These defences drive viruses to replicate faster so that they can get past bats’ immune defences. In turn, that transforms the bat into a reservoir of rapidly reproducing and highly transmissible viruses
  • “This virus probably jumped from a bat into another animal, and that other animal was probably near a human, maybe in a market,
  • Virus-ridden particles are inhaled by others and come into contact with cells lining the throat and larynx. These cells have large numbers of receptors – known as Ace-2 receptors – on their surfaces. (Cell receptors play a key role in passing chemicals into cells and in triggering signals between cells.
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  • “This virus has a surface protein that is primed to lock on that receptor and slip its RNA into the cell,”
  • Once inside, that RNA inserts itself into the cell’s own replication machinery and makes multiple copies of the virus. These burst out of the cell, and the infection spreads. Antibodies generated by the body’s immune system eventually target the virus and in most cases halt its progress.
  • “A Covid-19 infection is generally mild, and that really is the secret of the virus’s success,” adds Ball. “Many people don’t even notice they have got an infection and so go around their work, homes and supermarkets infecting others.”
  • the virus can cause severe problems. This happens when it moves down the respiratory tract and infects the lungs, which are even richer in cells with Ace-2 receptors. Many of these cells are destroyed, and lungs become congested with bits of broken cell. In these cases, patients will require treatment in intensive care.
  • Even worse, in some cases, a person’s immune system goes into overdrive, attracting cells to the lungs in order to attack the virus, resulting in inflammation
  • This process can run out of control, more immune cells pour in, and the inflammation gets worse. This is known as a cytokine storm.
  • Just why cytokine storms occur in some patients but not in the vast majority is unclear
  • Doctors examining patients recovering from a Covid-19 infection are finding fairly high levels of neutralising antibodies in their blood. These antibodies are made by the immune system, and they coat an invading virus at specific points, blocking its ability to break into cells.
  • Instead, most virologists believe that immunity against Covid-19 will last only a year or two. “That is in line with other coronaviruses that infect humans,
  • “It is clear that immune responses are being mounted against Covid-19 in infected people,” says virologist Mike Skinner of Imperial College London. “And the antibodies created by that response will provide protection against future infections – but we should note that it is unlikely this protection will be for life.”
  • “That means that even if most people do eventually become exposed to the virus, it is still likely to become endemic – which means we would see seasonal peaks of infection of this disease. We will have reached a steady state with regard to Covid-19.”
  • Skinner is doubtful. “We have got to consider this pandemic from the virus’s position,” he says. “It is spreading round the world very nicely. It is doing OK. Change brings it no benefit.”
  • In the end, it will be the development and roll-out of an effective vaccine that will free us from the threat of Covid-19,
  • the journal Nature reported that 78 vaccine projects had been launched round the globe – with a further 37 in development.
  • vaccines require large-scale safety and efficacy studies. Thousands of people would receive either the vaccine itself or a placebo to determine if the former were effective at preventing infection from the virus which they would have encountered naturally. That, inevitably, is a lengthy process.
  • some scientists have proposed a way to speed up the process – by deliberately exposing volunteers to the virus to determine a vaccine’s efficacy.
  • Volunteers would have to be young and healthy, he stresses: “Their health would also be closely monitored, and they would have access to intensive care and any available medicines.”
  • The result could be a vaccine that would save millions of lives by being ready for use in a much shorter time than one that went through standard phase three trials.
  • phase-three trials are still some way off, so we have time to consider the idea carefully.”
clairemann

Experts Predict What Summer 2021 Will Be Like With The COVID-19 Pandemic | HuffPost Life - 1 views

www.huffpost.com/...-19_l_60535bc4c5b672d70982294c

COVID pandemic research science

shared by clairemann on 27 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Certain feelings have practically vanished since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic ― the most major of which is hope.
  • “Speaking for the U.S., I’m really hopeful that this summer will be remarkably different from last summer,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “We’re on a good path right now and I just hope that we can stay on the path that we’re on.”
  • “These vaccines are absolutely our way out of this pandemic,” said David Aronoff, director of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.
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  • “One of the things that we are feeling better about is the data around SARS-CoV-2 transmission and recognizing that outdoor activities have not turned out, as best as we can tell, to be a significant factor in pushing the pandemic forward,” Brewer said, referring to the fact that the threat of virus spread is low in socially distant, outdoor settings
  • People who are vaccinated can also spend time indoors with unvaccinated, low-risk people from a single household.
  • “If you look at what’s happening with cases in particular, they’ve really fallen off since the beginning of January,” Brewer said. “It’s really hard to attribute that to population changes; something else has to be driving that. It couldn’t have been vaccines at that point, we didn’t have as many vaccines as we do now.”
  • “I continue to look for signals and continue to scrutinize the data, but so far I’m encouraged by the fact that we haven’t seen a real rise in case numbers particularly in the states where they have reported the variants,” said Nuzzo, who has been tracking COVID-19 trends and data since the pandemic’s beginning.
Javier E

The Huxleyan Warning-Postman.pdf - 1 views

Huxley entertainment distraction dystopia Postman

shared by Javier E on 18 May 21 - No Cached
  • There -are two ways by which the spirit of a culture. may be shriveled. In the first-the Orwellian_;,.;_culture becomes a prison~ In the second-the Huxleyan-culture becomes a burlesque.
  • What Huxley teaches is that in the age of advanced technology, spiritual devastation is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face than from one whose countenance exudes suspicion and hate.
  • When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when· cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-tal,tc, when, in
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  • short, a people become an audience and their public business a -~ vaudeville a_c~, _then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear poss1b1hty.
  • what. is happening in America is not the design of an articulated ideology. No Mein Kampf or Communist Manifesto announced its coming. It comes as the unintended consequence of a dramatic change in our modes of public conve~sation. But it is an ideology nonetheless, for it imposes a way of life, a set of relations among people and ideas, about which there has been no consensus, no discussion and no opposition. Only compliance.
  • As nowhere else in the world, Americans have moved far and fast in bringing to a close the age of the slaw~moving printed word, and have granted to television sovereignty over all of their institutions.
  • Introduce the alphabet to a culture and you change its cognitive habits, its social relations, its notions of community, history and religion.
  • The problem, in any case, does not reside in what people 1 watch. The problem is in that we watch. The solution must be 1 _found in how we watch.
  • Introdu~e the printing press with movable type, and you do the same.
  • Introduce speed-of-light , transmission of images and you make a cultural revolution. Without a vote. Without polemics. Without guerrilla resistance. Here is ideology, pure if not serene. Here is ideology without
  • words, and all the more powerful for their absence. All that is required to make it stick is a population that devoutly believes in the inevitability of progress. And in this sense, all Americans are Marxists, for we believe nothing if not that history is moving us toward some preordained paradise and that technology is the force behind that movement.
  • there are near insurmountable difficulties for anyone who has written such a book as this, and who wishes to end it with some remedies for the affliction. In the first place, not everyone believes a cure is needed, and in the second, there probably isn't any.
  • no medium is excessively dangerous if its users understand what its dangers are.
  • what if there are no cries of anguish to be heard? Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles? What is the antidote to a culture's being drained by laughter?
  • What is information? Or more precisely, what are iriformation? What are its various forms? What conceptions of intelligence, wisdom and learning does each form insist upon? What conceptions does each form neglect or mock? What are the main psychic effects of each form?
  • only through a deep and unfailing awareness of the structure and effects of information, through a demystification of media, is there any hope of our gaining some measure of control over television, or the computer, or any other medium.
  • What is 'the kind of information that est facilitates thinking?
  • it is an acknowledged task of the schools to assist the young in learning how to interpret the symbols of their culture. That this task should now require that they learn how to distance themselves from their forms of information is not s6 bizarre an enterprise that we cannot hope for its inclusion in the curriculum;
  • What I suggest here as a solution is what Aldous Huxley suggested, as well.
  • The desperate answer is to rely on the only inass medium of communication that, in theory, is capable of addressing the problem: our schools.
  • in the end, he was trying to tell us that what afflicted the people in Brave New World was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.
cvanderloo

Britain, dubbed 'plague island', wants tourists to return | CNN Travel - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

UK brexit Britain covid travel

shared by cvanderloo on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Boris Johnson plunged the country into harsh new restrictions, blaming a new variant of the disease that had been spreading in London and the southeast of England since September.
  • Country after country closed their borders to flights from the UK, in a bid to keep the new variant confined to "plague island,"
  • UK travelers are still banned from much of the world -- including EU countries -- because of the homegrown variant.
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  • In the end, 2020 saw a 76% decline in visitors and an 80% drop.
  • "A lot of our multi-country trips including England used to fly round-trip to London, and now we're looking to see if from a traveler's perspective that will be the most convenient."
  • DaSilva said that potential Brexit complications were on the radar of travelers' concerns last year, but, with a no-deal averted and the pandemic taking center stage, it's no longer an issue for her guests. In fact, three of the top five most searched trips on their website involve Great Britain.
  • "Early on in the pandemic, people were searching for places that had more open green spaces, like New Zealand and Ireland," she says. "But as news of the vaccine came out and people became more confident about trips for this year, England popped back up to the top."
  • And there's one big bonus for those traveling to the UK this year --- the tanking pound.
  • The UK made a great play that it was an international and welcoming destination over the 2012 Olympics, but that message was withdrawn with Brexit. The posturing of the government -- especially the threat to put gunboats in the Channel -- didn't play well with a lot of origin markets," he says.
  • "There may be differences with the import of goods and transmission of services that means London isn't as prosperous as it was."
  • "Suddenly, using the UK as gateway to Europe becomes enormously less attractive. Travelers will have to think about whether it's sensible to come to the UK as part of a European destination. They may wish to look at the UK as a single destination, but that isn't nearly as attractive as the UK being part of a European vacation."
  • "The UK won't be ignored, but it's unlikely to recover as strongly as Europe.
  • About 20% of the Intercontinental's staff left the UK before Brexit, says Ouseph; but while in normal times that would be a crisis, he thinks that Covid-induced job losses will mean hotels can fill these positions for now -- at least, the customer-facing ones. Instead, it's the less visible, but crucial roles, where they'll struggle.
  • Not everyone thinks Brexit will make a big difference to the inbound UK travel industry.
  • Maine -- who hasn't run tours since October -- says that he thinks the vaccine "will get us out of it -- it's a matter of when, not if." And he predicts that "when" could be as early as Easter.
  • "Rolling out the vaccine is the acid test of being a coherent holiday destination, and the UK looks like it's doing a reasonably good job in comparison to everyone else."
margogramiak

Why people choose to wear face coverings -- ScienceDaily - 0 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...201218165103.htm

shared by margogramiak on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Wearing a face covering in public is dependent upon how often people observe others wearing them, according to recent findings.
  • Wearing a face covering in public is dependent upon how often people observe others wearing them, according to recent findings.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      In class, we're talking about science, and the trust of science. I'm confused about the beginning of this article, in that I don't think people wearing masks has anything to do with the fact that other people do. I think it has everything to do trust of science.
  • "In this study, we examined what motivators are behind an individual's choice to wear or not wear a face covering in public,
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      I can't think of a reason other than trust of science. I don't understand.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • No evidence was found that a perceived susceptibility to becoming ill and a perceived severity of COVID-19 correlated with an increase in the intent to use a face covering in public.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      That is so confusing. I guess it doesn't matter people's intentions as long as they wear them though.
  • "Based on our findings, it is possible that messaging strategies that focus on susceptibility to and severity of COVID-19 may not be as effective as targeting actions that influence individual intentions and social norms."
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      Again, I simply don't understand that. I can say with complete honesty that regardless of who I was with or whether they were wearing a mask, I would have one on.
  • months before the vaccine is readily available to all individuals who seek it.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      Those months have past and the time is now!
  • an essential component in the continuing effort to reduce the virus' transmission
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      This piece of information should be reason enough to wear a mask. This article made me sort of disappointed in society.
colemorris

Los Angeles becomes first county to hit 1 million Covid-19 cases - 0 views

www.nbcnews.com/...it-1-million-covid-19-n1254498

covid

shared by colemorris on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Los Angeles on Saturday became the first county in the nation to record 1 million coronavirus cases since the start of the pandemic.
  • “The presence of the U.K. variant in Los Angeles County is troubling, as our healthcare system is already severely strained with more than 7,500 people currently hospitalized,
  • On Saturday, Los Angeles reported 1,003,923 confirmed Covid-19 infections and 13,741 deaths.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • The state of California is also reporting staggering numbers with more than 2.9 million confirmed cases, according to NBC News counts. Texas, with 2 million cases, and Florida, with 1.5 million, are the next two states with the most infections. New York, which was one of the country’s first and biggest hot spots, has recorded 1.2 million cases to date.
  • But its faster spread will lead to more cases overall, the study authors wrote, "exacerbating the burden on an already strained health care system, and resulting in more deaths."
    • colemorris
      colemorris on 17 Jan 21
       
      sad to think that things can get worse than this
  • Since then, rates have increased by 1,000 percent and have disproportionately affected Latinos, who comprise roughly half of the total population.
  • It will take a number of months to reach the level of vaccination needed in the population to curb ongoing transmission of the virus."
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