That is an interesting observation. I double checked: "One result of this is that only about 4% of Amish people are obese, compared with 36.5% of the overall U.S. population."
There is sufficient evidence in the coronavirus genome to assess the origin without any further cooperation from China.
The crime against humanity is not the lab leak, instead the crime against humanity is the CCP cover up actions that allowed the spread of the outbreak beyond Wuhan to the rest of the unprepared world.
I don't know how to make the western world prepared: the sequence of virus is out; CCP has locked down a whole city of 20+ million people; following lockdown in most Chinese cities. They managed to get rid of the virus in less than two months. I remember one of the European health minister said on TV that they will not have problem because their hygiene is better than Chinese.
Europe and US are the leaders in biotech and pharmaceutical industry, and yet they failed. Countries had politicians trained in UK also failed, because they just want to follow what UK did, those politicians don't know what to do. I have to say that if UK or US decides to lock down multiple cities gradually, the world will follow because their influences, things will be a lot different. Your politicians betrayed you, they put their ego before people's interests.
The issue is not what the CCP did, but the Wuhan local authorities while the outbreak was still manageable. They did not advise the local population to wear masks or avoid social contact and travel, even though they knew quite well that a SARS-like outbreak was occurring. WHO was actually advised of the situation well before any such clear advice was given to the people in Wuhan. So you had people traveling everywhere with no masks, no distancing etc. only to suddenly be forced into a "hard" lockdown as you mention. But this was too little, too late.
Are you sure the US failed here? From what I can tell we had a combination of technology to make a medical solution and the capital and drive to order enormous numbers of vaccine doses, to the point where we've been able to reopen (with thousands of people in close proximity without masks).
China is not in that situation. What they got right was initial containment (the US got that wrong, but that's because we had an ineffective leader and have a populace which is highly resistant to social control). The initial containment didn't completely help, because the chinese vaccine appears (I say appears because I'm not 100% sure yet) to be much less effective than Pfizer or Moderna, and China still has outbreaks that lead them to quarantine large sections of cities.
I don't think anybody really failed here. This was an event that the world partly prepared for for decades (vaccine tech, study related viruses) and partly ignored (our public health apparatus feels very slow and old now), and realistically, if we hadn't done what we did it woudl have been far worse.
I think US is great, and it didn't fail itself. I don't worry about developed world to be honest, they have the technology and resources to deal with this problem. US and Europe is so far ahead than anyone else in this field.
I believe many developing countries are lack of good decision makers, they blindly follow US and UK, without realizing that the reason behind US and UK's decision. Developing countries couldn't develop vaccines, not well equipped for medical support, and didn't have resources, they are not the same as US or UK.
> If < the lab leak is confirmed then China knew much earlier than the rest of the world just how bad what they were dealing with was and apparently didn't communicate it that way.
If you set your building on fire by mistake you ring the neighbours to tell them to get out before the whole building burns, if you don't do it you can't blame the people living on the top floor for not being prepared
What I am trying to say is that, after Wuhan lockdown, we have European health minister saying it is a hygiene problem and American politicians say it is a flu, and media painted the lockdown to be unnecessary and human rights crisis, is something I didn't understand. Wuhan lockdown is not a secret operation.
Anyway, I think the world should take a different view on lock down now. I would imagine technology in next 10 years would enable average person to launch bio attack in any city, and we need to have a way to deal with it better than 2020.
1. No animal host has been found.
2. At first appearance virus was very contagious to humans.
3. Wuhan Institute of Virology published research on Bat virus genetically engineered for human lethality before the outbreak.
Lab leak hypothesis has more evidence than natural origin hypothesis.
Java can be written with no garbage collection.
1. Pool the business objects and create them all ahead of time. Restore them to the pool after a thread uses them.
2. Create a String pool and use == for equality checks.
3. Avoid Java constructs that create temporary iterators.
for (i = 1, size=myList.size(); i<size; i++)
creates no iterator whereas
for (Object obj : myList)
does. You employ a profiling tool to find the garbage-creating sections of Java code and rewrite them.
I know of a wall street trade matching engine that operates with no pauses for garbage collection that uses these techniques.
Assume that COVID deaths are accurately reported. Assume 500K dead in the USA already. Then 500K / 0.26% = 192 million already infected and mostly recovered.
With 328 million Americans, 192M / 328M = 58% infected already which is well on the way to herd immunity at suppose 75%.
Its not just the USA, reported cases are dropping in a similar way elsewhere in the Northern Hemisphere.
Yay, get vaccinated and be ready to crush this virus again next flu season.
The new part is the assertion that lab researchers got sick in the fall of 2019.
This is consistent with evidence of the virus in Italy in the same time period.
Due to the large number of Chinese working in Italy, there was a direct flight between Italy and Wuhan at the time.
The new Biden administration has no reason to cover this up further, due to the obvious danger that another pandemic results from a lab accident involving designer lethal virus.
"leaked from lab" claim absolutely does not imply "designer". The virus could have been natural, collected for study (possibly in animal) by a lab which studies such viruses and still leaked via an accident (unexpected human transmission).
To prove that it is "designer virus", additional, different kind of evidence is needed.
> The new Biden administration has no reason to cover this up further, due to the obvious danger that another pandemic results from a lab accident involving designer lethal virus.
This is true - but the implication, then, is that if they don't follow through with it, it is most likely to be because they don't feel the evidence is strong enough for it, as opposed to that they do believe it and are inexplicably covering it up.
You're far more optimistic than I am. People can find many ways to mold statistics to fit their beliefs (or simply reject the numbers as a deep state conspiracy).
It won't be refusing to look; it will be asserting speculation as fact, e.g. saying that the excess deaths are from increased domestic abuse and suicide because of the lockdown.
EDIT: This is not in reference to comments here on HN. I wrote this before seeing any comments referencing those other causes of death, and those comments here on HN are not presenting speculation as fact.
This is so interesting to me. Facts are still important to those seeking truth. Sure, there are a lot of people seeking reassurance ahead of truth, but there are also simply a lot of people. Given that people now have more ability to make their opinions widely known, I suspect that truth and facts are just as relevant as ever, but that loud noises will be made by those who won't be doing anything relevant about it either way.
Our ability to judge the relative value of messages is proportional to our ability to reason about the sheer number of people with things to say. I think that wrapping one's mind around the enormity of 330 million people may be valuable towards honing in on not only what messages are important, but what movements simply aren't.
> Facts are still important to those seeking truth.
What about the people that don't want to seek truth?
> The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do." [1]
Again, lots of people produce lots of opinions. If I'm understanding you correctly, the meme that "the deplorables" all think alike (and are thus wrong) doesn't have much merit after more than a cursory glance.
While I agree in a sense, it doesn't seem useful that people keep pointing out how facts don't matter. Not only is it debatable whether they ever were relevant, but I've heard this sort of phrase used too often in a way that is dismissive. No one even replied that COVID isn't real, or whatever nonsense, but you're already arguing against some nameless side of the COVID debate.
The pandemic, like everything else, must have its costs weighed against benefits, even if it involves people dying; for that reason alone, whether or not people think the pandemic restrictions are justified, the debate should be ongoing. It should never be considered a settled issue because the facts often come out long after it has passed. I'd be concerned if everyone agreed on anything in unison.
Heh! Facts are always relevant when you are debating in good faith. People who find facts not supporting their beliefs argue dishonesty that doesn't mean facts are not relevant.
You're speaking as if this article gives us certainty that the 400,000 extra deaths this year, compared to last year, are due to COVID. The article makes no such claim. Maybe that's not what you meant, though, because clearly there are things like drug overdoses, suicides, domestic violence, etc., that can also explain a lot of it as well. Tens of thousands of people die of fentanyl overdoses each year, and the number was growing up to this point, so it's not farfetched to consider that the COVID restrictions have resulted in more people taking addictive drugs or killing themselves out of desperation.
I’ve worked in four emergency departments in three states this year. All of them have been overwhelmed by patients with covid, and not patients with overdoses, suicides, or domestic violence. Granted the incidence of those non-covid pathologies are likely higher this year, but they are no-way elevated at the scale of covid-19. I haven’t seen, or heard from any colleagues, hospitals brimming with suicides and overdoses to the point where they are filling an entire icu with those patients, or having so many domestic violence cases that they have to shut down operating rooms and convert them into icu beds.
Thank you for helping in all these emergency rooms, and I’m sorry that some people are downplaying the virus’s effects on mortality in the USA in 2020.
People floating potential alternate explanations is not a downplaying COVID. It's trying to better understand the issue through open-minded inquiry, and giving people like the OP an opportunity to help inform people by sharing their reasoning and personal experience.
Equating the consideration of different theories with the rejection of one particular theory will discourage the kind of free discourse that makes society more informed.
I've heard this argument many times over. While it's certainly plausible, I've yet to see real statistics supporting the claim that there's been a significant rise in suicides / drug overdoses during the pandemic.
After doing some research on 2020 suicide rates, the only legitimate source I found suggested there was a decrease in suicide rate towards the beginning of the pandemic due to a "honeymoon pulling together" phase and no peer-reviewed data thereafter.
Half this country didn't care about drug addicts before. Now all of a sudden people care about drug addicts. They don't care though when it comes to cutting social programs or health care reform.
People didn't care when Wal-Mart decimated mainstreet and Amazon killed who was left. Now people are all about small business.
Sick of the hypocrisy. It's sad we can't take care of our own people in this country.
The devil's advocate could point out how trivial it would be to fudge these numbers. "Government releases data showing government is benevolent. Trust government."
Better yet, he might point out how absurd it is that we need to wait this long to identify a potentially statistically significant increase in deaths... during one of the worst pandemics in recorded history.
>With this statistic, the explanation for the huge annual increase can only be COVID.
Do you really think that the lockdown and its effect (the bankruptcy, unemployment, reduced social activity, delayed treatment of other illness, etc) could not cause increase in death ?
Not sure why you're downvoted. Your question is valid. That said, I've yet to find solid evidence that supports a substantial rise in suicide rates. The only source I found suggested the opposite: https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4352
I didn't downvote, but it's probably because every time talk about covid related deaths comes up, there is someone that tries to downplay it, and almost always with the same line of reasoning.
Problem is it ignores all the actual reports of covid deaths, overwhelmed hospitals and lack of stats on significant increases (or at least significant enough to account for the extra deaths) from other causes. The implication is almost always something along the lines of Covid is just a flu, it's not that deadly and we shouldn't have taken the measures we have.
I see reports that hospital levels are fine, it's just that their dedicated covid areas are filling up. Or that nursing shortages are more to do with layoffs or hiring freezes by penny pinching executives. And reporting that covid deaths are vastly inflated from perverse incentives or political agendas or mandatory rules of which the nuance is lost in reporting.
Not saying any of this is true. Just saying I'm not exactly watching Alex Jones or Fox News and this is still the stuff I hear, and just because you hear a report about something doesn't mean it's the arbiter of truth and everyone else is wrong.
There are countries on the list here: https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/ that had lockdowns but have no significant excess mortality, so it’s at least possible.
There were other factors that differed in 2020 compared to other years, like the effects of the lockdowns: mass-bankrupties [1], social isolation for the elderly [2], an increase in drug-overdoses, a decline in access to quality-of-life enhancing services, etc.
Isolation in general is extremely deadly. [3]
My guess is that the effects of COVID on the US's 2020 mortality rate were much greater than the effects of the lockdown, but that is just a guess, not a scientifically validated conclusion.
"We engineered a SARS-CoV-2 variant containing this substitution. The variant exhibits more efficient infection, replication, and competitive fitness in primary human airway epithelial cells, but maintains similar morphology and in vitro neutralization properties, compared with the ancestral wild-type virus."
There was actually a huge debate about the ethics and safety of gain of function research on potential pandemic viruses in 2015 after, get this...the development of a chimaera coronavirus..
"An experiment that created a hybrid version of a bat coronavirus...made up of a surface protein of SHC014 and the backbone of a SARS virus that had been adapted to grow in mice and to mimic human disease. The chimaera infected human airway cells — proving that the surface protein of SHC014 has the necessary structure to bind to a key receptor on the cells and to infect them. It also caused disease in mice, but did not kill them.
Although almost all coronaviruses isolated from bats have not been able to bind to the key human receptor, SHC014 is not the first that can do so."
Interesting though that we don't consider this sort of research the same way we look at nuclear proliferation, we sanction countries that develop nuclear programs we we don't approve of but arguably pandemics are already much more deadly than nuclear technologies ever have been.
Awesome to have an explanation for the associated super powers and deficiencies.
My main super power is a love of programming from age 17 until now still going strong - learned Selenium in the last few weeks and it rocks.
Very encouraging to find out about the unexpected number of spectrum folks who made historic contributions to human progress. Ambition of course is a spectrum trait.
The analysis is consistent with man made...GoF research is evil.
"The progenitor had all the ability it needed to spread," said Sergei Pond. "There is little evidence of selection on lineages between bats and humans, although there is strong selection on coronaviruses in bats."
