I agree that public health authorities have not lied, but that's not the point. "Would transmission be reduced if everyone wore a mask?" is exactly the kind of question public health authorities should be asking! The answer seems to be "yes" even for homemade masks. So, public health authorities should be promoting massive production, testing, and use of masks.
They should have been developing more than one test anyway. This reduces the risk of failure, and if you get multiple working tests, it allows some cross-checking to reduce false results. Failure to diversify is also mismanagement (though clearly more money can help you try more things).
I don't agree at all. The WHO had a working test. We just needed to produce as many of them as we possibly could, and send them to labs to set up and validate.
They needed every resource they had going to the confirmed working test. Even if the CDC was better funded, they still would have needed to spend every resource on that.
Not many details, just that it worked better than some HIV antivirals. Still, worth ramping up production of this in advance of trials. It's a surprisingly small and simple molecule.
Proposed, yes, but you can't buy it yet. Also, the cheaper tests so far are all antibody tests, not the more accurate RNA tests that everyone is clamoring for. Antibody tests don't work until you have had the infection for a while.
And they are even worse at telling you when you're "all clear" (if they can do it at all, many antibody tests are a "once positive, always positive" deal).
There is an asymmetric risk, though. Due to feedback loops like methane release, we don't know at what temperature the warming will stop, or how fast it will go. The upper-range estimates are well beyond any temperature from the last 10 million years.
Doesn't it bother you that the temperature rised first, the CO2 levela just followed it. To me if A happened after B, A could not be made responsible for B, i.e. rising CO2 levels for rising temperature levels.
A lot of methane is coming from deep sea hydrothermal sources. You cannot stop that. But methane itself is unstable in the atmosphere and only accounts for less than 2 parts per million.
If the climate were so sensitive to CO2 levels, where we've seen it go from 250 to over 400 ppm...we would see much more dramatic warming than we have. It was not that much cooler 100 years ago. So far, we have yet to have a year significantly warmer than 1998. It's been 22 years and the CO2 has been rising all that time. In spite of billions of people coming out of poverty. Minimal difference in maximum temps. Antarctica had record sea ice extent in 2014. Antarctica has been trending positive for sea ice over the past 30 years: https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/world-of-change/sea_ice_so...
There's never ever been a geologic extinction event associated with high levels of CO2. In fact quite the opposite: the abundant and biodiverse periods in Earth's history are associated with high CO2.
Plants literally suffocate at 150ppm. We are near historical lows for the planet Earth.
There has been a geological extinction event associated with high levels of atmospheric carbon - it was the biggest one of all time, and it nearly wiped out all life on Earth. Look up the Permian Extinction. (Yes there are multiple theories of cause, but one of which - and perhaps the most likely - is run away global warming.)
First of all, I sourced from NASA. You provided no such sources despite making an extraordinary claim about the Permian extinction. The theories for that event include meteors, volcanoes, microbes, underwater methane release (from geothermal sources) and there is tons and tons of uncertainty about that event. You are oversimplifying by even attempting to attribute blame to CO2, which was already much lower in the Permian than in other eras like the Cambrian and Carboniferous [1], furthermore, temps aren't correlated with CO2 in Pre-Quarternary eras.
Best indications are that a series of super-volcanic events triggered massive drought, which probably led to drying conditions and decreased sunlight for photosynthesis, which triggered massive fires which burnt up tons of oxygen and caused hypoxic conditions for tens of thousands of years. This whole episode is also associated with geomagnetic instability [2]. Now, the two are related, because geomagnetism is caused by movement of the inner and outer core of the Earth. If the earth sees periodic disruptions in the normal movement of the cores, I can easily imagine that to trigger massive volcanic activity.
Now, in that case, a release of CO2 occurred from all the plant matter dying off as a result of drought, fire, flood, and volcanism. The CO2 itself didn't cause the extinction. The volcanism caused the extinction.
If funding for these projects is the problem, our society is even more short-sighted than I thought. We should be throwing money at them. I would be more worried about underlying physical constraints, like a shortage of manufacturing throughput.
I work in computational drug discovery. With current hardware, we are basically limited to simulating single proteins for microseconds of time, and even that requires a lot of simplifying assumptions. So we can only simulate a small part of any given process. We can't develop high confidence about a complex cascading process this way.
Quantum computing would definitely help if we had it. And researchers are using deep learning in many parts of the process now.
If these first trials succeed, yes, we might get a vaccine mass-produced fast. But you're not looking at the downside risk: if these trials fail, and the next trials fail. This is research; by definition we don't know what will happen. It could turn out to be really hard to make a vaccine for this particular virus. In that case, even with well-funded efforts trying everything, it could take many years.
> I'm reading your comment from a 170-year-old wooden house.
That's great, but that wooden house you live in is vastly better in terms of quality of wood than what is common today in USA construction. If OSB had existed 170 years ago, I assure you would have long ago turned to dust by today. You probably have magnificent wood beams and single-piece shipboards spanning all studs and joists.
It all comes down to material-quality, maintenance, design, expectations and weather. Sadly, all of those factors take a back seat to cost and speed where modern housing developers are concerned. Modern building techniques make it easy to fool unsavvy consumers into an illusion of durability and quality.
No it isn't - if you ask the people actually building American wooden houses how long they think they'll last - they'll tell you almost what I did - just 60 years! Check national building standards 7543:1992. They increased it under pressure a few years ago, but that's what they were designing against until recently!
Of course some houses will survive longer (and 170 is a pretty modest age to be boasting about) but even the people building them don't have confidence that they will.
I like this better than my solution. The technique of adding random numbers has a more crypto feel to it. It would help to use big numbers, so that they would conceal the underlying number better (clearly single-digit numbers would be no help, might as well extend that and use 5-digit numbers).
