New UK Strain of Coronavirus More Infectious, Say Government Scientists (reuters.com) 156
Reuters reports:
A new strain of coronavirus identified in the United Kingdom is up to 70% more infectious but it is not thought to be more deadly and vaccines should still be effective, Prime Minister Boris Johnson and scientists said on Saturday.... "This is early data and it's subject to review. But it's the best that we have at the moment and we have to act on information as we have it, because this is now spreading very fast.
Prime minister Johnson also announced new and tougher lockdown restrictions for millions of people in the U.K., according to Reuters, which elsewhere reports the following known facts about the new variant: - The new variant is thought to have first occurred in mid-September in London or Kent, in the southeast of England.
- UK analysis suggests it may be up to 70% more transmissible than the old variant, which could increase the reproduction "R" rate by 0.4...
- The new variant contains 23 different changes, many of them associated with alterations in a protein made by the virus. Patrick Vallance, the UKâ(TM)s chief scientific adviser, said this was an unusually large number of changes...
- In London, 62% of cases were due to the new variant in the week of Dec. 9. That compared to 28% three weeks earlier. In London, the overall infection rate doubled in the last week.
Prime minister Johnson also announced new and tougher lockdown restrictions for millions of people in the U.K., according to Reuters, which elsewhere reports the following known facts about the new variant: - The new variant is thought to have first occurred in mid-September in London or Kent, in the southeast of England.
- UK analysis suggests it may be up to 70% more transmissible than the old variant, which could increase the reproduction "R" rate by 0.4...
- The new variant contains 23 different changes, many of them associated with alterations in a protein made by the virus. Patrick Vallance, the UKâ(TM)s chief scientific adviser, said this was an unusually large number of changes...
- In London, 62% of cases were due to the new variant in the week of Dec. 9. That compared to 28% three weeks earlier. In London, the overall infection rate doubled in the last week.
I knew it (Score:1, Offtopic)
I swear, this year is just like G.W. Bush's presidency - just as Bush's term was almost over, after Iraq, Katrina, ISIS and who knows how many other fuck-ups, we got some icing on the cake in the lovely form of a major financial crisis. So by the same token, did you think 2020 was going to go away quietly, without a final fuck you?
Re:I knew it (Score:5, Insightful)
It's more like, "all these assholes saying we need herd immunity don't understand that more infections = more mutations = the ability to be infected multiple times"
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, vaccination should get us herd immunity with no mutations.
That's however hoping people *will* get vaccinated. I'm a bit worried about that, because I asked my physician whether he's planning to get the vaccine himself, and he said no - he's worried about secondary effects and thinks he's healthy enough not to need it. I kind of expected a doctor to be much more interested in getting vaccinated, since he has to deal with sick people, so he's much more at risk than a regular schmoe like myself. But then
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I think it's generally a terrible idea for people to "have" a physician. There's an argument that seeing the same one all the time is beneficial because they theoretically know you and can give you better care. However, there are so many bad ones that getting a random pick every time might well be best.
80% of second opinions differ from the first one.
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Oh, totally, yes. Everyone needs to get vaccinated. When I asked about the vaccine my doctor told me I would get mine "sometime after he did", which is the answer I would except. You should probably change doctors, and, quite frankly, I think unvaccinated medical professionals (without a real physical allergy/other reason to avoid it) should probably have their license suspended for the life of the pandemic (once sufficient doses are out there)
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Interesting that your doctor did not seem to take the health of OTHER people into account in his decision...
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We don't have any scientific reason to believe it's likely that mutations will undermine immunity in the near future. We're using the same measles vaccine approved back in 1968 today, even though the virus has been circulating and mutating for half a century.
Could it happen? Sure. Is it likely? No.
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This would be the seventh variant, not including the original in the bat, WHICH FUCKING MUTATED. Will it mutate, well, it has done so already a whole bunch of times, is the vaccine likely a waste of time, well, it will generate billions upon billions in profits by those organising and spreading fear.
So far the virus rots your brain, gives you heart attacks, remains in your system for years and it repeatedly has been reported that people have caught it more than once. That to drive up the fear but the phar
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I mean, it hasn't been circulating that much, because people get innoculated. Meanwhile, you get three new flu vaccines every year (in one shot) because it mutates so much.
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I'm this case though it looks like the antibodies for normal COVID will work just fine, as will the vaccine.
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In this case no disaster happened. We typically don't say things like 'well, it's cool that the school bus driver was drinking on his route cause all the kids were fine today"
Lot's of them do understand (Score:2)
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Except they did and it didn't. Georgia was the first state to reopen and flipped to blue.
The high level people pushing it, sure. The people who buy into it, not so much.
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They also don't get how bad a condition some of the survivors of COVID are. 10% have 'long haul covid' including my workmate who has gone from being super fit to not being able to walk around the block without being an aching wreck afterwards and that's just one of the symptoms.
Losing 10% of the workforce would be vary bad for any country.
How it is evaluated? (Score:1)
Re: How it is evaluated? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:How it is evaluated? (Score:5, Informative)
How is it possible to prove it comes from some mutation?
Here in the UK do we have public test stations. Where I live there is one less than 5 minutes away. It's basically a big tent in a parking lot. We have started with this a while ago, and with more testing sites popping up, and it allows anyone to get a test who believes they have the virus.
Testing for the virus allows one to also see its composition, its DNA code. Doing mass tests all over the country each day means we get to see how a new mutation spreads, if it mixes in with older mutations, or, of it dominates and replaces these. When it does the later and the number of cases increases as a result then you know that a mutation is taking over and is spreading more aggressively.
Re:How it is evaluated? (Score:5, Informative)
TFA says: I wonder how do you know it is 70% more transmissible?
Infection rate data. In the government TV briefing today they showed a graph showing the rates of infection in the rest of the UK compared to London and the South East who are going to be in Tier 4. The Tier 4 area rose several times that of the rest of the UK in the last week, the line on the graph for that region being almost vertical. https://www.cambridgeindepende... [cambridgei...dent.co.uk]
Re: How it is evaluated? (Score:2)
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The mutation claim would be more convincing if we weren't seeing daily evidence Tier2 areas and London in particular have been going crazy, mass risk taking activity in an already densely populated area every day. They've been enjoying suicidally loose restrictions just as we entered 'flu season', together that will add a substantial rise in CV19 cases without needing more virulent mutants, it's too early to pin the blame on just a new variant.
In a weeks time, if cases of it explode all over the country, we
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Vaccine outcomes? (Score:2)
How does this affect the vaccine's viability? Is it still going to recognize this virus as Covid-19 or is it too different from the original, so we're more or less back to square one?
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RTFS. It is right in the first sentence.
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Come on with a low # like yours you know Slashdot don't play like that. It's comment first on the head line then read last.
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Actually I had read the summary; but it's late here and I somehow blanked out that first part.
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How does this affect the vaccine's viability? Is it still going to recognize this virus as Covid-19 or is it too different from the original, so we're more or less back to square one?
This is probably completely fine - there's not a big enough change that it's likely to affect vaccines, however there will still need to be testing done. Generally, since this does change the spike protein it's a bad sign since there might be a further variant which becomes vaccine resistant. Even if that does happen though, we won't go back to square one since the current vaccine work can very likely be adapted to deal with whatever new variant comes up once the variant is identified and sequenced.
It causes a new symptom though: (Score:1)
Posting dupes. :)
Easy to solve (Score:2)
Seriously, this is one of the reason to limit the people movements, to try to stop the spread of mutated strains.
Re: Easy to solve (Score:2)
Yea (Score:3)
That's why I always skip the first version of anything, let 'em work out the bugs. I mean, did you try the first version of Windows Vista? It was terrible until like the seventh or eighth fix pack. You wanna talk about diseases? Influenza didn't even get good until version 1918. How about the plague? Well, think about the plague of Justinian in the year 541 AD, it was mediocre at best. Compare that to it's later iteration, the Black Death of the year 1342, which was by all accounts a more robust and full-bodied plague. It's going to be the same thing with this COVID-19 virus, so I'm gonna wait it out for v2 or v3 at least.
What Would Be Really Cool (Score:3)
Call it the UK virus. (Score:3)
No content (Score:3)
posting to undo incorrect moderation.
Will we regret opening schools? (Score:2)
It remains to be seen conclusively whether the opening of schools, even during lockdown and in the highest most restrictive tiers, is the primary driver behind this particular mutation and indeed the rapid spread we have seen, that even a second lockdown failed to properly curtail.
Whilst there was considerable testing of all university students, prior to them returning home for the Christmas break, the same cannot be said for school children. There was *some* testing, but not nearly enough.
It was a choice b
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If the morons in South-East London continue to refuse to wear masks and sanitise their hands and isolate when they have clear symptoms (as I have observed many times over the last few weeks) then yes, the vulnerable may be screwed.
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But those same 'morons' exist all over the country.
The scenes at railway stations around London shortly after the announcement of restrictions are deeply worrying.
Those people were travelling all over the country and into Europe - it is a no-brainer this mutation of the virus is going to spread.
Crowded trains heading to multiple destinations, require only a single infected person in a carriage to potentially infect another two or three people in close contact.
And those carriers are unaware, as are those the
Scientific Hubris (Score:2)
We aren't going to control / contain it. Gotta learn to live with it. It will kill a load of unhealthy people - which is terrible, but bad things happen. We've become used to no bad things happening, so such a pandemic is shocking to us. But we've just had a lucky streak really, it isn't that we're omnipotent, and can handle everything the world might throw at us.
Re: Whining limeys (Score:3, Informative)
The US invented garbage food, mostly reprocessed inedible corn, and itâ(TM)s population is 50% more likely to be obese than the UK.
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Re: Whining limeys (Score:2)
And that does mean something, given how crap UK food is. :)
(I'm saying that as somebody from the part of Germamy with BeNeLux food traditions, whose inherited cuisine was almost as bad. Seriously, fairy bread and fries and butrercream cake were considered normal grandma cuisine.)
Re: Whining limeys (Score:5, Informative)
you're just as fat as us now, and the fattest in Europe. Oh, wait, you're not actually "in Europe."
In data from 2020: (all based on BMI of 30)
US obesity rate is now over 40% for adults. (almost 50% for blacks)
UK rate "26% of men and 29% of women were obese."
And the most obese country in/near Europe is Turkey, 32% obese, a wide margin.
https://www.usnews.com/news/he... [usnews.com]
https://digital.nhs.uk/data-an... [digital.nhs.uk]
https://www.hurriyetdailynews.... [hurriyetdailynews.com]
Re: Whining limeys (Score:5, Insightful)
You post loses points for misconstruing what “Europe” and the “EU” is...
Re: Whining limeys (Score:2)
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They broke into our Dublin home,
The dirty English dogs,
They took away my sister,
And they beat my dad with logs.
Everybody!
Limey scum, Limey scum!
I toss a bomb and still they come...
Sounds like you think you're Oirish, So the appellation "Limey" is not appropriate to you, my little fruit cake.
Or pretending to be Irish, which is worse. Twat?
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While he definitely bears some of the responsibility, blaming Trump for the mutation is a stretch. But I do agree that watching people protest against both wearing masks AND lockdowns is both strangely and infuriatingly entertaining.
The scary thing is I've seen health-care workers with that philosophy... it would actually be kind of a relief if they were really just after more overtime, but na this is just plain old self-destructive behaviour powered by ignorance.
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Not exactly sure what Trump has to do with this.
Not that much really. At the beginning of the epidemic in the UK, you could argue that Trump got warnings from Taiwan and China during January and failed to pass them on. By the summer, though, the UK knew fine well what was going on, had the virus under control and could have eliminated it. This problem now has nothing really to do with trump
The President in the US federal system actually has very little power. When he exercised the litle power that he did have, which was to shut down travel with China, he was called xenophobic.
So, there are a bunch of presidential powers. He can impose quarantines on crossing state borders. He can deliver or take away money from states. In fact he did
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Not exactly sure what Trump has to do with this. The President in the US federal system actually has very little power. When he exercised the litle power that he did have, which was to shut down travel with China, he was called xenophobic. In the US, state governors have much more power. And we see how Cuomo was shipping Covid to old folks' homes by the truck load. In any case, the virus is exploding everywhere. It's probably just people across the entire political spectrum getting tired of lockdowns and masks. My liberal sister-in-law recently caught the virus and can trace it back to a funeral she went to.
The US President's legal power is limited, but the symbolic power is immense.
For instance, Congress writes legislation, the President only signs it. Yet the Obama ran on Health Care reform and the ACA became widely known as "Obamacare".
Trump has no authority to simply build a wall on the US border, Congress had to made that decision, yet that was a major promise of Trump's platform.
That's because the convention is that the President sets the national agenda.
So, during a pandemic, even though it's states and
Oh Boy (Score:5, Informative)
He didn't stop all travel, he still let people into the country so long as the were Americans (or just well connected business folk). He didn't do any quarantining either. Also he ignored all the experts telling him that the Virus was coming from Europe. We didn't do travel bans to/from Europe until, well, they'd already banned us.
The reason for the China travel ban was to try and brand the virus as the "Jyna Virus" in an effort to distract from his complete inability to handle a problem this large with his very limited managerial and leadership skills. It's xenophobic because Trump's entire political brand has been built on xenophobia. His slogan is "Build the Wall" for Pete's sake.
As for power, he's got a massive amount. First as the head of state people listen to him. So when he continuously calls it the "China Virus" people get angry at Asians. Good Asian buddy of mine's gotten some dirty looks and he's got family that've gotten a bit more than that. Next, he has enormous emergency powers that he just plain didn't use. It's now come out in leaked emails that he was actively trying to encourage people to get the virus in an effort to get enough folk sick, despite the fact that we know from the Woodward interviews he knew how dangerous it is. His experts were telling him millions of Americans would die if he pursued "herd immunity" and he did it anyway.
It's genuinely terrifying to me that anyone is still defending Trump on this site. We're a science and technology page. We're smart enough to know everything I wrote, to verify the veracity of it and to understand what it all means. When people call Trump a cult this is what we mean.
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You cannot block your own citizens from entering your country, this would make them stateless... No country has blocked their own citizens from entering, but pretty much all countries have imposed severe restrictions on foreigners.
No but you can put them in quarantine (Score:5, Informative)
Trump did all those things. What he didn't do was an effective travel ban. Because as always he never listens to experts. All that mattered to him was getting re-elected, so he wanted to keep the economy going because the strong economy was all he had to run on. He was a failure as a president otherwise (and if you know anything about the economy his massive deregulation plus the pumping of cash into the market to keep things going was going to cause a massive crash right after the election anyway).
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Mr. Biden promised a national strategy. What we got (or will get, per his announcement) is required mask use on interstate travel on buses and trains.
Yes, yes, I get the interstate commerce clause. What I don't see is leadership by influence and the use of the bully pulpit.
We need an FDR with fireside chats that sets the agenda and works with federal agencies and state and local governments to get some consistency. I'd like to see a US CONUS strategy that looks like PR and USVI and state-by-state or at leas
Do you just not watch the news? (Score:3, Interesting)
Biden isn't FDR. The man knows his limitations. And even if he was, America was much, _much_ more united back then.
As for lockdowns of the sort you're talking about, they're coming. We're over 3600 deaths per day already and the worst of Thanksgiving let alone Christmas hasn't hit yet. The hospitals are at the breaki
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He can use the same powers he used when he ran through the money Congress had given him to build his wall: emergency powers.
Using these statutory emergency powers he could have ensured there was enough PPE, test kits, and medical equipment to track and treat the epidemic. Instead the states ended up in cutthroat competition with each other for vital supplies.
As states who were calling this a "blue state problem" back in March have found, a pandemic does not respect state boundaries. This requires a federa
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If we were on top of this it wouldn't matter that there is a new strain, we could handle it. But we aren't, it's out of control and the vaccine roll out is going to miss the target numbers.
If we were on top of this, there would never have been a new strain. The difference between 2 million hosts to mutate in (UK) and 2 thousand (New Zealand - also an island) is huge. Before someone comes in with something like "Europe is just the same"; the reason Europe is bad is quite largely because they insisted on allowing people in from the UK for summer holidays. Now everyone's just getting tired of it, it's much harder to lock down properly.
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New Zealand, the remote islands covering an area a little bigger than the UK but with a population that would fit in a corner of London? The country that isn't nearly as tightly integrated with other countries and whose nearest neighbour of any size is four hours flying time away as opposed to about 20 miles? I don't think the two are comparable.
This is just ridiculous; why not just blame
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New Zealand, the remote islands covering an area a little bigger than the UK but with a population that would fit in a corner of London? The country that isn't nearly as tightly integrated with other countries and whose nearest neighbour of any size is four hours flying time away as opposed to about 20 miles? I don't think the two are comparable.
Population size doesn't mean anything in particular. Sure, more people can get the infection, but you also have more doctors who can fight it. South Korea, with a comparable population to the UK, has done fine (their current surge - 20 infections a day per 100k - is nothing compared to just about to go over 400 in the UK). The choice not to be comparable is exactly that - a choice. If the UK imposed a quarantine on people entering the country like NZ from the beginning and worked with a zero-Covid targe
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As I said: this is unrealistic. How many lorries a day cross New Zealand's border? One of Melbourne's super spreaders in their second wave was a haulier. In the UK, it's up to 10,000 lorries per day just between Dover and Calais at the moment. France has barely closed the border with the UK and they're already trying to get t
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I think you're seeing correlations that you want to see, not causations. The reason the UK is high at the beginning of your graph is because it was still coming down from the first wave, which followed behind the EU countries by some weeks. If you want to look for correlations, then this lag suggests it's other countries that infected the UK!
That's absolutely clear and should not be a surprise. It happened much earlier, but in Europe, the virus almost certainly originated in Italy and then spread from there, via France and probably Germany or Austria to the UK. It's normal that, if there is travel, the virus spreads from the area of high infection to the area of low infection. At the start of opening up Europe early in the summer the area of high infection was the UK. Unlike in January / February when the virus spread from Europe to the UK,
Re:Not good (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, BJ does not have the skills to lead. He has demonstrated that time and again. Unfortunately, he has the skills to get into power. Democracy is basically a failure because of people like him.
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He's been described by his colleagues as a man who waits to see which way the crowd is running and then yells 'Follow me!'
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He's been described by his colleagues as a man who waits to see which way the crowd is running and then yells 'Follow me!'
Fits. A true opportunist then and a man of no principles. If the voters were sane, such a person would be the absolutely last one to get elected.
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"Who's right doesn't matter, who has the power does" --Thucydides (b. 400 BC)
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While 'proving TDS is real11!", you called the guy who told someone else to rein in the blame AND changed the subject away from Trump... a 'stupid fuck'. Well done, sir. ;)
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This is what happens when you have an incompetent, corrupt bunch of chancers in charge.
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This is what happens when you have an incompetent, corrupt bunch of chancers in charge.
This so much. Boris is not Trump but they very much come from the same pod.
Re: Not good (Score:2)
Re: Not good (Score:2)
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Frankly, anyone who blames this on their government at this time needs to rethink. At this point is it far more the responsibility of every person to do something about it (masks, gloves, distancing, isolation, ...) than to expect actions from their government. Even if a government is a bunch of idiots is there enough information going around all over the world for people to become active. A government can only do so much. Everything else needs to come from the people.
That said, when you go home for Christm
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Frankly, anyone who blames this on their government at this time needs to rethink. At this point is it far more the responsibility of every person to do something about it (masks, gloves, distancing, isolation, ...) than to expect actions from their government. Even if a government is a bunch of idiots is there enough information going around all over the world for people to become active. A government can only do so much
Well, apart from the German government you mean.https://www.bv.com/perspectives/24-year
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Where the fuck did that link some from? Like why as I on that page?
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Unfortunately the very people who are all about "Personal Reasonability" are the ones causing the spread in the first place, because any government action is "Evil" or "Wrong" or "Freedumb!!!! (this is mostly US)"
I mean, I'd be down for the personal responsibility, as long as we could indict those doing the spread for negligent homicide and jail them for their actions that lead to other people's deaths.
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I mean, I'd be down for the personal responsibility, as long as we could indict those doing the spread for negligent homicide and jail them for their actions that lead to other people's deaths.
You don't want to create a police state, but at least here in the UK are the lockdown rules mandatory and one can call the police in cases where people ignore them. It's again the responsibility of the people to make the call. In severe cases will it get handled as a crime. Any injuries or even deaths can certainly get you into court and sentenced. What this sentence will be will depend on the evidence and motives, like with any other crime. Don't think for one moment that law and justice will look away bec
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A government can only do so much. Everything else needs to come from the people.
With this virus, your own ability to protect yourself depends very much on the actions of others around you. Want to stay home and not go to too many shops? You need working delivery services. Want to go to a shop or to work? You can wear a mask, but the more important question is whether the other people are wearing masks. Pushing all responsibility onto individuals without providing some powers to protect them from the "covidiots" just makes them feel powerless.
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... Pushing all responsibility onto individuals ...
It's not what I've said. Governments have their role to play. Just don't make the mistake to wait for your government to safe you and then to sit still. This is why I emphasise the importance of the public's responsibility. It's easy to blame the government and then forget that the virus spreads from human to human. There are quite many people who think like this. Governments get the blame for anything they do no matter what (and it's usually the opposition doing the blaming).
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It's not what I've said. Governments have their role to play. Just don't make the mistake to wait for your government to safe you and then to sit still. This is why I emphasise the importance of the public's responsibility. It's easy to blame the government and then forget that the virus spreads from human to human. There are quite many people who think like this. Governments get the blame for anything they do no matter what (and it's usually the opposition doing the blaming).
That's a different message from "anyone who blames this on their government at this time needs to rethink". I totally agree with what you say put in this way and started wearing a mask weeks before my government started recommending it; I will do things outdoors only that we are permitted to do indoors and so on. At the same time, I completely blame my government for not having a clear message and for not allowing our police to do anything about making sure people are able to stay safe.
Anyway, good we bo
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Anyway, good we both agree governments have to do their bit and people have to do their bit. The difference in emphasis doesn't matter so much.
Actually it does matter quite a lot. A government needs the cooperation of the public more than the public needs their government. Again, you do not want to create a police or military state, but you want the public to carry the major part of this responsibility. It enables the public to have a sense of power and to choose their government through elections. If you want a state where the responsibility weights largely on the government then you really want some authoritarian or totalitarian regime.
We want a
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Well, there's one of the differences. We'll think of you going home for Christmas when we video conference with our families.
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Here in the UK do the lockdown rules allow people to see their families over the Christmas holidays. I myself am not making use of it.
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You are basically a crazy person at this point and everyone knows it.
Why don't you give tips on turning lead into gold?
Re:Not good (Score:5, Informative)
Why don't you give tips on turning lead into gold?
Hi! welcome to the 20th century. It was pretty awesome for science. Maybe next week I can tell you about the 21st. Spoilers though: we have high speed, wireless access to almost the entire store of human knowledge on demand almost anywhere in the world. It's pretty good.
Anyway, here's some tips for turning lead into gold:
First ionize some neon and/or carbon, then accelerate it with an electric field to a good fraction of the speed of light and smash it into lead. You will, at great expense, get a minute amount of gold from your lead. And it'll be mixed with a bunch of radioactive gold isotopes making is quite nasty. You're better off using bismuth (easier to separate the gold) or mercury which only has to lose one proton, so you can use a neutron beam instead of whole nuclei.
I never heard the phrase "chancer" (Score:2)
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This happens all the time with viruses. To infect other people you need to make a gazillion copies of the virus, and there are going to be copying errors (mutations). A single cough contains tens of thousands of viruses.
People who have the molecular biological expertise to do what you're suggesting have got too much to do these days to be bored.
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What are the chances for this happening normally?
Has some biologist got bored and decided to be a c*nt?
Experts are surprised, but we all knew it was caused by 5G networks.
Wooosshh ...
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A very good example for this is how the influenza family of viruses mutates naturally.
Now the coronavirus family does this a lot slower, but mutations happen. And while a lot of the mutations might render the resulting viruses nonviable, some of the mutations can result in a 'better' virus.
And the rate at which this happens correla
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There are several major strains and dozens of individual variants running around. This one isn't anything qualitatively special.
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Still, I think such discoveries important to consider. Here in Germany for example we've seen a rapid spread since October. Standards for science and medicine are pretty high there as well, so there's no reason for me t
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I wish I could find it again, someone sent me some really nice stacked graphs showing the breakdown by strain in different places. You can kind of get the effect by fiddling around with the nextstrain.org graphs. Anyway, the original strains in most places have gotten squeezed out by newer strains that are probably more infectious. That's why I said there's nothing *qualitatively* different about this one. That is, it's not hockey sticks when we've been looking at apples up until now.
From what I've heard it
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What are the chances for this happening normally?
Very high. Every year the flu vaccine has to be modified because the flu virus mutates.
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Because scientists are to dumb to think of that.
The data they're using is from a genomic surveillance project. You don't even have to know the actual level of basic reproduction to estimate the *relative* reproduction rates between strains.
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Because the statistics are erratic , all the more so becaus the disease tends to clusrer. you cant trust the numbers. So then you look at whether they're hedging and they say 'up to 70'. I think there is some political opportunism going on weak data.
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Sure, but you have no idea what the data looks like. Personally I think your political suspicions are backwards. The Conservative government in the UK would rather project an impression that everything is under control.
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Sure, but you have no idea what the data looks like.
Yeah actually we do because the government shared it today. Here's a simple graph. https://www.cambridgeindepende... [cambridgei...dent.co.uk]
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Not the same data.
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Johnson wants to display confidence but he also wants people to worry so they will comply better to the rules.
If you tell Johnson "if true is is worrying but from this data it is far too early too tell" then he will use it.
And a lot of people a lot less nasty than him would too.
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The reason I find it hard is called dispersion. Transmission tends to happen a lot through superspreading. That means that even if the genetic variations are equally viable, some will transmit massively more than others for no reason at all and most will disappear for no reason at all. That makes it harder to make sure a variant which thrives has 'good reasons to thrive'. If it thrives and it has mutations on critical areas then you do want to pay attention to them, even if you don't know yet whether it's m
Re: Smells funny (Score:2)
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That is why the government needs people to worry.
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