BF2S Forums Pandemic thread

Covid-19 can leave the lungs of people who died from the disease completely unrecognisable, a professor of cardiovascular science has told parliament.

It created such massive damage in those who spent more than a month in hospital that it resulted in “complete disruption of the lung architecture”, said Prof Mauro Giacca of King’s College London.

In findings that he said showed the potential for “real problems” after survival, he told the Lords science and technology committee that he had studied the autopsies of patients who died in Italy after 30 to 40 days in intensive care and discovered large amounts of the virus persisting in lungs as well as highly unusual fused cells.

"What you find in the lungs of people who have stayed with the disease for more than a month before dying is something completely different from normal pneumonia, influenza or the Sars virus,” he said. “You see massive thrombosis. There is a complete disruption of the lung architecture – in some lights you can’t even distinguish that it used to be a lung.

“There are large numbers of very big fused cells which are virus positive with as many as 10, 15 nuclei,” he said. “I am convinced this explains the unique pathology of Covid-19. This is not a disease caused by a virus which kills cells, which had profound implications for therapy.”

SuperJail Warden wrote:

Jay wrote:

uziq wrote:

jay, can you please explain to me like i'm very stooopide ... if this is no big deal, why has every government in the world made somewhat of a deal of it? it's not just the WHO: most advanced countries have their own medical and disease administrations who are treating this as A Very Bad Thing. scientists and independent researchers all over the world, on every continent, in many languages, are conducting 100s of studies, gathering landfills of data, and all are treating it as a bad deal requiring Utmost Caution.

why? if you see through it? how has everyone been duped? i mean, it seems silly enough when you blame it on 'liberal hysteria' and 'democrats being democrats', but this is way way beyond an american party-political issue. what's with the rest of the world? china? south korea? germany? the UK? all of these disparate nations with very different systems, ideologies, and approaches, are all reaching roughly the same conclusions. all are urging caution and treating it as a very serious thing.

can you please just explain this to me? why is it only you and your national review blog who have seen through the groupthink and delusion? that's a lot of very intelligent scientists and doctors who have been duped.

I'm not saying it's no big deal. Clearly some small minority have very severe reactions, some to the point of death. Are you personally likely to have something severe and end up in a hospital? No. Odds of dying for people under 50 appears to be about 1 per 2000 cases. Not nothing, but not catastrophic either.

You don't have anyone you care for over the age of 50?

Britain has recorded the highest excess death rate of any country and is forecast to suffer the worst economic recession.

uziq wrote:

there is nothing remotely hipster about the conservative party, never has been. learn to use language properly, old man.

what characterizes BoJo's government is the same as trump's: mendacity, shamelessness, unaccountability, excessive concern for media 'optics', sloganeering, and, most of all, populism.

the violent thugs who descended on london last week for an open-air piss-up and punch-up were raised and encouraged by BoJo and his ilk. they are not disconnected phenomena. 'hipsters' have nothing to do with it. neither do their humanities degrees.

you will note that dominic cummings' entire point as a special advisor is to try and 'do away' with the usual whitehall bureaucracy. he is completely dismissive of the civil service. he has arranged around him a 'crack team' of ... science geeks, big data wonks, and other 'misfits' (recall cambridge analytica). you can even read his recruitment posting online, it generated a lot of media attention. cummings himself is full of rhetoric about 'useless oxford grads', and is looking for scientists and computer programmers, people who are 'outside the mould'. that's the people who currently control number 10, much to the chagrin of career civil servants and, er, the special scientific committee who were perplexed by cummings' presence.

you should read cummings' blog, by the way. it's full of your sort of ideology. hard reliance on 'technocracy', big data, numbers, fanciful social darwinist theories. cummings really is more like you than you think.

read this for a good outline:
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/20 … servatives
'inside the mind of dominic cummings'

He takes the term “Odyssean education” from the Nobel-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann, referring to “an education that starts with the biggest questions and problems and teaches people to understand connections between them”. The aim would be to “train synthesisers”. He appears contemptuous of most politicians, almost all media commentators, and all civil servants: none of these people really understand statistical modelling, quantum computation, synthetic biology, and so on. (Too many of them studied PPE (philosophy, politics and economics) at Oxford University – which, in his view, just turns duffers into bluffers.) As a result, they make or encourage poor decisions. Better “project management in complex organisations” is what we need, and his essay sketches a wide-ranging syllabus that would educate the effective decision-makers of the future.

[...]

In his ambitious intellectual and educational synthesis there are some obvious, and rather predictable, lacunae. He is dismissive of most of the social sciences, especially sociology and anthropology, precisely because they purport to explore the distinctive power of “the social”: their practitioners are mostly “charlatans”. Here he sounds like a souped-up version of Margaret Thatcher: there is no such thing as “society”, just the patterned interaction of evolutionarily moulded individuals. There are frequent irritable swipes at something called “French literary theory” and the damage it has allegedly done to the humanities; here we seem to be encountering nothing more than a lazy journalistic stereotype, a headline-happy approach that contrasts so strikingly with the care with which he expounds ideas from, say, evolutionary psychology.

His voluminous writings suggest no cultivated interest in the study of art or music, nor, a few allusions to Dostoevsky and Tolstoy aside, in literature, or anyway not in literary criticism, though one wonders whether he might not have a taste for certain forms of science fiction. A few philosophers get walk-on parts (he quotes Nietzsche fairly often, but then who doesn’t?), but on the whole he seems to treat modern philosophy, certainly the discipline of academic philosophy, as an irrelevance or an obstruction. Although he expresses a general commitment to including the humanities in his synthesis, in practice they (with the exception of history) seem marginal to his main interests.

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Last edited by Dilbert_X (2020-06-16 06:43:16)

unnamednewbie13 wrote:

A mutation in the novel coronavirus may increase its infectivity
https://www.salon.com/2020/06/16/a-muta … fectivity/

ew research on mutations in the novel coronavirus reveals that an evolved strain of the disease may possess a significantly increased ability to infect people. Physically, this mutation's changes have increased the number and flexibility of the protein spikes on the virus' surface.

"Viruses with this mutation were much more infectious than those without the mutation in the cell culture system we used," wrote Scripps Research virologist Hyeryun Choe, PhD, who is the senior author of the study. The study is still undergoing peer review, and its authors noted that the conclusions need to be viewed as preliminary. The conclusions were announced prior to the completion of peer review "amid news reports of its findings," according to Scripps Research.

We need to stop giving it so many DNA points.

While hospitals and doctors across the country say many patients are still shunning their services out of fear of the virus — especially with new cases spiking — Americans who lost their jobs or have a significant drop in income during the pandemic are now citing costs as the overriding reason they do not seek the health care they need.

“We are seeing the financial pressure hit,” said Dr. Bijoy Telivala, a cancer specialist in Jacksonville, Fla. “This is a real worry.”