uziq
Member
+492|3422
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/800/cpsprodpb/AF7D/production/_115152944_corona_uk_projected_daily_deaths_winter_640-nc.png

https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/800/cpsprodpb/C035/production/_115150294_pastedgraphic16-2.jpg

the south-west, where i am, has consistently had some of the lowest rates of covid transmission. but even still, the hospital system could quickly be over-run causing many more excess deaths. doesn't help that half of the west country basically has to filter to bristol or exeter for serious care.

it makes me wonder at what point the 2/3 chief scientific advisors who have been fronting this will make public complaints, or even resign. they told BoJo that his 'regional tiered system', with a tier3 that still had businesses/schools open, was not enough. and it's been nowhere near enough. BoJo in his speech made it seem like a reasonable option that had failed because of the unreasonableness of people; typical conservative ploy. blame it on individual behaviour when, time and time again, throughout history and all over the world, pandemics have only been solved by collective action and top-down management.

we've been living in this alice's wonderland for the last 6 weeks in which one town will be in tier3, the next one 5 miles over in tier2 still with all of its pubs open. deluding ourselves that this is prudent and suitable caution. the messaging has been hopelessly mixed and of course a multi-tiered, region-dependent system is ripe for sowing confusion and misinformation. the scientific advisors have been saying it's not enough all along.

i could get behind the 'balancing interests of livelihoods with lives lost' line if the conservatives had actually been consistent. but they encouraged people to 'eat out to help out', to cram into restaurants for tax-free meals, and all but forced employers to bring their offices back, when the science was pointing precisely in the other direction. they flip-flopped on the 'work from home if you can' guidance when it was wholly unnecessary for people to go back to city centre offices. why they wanted to reintroduce covid transmission into major cities for the sake of keeping branches of pret-a-manger and sandwich shops in business, i do not know.

Last edited by uziq (2020-11-01 02:28:30)

uziq
Member
+492|3422
cronyism is the dominant trend in the current ideology of the tory party. 'get rid of experts!' 'no more whitehall mandarins!' 'down with the old establishment!'

like trump, what has been brought in by the 'brain fund' of BoJo and cummings is far, far worse. algorithms that don't work, scientists with neo-darwinian ideas about natural selection in mind, eugenicists and cranks. oh and the usual roundabout of mates.

Kate Bingham, heads Britain’s vaccine task force. No experience in that area. She’s a venture capitalist. Married to a Tory minister.  Dido Harding leads Test & Trace.  No experience in that area. Married to a Tory MP. Mike Coupe, head of COVID testing. No experience etc etc etc
https://twitter.com/Conservatives/statu … 5710961665

this comms strategy aged well.

Last edited by uziq (2020-11-01 06:47:03)

Larssen
Member
+99|1857
https://i.redd.it/upefnvj30mw51.png
uziq
Member
+492|3422
The Brexit Party is to be relaunched as an anti-lockdown party called Reform UK, in a move which could alarm Conservative MPs jittery about Covid-19 policy.
Plans to change the name of the Brexit Party to Reform UK were submitted to the Electoral Commission last week.

Writing in tomorrow's Daily Telegraph, @Nigel_Farage and @TiceRichard declare that "lockdowns don't work" and say their new party will back a "focused protection" policy to protect only the most vulnerable to allow the rest of the population to develop herd immunity.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/20 … -new-anti/

'blindsided', dilbert?
SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+634|3689
The Tories shouldn't worry. Labor will unsuspend and reinstall Jeremy C. to lead them straight into another electoral disaster.
https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
uziq
Member
+492|3422
it's funny that dilbert's 'heroes of the common voice', who 'understand the people', are also hard science denialisms promoting herd immunity and anti-lockdown measures.

hasn't dilbert just been stressing the need for lockdown measures and listening to science all along? whilst in another thread talking about how in-tune farage and co. are with the world?

ah well.
Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,810|6075|eXtreme to the maX
Never said Farage is the hero of anything, he's expert at manipulating situations and morons to his advantage, probably as he understands how people think whereas you do not.

Anyhoo.

The worst part of the incompetent response to the Chinese Bat Flu isn't the unnecessary deaths or economic destruction, its the virus has thoroughly escaped, gone global and had the time and hosts to thoroughly mutate to the point we will never realistically have a useful vaccine.
Well done you fucking morons.
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uziq
Member
+492|3422
the mutation rate of covid is relatively low due to its RNA structure.

coronaviruses such as the common cold mutate so often that vaccination is indeed pointless. that’s not anyone’s ‘fault’, though. there is no appreciable ‘race against time’ factor at work here. it’s going to do what it’s going to do. vaccines even at full tilt development can take 5-10 years. a mutation-prone virus is going to mutate.

the idea of us ever having a total vaccine was rather fantastical. we haven’t ever eliminated a coronavirus at large in the general population from the world before. once again your approach to science shades into the religious. you’re expecting a deus ex machina. it’s illiterate and not in line with the science.

maybe you should have done chemistry at oksferd?

you should read this paper: published by chinese scientists in 2018/2019.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6466186/

it paints a pretty clear picture that, as human development and expansion continues, and our demands upon the planet/ecosphere continue apace, we are going to increasingly encounter zoonotic diseases which, without adequate measures, will quickly become pandemic-scale, due to the globalised system. we could effectively be entering an age of pandemics. they wrote of this based on the available evidence way before covid-19. who was listening? what political decisions were taken, for e.g. by trump’s lot to bin all previous pandemic response strategy?

make u think!

Last edited by uziq (2020-11-02 01:38:52)

Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,810|6075|eXtreme to the maX
Studying chemistry wouldn't have been much use in learning about coronaviruses, dur.

Population reduction is the answer to most questions. Maybe the zoonotic diseases will  do it for us.
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uziq
Member
+492|3422
chemistry/biochem has plenty of applications in virology. you should read a science journal sometime instead of presuming you're the master of the scientific universe with your BEng.
Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,810|6075|eXtreme to the maX
Biochemistry obviously yes, chemistry no.
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SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+634|3689
Anyway, God clearly does not favor the middle of the country at the moment. Though it is somewhat fitting that the middle of the country that defected to Republican in 2016 is being decimated by a virus that Republicans say isn't real. 
https://i.imgur.com/BG62Jer.png
https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,810|6075|eXtreme to the maX
If they stopped fucking their cousins transmission would go way down.
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uziq
Member
+492|3422

Dilbert_X wrote:

Biochemistry obviously yes, chemistry no.
http://anderson.chem.ox.ac.uk/virchem.html

organic chemistry is a huge area of modern chemistry departments.

do you have any idea what you're talking about?

undergraduate degrees only provide a broad base for graduate or post-doctoral lab work, in any case. a chemistry degree would work just as well as a biology degree, dilbert.

thatcher took a chemistry undergraduate and went on to work in food research lab. it might blow your mind to know that there's an overlap with biochem/biology there, too.
Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,810|6075|eXtreme to the maX
Thats an organic chemistry group, which obviously has some overlap with biochemistry, not exactly the same as 'chemistry' in the normal sense.

Its like saying people who study history should make great futurists, because its all just manipulating words after all.

Anyway, they look like complete nerds.

https://anderson.chem.ox.ac.uk/images/group2017.jpg

Last edited by Dilbert_X (2020-11-02 02:48:24)

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uziq
Member
+492|3422
here we go. dilbert knows best again. you can't just admit when you're wrong, can you?

http://anderson.chem.ox.ac.uk/group.html

look at the CVs of almost every single researcher in the group. chemistry undergraduate.

organic chemistry is a fundamental area of study on almost every pure chemistry undergraduate course. there's no two ways about it. chemistry has applications in virology. move on.

Last edited by uziq (2020-11-02 02:50:23)

Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,810|6075|eXtreme to the maX
Do you have any idea how different organic and bio-chemistry are?
Organic chemistry is almost exclusively devoted to industrial chemicals and processes.
"Organic" doesn't mean natural, it means chemicals with a carbon backbone - which are mostly crude oil based.
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uziq
Member
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with applications to carbon-based lifeforms, dilbert?

let's recap, shall we?

"lol chemistry wouldn't be much good in studying coronaviruses, dur".
[here is a group of chemists working on virology]
"not real chemists, are they?"
[every single researcher in this group has a background in chemistry from a world-leading scientific institution]
"yes but they're not real chemists, because i say so. btw thatcher wasn't a real scientist and i know best".

Last edited by uziq (2020-11-02 02:57:57)

Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,810|6075|eXtreme to the maX
Some applications in research. If you think there's going to be a treatment for COVID derived from oil you should start injecting aquarium cleaner now.
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Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,810|6075|eXtreme to the maX

uziq wrote:

with applications to carbon-based lifeforms, dilbert?

let's recap, shall we?

"lol chemistry wouldn't be much good in studying coronaviruses, dur".
[here is a group of chemists working on virology]
"not real chemists, are they?"
[every single researcher in this group has a background in chemistry from a world-leading scientific institution]
"yes but they're not real chemists, because i say so. btw thatcher wasn't a real scientist and i know best".
Its a group of chemists helping out actual virologists with a few chemical building blocks for lab tests.

Virological Chemistry
Our collaborations with virology research groups are mainly based on the design and synthesis of chemically-modified nucleotides for use as RNA- and DNA-based biological probes. These systems have potential applications for studying the life cycles of a range of viruses including HIV and HCV.
Now take a pill and get a grip.

Last edited by Dilbert_X (2020-11-02 03:02:38)

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uziq
Member
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yes, which is precisely what i claimed: that chemistry has useful applications in virological research. which evidently it does.

turns out your grasp of what modern sciences are up to isn't even that great. maybe you should relax a little with all the grand pronouncements?
Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,810|6075|eXtreme to the maX
Great, but the average chemist can't exactly jump straight into virological research.
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Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,810|6075|eXtreme to the maX

uziq wrote:

the mutation rate of covid is relatively low due to its RNA structure.

coronaviruses such as the common cold mutate so often that vaccination is indeed pointless. that’s not anyone’s ‘fault’, though. there is no appreciable ‘race against time’ factor at work here. it’s going to do what it’s going to do. vaccines even at full tilt development can take 5-10 years. a mutation-prone virus is going to mutate.
Would have been great to have had those 5-15 years while the virus was safely locked up in a Wuhan lab though eh?
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uziq
Member
+492|3422

Dilbert_X wrote:

Great, but the average chemist can't exactly jump straight into virological research.
nobody can jump straight into virological research. what is your fucking point? science research takes 6-7 years of training, especially in advanced or specialized areas such as virology. do you think biology undergraduates with 3 years of education are going to be solving the covid vaccine?

cutting-edge virology and the development of vaccines depends upon the knowledge of chemists as well as biologists. it's really that simple. the whole process of finding and designing a vaccine involves chemistry.

i mentioned 'should have studied chemistry at oksferd' specifically because you seem hugely illiterate on basic characteristics of covid-19, or on vaccination generally, and yet you're keen to denigrate margaret thatcher's education. not because i think chemistry is the absolute cornerstone of understanding viruses. do keep up.
uziq
Member
+492|3422

Dilbert_X wrote:

uziq wrote:

the mutation rate of covid is relatively low due to its RNA structure.

coronaviruses such as the common cold mutate so often that vaccination is indeed pointless. that’s not anyone’s ‘fault’, though. there is no appreciable ‘race against time’ factor at work here. it’s going to do what it’s going to do. vaccines even at full tilt development can take 5-10 years. a mutation-prone virus is going to mutate.
Would have been great to have had those 5-15 years while the virus was safely locked up in a Wuhan lab though eh?
chinese scientists and researchers were publishing papers warning about coronaviruses years ago. read the paper i linked. not some huge hush-hush secret government programme. researchers in the west were taking note of it, too. articles were published in the lancet, the new england journal of medicine, etc. policy was devised. again, as i mentioned before, bush specifically set-up a task force to respond to pandemic-level events in the early 2000s. chinese scientists and the research community globally have known that coronaviruses pose an active threat.

why do you think taiwan and south korea have done so well at this? they've spent the last 5-15 years encountering novel coronaviruses. they have dealt with the very real threat of SARS. and consequently they were much better prepared, and did much better. they haven't pinned all of their hopes on a miracle race for a vaccine.

it's not about waiting for a vaccine. vaccines might not even be possible. it's senseless to try and plan in advance to 'immunize' against a coronavirus: as we well know, many of them mutate far too quickly and far too often. herd immunity is a pipe-dream for most all coronaviruses, too. community suppression, as in korea and taiwan, works much better. you eradicate a novel SARS-like coronavirus when you stop it spreading and replicating.

i thought with your engineering brain you were great at long-term planning and strategy? you stressing the need to develop total vaccines is, in fact, very bad.

Last edited by uziq (2020-11-02 05:04:51)

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