COVID-19: Chapter 10 - Mission Achomlished!

Somebody get this guy a social media presence pronto.

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This sounds like weā€™re one step closer to homemade colloidal silver being a covid remedy which is something Iā€™ve been rooting for all along.

Libertarian candidate Stan Jones, 63, first discovered his skin was turning blue last year.

He began taking colloidal silver in 1999 amid fears that disruptions caused by the millennium bug might lead to a shortage of antibiotics.

Iā€™m only actually advocating to convince anti-vaxxers to drink fresh pee, not kill themselves.

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With only 42% of its population fully vaxxed the Chinese government probably doesnā€™t see its country as being ā€œpost-vaccineā€.

Millions more locked down as China battles Omicron spread

Five million residents in the central Chinese city of Anyang have started home confinement today in a new lockdown to curb the spread of Omicron variant, according to state media and as reported by Agence France-Presse.

Two Omicron cases were detected in the city in Henan province , prompting authorities to announce a lockdown late Monday, issuing a notice ordering residents not to leave their homes or drive cars on the roads, state news agency Xinhua reported.

All non-essential businesses have been closed, outbound travel restricted and a mass-testing drive has been launched ā€œto respond to the severe epidemic control situation and strictly prevent the spread of the Omicron virus outbreakā€, Xinhua reported.

There were 58 new local infections reported in Anyang, state broadcaster CCTV said Tuesday, bringing the cityā€™s total caseload to 84 since Saturday. It was not immediately clear whether the new cases were tied to the Omicron variant.

People queue to get a Covid-19 PCR test on 10 January in Beijing, China as the country locks down millions more residents in different cities.

People queue to get a Covid-19 PCR test on 10 January in Beijing, China as the country locks down millions more residents in different cities. Photograph: Andrea Verdelli/Getty Images

At least three cities in Henan are battling emerging outbreaks, with provincial capital Zhengzhou closing schools and kindergartens, and stopping restaurants from accepting dine-in customers.

Last week, one million people in the city of Yuzhou were put under stay-at-home orders.

Elsewhere, Tianjin - a major port city just 150 kilometres from Beijing - has barred people from leaving without official permission, ordered the testing of all 14 million residents, and cancelled trains into the capital. Tianjin confirmed another 10 new locally transmitted cases after citywide mass testing.

The northern city of Xiā€™an is in its third week of lockdown as it attempts to stamp out a 2,000-case outbreak.

And after logging a handful of cases in recent days, Shenzhen - a southern tech hub just across the border from Hong Kong - has locked down some housing compounds, launched a mass-testing initiative and shuttered some long-distance bus stations.

Apparently Trump University had a Public Health program:
https://news.yahoo.com/ben-carson-echoes-trump-says-231129165.html

Actually, he would sneer contemptuously about how school is really about ā€œchildcareā€ rather than ā€œeducation.ā€

UK cases still falling. 7dma is now over 10 percent off itā€™s peak.

Edit: Since the US has been about a week or so behind the UK this whole time, maybe that means next weekish for us. And NY, which has been even closer to the UK, appears to also be at or very near its peak.

Itā€™s more like 51 percent, but it sure seems to me like the better policy at this point would be getting more of itā€™s population vaccinated.

In fact both these figures look way off. I donā€™t know what happened there.

OurWorldInData says 84% of Chinaā€™s population is fully vaxxed. Apparently a drive to prevent people without a WeChat (Chinaā€™s equivalent of WhatsApp) vax certificate from entering workplaces seems to have forced people, understandably reluctant to trust the government, to get vaxxed.

That number certainly makes more sense.

Yeah, those look like similar numbers that I got my approximately 51 percent figure from.

Czech Republic hasnā€™t reached the 30,000 to 50,000 case range that people predict just yet but the fact that 10 students tested positive outside of school testing is a bad sign since they likely all got it separately.

Sure itā€™s a small number. But again, we didnā€™t have this before. It also seems that the government is pushing school to collect more data for contact tracing. Contact tracing in schools was basically given up on really early on when schools open. This time, it seems that the new government is keeping to it.

The former government was pretty sneaky by tabling a few very popular ideas but not passing them. This makes the current government withdraw them and look like the bad ones while the former government was good. For example, ANO/CSSD proposed allowing citizens to sue companies that violate COVID restrictions. Now that was never gonna pass but forcing the current government to make it clear that they wonā€™t do it makes them look bad. Sneaky.

says who?

So, I have read the conventional wisdom that evolution does not favor reduced severity, and we basically got lucky that Omicron is less mild. Can someone help me understand this better, because it seems counterintuitive for respiratory viruses. Specifically, if Iā€™m COVID, my best trick is apparently hanging out in peopleā€™s noses, not causing any symptoms, and letting my progeny get exhaled in respiratory droplets so they can end up in other peopleā€™s noses. I donā€™t really want my progeny to end up deep in the lungs or, god forbid, anywhere else in the body, because itā€™s much harder or impossible to infect new hosts from there.

I also donā€™t want my progeny to do anything that will cause symptoms, because that is likely to result in my host getting a COVID test and isolating until the T cells get me.

Now, maybe the logic of evolution doesnā€™t allow that strategy to be implemented, because replicating as fast as possible is a sensible greedy strategy even if it screws things up for all the other virus particles in this host by causing symptoms. But if lung infections are a dead-end and they cause symptoms that limit infection opportunities, wouldnā€™t a virus that limits those infections (as Omicron seems to) have an advantage?

Related, but more speculative: to what extent do virus infections in animal hosts follow a group selection principle? In other words, if each infection is seeded by a small number of genetically identical particles, is evolution optimizing, at least partially, for a genome that can spin off a lot of daughter colonies (like with ants) vs just replicating a bunch of virus particles in the current host?

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I thought the opposite was the conventional wisdom, tbh.

The problem is one of time scales. Over a long enough time scale evolution certainly would favor a less deadly disease. If it kills itā€™s hosts it canā€™t spread as efficiently and also the hosts alter their behaviors. Thereā€™s a reason that the common cold is so efficient. The problem is in how long it takes to reach the ā€œlong run.ā€

I think the specifics matter. Like it generally makes sense for respiratory viruses to ā€œwantā€ hosts to be generally ambulatory with mild symptoms. But a pathogen that spreads through dysentery, probably not so much. I recently read something about the 1918 flu pandemic, which maybe got more virulent as time went on. The guy was saying that because soldiers were in close quarters and not moving very much the pressure for less severe, ambulatory illness was absent. Because the infected guy can still infect his whole company even if heā€™s bedridden.