Some recent links related to Covid-19.
Hundreds of scientists had worked on mRNA vaccines for decades before the coronavirus pandemic brought a breakthrough.
In June, the Turing Institute, the UK's national center for data science and AI, put out a report summing up discussions at a series of workshops it held in late 2020. The clear consensus was that AI tools had made little, if any, impact in the fight against covid.
"That a laboratory leak would find its way to the very place where
you would expect to find a zoonotic transmission is quite unlikely,"
Joel Wertheim, an associate professor at UC San Diego's medical school,
told me. "To have it find its way to multiple markets, the exact place
where you would expect to see the introduction, is unbelievably unlikely."
...
Evidence that artificial manipulation of a virus gave rise to SARS-CoV-2
has faded, as scientists find more evidence that features of SARS-CoV-2
thought to be unnatural occur in nature. Meanwhile, evidence for zoonotic
transmission is constantly accumulating. No one who reports on the issue
without acknowledging these two trends should be trusted.
Your case of COVID-19 -- especially if it was very mild -- probably didn't create enough of an immune response to provide lasting protection against the coronavirus, said Dr. Buddy Creech, president-elect of the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society.
Even if you've had COVID-19, you need to get vaccinated to make sure yous don't catch a second case that might be worse than your first, experts said.
In a sign of the starkly different way Americans view the coronavirus
pandemic, vaccinated older adults are far more worried about the virus
than the unvaccinated and far likelier to take precautions despite
the protection afforded by their shots, according to a new poll out
Wednesday from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
...
That worry is taking a toll: Those concerned about COVID-19 are less likely
to rate their quality of life, mental and emotional health, and social
activities and relationships as excellent or very good.
The goal of this essay is not to convince you that Delta isn't
more transmissible than the previously established strains. To
be clear, I think it probably is (SARS-CoV-2 is subject to
natural selection and it's not particularly surprising that
more transmissible variants should emerge over time), but I also
think its transmissibility advantage has almost certainly been
vastly overestimated. The view that Delta is more than twice as
transmissible as the original strain is superficially plausible
because it comes with a compelling narrative.
...
The evidence that has been adduced for this specific claim is
no more convincing. As we have seen, the estimates of Delta's
transmissibility advantage that everybody uncritically cites could
easily be misleading, and there are good reasons to think that
Delta's transmissibility advantage is actually much lower.
Disclaimer: This is from a far-right / conservative author/publication and I haven't verified the claims, so read with caution.
The largest study so far of "long-haulers," published by researchers at University College London in July, comprised nearly 4,000 subjects from over 56 countries. Participants were over the age of 18 and suffered from symptoms lasting at least 28 days. The researchers acknowledged merely in passing that in the study a mere 27% or 1020 of these "COVID long-haulers" had evidence of exposure to the SARS-CoV-2 virus. That's whether antigen or antibody. The only connection to COVID was the attestation of the sufferers. They "felt" they had COVID, regardless of evidence.
An August study of 3,151 British ("long haulers") in Pragmatic and Observational Research found only 17.2% were test-confirmed positive. A further 12% said they were told they had acute COVID, but no test was performed. And over 70% admitted it was merely self-diagnosis. An influential and scary article in the Atlantic reported some two-thirds of "long-hauler" patients had negative coronavirus antibody tests without making the obvious inference. An advocacy group study released in May 2020 found that only "About a quarter of respondents (23.1%) tested positive for COVID-19" but in "our analysis, we included all responses regardless of testing status."
For some contrary evidence see,
At least one long-term symptom seen in 37% of COVID-19 patients -study.
So let me make one thing clear: Vaccinated people are not as likely
to spread the coronavirus as the unvaccinated. Even in the United
States, where more than half of the population is fully vaccinated,
the unvaccinated are responsible for the overwhelming majority
of transmission.
...
In the aftermath of the Provincetown announcement, many who had
gotten their shots were confused about what the news meant for
them, especially when headlines seemed to imply that vaccinated
individuals are as likely to contract and transmit COVID-19 as the
unvaccinated. But this framing missed the single most important
factor in spreading the coronavirus: To spread the coronavirus, you
have to have the coronavirus. And vaccinated people are far less
likely to have the coronavirus-period. If this was mentioned at
all, it was treated as an afterthought.
I think this anecdote is instructive in understanding the social dynamics that have emerged in the COVID-19 pandemic. Seemingly intelligent and well-rounded people (Stanford students, for example) have adopted bizarre, pointless habits to comport with new expectations about how to "stay safe" -- like wearing masks outdoors -- all while continuing in much more risky behaviors. This is not to say that riding a bicycle without a helmet is *especially* risky, or that I believe helmets should be mandated (they shouldn't). But it's absolutely a bigger risk than COVID-19 for a vaccinated twenty-something.