Scientists traced a mysterious Covid case back to six toilets(technologyreview.com) |
Scientists traced a mysterious Covid case back to six toilets(technologyreview.com) |
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/water-water-everywhere-but-...
Edit: this pre print is from more than a year ago! It was just published in Lancet https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanmic/article/PIIS2666-5...
Of them all the potential to reveal that the patient X is hiding their HIV status is probably the biggest tragedy that can happen, since it will compromise their social and work standing due to stigma. If, however, this person does NOT know they have HIV or something similarly immunocompromising, it's in fact their moral prerogative to find this person and inform them of their disease, instead of beating around the bush trying to go easy on their feelings instead of potentially saving their life.
Either way, at some point it becomes a question of common-good vs individual good and these options aren't so bad to even have this debate.
More information in this case is better outcomes regardless. We can't just accept the current state of affairs and do nothing if there are still avenues of improvement that don't involve pretending like COVID is a mild disease or forcing quarantines whenever some worse variants shows up.
Whether it will jump back from deer or dogs (two animals aside from minks who i remember testing positive for sars-cov-2) back to humans is a huge if (hasn't happened so far as far as I remember, or if it did, it couldn't have been more than ballpark ~5 cases), but I don't disagree that it might happen once more, since I'm not a lab leak guy.
We could massively mitigate its effects to the point we could actually live with the virus without risking the often debilitating effects it can have.
On a societal/systemic level: HEPA air filters in hospitals, care homes, public transport, schools, churches, generally any indoors place where large amounts of people gather would not just drastically cut down on transmission of pathogens of all kind, but also make the lives of people suffering from allergies so much easier. We put a lot of care into regulating our food, water, even our clothing to be free of pathogens and contaminants - but the air we breathe daily is barely regulated at all!
On an individual level, we could wash our goddamn hands more often (I'd be really interested in, but probably also really disgusted by a study on soap and towel consumption in large office buildings before, during and after the pandemic), wear masks in public transport, and stay the fuck home when sick - although I realize that this is all but impossible in the US with there not being a federal law that allows people to stay home when sick with anything without risking of getting fired. Here in Germany, it's no big deal.
Instead, our politicians seem to have completely given up any idea of dealing with covid.
it has jumped to so many other species where it has established reservoirs that it'll never be gone.
this virus is going to be with the human race for at least the next hundred years.
it may very well spill back from other species into new pandemics (although those pandemics are likely to look more like the 2009 swine flu pandemic since everyone will have cross reactive T-cells).
there's nothing we do to stop this with any known or really plausibly imagined technology.
even if you could snap your fingers and wipe it out of the human race, then the problem is that the longer it goes with humans not establishing immunity to it, the worse the pandemic will be when it jumps back from the deer or mice or whatever (although that likely wouldn't take very long at all).
Shouldn’t they have known that beforehand? Isn’t that a big red flag in this entire endeavor?
That's the thing with SARS-CoV-2.
It's primarily transmitted by aerosols, but it has also been shown to be transmitted via smearing. It's primarily a respiratory tract infection, but it has also been shown to have intestinal, cardiovascular and neurological impact as well as persistence in these tissues [1].
And yet, despite 7 millions of people dead and dozens of millions of people suffering from long covid, there's almost no prevention mechanisms in force anywhere on this planet, even vaccine development and rollout have all but ground to a halt. It's like we learned nothing at all from the pandemic, our politicians just wanted to make it go away by pretending it went away.
Approximately 1% of the population die per year.
You think that's a big number, but it's not. People die.
Yeah, but generally, your standard flu doesn't end the careers of about 6% of athletes who manage to catch it [1]. Covid is worse than the flu.
> People die.
Old people, yes. Young, healthy people in the midst of their careers? No. That's quite the misconception that has always stuck with covid, particularly as politicians focused on protecting primarily the elderly - the reality is, of all the US covid deaths, a quarter were people below pension age [2].
[1] https://www.dw.com/en/https-wwwdwcom-en-life-with-long-covid...
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-...
Sadly the politicians are trying to wave that one away as well...
Remember: "there are no solutions, only tradeoffs." Otherwise, we should just plug everyone into VR pods a la The Matrix and be done with disease once and for all.
Depending on the study, you have up to 45% of people experiencing covid symptoms (aka Long Covid) almost four months past infection, and around 10% that experience symptoms 18 months past infection [1].
The amount of people so massively impacted by Long Covid that they can't work any more or have to significantly reduce their labor hours is so large that it's been theorized to be a significant contributor to current labor shortages [2]. So yes, it does classify as "often" IMHO.
> and so any mitigation must have its costs, which are very high for any easily-transmissible respiratory illness, weighed against its benefits, which are pretty low.
Just the 2023/24 covid+rsv+influenza wave is suspected to have cost the German economy alone 36 billion euros in lost income and sick day payments [3].
We need pathogen mitigation concepts, the sooner the better.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-43661-w
[2] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/is-long-covid-worsening-t...
[3] https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/ifw-grippewelle-koennte-die-d...
“Patients with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) present increased risk for ischemic cardiovascular complications up to 1 year after infection.”
https://www.nature.com/articles/s44161-023-00336-5
“Approximately 1 in 5 individuals exhibited cognitive impairment 12 or more weeks following COVID-19 diagnosis.“
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S088915912...
And neither of those sound debilitating by the way.
> COVID-19 is associated with clinically significant symptoms despite resolution of the acute infection (i.e., post-COVID-19 syndrome). Fatigue and cognitive impairment are amongst the most common and debilitating symptoms of post-COVID-19 syndrome.
Base rate in the population in general, which would be a mix of various infections and not. For the no-infection part: those particular ones, for example, could be caused by aging.
> When they couldn’t refute that, they made an ambiguous appeal to other infections to distract from being wrong
Those were two different people.
Regardless, it's important to put these figures in context.
