> According to Bittner’s research, some BPA-free products actually released synthetic estrogens that were more potent than BPA.
I don't know if that means that "BPA-free" is often deceptive advertising, or it's referring to different additive that's technically not BPA but problematic for other reasons, or what. (Bear in mind, as a layman, my mindset on this stuff is that the burden of proof should be on proving safety, not on proving harm.)
This is highly opinionated, since I don't know Greg Wyler at all, but I do remember his Terracom broadband satellite effort in Rwanda, which looked noble at first, but was more a pretext to pay himself a generous salary, than doing anything.
So when he started OneWeb and then Ob3 (or vice-versa) I was skeptical. Now, reading about OW, and how it was mostly a middleman, I would say I am not surprised at all that he would pull this one and blame a virus. With chapter 11 he gets to protect his equity and compensation
I expect him to rebound, with even better compensation.
I've know and seen Wyler's work in Rwanda first hand and seen the impact it has had on my villages and schools around the country, having lived there for a time in the mid 2000s. I have no knowledge of the financials of Terracom or the success of it's business model but I'm curious to know more about what exactly made you say that this was all a pretext to enrich himself?
You are OverBallooning what he just said (sorry couldn't resist). There is no implication that the system is absolutely deterministic or will ever be.
Imagine a normal symmetric binomial distribution, along a X-axis of events and severity. Now imagine that the binomial distribution isn't normal and symmetric anymore, it is skewed toward the X-axis of more severe events (i.e. a negative skew). In this model, we still have the same number of events, but their distribution along the severity axis is skewed towards more severe events, and as such they have a higher probability of happening.
I also find this weirdly dubious, but not impossible.
I do know that to study human coronavirus in mice, we had to create a mouse line expressing the human ACE2 protein.
I just did a quick protein alignment and the %sequence identity between human and select animals are:
The whole thing about warmer region being less infected is still very much controversial, and not backed by any strong science.
India, like other warmer regions, has not been very active in the diagnostic. This is also what explains the low numbers you in Africa, Middle-East, and part of Asia.
Right now there is only one way that we currently have to stop this, and it is to do it Wuhan-style. Full lockdown for 8 weeks.
And forget about chloroquinone, studies published over the past 2 days are showing that it doesn't make a dent if you are already infected.
Yes, the doomer narrative is getting old very quickly. Everyone and their mothers are running formulas in Excel to try and prove that in 50 days 3.4783 billion people will be wiped out if you go out to buy groceries.
Let the experts do their work, take your precautions and everything will be fine.
Arguably, the planet isn't going to get wiped out. This isn't Hollywood. But rapidly mounting deaths, strained or collapsing health care systems and widespread fear will make these type of stories inevitably more prevalent in many countries in the next couple of weeks.
"everything will be fine" sounds nice.
But it's crystal clear that it won't be fine for many. The vast majority isn't going to die, but many will lose family members, friends, jobs, their current way of living,... And that's just horrible in itself.
You are forgetting that the people deciding the fate of this country is Trump and his billionaire cronies? I don't know how you can put your faith in "experts" anymore when the experts are controlled by these people.
What's the alternative ? Mass hysteria ? Hoarding of basic necessities ? It's like people feed off of this apocalyptic porn atmosphere, very disturbing.
It's been weeks now that people have been throwing the same line: "well wait and see in two weeks".
According to official stats, there are 17k deaths worldwide at the time of writing for 450k confirmed cases, assuming the number of cases grows exponentially, the death rate will eventually be much lower than what people are projecting.
That's a reflection of how wide / narrow is being tested by those who entered health care systems. It's extremely hard to accurately extrapolate that to a global population.
The million dollar question here is how many cases go unnoticed. How many deaths go unnoticed. Nobody really knows.
Nobody knows how mortality is going to evolve either, since nobody knows how well health care systems around the world will be able to cope. Collapsing health care systems will yield a different outcome then those that do cope. And we don't know how they will cope.
So, I'm not accepting either "a few ten thousands" or "multiple millions" of deaths predictions at face value. The right answer is the very uncertain "we do not know".
What is clear is that people die from this, that no one is immune, and that a confusing response of authorities that aren't able to rally together doesn't really spark confidence.
> The million dollar question here is how many cases go unnoticed. How many deaths go unnoticed. Nobody really knows.
Few deaths are going unnoticed. Even without this virus, there are cases every year in the US of isolated seniors dying at home because they were unable or unwilling to seek help. But it is trivial.
As far as actual cases of CV, can't we assume that the highest possible accurate infection rates would be coming from the countries with the best testing - those who are testing randomly or even those who aren't sick. And even in those countries, we're not seeing a death rate any higher than a normal flu season, apparently.
In the US, we're only testing those who show up at the hospital and are already sick. Our infected rate is missing out on all those people who don't need hospital care or don't even realize they already had and recovered from the virus.
So most countries have, in fact, a much smaller death rate than what is being published. If anything, the math here is telling us that we're overreacting, and the only question is by how much.
Those are valid points. But we don't know if the samples we have are representative. Either because of their size, or their composition.
Extrapolating the results from one context into a different context - different parameters (i.e. hospital capacity, treatment, prevention, local culture,...) - also yields a skewed view.
Even experts don't know how ugly it's going to get:
So, I don't want to make any guesses about exact death rates. That's just a number. What we do know is that a substantial number of people who get sick will need intensive care. How bad things will get depends on how well health care and social security systems will be able to cope; and how the other domino's - companies, taxpayers,... - will cope with that reality.
It's not a question of cost at this point. It's a question of availability of reagents and consumables, materials to make those, and time it takes to ramp up. The supply chain is like a supertanker.
At first we didn't have enough test, but that ramped up quickly, then we didn't have enough RNA extraction reagent, now we don't have enough swabs, and soon is the collection media that will be missing.
There has been a call for more protective equipement. But as the situation gets worst, beds space, ventilator, and then staff are going to be the bottleneck.
If you google you'll find stories of people helping their local hospital by 3D printing parts for for respirators, and swabs. There's nothing cost effective about that, it's not fast, but it gets the job done. If you were to scale that, you would be competing for the same materials than manufacturers using injection molding or plastic dipping are.
> At first we didn't have enough test, but that ramped up quickly, then we didn't have enough RNA extraction reagent, now we don't have enough swabs, and soon is the collection media that will be missing.
No one is out trying to actively hide this information, but its spread does seem a little uneven.
I also don't want this to be fearmongering. Capacity and supply will grow (hopefully fast enough). Alternative solutions will be validated. We will keep bumping into problems, and we'll keep solving them (cause we'll need to).
Yeah but about HALF of those tests were done in the last TWO days! Capacity is coming online very rapidly now and while we are starting from behind, we will not be so short on tests for long. Roche alone is shipping 400,000 tests per week and Abbot Labs is on track to perform one million tests per week in the next couple of weeks. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/03/america-is-final...
The important number is the ratio of tests:true case count. You need ~1000 - 10,000X tests/case to do true contact tracing because you want to a) blanket the country with tests and test every single suspected case even if 99% of them end up not being COVID 19 and b) proactively quarantine every person that a positive person has come into contact with and then test each of those people every single day for 14 days until they come up negative. If a single of those people come up positive, then you want to proactively quarantine all the people THAT person came into contact with, rinse and repeat.
It's great that tests are finally ramping up but the growth in testing can never exceed the growth in cases if cases are doubling every finite number of days. The choices are a severe lockdown where R < 0.5 until the true case count drops to near 0, a non-severe lockdown where R ~1.2 - 1.8 (Hubei's lockdown had an R of 1.3 in the early days until they figured out centralized quarantine could bring it down to 0.4) and you just continue the lockdown indefinitely, or "herd immunity" where R stays at 2.4 until pretty much everyone in the country gets sick.
Once you get your true case load down below your test load, then you can think about using non-pharmaceutical interventions (universal masking, universal temperature screening, mandatory hand washing when entering into a gathering space etc.) along with rigorous contact tracing to ensure that any future outbreaks remain small and contained.
I agree with wanted to blanket the country in tests, but you don't need 1000 tests to do contact tracing for one person, even normally, let alone during social distancing.
You don't need to test people every day for 14 days.
You do because as soon as that person is confirmed positive, then you need to contact trace and quarantine that person's contacts. Every day that goes between a confirmed positive and a contact trace, the more that person's contacts are walking around, spreading it asymptomatically and making the cluster even more out of control.
The FDA just approved an antibody test. One blood sample, results in fifteen minutes. The manufacturer thinks they can produce enough for 200K tests/day.
I don't know why you are being down voted. The risk is for false-negative, but you are right that people might think this is going to clear them.
Even the manufacturer/supplier warns that: "Negative results do not preclude SARS-CoV-2 infection and should not be used as the sole basis for patient management decisions. Negative results must be combined with clinical observations, patient history, and epidemiological information."
They also indicate: "The sensitivity is 97.90 %, the specificity is 91.77%."
But when you read the technical document you realize that this was for a subset of patient. The real numbers are 88.7% and 90.6% respectively, and again these are for severe cases.
The two sentence above clearly oversell the product: "refined", "delivers", "help you fly", plus all the details for something that is already known... It's not because everybody is doing glorified marketing, which often results in being deceptive, that we have to be okay with it.
