SARS-CoV-2 Coronavirus (COVID-19)

ray, you're feisty today

 

Just seen enough "news" for awhile I guess .

Need something positive.

 

That was not a forward looking statement about the future.

I'm not seeing that "unlikely" sensationalization before you used it.

After prior very high level official statements that a vaccine would be available within a few months, and that the virus was likely to magically disappear about April , I believe a tempering of irrational exuberance is appropriate. When a family of virus that causes a couple hundred million cases of illness and misery in our country every year, still has no vaccine available, we shouldn't be allowing our expectations get too high on rapidly having one for the newest member of that family.

 

too much social distancing

 

Not enough sports that I don't know the result .

Instead it's non-stop "news" about one topic .

Got out and did an oil catch can for our Prime though.

So not a total loss.

 

Although I fully agree with you that many media published articles such as the one I cited use tactics of sensationalism to sell, in this instance, I did not find the essence of the information presented in the article to be false or fake. As for the sentence "FDA has never approved a vaccine for a Coronavirus", it has nothing to do with the future development of a vaccine against COVID-19, it is a simple statement of a fact on the historical developments for other types of coronavirus. Just as we still have no vaccine against the common cold to this day, we can not falsely hope for a 100% effective miracle vaccine that would stop all the warry of SARS-CoV-2 infections.

By no means, I am saying to give up on efforts to develop such a vaccine. But to continue the efforts, it will definitely take very high-level governmental efforts. Without the fed involvements, there is no way to fund very expensive research. And certainly, once vaccine becomes available even if it's only partially effective, implementing vaccination programs community-wide will take a concerted effort by the federal and local governments. Without gov involvement, they will be akin to folk medicine to prevent the common cold. That will not prevent the next large outbreak in any way.

BTW, if you prefer reading unbiased objective reviews of COVID-19 vaccine development, you may skip all the articles intended for lay-person published in newspapers and magazines.

Instead, try something like those.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2005630
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00751-9
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41573-020-00073-5
SARS-CoV-2 Vaccines: Status Report
News Feature: Avoiding pitfalls in the pursuit of a COVID-19 vaccine | PNAS

 

i try to carefully source my articles. if you think that one was negative, don't surf the covid 'net

 

I'm not saying the article is false or fake either. They are using selected facts to sell their point and "move the news needle".

Given this is a global pandemic, there is a lot of effort to find a cure, which is good.

And not just state-side, which we tend to focus on. While I'd like to see a solution sooner rather than later, I understand the process takes time and we want an effective solution that has been tested.

Some of the stuff we work on where I work takes YEARS of testing and gathering supporting documentation before it progresses. I think all involved want a solution, so the process will be adapted to meet the needs of society. Purpose fit.

 

A couple hundred million stateside, eh?

Seems a bit "sensational" based on where we are at currently, even in the states.

Measures put in place are effective, and buy us time. Wear a mask and help reduce the spread when you have to go out.

But to say a vaccine may not happen or "unlikely" is just moving the news needle and citing a fact of the past (FDA has NEVER approved a vaccine for a Coronavirus) in the beginning of the article is an attempt to highlight their claim and support their hypothesis.

I wish there is more focus on the solution. But they have a captive audience for now.

 

i think most of the world is focused on a solution

 

Here, @fuzzy1 is referring to a common cold caused by other viruses including endemic coronaviruses. A couple hundred million may even be an underestimate.

 

CDC: "Key Facts

• Every year, adults have an average of 2–3 colds, and children have even more."

WebMD: "Colds cause a lot of people to stay home. The CDC says 22 million school days are lost each year in the U.S. because of them. Some estimates say that Americans have 1 billion colds a year."

The biggest cause of those common colds seems to be rhinoviruses, but:

WebMD: "Coronavirus. These tend to do their dirty work in the winter and early spring. The coronavirus is the cause of about 20% of colds. There are more than 30 kinds, but only three or four affect people."

There are a couple hundred known coronaviruses afflicting mammals. Of those, 7 are known to afflict humans: 4 that cause ordinary common colds (229E, NL63, OC43, and HKU1), and 3 for much nastier diseases: SARS, MERS, and Covid-19.

So about 1 billion total annual common colds in the U.S., and about 20% of them, 200 million, are from the milder coronaviruses. How is that "sensational"?

 

That is also on my To-Do List for this restriction period. It is still one of many items not done yet, but at least my yard, shed, garage, and home office are much much cleaner and better organized.

And my bicycle training season is off to an excellent start too, best ever since retiring and ceasing bike commuting. Not certain that there will be any organized events this year, but our Governor very clearly lists outdoor exercise, including hiking and biking, as essential for physical and mental health. We just need to be much more creative about finding uncrowded places to do it.

 

I bought a catch can not too long after purchasing the Prime last April:

Oil Catch Can

Just now got around to installing it.

But one less thing to concern myself with on our Prime.

Now for the cat shield install.

Saving that job for after shelter in place land when I have access to a lift again.

 

Yes it does. Oh yes indeedy it does, and you've hit on exactly why it is critically important in this day and age.

About 20 years ago, I was asked to co-lead a church youth group study module on drug policy, chiefly marijuana. I wasn't asked because I knew anything about the topic; in fact I agreed because I really didn't, so I didn't have a lot of stuff I already thought I "knew" pro or contra legalization, which meant I'd be in the same boat with the youth looking at different claims being made and trying to weigh and sort through them, and I personally cared more about the youth getting the hang of that than I cared what they might or might not think about legalizing pot by the end of the module.

Now, the church where this took place has some written principles, one of which goes like this: "A free and responsible search for truth and meaning." But it doesn't get all nuts and bolts about just what that means. So this was the rubricky thing I emailed around before the first session (see here, you've made me dig up 20 year old stuff):

• Free Search for Truth and Meaning
  
  Here's what I think. Here are a bunch of sources I found that all agree with what I think. The ones that didn't were stupid. I disagree with them.
  
  
• Free and Marginally Responsible Search for Truth and Meaning
  
  Here are a bunch of sources I found that take one side on the question, and another bunch I found that take the other side. Great, only now I don't know what I think.
  
  
• Free and Responsible Search for Truth and Meaning
  
  Here are a bunch of sources I found that take one side on the question, and another bunch I found that take the other side. I lined them up and collected the points they seem to agree on, and the ones they don't. Here's what they agree on. Here are what seem to be the crucial points where they disagree. Here's what I had to learn to get up to speed on those points, and here's how I learned it. Here are the extra sources I needed, and here's me thinking out loud about whether the arguments on one side seem more reliable than on the other. Now, here's what I think.

We ended up spotting some interesting things to look for when checking out sources. For example, the pro-legalization resource list I was given included this:

Marihuana as Medicine: A Plea for Reconsideration

where, if you look at the top of it, it says:



and you think, "ooh, Journal of the American Medical Association! Is this something peer-reviewed? Hmm, it says 'Editorial'. What's their editorial policy? Does that mean it's from their editorial board? Maybe it implies endorsement? hmm..." And you walk to the library and you find this:



and you find out a "commentary" in JAMA is the equivalent of a "guest column" in the local paper, Grinspoon and Bakalar had an opinion, sent it in, it got printed. (Grinspoon being one of the prominent advocates for legalization going way back.) Hosting a 'reprint' on another web site with 'commentary' changed to 'editorial' seemed a little misleading, especially when the site also didn't give any link to the AMA web site showing their official position at the time, which was different.

We found other entertaining stuff. The JAMA commentary briefly mentioned a petition to loosen the classification of pot that had bounced around from 1972 to 1994. An administrative law judge for DEA recommended in favor of loosening in 1988. The DEA administrator differed with the recommendation. A circuit court worried that some of the criteria for his decision were impossible to meet, and remanded the case for him to clarify that. He (his successor really) did, and convinced the circuit court, which ruled accordingly. This pro-legalization page told (some of) the story.

The "some of" part is what was entertaining. They liked the first decision by the ALJ, so they copied 30 paragraphs right out of it into the web page and gave a complete citation so it's easy to look up for yourself.

They didn't like the next decision (by the DEA administrator), so they don't mention it at all.

They skip right to the first circuit court decision, which they call "Upheld by the Federal Appeals Court", though really all that happened was it was remanded to the administrator to clarify. They liked that, anyway, enough to copy a couple paragraphs and the docket number, so you could easily find it yourself.

They definitely didn't like the final circuit court decision, so they called it "Reversed; not on facts, but over a technicality" and quoted nothing at all from the decision, and gave no citation at all, no docket number, no case title or judges' names, nothing to find the decision by if you wanted to see for yourself what the "technicality" was.

I thought that was a really fabulous teachable example of citation shenanigans. You're telling a story of four decisions, you give usable citations for the two you liked, and nothing usable for the two you didn't. The reader should just take your word on those.

And here's a key: those are things you can notice without even being a subject matter expert, just paying attention to whether usable sources are being given (or whether there's a pattern to when they are and when they aren't).

(Just for the record, that final circuit court decision was 104 U.S. App. D.C 400; it took me long enough to find with no help from those web page authors, so it might as well be here.)

Some shenanigans we noticed on the contra-legalization side included a DEA web page that quoted an old AMA policy statement they liked, years after AMA's actual policy statement was different ... and a kind of over-the-top anecdotal testimony given by a Drug Watch International president at a congressional hearing. (Edit: serves me right for trying to skim 20 year old notes: at one point we thought DEA was citing an outdated AMA policy, but that was a mistake; we had been looking at the wrong thing.)

Changing topics, along about the same time, few years earlier, my mom got passionately interested in a cause that she would never let me go home from a visit without more reading material about. The reading material was coming from some well-established operations that, for a long time, had never really bothered including source references; they were writing for a primary audience that wasn't needing to be convinced. But more recently, they had wanted to get their stuff into school science curricula, and been set back by some court rulings saying "might have to be scientific, then", and their publication styles changed. Now they had toned-down cover art and more boffinesque typography, and even lists of numbered references! They seemed to still figure their primary audience wasn't ever going to check any of those, but they could be waved at doubtful family members to say "look! this is researched! see, references!"

... which made them rather easy to check. If you ever have one of these things in front of you, go ahead and flip back to the ("see, references!") references. Maybe you're looking at a scholarly-looking list of 115 little numbered references like "Grompf, P.Q., Implications of hyperflettinated bogometry, J. Bogometric Cog., May 2017", and you're thinking "seriously, Chap? You think I (a) even have time to check out 115 references, and (b) would even know what to think about a paper on bogometry, flettinated or not? That's what I trust the author for!"

Which is where I say, relax, phase 1 of your reference checking doesn't require arguing flettination with Dr. Grompf. Phase 1 is about whether the good Dr. even exists, or that journal, much less that paper in it. Don't sweat the 115 references. Use the random-number button on your calculator and pick, like, ten of them. Find out if the "referenced" sources, or authors, even exist. You're looking for ten out of ten here, otherwise there is no need for you to spend any more time with that source, or the author of that source, or the person who gave it to you (unless that's your mom).

If you're somehow looking at a source you didn't eliminate in phase 1, you might take those same ten references you found in phase 1 and see if what they actually say is anything like what is "quoted" from them. This still isn't asking you for bogometry expertise, just for being a reasonably fluent reader. Worth watching for is the "quote" where the words are there, but lifted from a sentence or paragraph that was saying the opposite (the old "those were his exact words, right after 'not'!"). That was super common in the stuff Mom wanted me to read; the writers were always looking for prominent scientists to quote, but that meant always having to find ways to twist what they were saying.

It will amaze you how much stuff you can, um, classify with that kind of basic checking of just a fraction of the references. I got more practice doing it than I ever really wanted. You'll be thinking "this is crazy, it's like these guys are daring the reader to go check the reference, and they're totally confident it won't happen," which is right, because their primary readers don't.

I did most of my time on that detail 20-ish years ago, and I'm not seeing anything radically surprising or different about "this day and age." I had my worries back then that if we couldn't get more people to vet things more carefully, we'd end up in a big mess, and we seem to be in a big mess, but it doesn't seem like a different kind of a mess. Just 20 years bigger. And messier.

Deepfake videos do scare me. That's a different kind of a thing. But I think they're still not playing a very big role yet in the mess we've got now. This mess still goes back to the usual usual, people thinking references are decorative and not necessary to check, or that they can skip checking anything as long as they like what's being said.

 

I would say, that I'm NOT saying sources can't be checked, or that some sources aren't perfectly valid. Sources should be checked, much information comes from reliable sources.
But I would continue to argue that the challenge today is human psychology. People want to find that source, or read that piece that agrees with what they already believe. Most don't wander or even seek the dissenting viewpoint. It's reassuring enough to say MY source is valid, the other sources are questionable.

I do think "this day and age" is a valid perspective. Never in human history has there been such an absolute universe of information and opinion available on a specific user seek format.
Today if you want to believe unicorns are real and the earth is flat, you can insulate yourself with only information that agrees with your viewpoint.
Most people today aren't discerning enough to differentiate between "facts" and "opinion", commentary and statement, or even the difference between a news report and a politically slanted comedy routine.

In short, The Truth Is Out There. But I think most people are only looking for "Their Truth".

 

You need to keep those cats out of the engine compartment.

 

That's where I keep the horses and electrons.

But the horses make the cats hot.

So best to use electrons.

And protect the cat with a nice metal wall so others who might like my hot cat move along.

 

'how do you feel about topic drift'?