A coronavirus epidemic hit 20k years ago, new study finds
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
General scientific/numeric literacy among people who don't work in science seems higher in the younger generation than the older to me.
On social media nothing is ever unknown because there's always a large and emphatic group--some of whom will have PhDs, MDs, and other high-quality credentials--telling you with absolute certainty the way things are, and that's reflected in modern journalism. Not necessarily the certainty, per se, as outside academia the certainty of most information is inflated; but the shear breadth and depth of what's reported.
To be clear, "young" to me includes people in their 30s and 40s, which also happens to be my age group. I've been watching in real-time the turnover over the past several years of radio journalists (NPR affiliates, etc) and print publications and I definitely see a change. The level of credulity is much too high, as is the level of partisanship. For nearly 15 years I disagreed vehemently with claims that such outlets were too partisan (notwithstanding FOX News and similar outlets), but over the past several years I can no longer sustain such defenses. The latest generation of journalists don't believe they're partisan because they believe the information they share is rooted in science, but real science is contingent, and the further away you get from hard science the greater the uncertainty in various claims, but because "science" discourse has become pseudo-religious and partisan the reality of this is lost.
When you read a research paper, coming across the complexity and diversity of approaches and results is one of the most important aspects of the experience. It's difficult for experts, let alone journalists, to convey uncertainty and inconsistency. That's why it's so important, if you can, to read primary sources yourself. It doesn't matter whether you can understand the chemistry or calculus behind results. You can simply take the results and claims at face value, which in the vast majority of cases is how they'll be presented to you through the media. What matters is synthesizing the importance of the gaps that come into focus after reading many papers in a field.
Add in that youth tend to skew left and you get a bit of a perfect storm. I want to believe that the ecosystem is ripe for some sort of centrist, fact-based news reporting, but not sure there is a big enough audience, unfortunately.
And partly that is because the mainstream media outlets actually do a decent job of conveying the facts. It's just that it's 5min of every hour while the other 35 is talking heads "interpreting it for the layman". So if you're able to mentally sift through the bias and are willing to dig deeper yourself into other sources, you do get the basic information you need to become relatively fully educated. And I don't think that's the case these days with some of the more extreme networks.
edit to add: I fully support your main point of encouraging people to read papers for themselves!
The news isn't more partisan because young reporters are introducing some kind of hyper-partisanship. Young reporters are not in charge. Old money people are. Old money people see that hyper-partisanship makes money because old people with money enjoy consuming it.
Young people are much, much less partisan on average than older media consumers and that isn't something new. The older you get the more entrenched, generally, you get in your views.
With some scientific literacy, you may be able to understand the central claims made in a paper. Or you may misunderstand them, because you may not be aware of the specific meanings of some words that are also used in everyday language. You may not be familiar with the context the paper was written in or with the best practices in the field. Hence you may not see the implicit assumptions that were made or know the justifications for certain choices. Because you are not an expert in the topic, you may not see the immediate consequences of the claims and are likely to take them too literally.
It doesn't help that the authors probably didn't understand the results fully either. Most papers are difficult to understand, because they discuss early insights rather than final results. Clarity often comes with a better understanding years after the initial publication.
Certainly, as a dabbler in a lot of scientific fields, I might make fewer errors in comprehension than a typical journalist "on the science beat" who doesn't actually get much immersion in science.
But, as someone who comes across this journal paper while scrolling HN on the bus and knows I get off at the next stop, I more-likely-than-not just won't pick up / comprehend any useful facts from reading the scientific abstract, before I get up and forget about the open tab, never coming back to it again. Whereas skimming a few paragraphs of an editorialized version of the paper, might be enough to at least let me absorb a nonzero amount of information, in that same distracted two minutes. Even if I don't absorb a precisely-correct + objective reiteration of the conclusion, then at least I might learn what the novel research method was, to the point that it piques my curiosity to go back and learn more later!
PS: to salience: to make salient.
I've been involved in GWAS before, so have an inkling of what's going on. I love the creativity in this paper.
The stuff is super fascinating, but the pipelines are still very primitive—so I encourage programmers to get involved in bioinformatics if you like this stuff! In the future I expect we see work like this accompanied by not only source code but Spore like simulations that let you explore the ideas like a video game.
Otherwise, just noted that it was written in Perl.
Scientists typically don't particularly care about the latest and greatest software development environments and practices, they simply need answers. The best way to deal with that is to help out, I personally think they should be applauded for putting their code out there, which is better than the vast majority. Including CS, for that matter.
See e.g. https://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Perl-Bioinformatics-James-T...
The language itself is definitely better suited to writing those regexes all over the place, so if you have two axes of performance & regex usability, I wouldn't discount Perl for those use-cases. I do suspect though that the bioinformatics field overindexes its use of Perl because that's what they know even though it's less well-suited for other things. That being said, that's usually why programmers might choose Python. Something to be said for familiarity & access to a thriving software ecosystem you're familiar with.
You can downvote this comment as well, code is code at the end of the day :^)
Should it though? Seems like we've survived this many times as a species, and now have the technology to combat it! I'm more optimistic with this information, and hopefully we can eradicate coronavirus forever with mRNA and next-gen vaccinations.
I'm reasonably sure the species will survive climate change. Some nation states, civilizations and cultures' odds look more iffy.
I think your bar for worry may be a bit higher than mine.
Given that nobody knows with certainty that it can't, it is very much "fact" and not "opinion" that it could continue.
That's what the OP is getting at.
Left to nature alone, we'd likely evolve and adapt and survive in some form or fashion. But the advancement of humanity has led to all kinds of ways we could do ourselves in if we put our minds to it.
And those nation states and civilizations facing iffy odds aren't likely to go down quietly. In the throws of desperation, all bets are off (why care about stuff like MAD[1] when you're already facing imminent destruction by nature).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction
Just like the 1917/1918 swine flu didn't last for "generations"(meaning the potency of the virus was extremely deadly) this covid virus will do the same. It will def. be around but not in the same potency as when it entered the world stage late 2019.
I don't think we can use the luck we had with this vaccine to justify risky releases in the future.
The US Operation Warp Speed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Warp_Speed made a huge bet on Sanofi/GSK's vaccine, which in its first trial did not produce sufficient immunity in elderly, the second set of trials that started earlier this year are very promising so far. Ditto AZ/Oxford which has not applied for an Emergency Use Authorization. Novavax's vaccine also looks very good, but they are getting severely delayed in making an application because supplies for cell culture manufacturing are first going to the Serum Institute of India and AZ for Oxford's vaccine and Janssen, and there are some supplies common with the mRNA vaccines. Trained workers are also in short supply.
Operation Warp Speed is a fantastic success in using the style of the Manhattan Project including paying Pfizer in advance for 100 million doses of BioNTech's vaccine, but so far only 2 of its 5 huge billion dollar plus upfront bets have paid off. Outside of an emergency that would be considered an unacceptable waste of money.
It's slow because drugs aren't remotely understood, in the grand scheme of things, and not all side effects are immediate. If you stay up and watch late night TV, you'll see at least a couple "Were you affected by <recalled drug>? Our lawyers are here to help" ads. My mom, for example, has permanent heart damage from a recalled drug.
We can shorten development cycles when biology is understood. Currently, it's not. Your doctor will happily tell you "They don't know exactly why this works, but they believe..." if you ask them about any drug.
Risk vs reward aside, vaccines may have a much smaller problem space, but they're still not completely understood, evident by clots from the J&J and AstraZeneca vaccines [1], the link with heart inflammation [2], and the deaths from both.
1. https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-19-vaccine-related-blood-...
While I hate to sound like a cynic, this is the human side of science time and again. The fact that too many "journalists" don't recognize the context only makes matters worse.
To that I'll editorialize and add, key word "might." Such unsubstantiated hyperbol only makes the source even more suspect.
Fuck no. I'm really tired of these stories.
(this is all directed at the author that put that "it should make us worry" quote in the NYT piece, not at any HN poster, but I really need to vent)
The 1918 pandemic turned into seasonal influenza one we had enough herd immunity, enough people had T-cells that recognized H1N1 and the virus was forced into making sacrificial choices in order to spread.
This virus will not achieve an escape mutation that puts us back to square one with vaccinated or recovered people at the same risk everyone was at in 2019.
If you look at what happened in 2009 the H1 envelope protein of that virus traces its lineage back to the 1918 pandemic, it spent 50 years mutating in pigs before it jumped back to humans (that is a LOT of generations of fucking "variants") and people who were born and exposed to pre-1957 H1N1 when it was endemic to the human race had cross reactive T-cells which protected them. They still got infected, but the disease burden was vastly lower so that pandemic fizzled:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21653752/
The human immune system isn't a binary on/off switch, and while circulating neutralizing antibodies are the gold standard of immunity they are far from the entire story.
If you want to read an article supporting the idea that the coronavirus will transition to milder endemicity without all the irritated swearing read this:
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6530/741
And everyone can fuck off in advance about the idea that ADE will happen. If it was going to happen it would have already happened and this isn't Dengue:
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/02/12/an...
All the fucking headlines about how 99% of the people who are dying now are unvaccinated are screaming out that there's no fucking ADE anywhere to be found. People still talking about ADE need to see a psychiatrist to deal with their addiction to doom and gloom.
This pandemic is ending. I'm 2 months post vaccination and everyone I'm in close contact with is vaccinated, so its pretty much entirely over for me.
Now I need a fucking snickers bar.
The only quibble I take is that, while it's likely you (and by proxy, the experts you cite) are correct that we won't go back to square one, it is still a (low) possibility. Probably low enough that it isn't worth concerning yourself with, except to be aware that the possibility is there. And probably slightly higher than the normal chance of a random breakout until we get closer to vaccinated herd immunity worldwide. But I'm not suggesting it should necessarily change any significant behavior of those vaccinated, just something to pay a bit more attention to than normal and be ready to take action if needed (i.e. don't throw away all the masks just yet).
And that said, I really appreciate you including sources and I'm sorry I don't have any handy to back up my statement, but it does come from reading and listening to experts. That said, it's my recollection and summary of that so I'd encourage anyone to take it with that grain of salt.
It really isn't.
An escape mutation which completely evaded T-cells would write a whole new chapter in immunology.
It on par with worrying about a jet engine falling on my head right now.
There's risks that are low enough that they aren't worth worrying about or particularly acknowledging.
Anyways, I'll defer to you on this, I'm definitely not an expert, and you were willing to post sources and I'm not gonna try to dredge up the information I'm basing these comments on. Plus I haven't had the time to digest the sources. So add one more chink in my wall of being back to "normalcy" :P
I've read literally nothing credible that suggests that immune escape will ever be complete.
There are people who are "concerned" or "worried" about it or will argue that "we can't say"
But they're basically the same people who were arguing that the vacccines that we were producing that produced strong neutralizing titers might not work.
Or that vaccinated people might transmit the virus just as strongly as unvaccinated superspreaders, even though they have reduced symptoms and lower viral loads and we know that the household attack rate of fully asymptomatic disease is lower by nearly an order of magnitude.
The "well, we haven't proven it can't, so we have to assume the coronavirus could assemble and detonate a nuclear warhead in an American city" people have been solidly fucking wrong for the past 12 months.
They had a brief glimpse of correctness at the start of it all when people thought it would go away relatively quietly like SARS-1 + MERS. But those people were probably all the ones looking at the early ~20% case fatality rate and assuming that 20% of the coworkers were going to die.
And it isn't happening, and the messaging is horrible, and there's a cost to worrying about the literal worst case imaginable. It doesn't make you smart to consider literally all the possibilities, it gets in the way.
Social distancing is something that people even now are loathe to engage in, fortunately more and more people 'get it' but there are still plenty that do not. Arguably that's Darwin at work, but still.
1. sanitation
2. hand washing
3. understanding of how the disease spreads (not swamp gas)
4. knowing that throwing virgins into volcanoes does not work
5. clean water
Yes of course it will. The mainstream narrative is that the virus came from a wet market. Wet markets are still open and there is no discussion about what to do about it. The most basic lessons and precautions are forbidden topics.
Someone survived - but for the mutations to have a selection benefit strong enough to dominate that gene pool there would have to be more people who didn’t survive than did.
To be pedantic: the gene pool is mostly influenced by anything that prevents reproduction, i.e. if you have your kids, and then die that doesn't affect the gene pool to a first approximation (there are selection pressures of becoming an orphan, but they are likely usually very weak. If being an orphan makes it more likely one will have kids or more likely to have more kids than one would have otherwise, then the selection pressure will select for death, which is inverted from what is naively thought! Edit: And if you are older and have never had kids and die, there is very little chance for selection pressure.).
Source for reference: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7293495/
There were obviously viruses before urbanization (especially given there are viruses that spread in wild animal populations), they probably just spread more slowly. At the minimum, there was probably regular deliberate contact/mixing between adjacent groups to avoid too much inbreeding, and that would imply other social contacts (e.g. an adult who married into another group returning home to catch up with his/her parents and old friends).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fission%E2%80%93fusion_society...
Also, I’d imagine there were at least far fewer viruses before urbanization. My understanding is early civilization was really good for diseases.
There are plenty of diseases where humans are a part of the reproduction cycle - malaria is a good example. You don’t need groups of humans together.
Then add in human-animal transmission and you have endemic malaria, tuberculosis, parasites, disease causing bacteria. If you look at remote, isolated tribes today they have a very heavy burden of non-fatal (but quality of life decreasing) diseases.
That specific passage was talking about chimpanzees.
Genetic and linguistic studies demonstrate significant mixing of communities.
Just look at the gobekli tepe story.
As of February 2021, only 11,000 people in the USA under 45 died of COVID - and most would have been very sick with existing health conditions and unable to reproduce anyway.
There are 193,000,000 people in the USA in this age range, so the death risk from COVID is 0.006%
COVID is of no threat to young and healthy people so there will be no impact visible genetically.
I haven't looked at it since February, the numbers then were around what ArkanExplorer is saying.
Because, why? The vaccines hand sanitizer, soap, masks and social distancing didn't work 20K years ago, so why would they now?
Can someone please write something this topic without the fear mongering?
> But whatever happened in East Asia seemed to have been limited to that region.
Because the WHO recognized the problem sooner, and countries shut down international air travel sooner than we did this time around.
Has this been proven for covid 19? I thought it was still a theory at best.
But yes: consensus among experts remains that this is a natural virus, precisely because (as per e.g. the linked article!) such pandemics are literally as old as life. We knew a big human pandemic was going to show up sooner or later, because it happens to some species or another every year or two.
It's true we can't rule out the lab theory as much as we'd like to. There was a good WSJ article a few weeks back claiming that western intelligence sources knew about a disease cluster among staff at the lab which would be consistent with the start of the pandemic. That at least is something to hang the more conspiratorial hats on.
But really, no one serious was "surprised" by covid in any meaningful way. It was going to happen.
Why is it desirable to rule it out? It's not only plausible, but the evidence seems to be accumulating, not diminishing. Thorough investigations seem very much warranted[1]. Let's not ignore the possibility because we wish such things can't/don't happen.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/23/science/coronavirus-seque...
It really isn't. We have one good report, and a lot of conspiratorial dot connecting and string tying that is not good evidence and never was. It's enough to keep you guys going, but you're never going to win this at this rate. Consensus sits on the mechanism that produced a thousand other diseases.
And FWIW: of course it's desirable to reach a consensus. And it's decidedly undesirable for a handful of nuts deciding to have Their Own Truth in yet another area. Because the more you distrust experts in favor of your own thought leaders, the more likely this is to happen in the future.
To wit: Lab Leak Trutherism is of the same cloth as Big Lie election fraudurism, and climate denial, and 5G vaccine chipperism, and Storm Is Coming revisionism, and flat eartherism. It's one thing to investigate alternatives, it's quite another to keep flogging an unlikely theory because it fits your priors.
I think we have nothing left to discuss.
Doesn't it strike you as perhaps notable that to people in the more mainstream scientific community, your opinions look like those of a flat earther?
In point of fact, a Lab Leaker might be more somewhat more scientifically literate, but the logical fallacy at work is exactly the same: believing in the truth of a subject simply because it lacks disproof is just plain wrong. And it leads to wrong conclusions.
Anyone looking at the evidence on covid rationally would say that, yes, a lab leak is a possibility. But that a natural virus remains the more likely scenario. Again: there's a pandemic every few years in some species. To date none have been started by scientists.
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Did you register just to leave this remark? How odd.
While they can cause similar symptoms, they are very different diseases, caused by viruses that have no particular genetic link.
And yes, the family is named "coronavirus". The one we're dealing with now is a strain properly calls SARS-Cov-2, which causes a disease officially termed COVID-19.
We went too far prescribing a certain agenda in the last year, and it's time to reflect on that.
In my opinion studies and articles like this are doing more to fuel the fear porn than they are at teaching anything substantial.
We should definitely hear about coronavirus again and again until everyone learns that millions of people might die unless we completely master immunology. Public awareness, safety measures, and vaccine development should get as much attention as possible until we have a pipeline that allows to develop and distribute vaccines in a matter of months. We never know what next pandemic might strike.
See, that's the problem. You can't force anything, but you present it as a "must be done at all costs" proposition. That's very disingenuous.
Regardless, I think you missed my point. Some of us are just sick and tired of every crusade that dominates the news cycle with severe lack of pragmatism. There are plenty of more important issues than coronavirus and it sounds like you're suffering from a lack of perspective.
Sounds like you don’t have the right perspective.
I can't believe this has to be explained to you: Corporations and governments are working against the people every step of the way.
Yes, as I said before: I think you're suffering from a lack of perspective.