lbeltrame

I didn't ignore this at all. In fact, I raised my (little) voice against the widespread loss of civil liberties (those who live in the USA have no idea, really) that were carried out in the past three years all across the world, following a foolish move by a poor, incompetent PM. And EM had nothing to do with this.

The press, the journalists, and the "civil society" that prided itself to be the only barrier against the "dangers to society" happily complied. And those who weren't conspiracy theorists were considered at the same level as the true loons (which were always there, but a minority).

All of this with widespread support from the society at large, including the social media platforms like Twitter. I'm not talking about the Twitter Files. I'm talking about a "law of unintended consequences" where independently, most people shared the same mindset and acted accordingly (no conspiracy at all, IOW).

Those journalists that lament the loss of freedom with EM, they may have a point. However, where were they back then? I have a hard time believing them due to this. There are however some exceptions, which I happen to know, that were always consistent in their views, luckily.

Personally I don't get either the Musk cheering, or the hatred. I cared little about him.

And about muting, I put myself on a smallish Mastodon instance but I've had to mute, filter and block loads of people these days to prevent any inch of politics from appearing in the feed. I hope like this I can have a "curated" experience that is more enjoyable (I used to have an account somewhere else, then the instance turned into political activism and I just deleted it).

I don't agree: there were so-called respectable (because no one saw them as loons, nor sociopaths) people spreading lies and misinformation to fuel panic and subsequent engagement, without any sanction. Not the former POTUS, nor the people quoted in the Twitter Files. I'm talking about professional fear-mongers like Dr.Eric Feigl-Ding. Personally I wouldn't want a removal of said posts (nor of the others), but the dissonance, at least with these people, was great.

To be honest, I experienced what it meant to be on the "bad side of the fence", in my little universe (20 following, a few hundred followers of which mostly I don't know who they are) well before Musk. It was pretty stressful if you chose to engage with the platform.

But I decided that my account has basically zero value and it will be phased out after August 2023 (long story on why).

Currently the only one I've found that is even remotely decent is a sub-set of Japanese content creators that sticks only to what they are doing (a little obsessively, perhaps) and little else.

Everything else, a dumpster fire. Especially after these three years.

Am I the only one who thought that there were no changes in Twitter due to the acquisition and the platform was pretty bad all time around? A question that seems loaded but I've seen people lamenting the "good old times", but these times were indeed old, but not good, especially if you tried to have a nuanced position in debates.

Flu is not harmless. Not at all. It is a bad disease when symptomatic (30-40% cases may be asymptomatic). In particular for young children and the elderly.

Flu for me was way worse than a SARS-CoV-2 infection (think 40C fever).

SARS-CoV-2 was deadly for a specific part of an immuno naive population (60+). The age stratification was known since February 2020 (first Chinese paper on that from the Wuhan data). My country had zero excess deaths in the 0-50 range since the start of the pandemic.

EDIT: Anti-SARS-CoV-2 vaccines do not block transmission, certainly not now. And as thus, their protection is primarily for one's own benefit.

Because while SARS-CoV-2 used to cause a severe disease in people at risk, it was at the same time not the end of times (and didn't warrant the widespread violation of civil liberties throughout the world, mostly ineffective anyway).

Malaria is not an infection by a coronavirus (I do know one person too, FTR, my grandfather during the Albanian campaign in WWII). And it is not age stratified like a SARS-CoV-2 infection. And there's no 95% seroprevalence like with SARS-CoV-2 in most regions that had surges.

> Vaccinated people are also less likely to collapse the local medical system in surges because their disease course is less severe

But once you have primed your cell immunity with exposure (vaccine or natural), the benefit of repeated boosters is negligible. Protection from infection is affected by changes in variants because only Ig neutralizing the spike can block infection. Cell-based immunity, although it does not prevent infection, is more resilient to these changes (the homology in the SARS-CoV-2 proteins outside the spike is around 80-85%). Also, memory cells last for at least two years after exposure (A.Sette's group works).

IOW, less severe versus an immunologically naive person. But at this point, with 95%+ seroprevalence, these scenarios are becoming very rare.

At the time there were inflated Israeli data that suggested a reduction of risk of asymptomatic infection by 94%. Except, they were extrapolations because they were done on the general population, not on regularly-tested people.

UK's SIREN had a lower risk reduction recorded (60% IIRC), but more importantly, it halved after three months. Governments and others thought, wrongly, that elimination was possible. But the writing was on the wall since March 2020.

Eric Feigl-Ding is probably the worst reference you can have: he's been spreading alarmist news, spun research in the worst possible way, and even more than that. And he's not an infectious disease epidemiologist (he's an epidemiologist, but in the field of nutrition).

There are plenty, more nuanced people you can check on Twitter for more centrist views.

That's not what the paper cited by Time says. It is a study in the US veteran population, whose health condition is much poorer than the general population. Secondly, the study is set up to pick up bad outcomes. Third, the people compared are those with 1 and 2 infections after the second infection, rather than seeing the effect of each infection. Fourth, the paper is pre-Omicron.

There is also far more than that. The press spun it quite a bit, in a different way.

Personally, all my family members and myself have had a contact with SARS-CoV-2 within the past months. It wasn't particularly pleasant, but certainly not a "deadly virus" (prior vaccination helps, but I'm not a person at risk anyway). It will be the first of many. I stopped caring after I got my second dose, and there's no way I will care now.

Why? It's not a waste of resources for me (I forgot to mention I'm located in Europe and use public transport).

It is miles better for my mind (and for me: everyone is different) rather than having lingering thoughts about work (after having a breakdown in 2004 due to burnout). And it would remind me of the lockdown, too.

So, for my own personal work life balance commute is better than WFH.

I would love to have a shorter commute, of course (my old job took 35-40 mins which was optimal for me). But even 10-15 minutes would work. I would be fine even walking to be honest.

But to me it is neither negative nor positive. Just a "transition".

It depends on the person. For me the commute was the "moat" I built to detach my mind completely from work related matters until the next day.

Personal experience matters a lot, too. I did WFH for two years in 2009-2011 and it was mostly fine. Now, although not optimal by any means, I endure my 1h 15 min commute daily. After being locked down in my house for more than 70 days in 2020 while having a very stressful work experience I could not escape from, I don't want to WFH ever again.

Others may have different experience and goals.

It was public support. Polls, as unreliable as they were, showed that the vast majority of the people asked were in favor. Aside that we had people calling the police on "offenders", DDR style, and at the very least showering them with insults.

Italy, 2020 and 2021.

Oh and even afterwards protests were forbidden for a while to "avoid hurting the economic recovery". Again, most were favorable.

Freedom of assembly and movement, for one. My country had seventy days of armed soldiers out to enforce a lockdown. That was done by completely violating the constitution and the rule of law. It was done with an administrative act, bypassing all checks and balances.

Afterwards, a year later unvaccinated people were denied access to public transport and even work (note that a mandate would've been lawful instead, just not the vaccine pass scheme implemented).

All of this with an overwhelmingly high support for these measures. It was a de facto tiranny of the majority.

To be fairly honest, the rule of law in most European countries has been greatly eroded over the past two years. Mostly with support from the people themselves, I might add.

> Whatever natural immunity you got nearly 3 years ago is long since useless

This is factually incorrect. You don't have perhaps protection against infection, nor probably symptomatic disease, but there is working natural immunity, in the form of immune memory and cell based immunity (T lymphocytes). That is far, far more resistant to variants than humoral (antibody based) immunity, mainly because only antibodies neutralizing the S protein are able to prevent infection (so more vulnerable to mutations).

Cell based immunity can't prevent infection, and can not necessarily prevent disease (as in, having fever, cough...), but it is very effective in dampening the effect of infection (either through recruitment of other immune cells, or by killing infected cells). Memory T and B cells generally last quite a lot of years (and with SARS-CoV-2, up to two years at least), so this memory is long-lasting.

We don't allow anything. The writing was on the wall in March 2020: back then it was already too late to contain it. Omicron just sped up the rate at which it is infecting people.

> I think an Illumina MiSeq requires 50 - 500 nanograms of DNA to work well.

You can go as low as 10ng depending on the library you use (or so the vendors say), but I'm not sure it's the case for these specific applications (my experience is with other, equally difficult samples, but from a single source).

About ten years ago my former PI (second author in the below paper) did quite a job on this in Burkina Faso, analyzing the composition of the gut in children living outside cities, in cities, and a comparison with European children.

Obligatory disclaimer: I was working in his laboratory at the time, but I wasn't involved in that research.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1005963107

Back in the days I and others made an end of junior high school year project on military planes and we had a monitor playing clips of F-16 Falcon, F-29 Retaliator and Fighter Bomber. I did however use the F-19 Stealth Fighter game manual as an inspiration to write texts on the improvised stand we were using. We also had some model kits on display.

The outbreak was mostly in unvaccinated people, and there was no background of prior infections (they never had a first wave).

Besides, studies on healthcare workers, who are tested regularly, showed a clear reduction in transmission.

Can you provide some evidence that this happened now, or for earlier diseases?

Manaus in Brazil doesn't count, FTR. It never ever reached herd immunity: the data was a large overestimation.

That's likely because the immunity in Manaus was highly overestimated [1].

[1] https://twitter.com/WesPegden/status/1336801382955933697

Aside Chiaki Konaka from Lain, I would recommend some of the works of Sadayuki Murai (who, coincidentally, co-worked with Konaka in Bubblegum Crisis 2040):

- Moryo no Hako (not sure what's the English name, but it's a nice horror/detective story from a novel)

- Millennium Actress (an IMO nice way to show the evolution of the Japanese cinema)

- Perfect Blue (mostly Satoshi Kon's work, but Murai worked in the screenplay)

There's also Boogiepop Phantom, but you lose a bit of the plot if you haven't read the original novels.