General > General Technical Chat
Working From Home - Impacts of Coronavirus
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cliffyk:
Due to heart attacks and strokes I worked from home; June 2012 through my retirement on March 31, 2016. I was fortunate to have an employer (the State of Florida) with work-at-home policies in place, and that considered my work to be of sufficient value so as to allow me to do it. I even got a gigabit fiber optic line into my home office, that lives on to this day but just at 250 Mbs...
cdev:
Vaccines likely are not the right approach.

Modulating the sirtuin system probably is.


--- Quote from: paulca on June 29, 2020, 02:41:40 pm ---On vaccines.  I have two competing thoughts.
Coronaviruses are not new, most of the ones we know of cause a mild cold.  Nobody has managed to cure or vacinate against the common cold yet.  What are their chances of doing so now?
The competing thoughts are that there is less incentive to cure the common cold that a coronavirus that kills 1%+ of people.  So maybe with enough funding they will find one.
The other two SARS/MERS outbreaks didn't produce a vaccine that I'm aware of, once they outbreaks went away funding was probably pulled.

--- End quote ---

N-Acetylcysteine is also quite useful.
nctnico:

--- Quote from: Zero999 on June 29, 2020, 06:11:01 pm ---No, that's a totally unrealistic estimate, because the number of infections worldwide is much higher than that. Antigen testing (this is whether the person has it at the time or not) is heavily biased in favour of those who have symptoms, or have been exposed to those who are ill. We know that most people experience a very mild illness and some people never experience any symptoms. No one will bother to get tested,

--- End quote ---
Not quite. Over here they test donated blood for Covid-19 anti-bodies. This give a reasonable accurate view on the number of infections. And since blood is donated continuously it is possible to establish a time line on how the infection grew. I'm not sure whether they are registering the areas where the blood was donated though.
Zero999:

--- Quote from: nctnico on June 30, 2020, 01:02:17 am ---
--- Quote from: Zero999 on June 29, 2020, 06:11:01 pm ---No, that's a totally unrealistic estimate, because the number of infections worldwide is much higher than that. Antigen testing (this is whether the person has it at the time or not) is heavily biased in favour of those who have symptoms, or have been exposed to those who are ill. We know that most people experience a very mild illness and some people never experience any symptoms. No one will bother to get tested,

--- End quote ---
Not quite. Over here they test donated blood for Covid-19 anti-bodies. This give a reasonable accurate view on the number of infections. And since blood is donated continuously it is possible to establish a time line on how the infection grew. I'm not sure whether they are registering the areas where the blood was donated though.

--- End quote ---
Blood donation is better than swab tests, but will still be subject to selection bias. Randomly testing people for antibodies eliminates any selection bias, but you have a point that the sample size will be smaller, than blood donation.

Sewage is also another way to test for the virus in large populations, but levels will also depend on other factors such as rainfall, which will dilute the samples.
coppice:

--- Quote from: tom66 on June 29, 2020, 12:37:04 pm ---That is worse than Spanish Flu.

--- End quote ---
People love comparing any new infection with Spanish flu, but most of those comparisons miss something important. In 1920 most people worked almost to the point of death. They were typically fit enough to work until some point where they went downhill rapidly and were gone. Most people didn't spend years in a weak and vulnerable state, perhaps in care home, at the end of their lives. Now, retirement and care homes are a huge industry. We don't need something as powerful as Spanish flu to rip through a substantial section of the population. Any half assed infection novel enough to become widespread is a huge risk to the elderly, and new infections are popping up all the time. Just a couple of days ago I read about a new form of swine flu, while we are still in the middle of the COVID-19 problem. The inevitability of new pathogens needs to be factored into how society functions. Remember that Beijing was a large city when the largest cites in Europe were much smaller, and limited by their infection related death rates. Beijing was big through a single innovation in Chinese culture - hygiene. They didn't clean up the place because of an understanding of biology. It was mostly a cultural thing, because the city folk had to be more refined than the plebs in the countryside, but it worked. Civil engineering has done more to make the modern world healthy than any medical care. We need to up our hygiene game once again.
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