COVID-19 - appropriate government response?

[DrDavid]

Is Sweden the only country employing the herd immunity strategy or are there others?

I don't know of any other country in the developed part of the world. Developing countries don't have the option to choose.

[brimstoneSalad]

As far as I know, Croatia closed all restaurants, including the take-out and delivery-only ones.

That probably is not appropriate. Many people do not know how to prepare their own food.

How? The probability of dying from driving in your lifetime is about the same as the probability of dying from coronavirus in the next few weeks. So, it's more like "Would you rather get $100 this month, or $100 next month.".

The probability of dying from driving is lower if you wear your damn seatbelt, but "in your life" would be at least the mid-point for the rest of your life expectancy. If you expect to live another 60 years, then set it at 30 years later.

And why would it be more likely that I have misunderstood something than that you have misunderstood something?

...are you joking?

However, all the viruses of some specie in your body share a common ancestor: that one virus that infected you.

You are usually not infected by one particle. When you inhale a cough or a sneeze you're inhaling thousands of viral particles (the original cough/sneeze can have some hundreds of millions in it). The concentrations on surfaces you touch are likewise enormous.

So, they all have at least as many genetic mutations as the virus that infected you has, and most of them have even more.

The most efficient of them replicate and dominate the sample as per natural selection. Some mutations are ultimately advantageous, and it's easy to see how when you're dealing with billions of individuals per infection.

So, when you infect somebody else, you almost certainly infect them with a virus with even more genetic mutations than the virus that infected you has.

Some of the particles, yes. And again, some advantageous for the virus. Small changes to their surfaces can mean they evade immunity.

And as the virus keeps transmitting between people, the genetic information inside those new viruses gets less and less legible.

Not how it works.

Why? Cells in children are different, they have ends of the chromosomes that adults don't.

Longer telomeres do not confer much if any immunity to viruses. Children get colds all the time. The reason children are less affected is likely more that the mechanisms that keep mucus out of the lungs function better in younger people, and because of their immune systems.

Well, it's quite obvious for most people that economy works best if the government isn't intervening, so the party can't take credit for economy doing well if it isn't doing anything.

That's not really true, but the interrelationship of policy and economic success is complicated.

No, no mainstream political parties want to ban air travel.

Greta Thunberg and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez don't? They are relatively mainstream.

Do you listen to yourself?

I don't know what she believes but Greta Thunberg is a teenager, not a politician.
And no, AOC is not mainstream, she's considered quite radical and her Green New Deal has been widely criticized by both political parties for being impractical (even though the general idea has some support). But it's ALSO a lie that she wants to end air travel:

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2 ... lorida-se/

Maybe fact check your claims before you make them?
The Green New Deal aims to make it less necessary or unnecessary by expanding things like high speed rail, which kind of demonstrates how much your analogy here fails. The replacement comes first perhaps some day making it unnecessary.

Well, most of the illegal immigrants in the USA probably came via air travel, but their visa expired.

Yes, but the entries were legal. The Republican narrative (a false one) is about criminals jumping the border. They don't mention air travel and don't want to mention air travel. No mainstream voice in politics is trying to shut down air transportation right now.

But isn't that a conspiracy theory?

It's a stupid and transparent one. Conspiracies absolutely happen, the point is that they don't stay secret. Trump managed to do what he did for a few weeks until political pressure grew enough to force him to comply. If he had it his way people in the U.S. still wouldn't be aware of the issue. The point is that conspiracies fall apart, not that stupid and unethical people don't attempt them.

[Jebus]

And why would it be more likely that I have misunderstood something than that you have misunderstood something?

...are you joking?

LOL!!!

@teo123 Who was the person who spent countless hours convincing you that the earth is not flat.

[teo123]

Many people do not know how to prepare their own food.

My perception is that people in Croatia don't eat at restaurants nearly as often as people in other countries do. I am not sure, though.

...are you joking?

Why would I have to be joking? Chances are, none of us have any formal education in virology, so I am about as likely to be wrong as you are.

Not how it works.

I must say what you are saying is really confusing. If it's possible for a specie of virus to have countless generations of descendants, how it is that nothing of the RNA world survived? Viruses we have today are not descendants of some being in the RNA world, they come about when an RNA inside of the cell mutates so that it starts self-replicating in that cell and is able to self-replicate in other cells of that type, right? And viruses that last for longest are ones that evolved to be harmless (as most viruses are), right? Why did using DNA evolve if it weren't necessary? Why did all those complicated mechanisms for repairing the DNA evolve if they weren't necessary for a specie to survive? Why did sex in animals and conjugation in bacteria evolve if they weren't at least very beneficial to the specie by making mutations have less effect?

And no, AOC is not mainstream, she's considered quite radical and her Green New Deal has been widely criticized by both political parties for being impractical (even though the general idea has some support).

I thought the left generally supports the Green New Deal, and that so does much of the right.

That 64% of Republicans and 92% of Democrats.

Maybe fact check your claims before you make them?

How did you find that web-page? How do you know it's telling the truth?

The point is that conspiracies fall apart, not that stupid and unethical people don't attempt them.

But if there are indeed hundreds of people in Osijek having a coronavirus, rather than less than 10 of them (as mainstream media claims), what would stop some journalist from already informing people about that? If the police were really secretly preventing hundreds of people from leaving their houses, as the rumors I've heard claim, some journalist would report that very soon, right?

[brimstoneSalad]

...are you joking?

Why would I have to be joking? Chances are, none of us have any formal education in virology, so I am about as likely to be wrong as you are.

My track record is significantly better than yours, so chances are that on any topic you're more likely to be wrong. Induction isn't a guarantee, but it does say something about probability.

If person A is right 90% of the time and person B is wrong 90% of the time, on any given disagreement the probability of person A being right (without any other information) should be assumed to be around 90%.

This is unlikely to be one of those some 10% of the times when you're right and I'm not. 10% is being generous too.

I must say what you are saying is really confusing.

You are confused, that's fine. Just don't assume that you are also right.

If it's possible for a specie of virus to have countless generations of descendants, how it is that nothing of the RNA world survived?

What?

Viruses we have today are not descendants of some being in the RNA world, they come about when an RNA inside of the cell mutates so that it starts self-replicating in that cell and is able to self-replicate in other cells of that type, right?

Not exactly. Viruses are incredibly ancient. They have their own genetic information and don't spontaneously derive from broken human RNA in the advanced evolutionary state they exist in today. The fact that there are viral sequences in human genetics isn't because they came from us, but rather the other way around; viral genetic information gets stuck in the genes of other species when their replication mechanisms go wrong for whatever reason and the cells survive to replicate because it ended up somewhere useless.

Viruses like influenza are at least thousands of years old in the human population, probably tracing back to ancient China, and before that they probably jumped from other species where they likely trace back hundreds of millions of years if not more. Their ancestors probably made dinosaurs sneeze, and even long before that made primordial life in the sea sick.
Unlike more complex life, it's practically hard to trace viral lineages precisely because they don't contain a lot of genetic junk to track; they evolve really quickly to discard useless material to optimize replication. That doesn't mean they're new.

And viruses that last for longest are ones that evolved to be harmless (as most viruses are), right?

That is mostly true, yes. Viruses need to evolve to be mostly non-lethal for those of reproductive age, and optimally only producing symptoms that help them proliferate. In modern humans, though, people live a lot longer than they used to and viruses haven't evolved to safely spread in the elderly population without causing death. Viruses really haven't been able to evolve to NOT kill people over 50, it's something very hard to do while retaining their virulence in young people.

Why did using DNA evolve if it weren't necessary? Why did all those complicated mechanisms for repairing the DNA evolve if they weren't necessary for a specie to survive? Why did sex in animals and conjugation in bacteria evolve if they weren't at least very beneficial to the specie by making mutations have less effect?

This is very basic evolutionary biology. You fundamentally misunderstand the scale we're dealing with here, and the extreme nature of the r-strategy that viruses employ.
Here, read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory

Viruses do not NEED that level of stability because the investment in each individual is very low, much lower even than bacteria. They need reproductive efficiency, that's all. They need to be able to produce as many particles as possible, and RNA is the proper way to do that.
And they do not need specialized sexual mechanisms to exchange genetic information, because that happens already when two viruses infect the same host cell.

I thought the left generally supports the Green New Deal, and that so does much of the right.

No, they pay a little lip service to it because it's a popular term. Most people don't know much about the Green New Deal. Democrats don't actually support the content of AOC's green new deal, which is a lot of communist stuff. Companion legislation has been introduced because nobody takes the original Green New Deal seriously for anything other than its branding.

That 64% of Republicans and 92% of Democrats.

FYI, that's a conservative right-wing think tank, not a scientific group.

How did you find that web-page? How do you know it's telling the truth?

It's a very well known political fact checking site, similar to Snopes. I'm surprised you don't know what it is, it's like you just declared you don't know what Wikipedia is.

But if there are indeed hundreds of people in Osijek having a coronavirus, rather than less than 10 of them (as mainstream media claims), what would stop some journalist from already informing people about that?

How do you know they have not?
Conspiracies can usually survive for a few weeks, but you'll find doctors acting as whistle-blowers to journalists after a while. It's not that journalists are going around with test kits, or even can do that.

If the police were really secretly preventing hundreds of people from leaving their houses, as the rumors I've heard claim, some journalist would report that very soon, right?

If it's true it may be reported on soon, but you also have to keep in mind that this is a very busy news time. This is a small local story of corruption at best when we're dealing with a global crises. It might just be lost on page ten of some local newspaper. It wouldn't exactly make it into the international headlines. Also, your country isn't exactly known for freedom of the press, so that complicates things further when stories can just be suppressed. It takes longer for conspiracies to break in those circumstances, and this may be too small to even come to light given current circumstances.

[teo123]

If person A is right 90% of the time and person B is wrong 90% of the time, on any given disagreement the probability of person A being right (without any other information) should be assumed to be around 90%.

Well, maybe that plays some role, but everybody is far more likely to get things wrong if they are talking about something which is not their area of expertise. Your area of expertise appears to be astronomy. When you talk about astronomy, you are unlikely to get things very wrong. But when you talk about something unrelated to that, such as virology, I see no reason to trust you that you aren't getting things wrong. My area of expertise is onomastics, a part of linguistics, and compiler theory, a part of computer science, since I've written research papers about those things. And I am rather unlikely to get things very wrong about those things, or things closely related to that.

Just don't assume that you are also right.

I am not "assuming I am right", I am assuming that whether a virus can indeed infect billions of people is a very complicated problem. And it obviously is: what we are taught at high-school appears to suggest it can't, yet some people suggest it can.

Viruses are incredibly ancient.

Regardless of how ancient they are, they don't share a common ancestor, yet alone one that dates back to the RNA world. Though most viruses are RNA-based, there are a few species of viruses that have DNA. And those RNA-based viruses aren't based on the same type of RNA, some viruses are based on the type of RNA that is found in ribosomes (and, in cells, it isn't actually used to encode information), some RNA viruses are based on messenger RNA. Hard to explain if you suppose viruses have ancestors that date back to RNA world.

The fact that there are viral sequences in human genetics isn't because they came from us, but rather the other way around; viral genetic information gets stuck in the genes of other species when their replication mechanisms go wrong for whatever reason and the cells survive to replicate because it ended up somewhere useless.

The fact that we have the genetic code similar to that of some RNA viruses inside our DNA strongly suggests the viruses (at least ones based on messenger RNA) came from us, or some specie that also has that code. I distinctly remember we were taught in school that there is no known mechanism by which code from RNA would be copied onto DNA.

their replication mechanisms go wrong

Well, this is like saying things got copied from RAM to ROM by mistake: there is no known mechanism by which information can be copied from RAM to ROM, yet alone by mistake. Similarly, there is no known mechanism by which information from RNA can be copied into DNA, yet alone by mistake.

Here, read this

I think it would take time I don't have to properly study that and that it's unlikely to be productive. The conclusion we reach might seem perfectly sensible to us, but sound silly to a virologist.

FYI, that's a conservative right-wing think tank, not a scientific group.

Now, obviously, John Stossel, the author of the article, is not conservative.

It's a very well known political fact checking site, similar to Snopes. I'm surprised you don't know what it is, it's like you just declared you don't know what Wikipedia is.

I haven't even heard of Snopes. Why would I know that? I am a Croatian who is reading mostly Croatian media. Do those sites publish something that is remotely relevant to me, like something about Croatian politics?

It might just be lost on page ten of some local newspaper. It wouldn't exactly make it into the international headlines.

I wouldn't expect it to get into international headlines, but I would expect the national media to stop reporting the figure of there being only 8 people with coronavirus in Osijek and claim there are no new cases.

Also, your country isn't exactly known for freedom of the press, so that complicates things further when stories can just be suppressed.

Where are you getting the perception that Croatia has less free speech than countries such as US or Germany? My perception is that Croatia has more free speech than those countries. In Croatia, people publicly deny Bleiburg Massacre (most notably the linguist Mate Kapović), Jasenovac Massacre (most notably Igor Vukić) and Varivode Massacre (most notably Franjo Tuđman) all the time and they don't get punished for that. If you publicly deny Holocaust in Germany, you can easily get in jail for that, and you can also get in jail for that in the US. The media in Croatia rarely mention political correctness, and, when they do that, they do that to mock the political movements in other countries. Political correctness is the biggest obstacle to free speech in the western world, and Croatia appears to be mostly free of that.

[Jebus]

our area of expertise appears to be astronomy. When you talk about astronomy, you are unlikely to get things very wrong. But when you talk about something unrelated to that, such as virology, I see no reason to trust you that you aren't getting things wrong.

@teo123 I estimate 30-60 IQ points separate you and Brimstonesalad. Intelligent people know what they don't know and rarely comment about things they do not understand. This is significantly different from the behavior of people in the sub 115 IQ group.

I haven't even heard of Snopes.

At first I was shocked when I read this. After reflecting it started to make sense. Snopes is attractive to people who want to get to the truth. You don't come across as such a person.

Why would I know that? I am a Croatian who is reading mostly Croatian media. Do those sites publish something that is remotely relevant to me, like something about Croatian politics?

Why did you join this forum? We are not interested in Croatian politics. Which nationality do you think would be more likely to appreciate truth seeking websites like Snopes?

[EquALLity]

@teo123 I estimate 30-60 IQ points separate you and Brimstonesalad. Intelligent people know what they don't know and rarely comment about things they do not understand. This is significantly different from the behavior of people in the sub 115 IQ group.

IQ measures your ability to reason in and of itself, not your level of open-mindedness. Yes, if you're able to reason, it seems like you'd realize a lack of knowledge prevents you from considering potentially relevant factors. But there are reasons why that doesn't always happen. It could be your lack of experience, the people around you, etc. It's unfair to make an assumption about someone's intelligence (if you're using IQ to define that) because you perceive them to be closed-minded.

[Jebus]

IQ measures your ability to reason in and of itself, not your level of open-mindedness.

What now? Are you suggesting there is no correlation between intelligence and open-mindedness?

It's unfair to make an assumption about someone's intelligence (if you're using IQ to define that) because you perceive them to be closed-minded.

I agree that would be unfair. What's your point?

[EquALLity]

What now? Are you suggesting there is no correlation between intelligence and open-mindedness?

I said that a higher IQ (if that's how you're defining intelligence) often leads to more open-mindedness, but not always. There's a correlation, but they aren't the same inherently.

I agree that would be unfair. What's your point?

You were accusing someone of having a lower IQ based on perceived closed-mindedness.