Manic of a panic is geopolitical

[kriesel]

Originally Posted by PhilF

I don't think we would want that.

What if we were invaded by Martians?

Keep some in a cryofreezer at the CDC, and sequence it so we could whip some up if needed; store the sequence on redundant backups.

[kladner]

I remember a sci-fi short story in which the cold was cured. People then discovered that lots of the things which the cold virus had kept them from smelling were really stinky. An urgent project was launched to overcome the immunity, give people colds, and remove awareness of the unwanted smells.

[PhilF]

Originally Posted by kriesel

Keep some in a cryofreezer at the CDC, and sequence it so we could whip some up if needed; store the sequence on redundant backups.

Good idea. Then we'd have some ready to go the next time we need a political pandemic.

[kriesel]

Originally Posted by PhilF

Good idea. Then we'd have some ready to go the next time we need a political pandemic.

When the common cold becomes enough to send people into a panic, they'll get what they deserve, good and hard. Political pandemics may not even need an actual threat. (Remember the Salem witch trials..)
I was thinking of it being a pathogen that's not dangerous to us, but could be to something really alien
Another possibility is to use it as a vaccine by modifying it slightly to express some harmless fraction of a new problem virus.
Much worse than the common cold is being kept around. Smallpox for example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallp...tention_debate

[kriesel]

Google spreadsheet of Covid19 prevalence testing studies maintained by a doctor. Most are not peer reviewed. Location, sample size, % positive, URLs, much more. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...WC0/edit#gid=0

[kriesel]

Originally Posted by kladner

I remember a sci-fi short story in which the cold was cured. People then discovered that lots of the things which the cold virus had kept them from smelling were really stinky. An urgent project was launched to overcome the immunity, give people colds, and remove awareness of the unwanted smells.

It's been reported anecdotally that pregnant women about to deliver may have much more acute sense of smell than usual. A level of perfume that would normally not register consciously can be experienced as quite overwhelming and unpleasant.
There's a theory that human smell used to be much more senstive, and was dialed back considerably to make the accumulating smells of a fixed domicile tolerable.
Sensitivity may be low, but not extremely. http://www.sirc.org/publik/smell_human.html
Specificity appears to be pretty good. https://www.livescience.com/44240-hu...on-scents.html

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by Uncwilly

"The common cold" is a trite phrase that covers many different virii. And there are too many strains of them to overcome.

Correct - IIRC roughly 1/3 of said viruses are - ta da! - of the Coronavirus family.

Also, said viruses co-evolved with human, i.e. were already infecting us when our global population was in the tens of thousands and consisted of small widely-scattered bands of hunter-gatherers. Thus I concur, chance of eradication = 0, but yes, social distancing should also work to reduce the annual number of infectees and average # of colds a person catches in a given timespan.

=====================

From the Blitz to COVID-19, Our Rulers Have Got Us Wrong | Peter McColl, openDemocracy

They didn’t want to let people shelter in the Underground, for fear they’d never return to work. They don’t want to extend the lockdown because they think we want to work.

It’s the VE Day long weekend. There’s been lots of talk about ‘Blitz Spirit’ and the UK government is sending signals that the lockdown might be coming to an end. There’s an interesting lesson from this about the assumptions we make about human behaviour.

During the London Blitz the Anderson Shelters provided by the government (a sheet of corrugated iron to be placed in a garden) and the brick street shelters proved inadequate. I have vivid memories from school of reading accounts of the York Street brick shelter in Belfast which was hit and many of those inside killed.

There was an obvious solution to this in London: the Underground was deep enough to allow people to shelter in the stations. And that is eventually what happened. But only after a major campaign by working class communities to be allowed to use the Underground. The patrician government of the day feared that people, once underground, would never come back up. They would abandon their jobs and live subterranean lives, with Sir John Anderson, after whom the shelters were named, complaining that it would be impossible for people to “maintain the productive capacity in a troglodyte existence deep underground”.

It turned out that the patricians were wrong. The working class wanted to stop fascism enough to keep working, and when the bombers passed, they returned to ground level.

Interestingly this assumption that normal people would prioritise safety over work and spending is exactly the opposite of the assumption about people’s behaviour ahead of the Covid-19 lockdown.

There has been much discussion of the role of ‘behavioural economics’ and nudge theory in delaying the lockdown. I’m not as much a sceptic as many are of nudge theory. It is a tool that can be used for good or ill. But the perceived impact of decisions on behaviour is what interests me.

Every day the Daily Telegraph makes ever more shrill demands that lockdown end and people’s lives be sacrificed. But it has emerged that the assumptions that delayed the lockdown were wrong: most people think their health is their wealth. Polling consistently shows that people want the lockdown to last longer.

In the 1940s the population were thought to prefer safety. In the 2020s the population were thought to prefer work. The patricians of the 1940s were wrong. The behavioural economists of the 2020s are wrong.

And that should make us all think very carefully before we base decisions on what we think people will do in any given circumstance. Right-wing newspapers project an unbreakable confidence that they know what people think. That confidence is often misplaced.

[ewmayer]

Foreign Affairs Runs Propaganda from Swedish Employers on Sweden's Covid-19 Fiasco, Failing to Disclose Sponsorship and Misrepresenting Results | naked capitalism

Foreign Affairs just published an article that attempts to depict the failed Swedish approach to Covid-19 as not just a success, but even the way of the future. I suppose if you regard failed state in the making like the US as a harbinger, you could view this description as accurate. But nations that aspire to better like South Korea, New Zealand, Germany, and the Czech Republic, would beg to differ. As reader juno mas put it earlier this week, “For a relatively rural, isolated nation, Sweden is a train wreck.”

Mind you, the problem isn’t that the view expressed in the Foreign Affairs piece, in the words of a prominent economist, is “unmitigated horseshit”. People are allowed to say stupid things if nothing else to give parties with a better grasp a punching bag.

It’s that Foreign Affairs failed to disclose that this piece, which touts keeping workplaces and shops open regardless of the cost in lives, was funded by Swedish employers,. Oh, and as we’ll point out soon, this “Who cares if more people die” posture hasn’t helped the Swedish economy much either, even though that’s the supposed justification for running unnecessary health risks. Yet Sweden getting the worst of all possible worlds is nevertheless spun as an accomplishment, and more incredibly, a model.

Specifically, the authors of this piece are all key figures at the Swedish think tank Ratio Institute. Lead wrier Nils Karlson is its president and CEO; Charlotta Stern is Deputy CEO, and Daniel B. Klein is an Associate Fellow. The article lack of a disclaimer that the authors’ opinion and does not reflect the view of Ratio. It is therefore on its face a piece that makes no bones about being official Ratio work product.

And what is Ratio? From Wikipedia:

The Ratio Institute is an independent Swedish research institute focusing on the conditions for enterprise, entrepreneurship and market economy and political change. The institute’s infrastructure is financed by the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise, but various research projects have financiers like the Wallenberg Foundation.

And who is the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise? Again from Wikipedia:

The Confederation of Swedish Enterprise or Swedish Enterprise (Swedish: Svenskt Näringsliv) is a major employers’ organization for private sector and business sector companies in Sweden. It has 49 member associations representing 60,000 member companies with more than 1.6 million employees.

Its budget is the equivalent of $100 million which is not shabby for a country with a population of 10 million. And in case you had any doubts, Jacob Wallenberg, whose family investment entity is far and away the biggest employer in Sweden, forcefully advocates for favoring the economy over public health. From the Financial Times at the end of March. As one Financial Times reader reacted:

A bit ugly to see a rich man talking his book when lives are at stake. The government can make welfare payments to the unemployed, it can’t raise the dead.

Let’s turn to the controversy. Sweden has implemented only minimal Covid-19 public safety measures. Schools and restaurants are open but soccer season has been put off and university buildings are shuttered. Citizens are advised to stay home and avoid travel, but with virtually all businesses open, it’s hard to see how that works...

And just a short over-Finland hop eastward from Sweden, the latest out of Russia, and not via a Western-Stink-Tank article as so much 'news' from there in the western MSM tends to be:

Putin Withdraws From the Coronavirus Crisis in a Political Abdication - The Moscow Times

Abdication tends to be an all-or-nothing matter. As in so much else, Vladimir Putin makes his own rules, and yesterday’s address was a menu for an a la carte abdication, relinquishing the terrible responsibility of handling the pandemic, but retaining all the perks of power.

In his presentation, Putin announced that the “national non-working period” — his preferred euphemism for a lockdown in which employers were still expected to pay their workers’ salaries — would end today “for the entire country and for all sectors of the economy.”

Over to you, guys

Does that mean the end of the “quarantine”? On the very day that the country recorded a record increase in new cases, with the world’s second-fastest infection rate behind only the United States? At a time when it is clear the official death rate is seriously understated? And when, while 170,000 tests are administered a day, their accuracy is questionable?

Not quite; instead, he was simply saying that the federally-mandated lockdown was over, but that regional governors would still have the right to impose them in their own territories.

After all, while he conceded that “the fight with the epidemic isn’t ending” — arguably, it is still in its early stages given that there is no evidence that the situation is under control — he noted that “the epidemic and associated restrictions have had a strong impact on the economy and hurt millions of our citizens,” and so “it is in the interest of all of us for the economy to return to normal quickly.”

That is true enough, and the immediate lethal cost of coronavirus does have to be set against both the more subtle toll caused by lockdown and hardship, as well as the broader impact of economic slowdown...

[Dr Sardonicus]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

From the Blitz to COVID-19, Our Rulers Have Got Us Wrong | Peter McColl, openDemocracy

This reminds me: In 1918, Philadelphia's Fourth Liberty Loan Drive parade had unfortunate consequences.

Within 72 hours of the parade, every bed in Philadelphia's 31 hospitals was filled. In the week ending October 5, some 2,600 people in Philadelphia had died from the flu or its complications. A week later, that number rose to more than 4,500. With many of the city's health professionals pressed into military service, Philadelphia was unprepared for this deluge of death.
<snip>
A political appointee, Krusen publicly denied that influenza was a threat, saying with assurance that the few military deaths were "old-fashioned influenza or grip." He promised a campaign against coughing, spitting and sneezing, well aware that two days before the scheduled parade, the nation's monthly draft call-up had been cancelled because army camps, including nearby Camp Dix in New Jersey and Camp Meade in Maryland, were overwhelmed by a conflagration of virulent influenza. Philadelphia's parade poured gasoline on the flames.

[retina]

Originally Posted by kriesel

Keep some in a cryofreezer at the CDC, and sequence it so we could whip some up if needed; store the sequence on redundant backups.

Sure. And since we would have long lost our immunity to it we would also die. Thanks for nothing Mars, you killed us both.

But I think even if we can't manage to shake off all 48 (or however many there are) strains of the common cold, at least some of the less contagious ones could become a thing of the past. We shall see.

[kladner]

This is a really clear statement of the interlocking nature of rights and responsibilities.