Covid: Lucky 13

[Berzerker]

I am not convinced. There is evidence that in some bits of the world only one in 10 of those who die from covid are identified as such, which would mean we are underestimating the "percentage of people who have been infected by the coronavirus needed to be hospitalized". It could be that the republicans are nationalists who only consider the country they are in, and the democrats are actually considering everyone.

Democrats were thinking of Zambia when they answered a poll question about the risk of hospitalization?
We're talking about the effect of the scare campaign and it shows up in polls with less than a 1/5th of respondents knowing what should have been a basic knowledge. The people who were right did their own research instead of relying on US media.

Again with the made up term. No he wasn't, its bullfeathers spread by irresponsible moneygrabbing idiots.

https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-coronavirus-psychology-idUSL1N2TN1RE

First time I heard it was from Dr Robert Malone on Joe Rogan's podcast. As for irresponsible moneygrabbing idiots, are you describing big pharma, politicians, media, Robert Malone, or Eric Clapton? Most people are way off on the hospitalization risk, why? Give it a name, propaganda, brainwashing... Manufacturing consent!

Well, a million Americans have died. Based on that metric, I think people have underestimated it.

But people have a good idea of the death toll, that doesn't explain why they're so clueless about the risk of hospitalization. Hell, we've been bombarded so much people overestimate the risk for vaccinated people.

"In August, Gallup surveyed over 3,000 U.S. adults on their understanding of the likelihood of hospitalization after contracting COVID-19 among those who have versus have not been vaccinated. The results show that most Americans overstate the risk of hospitalization for both groups: 92% overstate the risk that unvaccinated people will be hospitalized, and 62% overstate the risk for vaccinated people."

 

[Takhisis]

It takes a special kind of person to suppose that one must be psychotic to do what the state tells you to do.

They are anarchists who believe in a police state, so…

 

[AmazonQueen]

D. As for irresponsible moneygrabbing idiots, are you describing big pharma, politicians, media, Robert Malone, or Eric Clapton?

Joe Rogan

 

[Berzerker]

Joe Rogan didn't come up with the phrase, it was his guest Dr Robert Malone

 

[Zelig]

Joe Rogan didn't come up with the phrase, it was his guest Dr Robert Malone

Dr. Dre doesn't have much of value to say about covid either.

 

[Berzerker]

how do you know?

 

[AmazonQueen]

Joe Rogan didn't come up with the phrase, it was his guest Dr Robert Malone

No, he was just making money out of it.

 

[Berzerker]

I thought we were talking about Clapton and by extension Malone - they were the ones spreading the phrase. What $$$ did Rogan make off their phrase? Seems like the bullfeathers was the overwhelming onslaught of fearmongering that led Americans to be so misinformed about the risk of hospitalization. Who made money off that? Check your portfolio.

 

[Zelig]

Covid 6/2/2022: Declining to Respond

The “Fund Anti-Aging Research” section:

“Aging is bad. It leads to being old, which leads to all sorts of bad things like loss of one’s various facilities and also it kills you. We should get to work on that. However, aging is not considered a disease, so attempts to treat or cure it don’t count. Most people have rationalized that the thing that slowly destroys and kills every single human is ‘natural’ and fine actually, using a variety of time-honored rationalizations.”

“However, aging is also the primary risk factor for Covid-19, so perhaps we can market our anti-aging solution as a Covid-19 treatment?”

(Also, substack is annoying. It effectively breaks text-selection on iOS, so to bring you this post I spent $11 on a browser extension to prevent sites from messing with with text selection: StopTheMadness)

 

[Samson]

Bounce backs amid continued losses: Life expectancy changes since COVID-19

In 2021 we saw divergence in the impact of the pandemic on population health. While some countries saw bounce-backs from stark life expectancy losses, others experienced sustained and substantial life expectancy deficits. While COVID-19 has been the most severe global mortality shock since the Second World War, this observed heterogeneity in 2021 indicates that pathways to long-term recovery of life expectancy trends remain unclear.

Life expectancy is an important summary measure of population health. Over the past decade, improvements in life expectancy have slowed in several countries. The COVID-19 pandemic has compounded these trends and disrupted life expectancy improvements across the globe. The pandemic increased life expectancy inequalities between countries, as life expectancy losses were higher among countries with lower pre-pandemic life expectancy. COVID-19 may be a short-term mortality shock, but it is unclear whether countries will bounce back to increasing life expectancy trends in the short- or medium-term. New variants continue the spread of SARS-CoV-2 globally. Variation in preventive measures and vaccine uptake has led to disparate mortality burdens across countries. The long-term mortality impacts of social and economic stressors due to the pandemic are not known, neither are the mortality implications of regular re-infection or Long-COVID. Going forward, it is crucial to understand how and why death rates vary across and within countries.
​

Spoiler Pictures :

 

[Samson]

Two more studies that are in the news today. Covid is bad for your mental health, but so are Covid conspiracies.

Risk of new-onset psychiatric sequelae of COVID-19 in the early and late post-acute phase

In summary, we support previously published reports of an increased risk of new-onset psychiatric illness following acute COVID-19 infection. In contrast to the nearly doubled risk identified by the earlier study, we found the relative risk to be increased by only about 25% (3.8% vs. 3.0% following other RTI). We did not find a significant difference in risk in the late post-acute phase, suggesting that the increased risk of new-onset psychiatric illness is concentrated in the early post-acute phase.
​

Conspiratorial Beliefs About COVID-19 Pandemic - Can They Pose a Mental Health Risk? The Relationship Between Conspiracy Thinking and the Symptoms of Anxiety and Depression Among Adult Poles

1. The Tendency to Believe in False Information About the COVID-19 Pandemic Is Positively Related to the Tendency to Believe in Conspiracy Theories in General, and to Its Components Such as Malevolent Global Conspiracies, Extraterrestrial Cover up, Personal Well-being, Control of Information, and Government Malfeasance.

2. The Tendency to Believe in False Information Regarding the COVID-19 Pandemic may Contribute to the Development of Symptoms of Anxiety and Depression.

3. Individuals and Institutions Influencing Public Opinion Should Take Into Account That Creating Belief in False Information About the COVID-19 Pandemic can be Harmful to the Mental Health of Citizens.

4. The COVID-19 Conspiratorial Beliefs Scale, Designed to Measure the Intensity of the Tendency to Believe in False Claims About the COVID-19 Pandemic, Although in Need of Further Study, Is Initially Promising and can Help in Identifying Individuals who may Have Developed Symptoms of Anxiety and Depression due to Conspiracy Theories.​

 

[EnglishEdward]

Careful. Correlation is not causation. There is a chicken and egg issue here.

Does believing in weird theories about Covid-19 make you barmy?

OR

Does being barmy make you believe in weird theories about Covid-19?

 

[Birdjaguar]

^^^Both could be true.

 

[Narz]

Who would've thought shutting people indoors on the internet for 2 years would warp their brains & make them even more susceptible to believing strange things!

 

[Samson]

I think the news is that we can test long covid in hamsters, but perhaps also an idea of how it happens

The host response to severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection can result in prolonged pathologies collectively referred to as post-acute sequalae of COVID-19 (PASC) or long COVID. To better understand the mechanism underlying long COVID biology, we compared the short- and long-term systemic responses in the golden hamster following either SARS-CoV-2 or influenza A virus (IAV) infection. Results demonstrated that SARS-CoV-2 exceeded IAV in its capacity to cause permanent injury to the lung and kidney and uniquely impacted the olfactory bulb (OB) and epithelium (OE). Despite a lack of detectable infectious virus, the OB and OE demonstrated myeloid and T cell activation, proinflammatory cytokine production, and an interferon response that correlated with behavioral changes extending a month post viral clearance. These sustained transcriptional changes could also be corroborated from tissue isolated from individuals who recovered from COVID-19. These data highlight a molecular mechanism for persistent COVID-19 symptomology and provide a small animal model to explore future therapeutics.​

 

[Rg339]

But people have a good idea of the death toll, that doesn't explain why they're so clueless about the risk of hospitalization. Hell, we've been bombarded so much people overestimate the risk for vaccinated people.

"In August, Gallup surveyed over 3,000 U.S. adults on their understanding of the likelihood of hospitalization after contracting COVID-19 among those who have versus have not been vaccinated. The results show that most Americans overstate the risk of hospitalization for both groups: 92% overstate the risk that unvaccinated people will be hospitalized, and 62% overstate the risk for vaccinated people."

Support for the mandates was based, at least in part, on what people perceived the danger Covid posed to them personally was, too. I don’t think there’d have been any mandates if not for the risk overestimation.

At least, not in most parts of the US. Support was shaky for mask mandates; just enough to pass muster, but never a solid consensus. I suspect there were just enough people that supported mandates out of fear of what catching Covid would mean for them personally, and these people were not concerned with communal good, really. Their fear was, of course, based on the idea they had that if they get Covid, it’s a coin flip if they go to the hospital. Once that fear left them, they began to oppose mandates.

 

[Samson]

Remember those covid tracking apps that were meant to be secure? Well they were not:

Hardware flaws give Bluetooth chipsets unique fingerprints that can be tracked

Researchers at the University of California San Diego have shown for the first time that Bluetooth signals each have an individual, trackable, fingerprint.
In a paper presented at the IEEE Security and Privacy Conference last month, the researchers wrote that Bluetooth signals can also be tracked, given the right tools.

The researchers – who hail from the school's departments of Computer Science and Engineering and Electrical and Computer Engineering – pointed to the applications governments added to Apple iOS and Android devices used in the COVID-19 pandemic that send out constant Bluetooth signals – or beacons – for contact-tracing efforts.

Other examples include the BLE beaconing that Microsoft and Apple added to their operating systems for such features as tracking lost devices, connecting smartphones to such wireless devices like wireless earphones or speakers, and enabling users to switch more seamlessly between devices.
​

Spoiler More details :

According to the paper, these devices constantly transmit signals at a rate of around 500 beacon signals per minute. To address issues of security and privacy, many BLE proximity applications use such measures as cryptographically anonymizing and periodically rotating the identity of a mobile device in their beacons. They will routinely re-encrypt the MAC address of the device, while the COVID-19 contact-tracing applications rotate identifiers so receivers can't link beacons from the same device.

That said, a person could get past these barriers by fingerprinting the device at a lower layer, according to the researchers. Previous studies have shown that wireless transmitters, in Wi-Fi for instance, have small imperfections accidentally introduced during manufacturing that are unique to each device.

The UC San Diego scientists found that similar imperfections in Bluetooth transmitters create distortions that can be used to create a similar unique fingerprint. The fingerprints can be used to track devices and, thus, their users.

That said, it's not an easy process.

An attacker would first need to isolate the target to capture the fingerprint in the wireless transmissions and find the unique physical-layer features of the device's Bluetooth transmitter. After that, they would need to have a receiver in a place the device might be and have it passively sniff for the target's Bluetooth transmissions.

To do all this, the attacker needs to have a radio receiver that can record raw radio signals. The researchers warned that a hobbyist device in the $150 price range could do the job.

In addition, the researchers had to create an algorithm for the work. Wi-Fi signals have a long and known sequence called the "preamble" – but those for Bluetooth are very short.

The algorithm skips the Bluetooth preamble and instead estimates two different values in the entire signal. This is where the defects can be found and the unique fingerprint identified.

The researchers developed a fingerprinting toolkit and associated methodology they used to assess how many mobile devices could be identified in public areas like coffee shops and public hallways. One test found that 40 percent of 162 devices detected were identifiable via their unique fingerprints; in another experiment 47 percent of 647 mobile devices could be identified.

In another test, they tracked a volunteer who had an iPhone as they walked in and out of their home over an hour-long period. Simulating an attack, they were able to track the person during most of that time.

 

[Narz]

Remember those covid tracking apps that were meant to be secure? Well they were not

It's good to assume all online activity is insecure

 

[Samson]

It's good to assume all online activity is insecure

This is not "online", this is bluetooth connections.

 

[Narz]

This is not "online", this is bluetooth connections.

How is it tracked then?