Covid: Lucky 13

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How is it tracked then?
It requires physical bluetooth devices where you may go. Some more of the article:

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.

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.

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.

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.
It is probably not the most dangerous privacy flaw ever, but in a system that was effectively forced upon people and we were told was safe. It seems the PTB did not actually bother to check how safe it was, they just said it was and hoped for the best.
 
Narz is still mostly right though ^^.
Yeah, mostly. Tails is pretty solid if you are not an international criminal.
 
Brazil has more than 150 deaths in 24 hours according to O Globo, so hey, the pandemic's over, amirite?
 
COVID and smell loss: answers begin to emerge

A clearer picture of how SARS-CoV-2 causes this disruption should help to create better therapies for the condition. Early in the pandemic, a study showed that the virus attacks cells in the nose, called sustentacular cells, that provide nutrients and support to odour-sensing neurons.

Since then, clues have emerged about what happens to the olfactory neurons after infection. Researchers including biochemist Stavros Lomvardas at Columbia University in New York City examined people who had died from COVID-19 and found that, although their neurons were intact, they had fewer membrane-embedded receptors for detecting odour molecules than usual.

This was because the neurons’ nuclei had been scrambled. Normally, the chromosomes in these nuclei are organized into two compartments — a structure that enables the neurons to express specific odour receptors at high levels. But when the team looked at the autopsied neurons, “the nuclear architecture was unrecognizable,” Lomvardas says.

There is also evidence of lasting changes to the brain for people with smell loss. In a study published in March, 785 people in the United Kingdom had their brains scanned twice. About 400 people became infected with COVID-19 between scans, so the scientists were able to observe structural changes. The COVID-19 survivors showed multiple changes, including markers of tissue damage in areas linked to the brain’s olfactory centre. It’s not clear why this was the case, but one possibility is lack of input. “When we cut off input from the nose, the brain atrophies,” says Danielle Reed, a geneticist also at Monell. “It’s one of the clearest things we know about taste and smell.”
Disrupting nuclear organisation could have all sorts of effects, I wonder how many of the features of long covid could also be related.
 
Covid is an ongoing disaster. Now people are catching it twice in a month.
Accelerated aging of the immune system, brain damage, harm to children, neverending new variants that will by random evolution also produce deadlier strains... and playing russian roulette with all things again and again. It ends up shooting you all.
 
Covid is an ongoing disaster. Now people are catching it twice in a month.
Accelerated aging of the immune system, brain damage, harm to children, neverending new variants that will by random evolution also produce deadlier strains... and playing russian roulette with all things again and again. It ends up shooting you all.
We'll be fine.

When climate change gets bad enuf people will barely remember this.
 
We'll be fine.

When climate change gets bad enuf people will barely remember this.
Ah, yes. When we're dying of something else, we'll forget about the other things that can also kill us. Because we've been very good at doing that to date.
 
Covid can do a whole lot of mutating in a single persistent individual infection

Before becoming infected with SARS-CoV-2 in late 2020, the woman, who was in her 60s, had been taking immune-suppressing drugs to treat a lymphoma relapse. The COVID-19 infection lingered for more than seven months, causing relatively mild symptoms, including fatigue and a cough.

Sonnleitner, who is based at a microbiology facility in Außervillgraten, Austria, and her colleagues collected more than two dozen viral samples from the woman over time and found through genetic sequencing that it had picked up about 22 mutations (see ‘Tracking spike’s evolution’). Roughly half of them would be seen again in the heavily mutated Omicron variants of SARS-CoV-2 that surged around the globe months later. “When Omicron was found, we had a great moment of surprise,” Sonnleitner says. “We already had those mutations in our variant.”

Omicron did not arise from the woman’s infection, which doesn’t seem to have spread to anyone. And although no definitive links have been made to individual cases, chronic infections such as hers are a leading candidate for the origins of Omicron and other variants that have driven COVID-19 surges globally.​

 
Ah, yes. When we're dying of something else, we'll forget about the other things that can also kill us
That describes covid pretty well. While even more sedentary than before, eating worse, moving less, gaining weight, losing social connections and becoming more mentally ill people obsessed about covid. Meanwhile all those listed above gonna lead to tens of millions of premature deaths (heart disease, cancer, suicide, alcoholism, drug addiction, etc)
 
That describes covid pretty well. While even more sedentary than before, eating worse, moving less, gaining weight, losing social connections and becoming more mentally ill people obsessed about covid. Meanwhile all those listed above gonna lead to tens of millions of premature deaths (heart disease, cancer, suicide, alcoholism, drug addiction, etc)
I kinda feel like you're lowballing the impact of Covid on mortality in the short-term. All the things you've described are more closely linked to things like lockdowns, instead of simply contracting a variant of the virus itself. Most countries have taken themselves out of lockdowns, so we're kinda past that point in the eye of the public (generally). The actual virus itself remains, and its effects (and impact on survivors) is still drastically understudied. Everything we seem to learn about it (and long Covid in particular) doesn't seem to be good news.

If your only reply is "yeah but the next global catastrophe is going to be worse", I don't think you've really thought through the cost-benefit here. You could say the same about cancer, or other life-threatening things that we continue to invest and research in to help improve the quality of life of the human race (on average). But you don't. Why?
 
Everything we seem to learn about it (and long Covid in particular) doesn't seem to be good news.
I honestly don't know much about long covid.

Everyone I know who's gotten it seems fine but most people I know are young and healthy.

My 81 year old mum got it so let's see how she fares. She's healthy and on 0 medication so I suspect she'll be fine.

I just don't see reasons to keep panicking when it's been less bad than the flu for what like a year now.

You could say the same about cancer, or other life-threatening things that we continue to invest and research in to help improve the quality of life of the human race (on average). But you don't. Why?
You can't compare covid to cancer that's absurd. Covid kills what 1 of 20,000 (new varient much less iirc), cancer kills 1/3- half of everyone (probably 100% of everyone if they lived long enough)
 
I honestly don't know much about long covid.

Everyone I know who's gotten it seems fine but most people I know are young and healthy.
I was young and healthy. I played water polo weekly. I'm now (relatively) young and cough up phlegm daily. Haven't been able to make it back to practise (logistics mainly; we moved during the pandemic), but am working on fitness with an exercise bike.

Anecdotal, obviously, but this isn't something we can just discount because we haven't encountered it personally. It's why stuff like Samson's links are so useful (and don't always get the attention they deserve, imo).
I just don't see reasons to keep panicking when it's been less bad than the flu for what like a year now.
I've had the flu, and I've had Covid-19. One was significantly worse to me than the other, and it wasn't the flu. Anecdotally.
You can't compare covid to cancer that's absurd. Covid kills what 1 of 20,000 (new varient much less iirc), cancer kills 1/3- half of everyone (probably 100% of everyone if they lived long enough)
I'm not comparing Covid-19 to cancer. I'm saying you can compare the consequences of global warming to cancer, as you've done with Covid-19. The point is that global warming renders the problem moot, right? As prolific as cancer is, global warming does the same to it.
 
Ah, yes. When we're dying of something else, we'll forget about the other things that can also kill us. Because we've been very good at doing that to date.
That describes covid pretty well. While even more sedentary than before, eating worse, moving less, gaining weight, losing social connections and becoming more mentally ill people obsessed about covid. Meanwhile all those listed above gonna lead to tens of millions of premature deaths (heart disease, cancer, suicide, alcoholism, drug addiction, etc)
You can't compare covid to cancer that's absurd. Covid kills what 1 of 20,000 (new varient much less iirc), cancer kills 1/3- half of everyone (probably 100% of everyone if they lived long enough)

Anecdotally, when we went into lockdown, I became less sedentary, ate better, moved more, lost weight (until chemotherapy started), and gained social connections. (I don't think my mental health changed.) Lockdown was great, for me personally. Plus, thinking about COVID was a great distraction from the multiple cancer diagnoses in my household (both of which have much better survival rates than 50%, more like 95%)..
 
2. The Tendency to Believe in False Information Regarding the COVID-19 Pandemic may Contribute to the Development of Symptoms of Anxiety and Depression.

From Merriam-Webster
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/superstition

Definition of superstition
1a: a belief or practice resulting from ignorance, fear of the unknown, trust in magic or chance, or a false conception of causation
b: an irrational abject attitude of mind toward the supernatural, nature, or God resulting from superstition
2: a notion maintained despite evidence to the contrary

I think that:
Whether you have a conventional religion or science as mainstream in a society, there is always superstition in the border zone.
And always fears for what is lurking in that border zone.

Also considering that most people (especially when more lazy on a topic) will use correlations instead of causations (like in science) for opinion building and opinion confirmation.
All the more when correlations are of the personal kind (like social media) and causations are from experts of "the anonymous system" (government, institutions)
 
That describes covid pretty well. While even more sedentary than before, eating worse, moving less, gaining weight, losing social connections and becoming more mentally ill people obsessed about covid. Meanwhile all those listed above gonna lead to tens of millions of premature deaths (heart disease, cancer, suicide, alcoholism, drug addiction, etc)

Did this apply to Australia and NZ while they carried out their policy of zero covid, before the australian government succeeded at sabotaging and dismantling it?
Does it apply to China currently, even despite those very visible albeit also very temporary lockdowns in major urban areas?

I feat that this summer was the last illusion of "return to normalcy" before the flood. Covid keeps mutating. Can easily hit worse than it has been hitting over the past few months.

And how it has been hitting, it is not mild. Take notice that there are immunologists pointing to accelerated aging of the immune system. This means widespread cancer in the future, without an effective immune system it can hit a larger fraction of young people. And cancer in younger people also tends to progress faster. And more deaths from otehr infections also.

I wonder what life insurers will say. In my country, currently basking in tourism&covid, mortality over the past two months has already been the highest since recent detailed record keeping available in an online database in 1980. Officially "not due to covid only", that is at just about 800 surplus deaths/month. We may be seeing the second-order effects beginning to show.
 
And cancer in younger people also tends to progress faster.

Are you sure about that? Intuitively, I wouldn’t expect this to be the case, but a quick search didn’t yield anything relevant.

I wonder what life insurers will say.

FWIW, I’ve recently acquired both life and disability insurance (~6 month process, just finalized this week), and the only covid-related question was, upon finalization, whether I’d had it in the past three months, and if so, hospitalization and recovery times.

Rates for both disability and life insurance where within the range of inflation from before covid.
 
recently there's been some data on non-covid excess death, and how that also spiked. i wonder how it relates to places that chose to lock down vs not.
 
Are you sure about that? Intuitively, I wouldn’t expect this to be the case, but a quick search didn’t yield anything relevant.

You are right, I should have qualified: some types of cancers can reproduce faster, like prostate. Supposedly because cells in older people simply can't manage to multiply as fast. But this is hearsay, I haven't checked what the scientific literature actually says.
Thanks for the anecdotal data on insurance.

recently there's been some data on non-covid excess death, and how that also spiked. i wonder how it relates to places that chose to lock down vs not.

The US hardly locked down, certainly hasn't done so during the few months, and is now having unusually high all-cause" death rates it seems.
 
What Happened to Ivermectin? The Big Disappointment!
What are the results from the latest COVID study with ivermectin? Researchers at Duke and Vanderbilt provide new data from a clinical trial!

Conclusions: Ivermectin dosed at 400 μg/kg daily for 3 days resulted in less than one day of shortening of symptoms and did not lower incidence of hospitalization or death among outpatients with COVID-19 in the United States during the delta and omicron variant time periods.”

More details here.
 
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