Science 2.0

Environmental Protection Network, a group of former EPA employees under the umbrella of the ironically named Union of Concerned Scientists, is claiming that the science is settled and that American air quality caused coronavirus deaths.

It's as stupid as claims that 5G makes us more susceptible to a virus.

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Cristina Cuomo, the wife of journalist Chris Cuomo, who had been setting progressive hearts aflutter with his jovial sort-of interviews with his brother, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, before contracting COVID-19, has also tested positive for coronavirus.

Nothing surprising there. What is shocking is that she is founder of The Purist, a "wellness" (read: rich white people) brand which promotes woo like homeopathy, "energy medicine" and "oxygenated herbs" as how you prevent disease. And yet she got the disease anyway.

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Happy Science does no science despite its name. It's like Scientology that way. It spouts meaningless gibberish that is hard to deny. It's like "wellness" that way. They even offer a preventative for coronavirus, embraced by the kinds of people who claim it must work because they didn't get COVID-19. It's like the "food is medicine" movement that way.

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Science is often easy in hindsight and two years from now we will likely know the evolution of SARS-CoV-2 from bats to humans. For now, it is mostly speculation.

An intermediate animal host may have been snakes or pangolins, but the real common ancestor of SARS-CoV-2 goes back for as long as coronavirus was recognized as distinct from the common cold - the 1960s.

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It is election season so political journalists and their allies are using every soundbite during this pandemic for their own gain but the U.S. has been more right than wrong in our response - especially when we ignored WHO.

The President mentioned hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19, the disease that can result from the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus that originated in Wuhan last year, and the political knives came out for him, and he had put in travel restrictions when the United Nations World Health Organisation was saying that the U.S. should not do that and had just denied that coronavirus was a human-to-human disease at all.

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The International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents has already retracted a March 20th paper analyzing hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19, the disease that can result from the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus that originated in Wuhan, China late last year.

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China has decided to re-open the "wet" markets in Wuhan, where live animals are butchered, sanitary conditions are non-existent, and which directly led to the coronavirus rampaging across the world, and the World Health Organization has rushed to show support.

No one is surprised. WHO Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus believes anything a communist dictatorship tells him - because the United Nations itself is a centralized paper tiger. It rushes to endorse decisions made by countries that are going to ignore the U.N. anyway. It is the only way their ineffectiveness is not exposed to the rest of the world.

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When is it right to turn over 5 million acres of public land for exploitation by energy corporations? 

The Obama administration did just that, with corn ethanol, and environmental groups wrapped him in the flag of renewable biofuels despite science showing it was worse for the environment than gasoline. A generation earlier they had also wrapped natural gas in the flag of environmentalism and continued to do so until it began to replace coal.(1) During the Bush administration, a Republican.

Then it was time for lawsuits.

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These days I have been writing a chapter of a book on machine learning for physics, and in so doing I have found myself pondering on how to best explain, in very simple terms, the nocuous effect that model uncertainty may have on the result of a classification task. So I decided to create a toy example with the purpose of introducing the discussion.
The example is meant to have two attractive properties: be analytically solvable in closed form - meaning that one may compute with paper and pencil all the relevant results - and be described by simple-to-interpret graphs. Below I will describe what I came up with, but first let me explain what are the points I wish to focus on.

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Reminder to all of you, do protect yourself using the simple methods recommended by the WHO - they work and save lives of yourself and others:

• How To Protect Yourself From COVID-19 - And Help Stop The Spread

You may not know that we in the UK are ignoring the WHO's advice. Allyson M Pollock, professor of public health at Newcastle university put it like this:

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It's long been hiding in plain sight that Russia funnels money to activist groups in the U.S. that will help their causes. Russia's top two exports are food and energy so it was no surprise when activists began to claim that hydraulic fracturing ("fracking") would lead to earthquakes or cause the earth to deflate, or that 400 miles of Keystone XL pipeline in addition to 20,000 miles of pipeline on top of an aquifier would be risky.

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The early "evolutionary paths" SARS-CoV-2, the 2019 coronavirus that leads to COVID-19 in humans have been traced using phylogenetic network techniques and shows how it spread from Wuhan to Europe and America.

While there are too many rapid mutations in coronaviruses, they are in the same family as the common cold, to ever find a Patient Zero or even a settled family tree, analysis of the first 160 complete virus genomes to be sequenced from human patients show the original spread of the new coronavirus through its mutations. 

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Wealthy elites from Manhattan have been retreating to their vacation homes while year-round residents wish they would stay away. Urban residents are being treated look poor refugees during pandemics, famine, and war. They will bring the problem with them, it is believed. 

While it may seem like an odd stance for progressive elites in the northeast to take about their fellow man, it is likely the first time that these issues were anything except academic to them. And they are not wrong for believing that people from cities are more likely to be carriers.

But while cities are more likely to be carriers, they are also more likely to have infrastructure to handle it.(1) 

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There is no question that travel restrictions and social distancing have helped reduce the spread of SARS-CoV-2, that coronavirus strain that originated in Wuhan, China late last year and then spread worldwide.

What about quarantine?

A new review hopes to shed some light but because the review is primary of modeling papers - many of which looked like estimates and some more like guestimates - it may be only partially useful from an applied health policy perspective. The real answers may not be known for years.

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This is one of the biggest differences between the UK policy and the WHO recommendations. The UK think that Covid19 is very infectious like flu, and only for a very short time and that if you have it then likely everyone in your house already has it or will get it soon.

But the data from China and now many other places is the opposite. Covid19 is mildly infectious for a long time. It can be infectious through to death if you die and up to two weeks after recovery if you recover.

If you catch it early, often nobody else has got it from the first case. This story is often in the news - couples where one has it and the other doesn’t. Prince Charles got it for instance, and his wife Camilla didn’t get it.

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This is a trimmed down version of my last article with just the cites from the Imperial college paper to show that in the UK we are indeed using a simulated flu pandemic to guide UK policy and that it differs in almost every detail from the real disease. I know this is hard to understand or believe. But please check my cites carefully and you will see they do.

First the background. You may not know that we in the UK are ignoring the WHO's advice. Allyson M Pollock, professor of public health at Newcastle university put it like this:

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Evidence for the big bang can be provided from observational astronomy using Hubble’s law (redshift of galaxies) also known as the ‘Doppler effect’ (Roy et al 2003) where the wavelength of light from distant galaxies is shifted towards the red end of the visible spectrum and results from receding galaxies.

Hubble published his observations in 1929. It provides direct evidence that the galaxies in the universe are accelerating away from our reference point and implies that the universe is expanding.

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Political critics can argue that the U.S.

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There is one Cthulhu it's safe to invoke; Sollasina cthulhu, obviously named after H.P. Lovecraft's tentacled monster, a 430 million-year-old fossil that has been identified as a new species related to living sea cucumbers.

The new cthulhu, Sollasina, was an echinoderm (the group that includes sea urchins, sea cucumbers, and sea stars) that had 45 tentacle-like tube feet, which it used to crawl along the ocean floor and capture food. The creature was small, about the size of a large spider. It was found in the Herefordshire Lagerstätte in the United Kingdom, a site that has proven to be a trove of fossilized ancient sea animals, and included soft tissue preservation.

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I love chemicals. I keep them in the house because they clean stuff in ways that Seventh Generation nonsense and All Natural Lavender alternatives never will.

But unless they have common names like 'coffee' I don't drink them. Nor should you. Especially if some charlatan slaps the words Miracle Solution on there. The Genesis II Church of Health and Healing, which is obviously not a church and can only prevent conditions no one has, is selling chlorine dioxide products that it fraudulently claims can treat or prevent COVID-19.

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