Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Spilling the end game before they can coat it in frankl luntz-approved dogwhistles.

I really should read my own blog.

Polls are now a reliable indicator of what corporate Republicans want us to think.

In my day, never was longer.

If you voted for Trump, you don’t get to speak about ethics, morals, or rule of law.

Republicans in disarray!

This must be what justice looks like, not vengeful, just peaceful exuberance.

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.

Israel is using food as a weapon of war. Unforgivable.

Donald Jessica Trump found guilty as fuck – May 30, 2024!

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

Someone should tell Republicans that violence is the last refuge of the incompetent, or possibly the first.

“Can i answer the question? No you can not!”

Can we lighten up on the doomsday scenarios?

If you are still in the gop, you are either an extremist yourself, or in bed with those who are.

Speaker Mike Johnson is a vile traitor to the House and the Constitution.

Live so that if you miss a day of work people aren’t hoping you’re dead.

Relentless negativity is not a sign that you are more realistic.

They are lying in pursuit of an agenda.

It’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

You are here: Home / Healthcare / COVID-19 / Semi-Respite Open Thread: The Solace of Science

Semi-Respite Open Thread: The Solace of Science

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27Comments

  3. 3.

    Nicole

    The science nerd in me absolutely LOVED that twitter thread.  Thank you for posting it!

  5. 5.

    Yutsano

    @trollhattan: This is nowhere near your fault, but Jeebus Tapdancing Keerist I am tired of websites whining about adblockers! Here’s a concept: instead of whining about adblockers figure out why TF we have them in the first place? They’re spam at best and backdoor malware injectors at worst.

  9. 9.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @Baud:

    Why aren’t we all dead yet?

    I know the answer to that!  Killing your host greatly reduces a pathogen’s ability to reproduce.  C-19 is on its free run through a completely immunologically virgin populace, but over time, the deadlier a pathogen, the less evolutionarily fit it is.

    See list above for exceptions that are weird because they’re exceptions to that rule.  There’s also the whole accidental host thing.  The details get really complicated.  But the general rule is the one I just said and answers your question.

  11. 11.

    WaterGirl

    @Yutsano:

    They’re spam at best and backdoor malware injectors at worst.

    Are you talking about the ads themselves?  Or the ad-blockers?  I think the former, but it reads like the latter.

  13. 13.

    CaseyL

    I believe viruses exist for the purpose of enabling inter-species transfer of genetic material; or possibly had that role during the dawn of cell-based life.  They aren’t “alive” in and of themselves, any more than DNA is.  Basically, carriers of DNA looking for a cell to infiltrate.

    That’s why our reactions to them are so strange and non-uniform, and why they affect totally different parts of the body in different ways.

    Wild genes, baby.

  14. 14.

    joel hanes

    @Baud:

    Why aren’t we all dead yet?

    Hello, hello, hello, hello
    Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye
    That’s all there is

  17. 17.

    hitchhiker

    Okay, I’ll tell you all how this feels to me.

    When mr hitchhiker broke his neck skiing back in 2001, the first ER doctor told me that he would never move or feel anything below the line of his nipples again, and that his hands wouldn’t work. He was 46. We had 2 kids in middle school. We lived in a house with 4 sets of stairs, not including the ones you had to navigate to get in from the garage. None of the toilets in our house were accessible to a wheelchair. ETC.

    There followed after that surreal night a period of about 5 months, 3 of which were him stuck in the local trauma center, and during which we just had no idea what the hell our lives would look like in two years. Would we have to move? How would we pay the bills? Would he really be a blob in a chair for the rest of his life? Were they sure?

    No, they weren’t sure. This is medicine, not arithmetic. It involves probabilities based on massive unknowns, and either you learn to live with a giant cloud of uncertainty and do the best you can, or you lose your freaking mind. You grieve every day over what’s gone forever. You get angry at the systems and idiots in the way of your ability to cope. So angry.

    Most days this spring, 19 yrs later, it feels to me as if the whole planet just got a spinal cord injury. We’re damaged, but how badly? We’re struggling, but what’s the long term outlook? We’re pissed off, but at whom? We’re sad. We’re bored. We just want it all to go the fuck away.

    It’s a fact that the families that survive this kind of injury — and I’ve come to know so many of them — are the ones who went into it with resources. Not necessarily money, tho’ of course that really, really helps. I’m talking about solid relationships, education, access to information, ability to process that information, friend networks, extended family that wasn’t dysfunctional, and so on.

    Right now it looks much the same to me, only on a global scale. There are very stupid people running around making things worse, and very smart people who deserve our attention. I had to ignore the people who were insisting that my husband needed to go overseas to get a stem cell injection and find the people who understood exactly what kind of physical therapy would help him. When I watch trump quacking about bogus cures, it’s like, Dude, I know you. You’re a dangerous fool, and you need to stop talking while vulnerable folks are listening.

  18. 18.

    Obvious Russian Troll

    @Yutsano: Seriously! Every time I turn off my ad blocker I quickly regret it.

    Advertisers also insist on repeating the same damn ad over and over and over. The problem is that repetition makes me more likely to turn on the ad blocker.

    Now I merely engage in click fraud to support my favorite web sites.

  19. 19.

    Bill Arnold

    @WaterGirl:
    Would look a lot worse if drawn to scale. Though some of the graphs would be close to flat lines. (It appears to be that peak is full scale for each graph.)

  20. 20.

    Sm*t Cl*de

    rabies: host range lol whats that i just infect everything

    Little-known fact: Rabies can even affect birbs.

    Fortunately birbs don’t have salivary glands so they can’t pass it on to anyone else.

  22. 22.

    Yutsano

    @WaterGirl: Ads. They’re notorious for being links to garbage at the very least.

     

    @Obvious Russian Troll: Every single time I disengage one, EVERY SINGLE TIME, I get some kind of issue on my phone or computer. I don’t even bother with going in the back way anymore. They get no ad eyeballs from me.

  23. 23.

    Elizabelle

    @hitchhiker:   Wow.  What an experience to go through.

    Interesting point about the world as spinal injury victim.  It’s as good a metaphor as any.

  24. 24.

    prostratedragon

    Nice to see s twitter thread where the replies are all intelligent.

  25. 25.

    J R in WV

    @hitchhiker:

    I would like to offer my prayer that mr hitchhiker is doing well today, after much PT and rehab work.

    Best wishes and all that too…

  26. 26.

    Ohio Mom

    Hitchhiker @17: Wow. I feel like one of those blubbering characters in a movie who was just brought to their senses by a slap across the face or a bucket of cold water. Thank you. I needed that.

    What you say about the difference having resources makes when facing the fallout from a traumatic injury syncs with what I’ve observed of families with autistic children.

  27. 27.

    ProfDamatu

    @Frankensteinbeck: That’s true for many pathogens, but it turns out it’s more complicated than that. Not all pathogens become less virulent/deadly as hosts are exposed to them for longer periods of time. What natural selection does to virulence is strongly mediated by factors like mode of transmission and pathogen hardiness.

    Pathogens that are spread by direct contact (and, to a certain extent, indirect contact like on surfaces – though hardiness plays a complicating role there) are indeed expected to evolve to become less virulent, because they need their hosts to be mobile and encounter one another frequently in order to spread. But vector-transmitted pathogens don’t have that same pressure to evolve toward decreased virulence; they can “afford” to prostrate their hosts, as long as the vector still has access to both victims and new hosts (ex: malaria). Water-borne pathogens can be quite virulent as well (ex: cholera), when people keep making use of contaminated water sources and adding pathogen back into possibly clean sources. (There’s a really cool example I use in my evolutionary medicine class, of what happened in areas where intensive cleanup of the water supply took place: cholera became much less deadly in those areas, because taking away that mode of transmission selected for the less virulent strains that were spread by direct contact.)

    Durability also can play a role; something like anthrax, which can lurk in the soil for years and still be infectious, can “afford” to be highly virulent, because it doesn’t need hosts to necessarily infect one another directly.

    There’s another wrinkle, that I won’t bore everyone with, having to do with pathogen communities within hosts versus between hosts – the amount of competition in those areas among pathogens also has an effect on virulence.

    Also, it’s true that killing the host is never going to be selected for per se, so it’s kind of an accident on the part of a pathogen. However, killing hosts is also a little difficult to completely remove via selection as long as each host manages to infect at least one other host before dying.

    Thus endeth the lesson nobody asked for. :-)

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