The lack of an empire to supplant the Romans was recently discussed by Walter Scheidel in Aeon. In most cases the bureaucracy of empire survived when power was supplanted by an invader, and so some semblance of the the social structure of empire continued.
When Rome collapsed the empire totally fragmented.
It is a very interesting read:
https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-fall-of-the-roman-empire-paved-the-road-to-modernity
There are a group of researchers concerned with CoV19 origins who frequent Twitter and use the moniker #DRASTIC. They count a number of geneticists / microbiologists in their number. See this list:
https://twitter.com/i/lists/1344953249334513666
@ydeigin, @__ice9, @MonaRahalkar, @Rossana38510044, @Ayjchan and @AntGDuarte may be good candidates for your questions.
Note that they consider RATG13 to be a chimera designed to obfuscate research.
GoF research assists with vaccine development. Apparently that was the reasoning behind GoF research conducted on bat CoVs at the Wuhan Inst. of Virology.
And the results of all these experiments were lots of novel contagions and no vaccines. Complete and utter madness.
https://www.nature.com/news/engineered-bat-virus-stirs-debate-over-risky-research-%201.18787#/b1
A much larger cohort study was published just before the Dana King paper:
https://ard.bmj.com/content/79/6/829
They have adjusted for a wide variety of factors and concluded there was a 15% overall reduction in mortality associated with glucosamine supplementation.
h/t https://lemire.me/blog/2020/07/25/science-and-technology-links-july-25th-2020/
Daniel Lemire covers medical developments in his blog, it is well worth following.
Naked Capitalism produces a very good daily roundup from (usually) reputable sources, well worth a skim through.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/
Project syndicate provides in-depth coverage of current events
https://www.project-syndicate.org/
https://indianpunchline.com/ and https://supchina.com/ provide counter-narrative views on events in their respective countries
A rss junky here, all my news consumption is sucked into feedbro (chrome/firefox extension). Some of my must reads are:
https://chinai.substack.com/feed/
import ai http://us13.campaign-archive1.com/feed?u=67bd06787e84d73db24fb0aa5&id=6c9d98ff2c
http://dataelixir.com/issues.rss
https://www.oreilly.com/radar/topics/four-short-links/feed/
http://feeds.feedburner.com/HighScalability
https://exponentialview.substack.com/feed/ This is a paid for feed but some free content is available. I can't recommend this newsletter highly enough.
http://feeds.harvardbusiness.org/harvardbusiness/exponential-view podcasts from the above
https://samestuffdifferentday.com/feed/
http://datascienceassn.org/data-science-news.xml
and of course, lesswrong
Zinc ionophores such as Chloroquin and quercetin transport zinc across cell membranes, increasing zinc density within cells by 100 fold. Zinc interrupts RNA replication within the cell.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25050823
Daily intake of zinc tablets along with quercetin rich foodstuffs washed down with nice glass of red wine is the prophylactic for me.
Long covid is a very real concern, but cognitive deficits due to covid, whether mild or severe, is a much bigger concern and is only just beginning to be defined.
Cognitive deficits in people who have recovered from COVID-19
"The scale of the observed deficit was not insubstantial; the 0.47 SD global composite score reduction for the hospitalized with ventilator sub-group was greater than the average 10-year decline in global performance between the ages of 20 to 70 within this dataset. It was larger than the mean deficit of 480 people who indicated they had previously suffered a stroke (−0.24SDs) and the 998 who reported learning disabilities (−0.38SDs). For comparison, in a classic intelligence test, 0.47 SDs equates to a 7-point difference in IQ."
Given that the virulence of Delta has made covid endemic what does this mean for the future?