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.
"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...
Note that the scary big figure there is for people who were hospitalized and needed ventilation. The figures for "just getting COVID-19" are much smaller.
I find it slightly suspicious how close each figure is to being half its p...
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/
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.
If you like Steely Dan you may just get Weather Reports output from the early eighties - Procession, Domino Theory and Sportin' Life. Omar Hakim on drums and Victor Bailey on bass. Confians isn't typical of their output but it is so heartfelt. I am told it is sung in a Brazilian creole, but I have not idea what it is about. But then again, I do.
Shpongle consistently pushed the envelope of electronic music, always creative, always original. For example...