[pilowsky]

Zelandakh, on 2020-September-23, 03:30, said:

You appear to misunderstand pretty much everything in every discussion here. If BBFers want reliable Covid information, they look to Arend, Helene and pescetom, who have all been extremely helpful during this period. The others calling themselves experts have, like the US Expert-in-Chief, proven themselves to be extremely unreliable.

Look, as I said, I appreciate expertise in mathematics, statistics and Bridge, A lot has been talked and written about on these topics in relation to COVID19.
I was trying to get Clubs to close in Sydney weeks before they did. I was ignored because I'm a weak player. Bridge is like that. Only people who are good players are considered to be clever - this is pretty stupid thinking really.

The mathematical and statistical discussion is terrific - obviously. Missing is the medical element. I apologise if anyone has their nose out of joint because the 'tone' appears incorrect'. It's completely unintentional.

We all have our special areas of expertise. Where problems do arise is when people (like Peter Navarro) who has competence in one area thinks that this expertise enables him to speak authoritatively about every area.
Trump is much worse. He has no competence in any area but speaks authoritatively about everything.
I on the other hand am consumed with modesty. Although I do have quite a few mild competencies in a number of areas.
What I can tell you is that in my world words matter. A few weeks ago in a post here that was ignored I mentioned that I rang the Journal of Physiology (London) to ask an Author to change the wording of a Topical Review that was in preprint. This was to avoid panic if the media were to get hold of it.
This is important stuff. Lives could have been lost.

Opinions on my abilities vary.
From: you have ***** for brains
you're a *****wit
how do you know so much
and my all time favourite - you need to look up the Dunning-Kruger effect (from a certified ACBL Bridge Teacher) - which by the way is a great read but a terrible paper.

[awm]

Suppose we had a test that everyone takes every day. If you test positive, you isolate yourself for 24 hours. If you test negative you act as if Covid wasn’t an issue for the next 24 hours.

Even if the test isn’t the most accurate, it seems like the transmission rate would be multiplied by the false negative rate and the economic costs (healthy people isolating basically) would look like the false positive rate. Neither rate needs to be very low for this to be a huge success! Even without any precautions I thought the (average) transmission rate was only R=3 or 4.

[Zelandakh]

pilowsky, on 2020-September-23, 03:48, said:

Opinions on my abilities vary.

Your ability is very simple to describe, even from this distance. You are not at all stupid but you are nowhere near as knowledgeable as you think you are. But the bigger issue is not intelligence but an apparent inability to listen to any other point of view and evaluate it objectively. Unfortunately you have interjected a number of times on BBF on subjects where you were wrong and this really shows up the character flaw.

I am sure that you will contribute some positive things here eventually but in the meantime, take a step back and consider the people around you. Arend and Helene are both extremely intelligent individuals, more intelligent than me and I have literally ranked #1 in every cognitive test I have ever taken. Listen to them - they know what they are talking about.

[y66]

Matt Yglesias said:

Look at what the University of Illinois achieved here and imagine what could have been accomplished if the federal government had spent the past six months encouraging large-scale testing rather than discouraging it.

https://abcnews.go.c...ory?id=72686799

[pilowsky]

Zelandakh, on 2020-September-23, 11:02, said:

Your ability is very simple to describe, even from this distance. You are not at all stupid but you are nowhere near as knowledgeable as you think you are. But the bigger issue is not intelligence but an apparent inability to listen to any other point of view and evaluate it objectively. Unfortunately, you have interjected a number of times on BBF on subjects where you were wrong and this really shows up the character flaw.

I am sure that you will contribute some positive things here eventually but in the meantime, take a step back and consider the people around you. Arend and Helene are both extremely intelligent individuals, more intelligent than me and I have literally ranked #1 in every cognitive test I have ever taken. Listen to them - they know what they are talking about.

OK, I've taken a step back. I think a lot of the trouble originates from this post by Cherdano on July 28 #795.
Appreciating his undoubted competence in Mathematics, He stated

Quote

Cherdano July 28 #795Possibly, but that argument doesn't apply to pre-symptomatic carriers. Once your immune system starts fighting the virus, it will immediately start slowing its growth and quickly start reversing it, thus decreasing the viral load. That's why people are much less infectious already a few days after symptoms set in.

I can assure you that once your immune system starts fighting an infectious disease, this process - of fighting an infectious disease - may mean you are less infectious, but it does not mean you are not infectious.
Since viral load, the duration of infection, the relapse rate and many other variables that can affect what happens to any one person. I was urging an abundance of caution in order to try and save lives.
Some people, not all, reading Cherdano's comments might think that it was safe to go outside a couple of days after you contracted the virus or even a day or so after you felt better. This is not right. It is not the advice of health authorities either.
To know this you need competency in infectious diseases, immunology and medicine in general. It has nothing at all to do with 'intelligence' (an out-moded concept anyway).
It also has nothing at all do with cognitive ability.
I am always happy to be corrected on errors of fact.
In fact, the PVP is not as relevant as I at first thought because COVID19 is an incredibly common disease, and the consequences of a false positive test are minor, so the relevance is less. I should have thought of that.
It is more important to have a very sensitive test. I agree, Cherdano and Helene were right and I was wrong. (Is that the first time someone has said that on BBF?)
Now the real problem is public confidence in a vaccine when one comes along.

[FelicityR]

Going slightly off tangent with regards the relative positives and negatives - please excuse the pun - of testing, how do the forum members see herd immunity now?

The reason I say this is Sweden's herd immunity is now being seen as a model that may work in certain circumstances. The idea of controlled herd immunity for Ireland has been discussed. Sweden had their fair share of covid-19 deaths in the beginning but many of those occurred in nursing homes as in other countries.

The topography and demographical features of Sweden is different to other countries, but the basic premise of herd immunity in any community, I assume, is the same.

Let those who are well and do not have underlying health issues build up the immunity in the population generally and the spread will not be as severe in the latter stages and risk a second wave.

Could herd immunity work? In hindsight if the UK had isolated all the vulnerable people from the beginning and let the virus spread through the community would we have seen far less deaths than we are seeing now?

As a former nurse, I agree we should have provided visible protection for people who would have been exposed to large viral loads, from hospital staff to bus drivers and retail staff, but would this have been better in the long run.

[cherdano]

There have been LOT of reports on "long-covid", i.e. people who still have severe symptoms months after their infection. I personally know two of them. (One has occasional heart problems, the other is completely exhausted after a short walk.)

We don't have systematic data how frequent that is. I think anyone who wants to argue for herd immunity should have particular motivation to gather such systematic data. Is it 1% of all symptomatic cases? 30%? And obviously we don't know for how many of them this will become a permanent condition.

As for isolating the vulnerable - it just doesn't work. All of them need food, and many of them need care. Do you want to isolate the care workers, too? Tell them their children can't go to school?

[FelicityR]

cherdano, on 2020-September-24, 03:09, said:

There have been LOT of reports on "long-covid", i.e. people who still have severe symptoms months after their infection. I personally know two of them. (One has occasional heart problems, the other is completely exhausted after a short walk.)

We don't have systematic data how frequent that is. I think anyone who wants to argue for herd immunity should have particular motivation to gather such systematic data. Is it 1% of all symptomatic cases? 30%? And obviously we don't know for how many of them this will become a permanent condition.

As for isolating the vulnerable - it just doesn't work. All of them need food, and many of them need care. Do you want to isolate the care workers, too? Tell them their children can't go to school?

Yes, I totally agree there are many side issues to factor in with herd immunity, but as things stand in this country right now we are in a dreadful mess that has been perpetuated by poor management by this government. But the question still remains whether a different policy of, perhaps, some restrictive lockdown coupled with herd immunity might have been a better strategy. The death rates for younger people are very low, but there's also the moral and ethical issues of allowing a very infectious virus to spread in the general population where younger people can still die from it.

As you say, the problem of isolating the vulnerable is that they still have needs, but I think we all know now that both the lack of PPE, lack of proper face masks, coupled with a lack of infectious disease knowledge amongst care home management and their staff, contributed massively to the crisis that befell them. Some care homes coped better than others, as we all know. And. during the lockdown, many essential workers' children were let into schools in small numbers so that the adults could work during the worst days of the pandemic.

However, as you say, systematic data is not available so we would never know whether it would have worked better in the long run. I read an article this morning stating that the NHS would have been thoroughly overwhelmed if herd immunity had been adopted. That might be so, but a policy of controlled herd immunity might have been the way forward. Isn't that what we are doing now, allowing children back into the classroom and students back into their universities?

[pilowsky]

FelicityR, on 2020-September-24, 03:00, said:

Going slightly off tangent with regards the relative positives and negatives - please excuse the pun - of testing, how do the forum members see herd immunity now?

The reason I say this is Sweden's herd immunity is now being seen as a model that may work in certain circumstances. The idea of controlled herd immunity for Ireland has been discussed. Sweden had their fair share of covid-19 deaths in the beginning but many of those occurred in nursing homes as in other countries.

The topography and demographical features of Sweden is different to other countries, but the basic premise of herd immunity in any community, I assume, is the same.

Let those who are well and do not have underlying health issues build up the immunity in the population generally and the spread will not be as severe in the latter stages and risk a second wave.

Could herd immunity work? In hindsight if the UK had isolated all the vulnerable people from the beginning and let the virus spread through the community would we have seen far less deaths than we are seeing now?

As a former nurse, I agree we should have provided visible protection for people who would have been exposed to large viral loads, from hospital staff to bus drivers and retail staff, but would this have been better in the long run.

Or as Donald Trump said - "herd mentality". As Fauci points out - in his recent testimony Sweden and New York are very different - so is the UK. I vividly recall the head of the British Heart Research Institute in Glasgow calling the British "the control group of Europe" because they are so poorly compliant when it comes to taking their anti-hypertensive medication. Given that pre-morbid state (obesity, hypertension, diabetes etc) is a major factor in the relative success of Sweden vis a vis the USA and give that Sweden performed badly compared wth comparable Scandinavian countries, this seems unlikely.

Also, once again Dr Fauci - an actual infectious diseases expert - made Dr Paul a former ophthalmologist (like Basheer Al Asad) look a bit silly. Herd immunity works when (and I could be wrong on the exact number) about 80% of the population is immune. The best way to achieve this immunity is by vaccination, Not by exposing everyone to a disease that might kill up to 4% of individuals and cause serious delayed effects in many others. Generally speaking.

Trump and his backroom fiends doesn't care partly because the overwhelming demographic affected in the USA are overweight black males - guess who they tend to vote for! Now apparently he wants to ignore the mail in ballots.

[cherdano]

FelicityR, on 2020-September-24, 03:56, said:

That might be so, but a policy of controlled herd immunity might have been the way forward. Isn't that what we are doing now, allowing children back into the classroom and students back into their universities?

Tbh, students back to universities sounds more like uncontrolled herd immunity to me...

EDIT: By now all Scottish Universities have started teaching. There are outbreaks among students at U of Glasgow and St. Andrews. (Oh, should I mention that students at the other Universities don't currently have walking access to a testing centre?)

[FelicityR]

cherdano, on 2020-September-24, 05:53, said:

Tbh, students back to universities sounds more like uncontrolled herd immunity to me...

EDIT: By now all Scottish Universities have started teaching. There are outbreaks among students at U of Glasgow and St. Andrews. (Oh, should I mention that students at the other Universities don't currently have walking access to a testing centre?)

This was in The Guardian online this morning. Yes, uncontrolled is about right. Surely the writing was on the wall months ago that this would happen? Were there any contingencies in place? I somehow doubt it.

Why do students travel to university? Covid has proved they don't need to

Who ever thought it a good idea to disperse 2 million Covid super-spreaders across British cities this month? One hundred and twenty-four returning Glasgow students have already tested positive, with dozens more at Aberdeen, St Andrews and elsewhere. Six hundred are now confined to their Glasgow lodgings and told they may have to stay there through Christmas. Now this fiasco is to be repeated in England as freshers’ week gets under way there too.

At the same time as this mass return to campus, the Scottish leader Nicola Sturgeon is banning most households from meeting even their next-door neighbours, the most severe curb of personal freedom in this phase of the pandemic so far. Yet teenagers who have won the privilege of a university place have also won the privilege of travelling as far as they choose from home and meeting thousands of new friends. This might be called a giant exercise in herd immunity, a national version of what used to be a children’s chickenpox party. Is this now policy?

When Johnson introduced the “rule of six” in England last week, schools and universities were excluded. Schools needed to stay open to allow parents to return to work, and schoolchildren are largely less affected by the virus, and by definition local. Students are not local. The tradition – and expense – of a residential university education dates from days when they were elite institutions catering for under 10% of young people. The remainder of post-school students went to local technical colleges. Today roughly half of England’s young people go to university, with about 80% of UK undergraduates leaving home to live elsewhere.

The reason for such generosity to universities had nothing to do with scientific evidence. Such “evidence” has all but disappeared from British political discourse. The reason is politics. Students have votes, and universities have influence. Queen’s University Belfast has even chartered planes to ferry Chinese students to Belfast. More than 24,000 Chinese students applied to British universities this summer, and acceptances are up 14%. To hard-pressed universities, overseas students are gold. There is no way those planes are turning back. But imagine the government aiding the travel industry by flying in thousands of tourists, from China or anywhere else.

We know a university education is about more than teaching. It is about the “rite of passage” of graduates through the groves of academe, a rite inherited from the monastic tradition of a residential university. But we are supposed to be in an emergency. If lockdown can allow hundreds of thousands of clever young people at least some of the delights and promiscuities of freshers’ week, what about their school-leaver contemporaries embarking on work or training, but told they must do so from home, while observing social distancing and avoiding unnecessary contact?

I sense that here, as in so many walks of life, coronavirus is moving mountains. Commuting students living at home have been widely seen as inhibited, denied the socialising benefits of life on campus. Not everyone thinks that way. Manchester’s professor of higher education, Steven Jones, wrote recently that he found his “stay-at-home” students, if anything, more in touch with the world. They linked university with family and community, and were “invariably an asset, bringing important alternative perspectives and enlivening academic discussions”.

No less significant is what the pandemic has done to teaching technology. Education must be the most conservative discipline on earth, rooted in “what was good enough for us is good enough for them”. Universities still live in a pre-digital world of three or four-year residential courses, leisurely holidays and medieval calendars and costumes. Parkinson’s Law reigns, with study expanding to fill the years allotted to its completion.

Yet in just six months of the pandemic, universities have seen more innovation than in a century. Lectures and classes have gone online. At the London School of Economics, teachers have converted lectures into videos with library clips, inserts and YouTube interviews. Lecturers have had to become theatrical performers visible to their colleagues. Zoom classes and other devices promote feedback. Prospective students can see “trailers” of courses they may or may not want to attend.

In other words, students – pandemic or not – will become digital commuters, much as will many office workers. Where they live will not matter, at least not all the time. The LSE can link its classes to 25 different locations worldwide, even adjusted to time zones. This can only transform the concept of the exclusive campus. It becomes a cross between a television studio and a wifi-enabled pub: Ye Olde Rite of Passage, perhaps open to students of all ages. Physical campuses will not be unimportant – education is also about human contact and new friends in new places – but they will be dynamic and different. Born of coronavirus out of the digital age, a new university will dawn.

• Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist

[hrothgar]

My nephew was supposed to start his freshman year at Princeton this month.
However, a few months back the school contacted students and recommended that they take a gap year instead which he is doing. (FWIW, I think that this is precisely the right course of action)

I don't believe that distance learning is an effective substitute for attending college remotely.

Two important reasons

1. The single most important thing that you learn at college are "life skills". Stuff like:

How do you buckle down and get work done when no one is watching you?
Who do you want to be / how do you want to represent yourself to other?
How do you live together with a group of diverse individuals without killing each other?
How do dirty dishes actually get clean?

2. Equally important, college is a chance for networking. This is where you build the support network that is going to get you through all sorts of stuff in the years going forward.

I really don't know whether there is that great a difference between the academic experience wrt F2F learning and modern distance learning alternatives. However, I don't see much discussion about areas where there are very real and very important differences.

[kenberg]

There are many things to be learned, many aspects of education. You can learn that St. Paul is the capitol of Minnesota by reading a book, and probably you can learn the quadratic formula and how to apply it that way, although I can see how interactive programs could be useful. But there is also something else. In college I took a course from John Berryman. One of the questions on the final was to discuss the dramatic structure of one of the Cantos of The Requiem. I couldn't do it then and I can't do it now, but I still regard that course from Berryman as one of the high points of my four years. I had had no previous experience with anyone remotely like him. He was brilliant, he was very independent in his thinking, and yes, he was at lest a little bit crazy. It was great. You cannot experience that online through technology.

In a weird way this matches with what Richard says about how dishes get clean. Not the same problem of course, but also you don't really learn this by watching an online video. Berryman was a lot more fun.

So there are many aspects to education. Some of the most important ones work best with very personal interaction. But yes, technology has an important role. Just don't forget the importance of personal interaction. At that ae we are exploring how to think. We will choose our own way of thinking, but interesting examples are a help.

As for a gap year, not for me. I considered joining the Navy after high school, then going to college later, but I like the way I did it. I can see why it might be right in the current situation. Best wishes.

[shyams]

https://covid.joinzo...?utm_source=App

I found this interesting/useful

[y66]

re: washing dishes

Start by washing one dish. Then wash another one. Repeat until done. The hard part is getting started. This works for other stuff.

[pilowsky]

y66, on 2020-September-25, 11:31, said:

re: washing dishes

Start by washing one dish. Then wash another one. Repeat until done. The hard part is getting started. This works for other stuff.

Come and make my bed - then sort out terrorism for me.

[y66]

pilowsky, on 2020-September-25, 15:07, said:

Come and make my bed - then sort out terrorism for me.

It's never too late to learn pilowsky. For bed making, the first step is to get out of it.

[pilowsky]

y66, on 2020-September-25, 18:38, said:

It's never too late to learn pilowsky. For bed making, the first step is to get out of it.

You do realise that you are "mismangling" the speech by the Commander of the SEALS Admiral McRaven - just checking.

[Zelandakh]

pilowsky, on 2020-September-25, 18:44, said:

You do realise that you are "mismangling" the speech by the Commander of the SEALS Admiral McRaven - just checking.

It seems to me he is enhancing it:

Quote

Every morning in basic SEAL training, my instructors, who at the time were all Vietnam veterans, would show up in my barracks room and the first thing they would inspect was your bed. If you did it right, the corners would be square, the covers pulled tight, the pillow centered just under the headboard and the extra blanket folded neatly at the foot of the rack — that's Navy talk for bed.

It was a simple task — mundane at best. But every morning we were required to make our bed to perfection. It seemed a little ridiculous at the time, particularly in light of the fact that were aspiring to be real warriors, tough battle-hardened SEALs, but the wisdom of this simple act has been proven to me many times over.

If you make your bed every morning you will have accomplished the first task of the day. It will give you a small sense of pride, and it will encourage you to do another task and another and another. By the end of the day, that one task completed will have turned into many tasks completed. Making your bed will also reinforce the fact that little things in life matter. If you can't do the little things right, you will never do the big things right.

And, if by chance you have a miserable day, you will come home to a bed that is made — that you made — and a made bed gives you encouragement that tomorrow will be better.

If you want to change the world, start off by making your bedgetting out of your bed and making it.

[FelicityR]

This is completely depressing to watch. I can understand young people of limited intelligence behaving irresponsibly, but here are the next generation of 'professionals' just having no respect whatsoever. If you wonder why older people now despair of the young, this video goes some way to showing why. It behoves the supposedly more intelligent younger people to behave responsibly and so, through their restraint, their peers may perhaps follow their example. As was said earlier on this thread, uncontrolled herd immunity. I wonder if they would all behave irresponsibly under private health care if any of them fell ill? Just because the National Health Service will pick up the tab is no reason why they should disregard rules. (And, don't worry, there are plenty of older people who have broken lockdown rules as well, but I know that if I had behaved this stupidly at university many, many years ago I would have been kicked out.)

https://www.standard...n-a4559436.html