Yah, it’s weird. Is there some factor in the environment that selects for it there? (Like Sickle Cell in malaria areas.)
5 Likes
But the new findings, which were posted online on Friday and have not yet been published in a scientific journal, show how some clues to modern health stem from ancient history.
A brief cursory look at the paper shows an obvious issue. The raw dataset is an international dataset including people from Europe, America, and Asia.
The problem here is that the asian data includes patients from Korea and Japan, where the DNA variant is absent. It seems to me that any association they see could be explained purely by the variant actually being a proxy for being from those covid-competent countries, where there are few cases and they are all detected quickly. In comparison to covid-incompetent countries where only the most severe cases can be caught, it would therefore appear as if all the Korean and Japanese cases are mild, and therefore everyone who has the non-Neanderthal variant gets mild covid.
In case you are wondering, India and Bangladesh are not data contributors.
5 Likes
Buyers pay for the masks’ political message… in more ways than one.
4 Likes
They don’t call it the Indo-European language family for no reason…
4 Likes
Well, since we of European descent do not seem to be hardest hit by this thing, I propose a few confounding variables…
9 Likes
Neanderthals are named after the valley, the Neandertal, in which the first identified specimen was found. (The valley was spelled Neanderthal and the species was spelled Neanderthaler in German until the spelling reform of 1901.)
So, pure coincidence and not an indication of where they originally came from. If the first bones had been found somewhere else, we’d know them by another name.
Locations of Neanderthal finds
Neanderthal genetic subgroups
9 Likes
School Reopening and Magical Thinking
July 6, 2020 2:14 p.m.
We’re now down to little more than two months before school starts in most of the country and a great many districts, if not necessarily most, are yet to announce definitive plans for how they are going to conduct school in the Fall semester. Indeed, the entire subject of school closures and openings is another example of a country trapped in magical thinking, yet another permutation of the “reopening” debate.
How do you prevent your home from flooding? The biggest thing is to make sure there’s no flood near your house. Fix the levees or the dam. If you don’t, your house is going to be toast no matter what clever ideas or plans you come up with. We’ve seen from other parts of the world that you can reopen schools. But it’s not a matter of any particularly clever strategies. It’s just something that becomes possible once the prevalence of the disease gets really low. And it doesn’t ‘get’ low. You make it low.
The clear lesson from Europe and East Asia is that you need to get the prevalence of COVID down really, really low. Once you’ve done that lots of things become possible. People in those countries are still doing mitigation and wearing masks and social distancing. But they’ve been able to resume a reasonable level of social and economic life because they got cases really, really low. Like I said, if the water is ten feet deep on your street, you’re going to need to get a new house.
Here we’ve been focused on these absurd “reopening” debates that are both highly politicized and highly hypothetical while the actual case counts are exploding in much of the country. Can we have schools open in September? It’s an entirely moot point unless you have cases low enough that you’re not contending with having to do another total shutdown.
From start to first we’ve treated ‘reopening’ as a parlor game or political conflict or a subject for debate as opposed to something you start doing once you’ve wrestled the disease into some kind of submission. And that is quite simply a joke.
Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) is editor and publisher of TPM.
Eschaton
MONDAY, JULY 06, 2020
The Best Testing
Can’t even try to keep a school safe if you can’t test people in a timely fashion.
https://twitter.com/megtirrell/status/1280240764665180160
by Atrios at 16:46
20 Likes
jfc
8 Likes
This is what happens when you have clear, consistent guidelines. Sure you still have you “truther” “freedom lovers”, but they quickly get shut down and escorted off the premises.
16 Likes
9 Likes
Can confirm. I had to pick up some replacement parts that were only available there yesterday, and everyone was wearing masks. They even stopped a woman who was wearing her mask below the nose, and made her put it on properly.
Know that it is possible to eradicate a viral disease without a vaccine. Smallpox was eradicated through testing and contact tracing. It’s just a different approach - though it’s one we could be taking right now before the vaccine is available, and TPTB have chosen not to. Assholes.
16 Likes
Yes, exactly as the truly developed world is doing. Instead, people complain about masks, and I’m going to feel very bad about my schadenfreude when some of those I know contract it (obligs: masks are to prevent spreading it, not prevent catching it)
9 Likes
What term will future generations use to refer to the formerly developed nations?
7 Likes
Legends from the Old Republic
9 Likes
Mostly, I have a planet of the apes vibe right now:
[George Taylor ]: You Maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!
7 Likes
I think the people who refuse to wear masks are also the kinds of people that don’t minimize their contact with others. Going to parties or bars, hitting the stores multiple times a week, etc. In other words, exposing themselves and making it so much more likely they will contract covid. These will probably end up being superspreaders.
And while the masks are primarily to help others, the science behind how they can minimize the viral load a person is exposed to is pretty solid I think.
8 Likes
13 Likes
There doesn’t seem to be any sense yet of why some Neanderthal genes have continued on for so long in some populations. Nothing as obvious as sickle cell, that’s for sure.
4 Likes
Oh the fucking, ugly irony…
9 Likes
Follow-up:
19 Likes
