It's astonishing how virulently your very sensible post is getting downvoted. By bots? Or actual HN real people? Either possibility is very very bad for humanity.
> even people who recover, this does long term lung and maybe heart damage
The problematic ACE2 receptor sites are also in the brain, intestines and liver and have seen damage. The brain one is the most alarming one from a survival perspective. We survive, but with irreparable permanent brain damage. We're no longer ourselves, we have a different personality, and we are incapable of doing our previous jobs. Is death preferable?
And here is one [0] from another reputable news source that says more or less the opposite.
I think it's too early to call out a "winner strategy" - I think there will be a new wave when the different countries opens up - but that's my guess, and hey - I program computers on a daily basis, as far away as you probably can get from this kind of science.
That article is specifically about elderly homes, not about the overall strategy. Elderly homes have been a disaster. But the decision to not force a lockdown via regulations like other countries have done has worked well so far.
Speaking to my family who lives in Sweden, while there is no official lockdown, they sure seems to be mostly confined to their homes. It's based on recommendations rather than regulations, but the effect is the same.
> For nearly 2 million years, ancient humans crafted stones into hand-size balls, but archaeologists were unsure why.
Wait, for nearly 2 million years ... humans? Starting and ending when? Do we have human remains from more than 2 million years ago? Turkana Boy is 1.5 million years old and close to modern physiology, once you get back to 2 million isn't it australopithicus and such?
> That changed when Assaf and her team came across a cache of 30 stone balls in Qesem Cave in Israel, where humans lived from about 400,000 to 200,000 years ago
I wonder if 2 million is a typo for 200 thousand?
> these stones "might have helped enhance human caloric intake and adaptation in the lower Paleolithic period," (2.7 million to 200,000 years ago), at Qesem Cave and possibly beyond, the researchers wrote in the study.
Whew, OK, so 2.7 million years ago is their starting point on this. That's interesting. Who was shaping stones that far back?
An interesting other site is the Cerutti Mastodon site in San Diego with 130kYBP mastodon bones possibly crushed with similar stones which were found at the site.
You can see in the sidebar that you can traverse the industries in time (Preceded by and Followed by links). Amazingly, these span _species_, since stone tools were in use before Homo sapiens were on the scene.
It's really incredible that at that point humans(or whatever homo species) could 1) invent novel techniques for tool making and 2) train others, who could train others, etc etc until the technique traveled flawless across the accessible world.
The weirdest part for me though is how flawless transmission of the techniques happened over a relatively short period of time, but (1) was so infrequent that each technique lasted for tens or hundreds of thousands of years. Yet not so infrequent that it never happened, or it only happened once.
There's an argument that some technologies only make sense in a particular context and so if you invent that technology without the context it dies out.
IIRC Writing died out several times, some specialists would see the value in recording language "permanently" and embrace the invention but nobody else did, then circumstances result in this group dying out or at least being dispersed and the ability is lost again.
There are some edge cases too. The invention of radio almost doesn't make sense, because they didn't yet understand enough about electromagnetism to make anything resembling a modern radio transmitter. The "spark gap" radio transmitter invented was totally crazy (in modern terms it's basically a broadband jammer and thus illegal), but if nobody else has a radio transmitter then it's all you've got. If that technology was slightly worse (say the maximum range is a hundred times worse or getting the transmitter working is not merely tricky to learn but such an art that few can do it reliably even with practice) it wouldn't be useful and would have gone nowhere until the electromagnetic theory gets better and valves are invented.
The Alexanderson alternator was an intermediate technology between the spark gap transmitters and tubes. Unlike the spark gaps transmitters, it produced a more spectrally clean waveform, but only at modest frequencies (up to 600 kHz, according to the Wikipedia page).
The other thing this article made me think of: the stone tools get stored in a cave and forgotten (the small band of users get wiped out for some other reason), then another band finds the cave (because of a rainstorm) and the tools and the broken bones nearby. They figure it out and “own” the cave and the tools for a few years/generations until history repeats. Over the 200,000 year use of the cave, maybe it sat dormant for 1-5,000 years at a time. Imagine finding a cave in a mostly empty land, and finding useful artifacts inside.
OK so that Novartis thing. Trump gets elected. According to the second article there Novartis tracks down Trump's lawyer and signs a contract for him to "advise" them on US health care policy matters.
Then after they sign the contract they meet with him and determine that he "would be unable to provide the services that Novartis had anticipated". Without details but it sounds like they said, "OK we gave you all this money, we don't really want legal advice, we want you to influence the President or tell us privileged information" and Cohen said "No way that is unethical." They then had to pay the rest of the contract since it could only be terminated for cause and "lawyer refuses to commit crimes" isn't valid cause.
So yeah, Novartis is one of many companies that makes generic HCQ and sells it at near cost. It's not a money maker for them at all. It definitely sounds like they were trying to do something unethical and illegal here, but how is the fact their lawyer refused to go along with it evidence of something wrong with Cohen or any of his other clients?
Thanks for that link. So that's a mutual fund that like most mutual fund includes some pharmaceutical companies.
Like most people with any 401k retirement savings or other stock holdings (includes most people in the US), I have a mix of mutual funds and indexed funds that include stocks I've never heard of and don't care to know anything about. I bet I own part of some company that makes HCQ as well. I probably also own Big Tobacco, Big Oil, Big Pharma, Defense, Offense, and a bunch of other horrible things, as probably nearly everyone that posts here does as well without realizing it.
> This is this the more toxic variant though right? It’s meant to be hydroychloroquine
Hydroxychloroquine has fewer side effects than chloroquine which has fewer side effects than quinine which has fewer side effects than the bark it's made from that contains a bunch of other compounds including quinidine.
All quinine class drugs produce heart arrhythmia as a side effect in some patients, more so with increasing doses, and all come with warnings that they should not be used or should be used with caution in patients with heart conditions. These contraindications of these widely used drugs have been known for decades.
They were giving 1.2 grams a day to the patients that died. That is significantly higher than what is known to be a safe dose. CQ is also not indicated for anyone with underlying heart conditions. Since COVID-19 is known to cause heart damage as well as lung damage in the late stage of the disease using these drugs in the late stage of the disease has built in problems.
The article doesn't mention anyone in the lower dose group dying of heart problems, though heart attacks and related problems are things that are known to happen to people with COVID-19. The lower dose study is continuing and was not halted. Presumably there will be a subsequent study published with those results. I agree that it is a bad idea to be taking 1.2 grams a day of CQ. During the century of widespread CQ use the fatality rate due to side effects was certainly no where near what they managed to obtain by overdosing patients in this reckless study.
Hm, the pseudo-study (it was a after the fact data review) found a near halving of mortality rates in the HCQ group. Yet that is described as no evidence of efficacy. Odd.
