Roderick? There's a lot here [1] and the usual life summary here [2].
Sadly he passed away too soon and recordings of his lectures are
a bit collectable.
I think this is a misleading title. Journalism as a profession shot up the last couple of years due to internet and media so the count should be normalized. What ratio of journalists are persecuted compared to total number of journalists out there?
Yeah, I would expect the number of journalists in jail to be at an all time high if the number of journalists (and, in fact, the number of humans) is at an all time high.
what's your data for that? If anything, with most 'journalists' being professional retweeters, there are fewer correspondents in dangerous places. How many journalists were in afghanistan?
Full Story: Five years ago as I was learning to code, I was frustrated about not knowing the whole journey. Recently I decided to revisit this problem and to solve this, I decided to build a web app where you can create and share learning roadmaps, and beginners can explore roadmaps based on careers and programming languages. The aim of this project is not to give a single roadmap to anyone as a prescription that promises a career if you do X, Y and Z, but merely an exploratory platform that can be used as a source of inspiration if you get stuck because no tech career path is the same. I managed to get over 50 learning roadmaps on a variety of careers and programming languages. It's built with golang and nextjs and use postgres as a database. I'd love your feedback and your criticism!
We don't know. But the early data looks concerning enough to warrant attention and closer examination.
The early data is always not very reliable, there are some big effects that can skew the data and you don't have many data points yet at that point. There is also no lab work done yet, where you'd directly examine the properties of a variant.
This very well could be worse than delta, but it also might not be. It looks more concerning than any variant we've seen since Delta, but we simply don't have hard data that early.
it's very early in terms of the data that's out there, but so far it looks quite bad.
the ELI5 is that it's expanding really fast, and it is probably at least somewhat resistant to our immune system's first line of defenses that are formed from vaccination or a prior infection. the details on all of those points are very much in flux still, so be aware that the story could change as we learn more.
in more detail:
the biggest piece of worrying evidence is that it's growing as a proportion of cases in south africa at such an intensely fast rate that it's outcompeting the delta variant as though it isn't even there, which means it's far more transmissible than any other variant.
as far as i know, there isn't any information on whether it has higher lethality compared to delta, but my hunch is that it does.
the reason why i think it will end up having increased lethality is that it appears to have a complex of mutations that are associated with resistance to antibodies, likely including those generated by vaccination. that will make it take longer for the immune system to form an effective response to infection, allowing the virus to replicate rampantly and cause organ damage for longer.
keep in mind every other variant has also exhibited this property at least to a small amount, and in most cases, regardless of vaccination, our bodies are still able to clear the infection.
the issue is that this time around, the variant doesn't have just one or two tropisms associated with lower antibody binding efficiency, but perhaps a couple dozen. so, it'll likely be more effective at reinfecting people who have already had covid, too. and even though the variant may be "vaccine resistant", i'd bet that vaccinated people will still fare better than unvaccinated people. unfortunately, our antibody therapies probably won't be as helpful at saving people who are hospitalized.
but, our antiviral therapies (including those still in development) shouldn't be any less effective against this variant, which is a very faint silver lining.
in conclusion: buckle up, we're probably in for a rough ride.
> biggest piece of worrying evidence is that it's growing as a proportion of cases in south africa at such an intensely fast rate that it's outcompeting the delta variant as though it isn't even there, which means it's far more transmissible than any other variant.
OTOH - cases in SA were very low, so we would see this sort of growth of a variant very quickly just due to founder effects without anything nefarious going on.
Delta arrived when the background number of cases was much higher so it took longer to become a high proportion of cases.
That's objectively false, seeing as though the test infrastructure has been able to detect hundreds of thousands more cases during the country's waves. If your claim was accurate, South Africa's case rate would have plateaued at a level and just stayed there.
Sure, the testing infrastructure is not as good as in a developed country, but it has many orders of magnitude more capacity than the current case rate.
If testing is limited but effectively randomly sampling, then measured incidence will be proportionate to actual incidence.
If testing is targeted toward regions of higher interest and likelihood, then test positivity should skyrocket out of proportion to actual positives. (I'm not sure what the case is for South Africa.)
Using deaths as a lagging indicator of cases, South Africa reports about a 3% CFR (based on reported cases and deaths), as opposed to about 2% for the US. This would suggest a somewhat lower testing prevalence in ZA, by about a third, but not an especially bad record. This does assume that Covid deaths are being accurately assessed and reported. Total excess mortality is the usual check for that.
My read is that ZA's testing infrastructure is reasonably good, and that the B.1.1.539 variant's growth is extraordinary.
> the biggest piece of worrying evidence is that it's growing as a proportion of cases in south africa at such an intensely fast rate that it's outcompeting the delta variant as though it isn't even there, which means it's far more transmissible than any other variant.
Can anyone ELI5 how this is working?
If the Covid #s SA is reporting are accurate, the entire country is only at around ~2.5k cases per day.
Since Delta has an R0 between 6-7, for this to be outcompeting it so substantially, it would need to have an R0 of 8-9 (if not higher) -- at which point it would be almost as contagious as Measles. For it to be this contagious, wouldn't there already HAVE to be ~10k+ cases per day in SA?
The original Covid had an incubation period of 5.4 days. Delta dropped to 4.
If this has been around for weeks, with an incubation period of 4 days, shouldn't this have already infected close to ~100k people? And shouldn't there be 10s of thousands of infections per day?
To be fair, the growth rate South Africa IS reporting is 10x in 4 days. If that trend continues for even three weeks, then it would infect the entire country...
Does anyone know how reliable South Africa's #s are?
> Does anyone know how reliable South Africa's #s are?
This is what I was going to comment on as I was reading your post but glad you brought it up here at the end.
I would have a difficult time believing the COVID numbers in South Africa are being reported reliably (regardless of the reason).
SPECULATION:
I'd love to know more if this is incorrect but I think even in countries like the United States, or Denmark, or Germany, or wherever the numbers are likely to be undercounted based on people just getting sick and not doing anything about it. My intuition is that numbers in countries like South Korea, Singapore, and perhaps Israel are more likely to be closer to the "ground truth". Other countries in Asia I have less confidence in (Japan and China). We probably need to develop and deploy more rapid at-home testing.
There's always going to be some undercounting, as in any country, but in terms of being able to test enough cases and be consistent over time South Africa's numbers are reliable.
During earlier waves the testing infrastructure has detected orders of magnitude more cases, and the current lull in cases is following what epidemiologists predicted and expected before a fourth wave in December/January.
I’d say sure it’s under control, I question the infection numbers and deaths. Then again maybe they’re posting the real numbers because they’re so good. But I’m not sure I buy that.
Sure. I think with China and COVID-19 so far my stance is guilty until proven innocent. Not really getting a lot of antibody testing done from people who don't travel or who have died. The CCP is inherently incentivized to fake numbers, underreport (this is a China-wide problem and you can see it manifest in the debt crises unfolding there), and downplay any problems so that the CCP looks strong.
And this has nothing to do with being pro or anti-China. I think it's just an obvious recognition of incentives and current state.
>the issue is that this time around, the variant doesn't have just one or two tropisms associated with lower antibody binding efficiency, but perhaps a couple dozen.
Can you share a source for this? I'd like to hear more.
summary of the phenomenon in layman's terms: when binding at 100% efficiency, antibodies bind to portions of the spike protein like a key fits into a lock, so it's easy to "unlock" the lock, thereby neutralizing the viral particle. when there are mutations which affect the shapes of the different portions of the spike protein, it's like the pins in the lock shifting so that the key you used before might not work without quite a bit of jiggling, assuming you can get it to unlock the lock at all. the more mutations that increase the amount of jiggling it takes, the more the pins in the lock become intractable with the key you have.
this set of analogies is imperfect in a few ways, but hopefully it helps you to understand the gist of the problem.
My understanding is that this virus has a mutated spike protein, i.e. a different "outside shell". This spike protein is what gives the virus its ability to attach to human cells, and also what most vaccines "expose" to your immune system to teach it how to recognize COVID-19.
The difference in this variant's spike protein might have effect, among other things, on the ability of the immune system of a person that has been vaccinated to recognize the virus, so there's potential for a much decreased response/efficacy of the vaccines. However this is pure speculation at this point.
Update: earlier this year it aws speculated that the beta mutation might have increased infectivity and/or the ability to better elude the immune response; that variant eventually died out, and delta is now the prevalent one. It might be a similar case, but it's hard to tell yet, and it's of course better to err on the side of caution.
Given the low level of vaccination in the region, I have to wonder if the mutations are in response to something else in the environment rather than the virus working around vaccination induced immunity. That area has extraordinarily high rates of HIV. Is it possible that the virus has mutated to be better able to infect those with HIV too? I'm not a virologist either so the HIV question might be naïve but looking for differences in that environment compared to other parts of the world seems worthwhile.
I believe the theory is that since this variant has so many mutations, it evolved over quite some time within a single host with a lowered immune response. Makes sense that this would happen in an area with high HIV prevalence.
Chiming in as a 3rd level of uneducated layman, but isn't one of the defining features of HIV that it makes it easier for other infections? I'm not sure what adaptation would be required there.
Common wisdom is that immunocompromised individuals, which are unable to battle off the virus and suffer the infection for long periods of time, are fertile grounds for variants evolution.
"Rapid viral evolution has been described in immunosuppressed patients with persistent SARS-CoV-2 infection. Choi et al. described an immunosuppressed patient with antiphospholipid syndrome who was hospitalized in August 2020 and treated with anticoagulants, glucocorticoids, cyclophosphamide, intermittent rituximab, and eculizumab.2 During 152 days of persistent SARS-CoV-2 infection in this patient, the investigators identified 31 substitutions and three deletions in genome sequences. Twelve spike mutations were found, including seven in a segment of the receptor-binding domain consisting of 24 amino acids, some at sites linked to immune evasion (478, 484, and 493).6,7 The patient eventually died of severe Covid-19–related pneumonia. "
Apparently it has taken over from the Delta-variant in southern Africa. But I haven't heard anything about how sick you get, how deadly it is, and how effective the current vaccines are. This region is poorly vaccinated, so it could very well be that the vaccines still are effective.
There's a general tendency for viruses to become less deadly when they become easier to spread. But that's just a general tendency and we'll have to wait and see if it's true in this case because from time to time it's not.
It does have a large number of mutations. There is a theory being bounced around that the rapid decline in cases in Japan might be due to the virus there having mutated itself out of the ability to copy itself correctly so what is still spreading is falling apart. We can hope for something similar with this variant but it's just that, hope, for now.
I think it's largely too early to say (in the sense that it has yet to be thoroughly researched in vaxx'd areas). It's clearly taken over the population of infections in South Africa but they're rolling with fairly low vax rates (I have seen a few figures reported but < 40%).
There are some protein/spike characteristics of this variant which alarm scientists who think it might evade vax-generated antibodies better--i.e. alpha/delta-targeting vax antibodies may provide less resistance to this one.
So on the one hand it //could be// worse than Delta but I am personally waiting for more data to flow out (esp. beyond SA).
It also, in early estimates, has a higher infectivity rate than the Delta variant, which is disquieting because Delta was already about as contagious as chicken pox.
Numbers this early can be very misleading, but anecdotes have cropped up about infections occurring from one hotel room to another, possibly through the HVAC system, which is not a durability trick that previous variants were believed to have.
Right now the biggest concern is that this variant is the most mutated from the original strain and it is unknown how effective, if at all, our current vaccines are against it.
As to is it worse (i.e. more contagious, more deadly, increased risk of hospitalised) than the current Delta variant I think it is too early to say with any confidence.
The expansion of space itself is not subject to the same constraints as travel through space.
Put another way: Nothing can travel through space faster than light. But the expansion of space itself isn’t a form of travel, and so it’s not subject to this limitation.
I relate with your sentiment. I'm from a product background, not a research one. What do you think is the best way to eventually transition into deep tech companies over the next five years?
By deep tech, I mean getting to solve complex challenges through technology. It could be solving problems using machine learning, or a hardware product that's genuinely useful. I believe we're going to see a rise in hardware technology soon. After being in the phase of building a product to get upvotes on ProductHunt, I was trying to capture the essence of being an inventor by following a prescribed recipe, which wasn't satisfying. I ended up moving to a more business role and it's much better this way but we're barely building anything.
I'd like to play a role of an inventor and a builder of crazy technologies. Imagine https://www.noya.co/ or https://frame.work/. My only concern is that not being from a research background or a first world country could hinder my chance of doing that. Hope that made sense.
Yeah, that makes sense. I think the best way to do that is just to invent stuff. I've followed a similar-ish track in the past, and I can promise you that nothing upskills you more than actually building things.
