That is a good point about the longer incubation period of COVID19 (1 to 12.5 days) vs ~2 days for Influenza.

A tendency towards less virulence is not a given. When it comes to Ebola "whether it is about emergence, short-term or long-term dynamics, virulence can be explained by its particular life cycle that mixes parasitism and parasitoidism (postmortem transmission). Unfortunately, any longterm decrease in virulence is unlikely for West African strains at any time scale, although increasing the safe burial proportion appears to be an optimal response in both the short and long terms." (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2017/11/11/108589.full.pdf).

Ah I see. Thank you @lukasz and @luceth.

It would rule the vaccine candidates out if the likelihood of getting COVID19 was low or it the seriousness the illness, after catching it was low. On the latter point there is a slight chance of this happening. Viruses have a tendency to evolve towards being less pathogenic over time, and it is hypothesised that this is what happened in relation to the 1918 influenza pandemic. Even though viruses are not technically alive, the less pathogenic ones are 'fitter' candidates for propagation, as the host is not dead or incapacitated. It is a long-shot though, especially given that, if my understanding is correct, H1N1 is able to evolve faster than COVID19.

A scientist friend has said that he is worried about the Oxford ChAdOx1 candidate - it is based on a modified adenovirus, which hasn't been done before, and according to him, the middle of a pandemic is not the time to try. He's worried about 'off-target editing'.

Western media rarely talks about the Sinovac candidate - developed between Canada and China. Currently being tested on China's own military personnel. Lucky them - their definition of 'fighting for country' is broader!

+1 mod this up

Well that settles things then! Clearly this could never happen in a Western company.

Hang on. . . didn't Zoom just backtrace and say that their end to end encryption is not actually encryption after all?

I wrote the wikipedia article on Dr Robert Edgar Hope-Simpson, who discovered the link between Vitamin D and immunity. I've been following studies on network-based drug repurposing. For each drug candidate, I've taken the progenitor from that class of drug and looking at the food/herbs from which that class of drugs was originally derived, and then where these are frequently consumed.

Case fatality rate is irrelevant when it comes to Vietnam, because due to government policy, almost nobody had the virus.

Stop living in denial and soaking up propaganda like a sponge. Come to Asia. You will see. Vietnam won the war despite USA firepower because they're used to uniting against adversity. They care for each other.

Quality of life is not just about material prosperity or freedom to be a total idiot and eschew masks. It is the Asian century. Get used to it.

This is normal. Temperatures at the center of the sun are far hotter, and sometimes reach up to 12.5 bajillion degrees. Plant life thrives there, and if wasn't so far away could be an agricultural hotspot.

Why is the above post down-voted? It is factual, though lacks citations. Google - they are easy to find.

Why is it so hard to separate Trump from this? He tried to use it as an excuse not to do a lockdown/quarantine. That was flat-out evil. But it doesn't mean he wasn't right about this medicine working. Even a broken clock (like Trump) is right twice a day.

HCQ is withdrawn for emergency use, because it is useless at that stage. There is evidence that it is useful in pre-exposure prophylaxis and early post-exposure treatment. There are many anti-virals (eg Tamiflu) with the same traits.

Most of the studies are analogous to pulling a parachute rip-cord 100 ft above ground level and then declaring that parachutes don't work.

Yes, when the black death broke out, the authorities at launched a solidarity trial of the four most promising poultices. In the end though it didn't matter as Lord Gilead used his significant political connections to stack the odds in favor of his own proprietary fig and onion paste. (Also none of them worked).

Even a stopped clock is right twice per day. I don't know how this is so hard for people to grasp. Its not like even the worst ever USA president doesn't have a whole team of world class scientific and medical advisors at his disposal. People act as though it was his (bad) idea.

Research into anti-malarials goes back to SARS1, and continued for SARS2, such as in this article (quinacrine): https://www.nature.com/article....

Yes, but not as much as it deserves. For example, Rod Johnson, founder of Spring (defacto standard enterprise Java framework) raved about Kotlin, called it a game-changer. But it is not like every second Java backend is using Kotlin now. Some places do - Netflix for example.

So that's backend. Meanwhile it can compile to JavaScript and native. I tried JavaScript, and even though I like the language better than TypeScript, the latter was much easier. Better tooling, community, etc. I haven't tried native yet.

Kotlin (https://kotlinlang.org/) is a fantastic language for the JVM. It can also target native and compile to JavaScript. On the JVM front it is completely interoperable with standard and open-source Java libraries.

Shouldn't it be like: The FBI can photograph your front door, but they can't search your house?

BGC vaccine does some remarkable (and as yet unexplained) things to the immune system. For example it is also confers protection against bladder cancer.

One theory in support of efficacy against COVID19, is that COVID19 enables a proliferation of facultative and obligate anaerobes as a complication of the virus, just as Lemierre's Syndrome follows Epstein Barr Virus. BGC is known to provide partial protection against other kinds of anaerobes.

There may be another explanation for it working, or another explanation entirely, for the correlation.