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Comment Re:Estimated 1.5m to die and still ahead of US (Score 1) 133

What baffles me is why China did not vaccinate the population during these 3 years?

Yes, they did vaccinate their population. They have a higher vaccination rate than the US but with inactivated virus vaccine. And also months ago so immunity would have waned.
https://www.statista.com/stati...

Comment Re:China's Vaccines Work Better (Score 1) 311

China doesn’t make a mRNA vaccine because they don’t have the technological understanding or manufacturing capacity ....

China's first mRNA vaccine plant to start operation in October. China’s top mRNA contender is ready to go. And SoftBank just led a cash infusion pushing it over the $1B line.

Comment Re:Not anti-vax (Score 1) 297

Well, in Manaus they thought they had herd immunity because over 70% had antibodies to Covid-19 and carried on as if the danger had passed. But they were very wrong.

BMJ: Is Manaus the final nail in the coffin for natural herd immunity?
https://www.bmj.com/content/37...

How one city missed warning after warning until its health system collapsed
https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/25...

Comment Tests in recovered patients found false positives (Score 1) 218

Tests in recovered patients found false positives, not reinfections, experts say
"South Korea’s infectious disease experts said Thursday that dead virus fragments were the likely cause of over 260 people here testing positive again for the novel coronavirus days and even weeks after marking full recoveries. Oh Myoung-don, who leads the central clinical committee for emerging disease control, said the committee members found little reason to believe that those cases could be COVID-19 reinfections or reactivations, which would have made global efforts to contain the virus much more daunting. The tests detected the ribonucleic acid of the dead virus, said Oh, a Seoul National University hospital doctor, at a press conference Thursday held at the National Medical Center."

Comment WHO could not have withheld or delayed information (Score 4, Informative) 373

Washington Post article explains clearly that Trump's administration had people embedded in WHO and received real time updates So it is a lie that the administration did not know everything that the WHO knew from the very start.

"15 officials from Trump's administration were embedded with the WHO in Geneva, working full time, hand-in-glove with the organization on the virus from the very first day China disclosed the outbreak to the world, Dec. 31. At least six other U.S. officials at WHO headquarters dedicated most of their time to the virus, and two others worked remotely with the WHO on covid-19 full time. In the weeks that followed, they and other U.S. government scientists engaged in all major deliberations and decisions at the WHO on the novel coronavirus, had access to all information, and contributed significantly to the world body’s conclusions and recommendations."

So there is no way the WHO would have been able to withhold or delay the release of essential information.

Comment Re: You must choose.... (Score 1) 345

Anyways, the reason nobody works on these is probably because our existing antibiotics already work really well, likewise it wouldn't be terribly practical to develop more.

No! No! Bacteria have been evolving antibiotic resistance and things are getting quite desperate, especially in hospital settings. Newer and more potent antibiotics are urgently needed. Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus (VRE) and multi-drug-resistant Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MDR-TB) are well-known examples of superbugs. The latest are NDM-1 bacteria that have acquired the ability to defeat carbapenems, the antibiotics of last resort when all else fails. And these are failing too. There is an ongoing arms race between bacteria and antibiotics and it has always been so since the introduction of penicillin. The bacteria are getting ahead and we need new antibiotics since yesterday.

Comment Re:Very admirable (Score 3, Informative) 206

High speed trains are awesome, and they're great for prestige and getting customers to buy that technology. Yet they're out of price range for the majority of customers.

Maybe not? This from a recent World Bank report:
"As of October 1, 2014, over 2.9 billion passengers are estimated to have taken a trip in a China Rail - High Speed train (called CRH services), with traffic growing from 128 million in 2008 to 672 million in 2013, or about 39 percent growth per annum since 2008. In 2013, 530 million of those CRH trips took place on passenger dedicated HSR lines. In 2013, China HSR lines carried slightly more HSR passenger-km (214 billion) than the rest of the world combined. This represented about 2.5 times the HSR passenger-km of Japan, the second largest country in terms of HSR traffic. These are substantial numbers for a system that is still in its early days."

Also, a personal informed opinion here

Submission + - Good Cholesterol (HDL) is not all that it's cracked up to be

BayaWeaver writes: We have been told for a long time that there's good cholesterol (HDL) and bad cholesterol (LDL) and good cholesterol lowers the rate of heart disease. However, the New York Times reports that a just published article in The Lancet has shown that people genetically endowed with higher levels of good cholesterol (HDL) do not have decreased heart attack risk. Also, tests of HDL-boosting drugs by Roche and Pfizer have failed to lower heart attack risk. So it looks like we should ignore 'good' cholesterol and just concentrate on lowering bad cholesterol with diet, exercise and statins if we want to reduce the risk of heart attacks.
China

Submission + - New species of human from China?

BayaWeaver writes: These are exciting times in anthropology.
Recent analysis of fossils first discovered in China in 1979 indicate that a human-like species may have co-existed with modern humans as late as 11,500 years ago. This presumably new species has been nicknamed Red Deer Cave people because of their apparent taste for the extinct giant red deer. Compare this finding with the "hobbits" discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2003 which are also thought to have been around until 12,000 years ago. Similarly, the Denisovans discovered in 2010 were co-existing with modern humans in Siberia about 30,000 years ago. It is also interesting that the sensational, high-impact is published in open access PLoS and not the traditional pay-walled journals like Nature and Science.

Comment Re:New technology, old mindsets (Score 2) 559

But what about the Fourth Crusade when the Byzantines themselves were attacked and Constantinople - the richest city in Christendom - was sacked, looted and raped by the western Crusaders? It was so awful, shameful and painful that 800 years later Pope John Paul II thought it necessary to apologize for it. There was nothing "good" about that one.

Comment How about a Google + Amazon merger? (Score 1) 140

That will create the ultimate anti-Apple. Amazon's store is the only one right now that can compete with Apple's App store and if that becomes the de facto Google Android store, that will mean the first real competitor to the iDevice/App Store ecosystem. And Google's cloud + Amazon's cloud will be mother of all clouds too.

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