Coronavirus: Better Call Sol - CORONAMANIA (16 Viewers)

I did an antigen test today completely expecting it to be totally clear.
Turns out I got the most definite positive so far!

I don't know what to think.
I came up negative, finally. You just have to sleep and rest and give it time.

I guess a way to think about virus transmission is like water running downhill. Any path that can be found will be used, as long as progress can be made it's all equal.

You'll hear the argument made that transposons are almost the ideal virus, even though they aren't viruses (any more?). They get into your genome, and hop about, they put very little load onto the host, and they get transmitted between generations. But yeah, Dr Robertson isn't saying anything too contentious there, the only thing that matters is hopping to other hosts.


Like, I guess you could make the argument that something like Ebola which turns you into an exploding sack of blood in... whatever, days or something ridiculous, isn't a great virus as it limits spread. You have this model of the virus burning itself out before it can spread, like a newspaper fire compared to HIV which burns slowly for ages like coal, really long lived in the host but not very contagious.

I'm not working directly with cov-2, and I can't be arsed reading about the prick any more, but I've heard conversations where they're talking about the spike being bimodal with respect to conformation (structure). That is, it has two structures, one active and one hidey. I guess the default mode would be hidey, and the adaptive response type guys don't notice the spike because it's sort of hidden. Then, upon some class of trigger, it flips to the other mode, active mode, and can infect.
 
speaking of a pathogen wiping its host out, a crowd of tree huggers i'm involved with started a so far informal quest to find elm (wych elm) trees in ireland which may be immune to dutch elm disease. one of the interesting things about dutch elm disease is that it's not the fungus itself which kills the trees, but the tree's own immune response which does it in. which sounds superfically similar to the reports when covid first appeared, that the sufferer's own immune response was causing a lot of the damage.
 
but, like, when I say isn't a great virus, I'm talking about within humans.

So, I guess... to maybe add more to the argument that viruses tend to evolve to put less load on the host, if you look at the source of let's say HIV or sars-cov-2, they come from chimps (?) / bats, and in those populations they aren't so damaging to the host. Same with Ebola, I think their normal host are bats too.

The viruses tend to be adapted much better to the hosts they evolved to live in, and not as damaging, just as a function of being able to spread. They get bad when they hop out of the species they were designed for, into another one, like humans.

So, I guess you could just about argue that the virus will tend to evolve to less damaging forms? in the long term. But now isn't the long term, now it's just prototyping. So it'll flow into every niche it can flow into, if one of these niches end up being not very damaging to the host, so be it.
 
speaking of a pathogen wiping its host out, a crowd of tree huggers i'm involved with started a so far informal quest to find elm (wych elm) trees in ireland which may be immune to dutch elm disease. one of the interesting things about dutch elm disease is that it's not the fungus itself which kills the trees, but the tree's own immune response which does it in. which sounds superfically similar to the reports when covid first appeared, that the sufferer's own immune response was causing a lot of the damage.
oh yeah?
Didn't hear that one. I heard they were doing a similar thing with the US chestnut. They found... possibly a grove out somewhere, they backcrossed in some other class of chestnut that had resistance, and are slowly upping the numbers again.

There were a few elms out by that bloody shed I lived in near Leap. Like, a handful, just scattered about on some old unused farmland.
 
but, like, when I say isn't a great virus, I'm talking about within humans.

So, I guess... to maybe add more to the argument that viruses tend to evolve to put less load on the host, if you look at the source of let's say HIV or sars-cov-2, they come from chimps (?) / bats, and in those populations they aren't so damaging to the host. Same with Ebola, I think their normal host are bats too.

The viruses tend to be adapted much better to the hosts they evolved to live in, and not as damaging, just as a function of being able to spread. They get bad when they hop out of the species they were designed for, into another one, like humans.

So, I guess you could just about argue that the virus will tend to evolve to less damaging forms? in the long term. But now isn't the long term, now it's just prototyping. So it'll flow into every niche it can flow into, if one of these niches end up being not very damaging to the host, so be it.
There’s a nuance with hiv in humans - and that’s a relatively long latency period.
Which means you can have it, pass it on to multiple people long before if fucks your helper T cells and you get aids

If the knackering of the immune system happened in a week or two you’d potentially pass it on to much fewer people.

I guess theres a difference in r number between an Sti vs respiratory virus as well - unless you were literally spraying jizz or blood about
 
oh yeah?
Didn't hear that one. I heard they were doing a similar thing with the US chestnut. They found... possibly a grove out somewhere, they backcrossed in some other class of chestnut that had resistance, and are slowly upping the numbers again.

There were a few elms out by that bloody shed I lived in near Leap. Like, a handful, just scattered about on some old unused farmland.
yeah, they're a lot better funded than we are! there are two projects trying to save the american chestnut, one is using gene editing IIRC and the other the hybridisation route.

there are some large old elms around the country, and we started asking people to gather seeds from them and post them in, as long as the trees were above a certain size. the hope would be that these trees survived due to a possible resistance, but it's also possible the ones identified are isolated so the elm bark beetle has never found them.
there's apparently a very large specimen in stephen's green, but it's not too far from there to trinity where the elms on the grounds there were wiped out; so i guess that tree should have been exposed?

i'm not sure what it means for seed viability if there's no second tree nearby to cross pollinate with. but one of the reasons elms suffered so badly is that frequently they spread by suckering, so often a stand of elm can all be genetically identical, so there's not enough variation in the stock to have many pockets of resistance.
and they can be killed back to the ground and sprout again, and it's once they hit about 12-15 foot when they're hit again - as that's the height the elm bark beetle which spreads the funcgus, flies at.
 
I'm sure those of us who've lived away from Ireland appreciate the dangers of asking Pete for a Thumped Tree Thread, but I want to do it anyway.

It, and us, would be locked after thirty three and a third posts.
 
yeah, they're a lot better funded than we are! there are two projects trying to save the american chestnut, one is using gene editing IIRC and the other the hybridisation route.

there are some large old elms around the country, and we started asking people to gather seeds from them and post them in, as long as the trees were above a certain size. the hope would be that these trees survived due to a possible resistance, but it's also possible the ones identified are isolated so the elm bark beetle has never found them.
there's apparently a very large specimen in stephen's green, but it's not too far from there to trinity where the elms on the grounds there were wiped out; so i guess that tree should have been exposed?

i'm not sure what it means for seed viability if there's no second tree nearby to cross pollinate with. but one of the reasons elms suffered so badly is that frequently they spread by suckering, so often a stand of elm can all be genetically identical, so there's not enough variation in the stock to have many pockets of resistance.
and they can be killed back to the ground and sprout again, and it's once they hit about 12-15 foot when they're hit again - as that's the height the elm bark beetle which spreads the funcgus, flies at.
I think the ones I was finding were gnarly small guys. There was a stand of them though, so there would have been pollination.

Picking the big ones seems logical enough. They did do a spell of cutting them down to try to prevent spread, which might have kneecapped that to a certain extent? I remember them all getting chopped down in and around Herbert Park.

I think Aspen do that suckering thing too, massive groves of trees all genetically identical. Nice facts @magicbastarder , I'm into them. I'll keep an eye out for any big Elms then. Bugger all trees around this region though sadly.
 
speaking of a pathogen wiping its host out, a crowd of tree huggers i'm involved with started a so far informal quest to find elm (wych elm) trees in ireland which may be immune to dutch elm disease. one of the interesting things about dutch elm disease is that it's not the fungus itself which kills the trees, but the tree's own immune response which does it in. which sounds superfically similar to the reports when covid first appeared, that the sufferer's own immune response was causing a lot of the damage.
and the 1918-20 flu pandemic mostly killed young adults because their strong immune systems had an over reaction to the virus. it ran out steam after a second more virulent wave ran out of people to infect.

interestingly some of the worst affected places were the Pacific Islands like Nauru or Western Samoa.
after the Americans took over German Samoa a quarantine blockade meant no one there got infected.

I always found it bizarre that in school history immediately after WW1. there's a tiny half page mention of virus that killed more than the war did and that's all...

about 3 years ago I did a bit of reading on that pandemic.
at the time I saw one book review about the Spanish Flu pandemic and RTE broadcast a one hour programme about it.
that was all - no other real coverage that I noticed.
compared with the constant 1916 to independence or WW1 documentaries and memorials - lest we forget?
 
and the 1918-20 flu pandemic mostly killed young adults because their strong immune systems had an over reaction to the virus. it ran out steam after a second more virulent wave ran out of people to infect.

Just spitballing but i wonder how much removing that demographic left a hole in the age group that would have been the parents for ww2. like did the gap in community leave room for people to get into facism. quick look at wiki, mussolini was in from 1922, but the rest of european facists appeared around 33 onward.
almost immediately disproved it there.
 
this is a bit 'he said she said' but my sister was told by her next door neighbour, who is a nurse who has been working on covid testing in some managerial role, that they reckon antigen tests are more likely to work in the afternoon than in the morning; whatever way your physiology works (and i don't know what the mechanism would be, i don't know if she even explained that to my sister), you're more likely to get a correct positive in the morning than in the afternoon.
 

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