Beseeching employers in Canada to make work as remote as possible. If your employee is not, e.g., a healthcare worker, requiring in-person interaction, there is no reason why they should be out there at risk + increasing the risk for essential workers.
cbc.ca/news/canada/wo…
I wonder, often, at employers who think IT/admin people must be at the office. You can basically look South to see what happens when people treat this virus like it's not serious. Not everyone has access to (1) regular testing and (2) new therapeutics + a top class medical team.
The question at this point is how many deaths and disabilities your employer needs before they decide to make work remote. You already know cases are rising, that means many undetected cases. And you know people with pre-existing conditions have a fair chance of death/disability.
If the answer is 1. That means that your company is just waiting for 1 employee to die/suffer disability before they wake the *** up and realize that they should not be making people who can work remotely come into the office, taking public transit, interacting with others.
I'm confused by, on the one side, the people who think SARS2 is a bioweapon/manmade but for some reason we should all be exposed to it to get herd immunity. VS on the other side, people who think SARS2 is 100% natural and so no one should be exposed. How does this logic work?
If the answer is 1. I'm asking people to point out the colleague who you think should die/become disabled before your workplace realizes it's a bad idea to have people coming into work for unnecessary in-person interactions.
Canada making the mistakes they just watched unfold in real time in the USA.
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More from @Ayjchan

25 Sep
I've been sitting on a major topic that I think the non-scientist public needs a primer on, with particular significance to COVID-19 research.

That topic: Research Misconduct
ori.hhs.gov/definition-mis…

And what to do about papers that are found to have engaged in misconduct.
One of the most notable instances of misconduct was the Surgisphere HCQ papers. @TheLancet eventually decided to retract the paper & commentary because they would be too misleading in their original form. They adopted a "retract and replace" approach... retractionwatch.com/2020/07/10/a-m…
... because the editorial had been written by innocent parties who were not aware of the data issues, @TheLancet published a new editorial to explain what had transpired - in order to rightfully preserve the reputations of scientists who had been misled. retractionwatch.com/2018/03/29/a-n…
Read 17 tweets
25 Sep
There's some confusion about how new the D614G mutation is. I'm going to use data on @GISAID visualized by @CovidCg to answer this question. The first time it appeared in China was Jan 23, 2020. So this mutation occurred pretty early on in the outbreak before travel restrictions.
When+where did D614G first get detected in Europe? It's not possible to tell using GISAID alone because many countries did not sequence virus isolates and deposit data till later in the pandemic. However, you can see that there are EU countries with D614G even in Jan.
It was only after January that travel restrictions started being sporadically imposed on China by other countries but it was too late because SARS2 (including D614G variants), as we now know, was already widespread. thinkglobalhealth.org/article/travel…
Read 17 tweets
24 Sep
For COVID-19, countries are getting so desperate that they're running human challenge trials or using vaccines that haven't passed phrase 3. What's the plan for the next pandemic? How will global pathogen sampling from nature generate vaccines that work against emerging threats?
Some countries are in such dire straits that they have made deals to allow Chinese Sinovac to perform phase 3 tests on their citizens. "The company is also planning clinical trials with thousands of volunteers in India, Brazil and Bangladesh." washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pac…
Other countries are considering giving up their territory or military alliances to ensure that they have priority access to vaccines. ft.com/content/853775…
Read 7 tweets
20 Sep
I’m hearing from some readers that fb and maybe twitter are flagging this article as misinformation ~24h after posting. Let’s see what happens! bostonmagazine.com/news/2020/09/0…
I think I figured out what's happening. It's past 24h now and I have not seen a misinformation warning on shares of the article (thank goodness). The misinfo tag pops up when people share the article alongside text saying that SARS2 was most likely engineered in a lab.
For the record, I think all 3 scenarios: pre-adaptation, pre-circulation in humans, lab-based origins are -plausible- and must continue to be investigated. It's not productive to be guessing the probabilities of each scenario. Game-changing evidence can emerge any time.
Read 7 tweets
20 Sep
The ripple effect of the Yan report that as I said before has done more to discredit the lab origins hypothesis than all of the peer-reviewed natural origins papers combined. What is new from this article is the interview of Dr Fauci, who seems to think lab origins are possible..
.. but he asks does it matter whether it’s from a lab if the virus was not deliberately mutated, ie was taken from nature?

I think it does matter, if lab activities have a high risk of resulting in outbreaks, and would have implications for future pathogen sampling expeditions.
Let’s say a future expedition to Myanmar, Laos or Vietnam finds a virus that is even more closely related to SARS2 than RaTG13. It still doesn’t answer the question: how did that virus break out in Wuhan city, 1000s of miles away. Was it wildlife trade, travel, or lab activities?
Read 8 tweets
18 Sep
Was RaTG13, the closest virus genome to SARS-CoV-2 (96.2% match), fabricated?

Whistleblower Limeng Yan says she will share a report showing evidence.

But a solid analysis by Eldholm & Brynildsrud shows that the genome is supported by raw sequence data.

virological.org/t/on-the-verac…
@shingheizhan and I, alongside several other teams of scientists, started independently looking into the RaTG13 raw data because of amplicons that were quietly deposited by the WIV onto NCBI on May 19, 2020, months after its genome was published in Nature. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sra/SRX8357956
These amplicons revealed that RaTG13 had been sequenced in 2017 & 2018, which threw everyone for a loop because we all thought that RaTG13 had only been full genome sequenced AFTER COVID-19 broke out. Acknowledgements: @babarlelephant @franciscodeasis

Read 30 tweets

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