(5) China, last #ZeroCovid country, struggles. Economists speculate when SARS-CoV-2 will defeat it. I won't ridicule the short-term questions. Vital to system dynamicists and humanity is the inverse: what societies can learn fast enough to return to #清零?
(6) There is another layer here: the role of science and lack of international regulation in GOF research. These are challenging questions that most people choose to ignore - for understandable and valid reasons. I assume the people who matter are aware.
(7) With CRISPR/Cas9 and lack of oversight & accountability in virology labs, we face urgent global governance problems. Everyone has known for years; it's a common plot line in popular thrillers as you find in any small airport or train station bookstore. science.org/content/articl…
(8) Under hashtags like #ZeroCovid#清零 (#5), you find a trashfire of disinformation, and some high-quality content. People untrained to counter "flooding the zone" tactics will be helpless. This syndemic extends into the information sphere.
Other smart people use similar terms like polycrisis (@doctorow@brittwray) - also fine. Syndemic is the medical term to unite climate, ecology, energy + information, and public health.
En fin: Climate and governance scholars need to step up, we need you.
(9) Back to urgent epi questions. Given complement-mediated pathogenesis in SARS-CoV-2, here Ted's Japanese haplogroups D & E hypothesis (why?). Japan is not fine. Note the paleo climate links. - All above my nonexistent pay class. nature.com/articles/jhg20…
(10) Without data, no epidemiology. As free PCR tests were cut back, LongSARS (='LongCovid') isn't even tracked, and international surveillance remains poor, no one knows what's going on.
The first syndemic lesson is that we face a political, no epidemiological, problem. @rki_de
@rki_de (11) Throughout the pandemic, Japan had about a two-week lag from peak cases to peak deaths. Whatever happened - the pattern broke ("decoupling"), & deaths just keeps going up. (See @T_Brautigan on this)
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1. May do SARS-CoV-2 science threads when I find time. "While association between ABO blood group and infection is well known for many years, lower susceptibility of O blood group to coronaviruses had already been reported nearly 20 years ago for SARS-CoV" degruyter.com/document/doi/1…
2. Transplacental SARS-CoV-2 protein Orf8 binds to complement C1q to trigger fetal inflammation - Yes, as we've been saying for years. Orf8 makes SARS (CoV-1/-2) unique among coronaviruses. Let's infect all the kids so we are really, really sure that's bad embopress.org/doi/full/10.10…
3. SARS-CoV-2 can trigger a devastating, destructive placental pathology causing placental dysfunction and fetal hypoxia, yet stillbirth is rare. The fetal hypoxia is acute/subacute, apparent as reduced fetal movements. 20% of participants in this study(!) sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
1. The structural parallels of SARS-CoV-2 and HIV-1 were known already 20 years ago, from SARS-CoV-1. Yet COVID-19 policy and even most scientists ignore these parallels, failing to learn key lessons. Fundamentally, genetic recombination drives both pandemics—two typical articles
2. Don't worry about the specific article—there are hundreds more, and more relevant ones. The lesson here is we face syndemics, overlapping epidemics that cluster with inequity, not just distinct pandemics. All reinforce each other link.springer.com/article/10.118… frontiersin.org/journals/micro…
3. Background. There are literally thousands such articles; no one integrates them. That's why as political scientist, for years already, I've been arguing that only institutionalization can help with such complexity. We need a @UNAIDS for SARS-CoV, sorry
1. Growing bamboo is our best chance to avert climate breakdown: the plants build soil, help biodiversity, avoid GHG emissions, provide food & construction material, sequester carbon 30 times (!) faster than mixed temperate forest. Yet stunningly, no one coordinates this work yet
2. After 40 years of climate science - first AGGG, now IPCC -, everyone feels they know climate. Yet experts only really know their own field. Generalists and practitioners can implement solutions but need experts to develop them. Bamboo as climate solution is entirely unexplored
3. Last time atmospheric carbon content was as high as today, 16 million years ago, Earth was >3°C warmer than today, the Arctic was ice free, and Iceland had a subtropical climate. People think they know what climate change means, but most really don't. mdpi.com/2673-4834/5/2/…
We’ve shared this for years, it was known or suspected even before the pandemic from SARS-CoV-1. Friends of we’re going to learn at this rate, ignoring prepandemic science, populations worldwide will get into serious trouble
I'd like to delete my account, but then a sizable fraction of the early Covid twitter scicomm documentation - to show what was known when - would be gone. As far as I know, no one else with even a moderately sized account (>10k followers) shares the same readily available science
“Bamboo is our best chance to slow climate breakdown. It can replace drivers of GHG emissions and biodiversity loss (food, construction, concrete, plastic), build soil & allow regrowing rainforest." - Let's test it. Grow bamboo as blueprint for a future ecological civilization 🧵
2. Giant bamboo dwarfs trees. As grass, it grows 30 times (!) faster and can be harvested every year. Timber takes decades; too slow. Stunningly, no one in the west described the unique climate mitigation potential of bamboo yet. - Note the rhizome system:
3. Climate relevant will be the use in millions of ha of plantations, just like other economically important crops. After two months on this, some significant progress: air pot kindly donated 1 m of their professional U system, so I can test it for bamboo.
SARS-CoV-2 reminder: The more immune compromised the population, the less symptoms, the ‘milder’ it appears, the more severe it really is (=Long Covid, long term damage). That’s what even most scientists seem not to get
Thanks for vivid discussion everyone. It really is a fundamentally important point. Since I deleted most references for lack of structure (and frankly, just being fed up repeating the same points for 3 to 4 years), I'll look for new references that must have been published by now