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my answer
Black absorbs more EM than white, but black objects also radiate more. All matter above 0 degrees K radiate EM known as "black body radiation". Black objects radiate that energy more quickly than white objects, so they get cold more quickly.
"During the day in a polar region", means that in the dead of winter it's dark out, even at noon. (The question didn't specify the season.) If the sun is below the horizon or very low in the sky (i.e., traveling through a lot of atmosphere), the solar EM wouldn't be much, in which case the black would radiate more energy than the white, and the inside would get colder.
Also, even if there is some sun, the surface of the coat is on the outside of the insulation, so any heat that it absorbs would quickly radiate back out into the air before that heat could penetrate the insulation to help warm you up.
I didn't look any of this up, it all from memory so I can't guarantee it's accuracy.
my answer
I use your by default mostly because I type to fast and dont review what I write. Couple that with the fact that i got into the habit by typing on my phone where an apostrophe is a bit tedious. That particular error, as most of my errors, are largely due to not caring and typing as fast as I can since i dont find the medium to be critical for correctness.
My formal writeups, as well as my blogs, tend to have very few errors since I proof read them.
That said my natural rate of errors has been unusually high the last 2 years since my injury and COVID largely due to the extremely high levels of stress I've been under which seems to effect the prevelance.
When spell-checkers came out, it was a godsend for me. If I left my spelling mistakes in my writing, you wouldn't be able to make out half of what I was saying, it's so bad.
A lot times I can't find the words in the dictionary because I can't spell it close enough to find it. I use Google a lot now because they have AI/phonetics algorhtms.
(I left that last word misspelled, just so you could see how I tried to spell it unassisted so you get a feel what I face with this issue. It's a real pain.)
@Pat Actually the idea that more lethal viruses are less of a thread isnt actually true. For example if a virus kills 100% of victims but takes 30 days to do it it will still spread quite a bit if it is contagious enough.
I debated this some months back and if you look at a comparison between R0 and morality they arent really strongly correlated at all.
>...if a virus kills 100%, social distancing might actually be followed more tightly, lessening the spread
Yes, human behavior is a big part of it. With diseases like ebola with all of the bleeding, or small pox with the facial deformities, those diseases probably spread less than they would otherwise because people take them more seriously.
Long before we even had a vaccine I mentioned that vaccines would fail no matter how many people were on board, and surprise surprise, it played out almost exactly the way I claimed.
There is a reason we have never had a successful vaccine to any coronavirus class virus in existance. Every vaccine we tried never made it to market due to the exact sorts of problems we are seeing
When i explained my concerns in the past I did go into detail on boosters. What I had said at the time is that for a vaccine to have any potential of working it would need boosters that would likely need to be very frequent, on the order of every 3 months to 6 months, which is not practical as a long term solution and overtime presents ever increasing risk since the nature of mutation of corona class viruses are not like flu viruses. A flu virus undergoes recombination and thus its next gen viruses are not any more deadly or specialized, they just make the vaccine less effective. Corona class viruses as they mutate to stay ahead of vaccines undergo a more classical form of mutation and as such create an ever increasing risk as you vaccinate against it, presuming you even find a booster every 6 months to be palatable at all.
@freemo Yeah, as this is still largely untested fields for this virus you certainly do have a point. Though there are more factors at play, of course.
I see boosters as a way to buy time at the moment until we have a more permanent solution. Even without boosters the virus would mutate anyway.
Also, boosters can still go two ways at this point. Either you would need regular boosters, or the third (or maybe fourth) booster would be the end solution. Some vaccinations for other ailments needed a 3rd booster much later as well. But seeing as we haven't got much long-term experience yet with this virus it is still largely guess-work at this time.
For boosters to buy us time at all we would need to engineer a new RNA sequence every 3 - 6 months. Usually vaccine testing takes longer than this so the only way boosters will really be effective (most likely) is if we throw the usual safety testing out the window.
That said also keep in mind that while boosters may buy us some time it means every new booster that targets the new strain will likely give rise to a newer even worse strain. So you may find going that path doesnt buy us time at all but pushes the virus evolution to the point where the problem becomes even harder to solve and in the end make matters much much worse (potentially)
While you are right the virus mutates regardless of boosters, and that the vaccine doesnt **cause** the mutation what the vaccine does do is it causes new mutations to be **selected for**. This means that without a vaccine new mutations will come, be very low prevelance (well below 0.1%) and then die off as they cant compete against the pathway of the original virus. The vaccine however gets rid of the base virus and thus allows the new strain to become selected for at which point you will see its prevalence skyrocket nearly over night from <0.1% to 99%, the exact opposite of dying off. This is exactly what happened with Delta.
The other thing about boosters is two fold 1) as with all coronaviruses immunity tends to be temporary (anywhere from weeks to a few years) so you need a booster that is the same as the original every few months 2) coronaviruses mutate fairly quickly so you also get new strains arising. Meaning you need to double-dose, one booster every few months for the old strain AND new boosters you have to start repeating for new strains.
Point is, if you go down the vaccination route it becomes unmanageable very quickly.
@freemo That's a very valid point, but no vaccination at all isn't really much of an option either if the healthcare gets overworked and other treatments (cancer, heart trouble, etc) gets cancelled just because of Covid. Unless we get to decide that everybody who's infected just stays at home, and just will die at home as well if they can't handle the virus.
We're in quite a pickle, aren't we?
Doing nothing isnt an option, but the choices arent vaccination or nothing.
If it were up to me my focus would be on supportive medicine. Forget about masks, or vaccines, or any of that. Instead invest all that money on 1) researching cures such as transcription inhibitors that may provide a solution where vaccines wont 2) dump tons of money into building new respirators and space in hospitals so we can handle the increased load on the medical system until we find a solution.
@freemo Oh yes, I wasn't saying vaccination or nothing, sorry if I gave that impression. I'm more like saying, vaccinations buy us time so your 1) can get to work.
The 2), however, is totally not an option here, alas. In the years we have this pandemic, our healthcare didn't really improve much despite the huge need. Hospitals even got closed... which is actually quite ridiculous. It's all about money and 'efficiency' somehow, and yet our healthcare workers are still overworked.
But even Germany with its huge IC capacity (they have proportionally really a lot of IC) is now refusing to take over our patients, as they're facing a huge surge themselves as well. Whoopsie.
What im hearing is not that #2 isnt an option there, its that politicians are idiots and didnt execute on #2... big difference.
And yea improving ICU capacity is a huge cost. Expecting other countries to be able to support their own increased capacity AND yours isnt going to work. The netherlands needs to execute on #2 rather than bickering about what to do :)
Thats fair. But that mostly just boils down tot he fact that your government cant stop quibbling... Lets not pretend the solution is impossible. Politics just refuses to do what it needs to.
I blame a lot of it on the medical community which is trying so hard to get everyone to conform they sell everything as absolute fact when the truth is we are kinda just making educated guesses of minimal info. The end result is that when new data questions the earlier assumptions they refuse to back peddle.
We are so committed to vaccines being the solution right now that it would be career suicide for a medical worker to actually suggest we let the virus run its course and focus on supportive care. The narrative has been repeated too many times to backpeddle now for fear of loosing public trust.
@freemo Well, to be fair the vaccines are still a decent short term solution (short term for the reasons you've given already). As we're having a HUGE surge right now, that could've been avoided by vaccination (short term), I can see why the healthcare workers won't backpeddle at this point in time as they're the ones who have to deal with this shit firsthand.
Granted, it could've been more avoided much more if the government didn't do a dum-dum and say all restrictions are lifted about a month (or two) ago.
We totally saw this coming, even though they claim we didn't.. uhuh.
@freemo Yeah, that's where we might differ in opinion. I see it as a valid strategy but it needs to be utilized properly. What's proper is uh... well, that's what we'll have to figure out somehow. We're humans, so chances are we're all idiots anyway. So far most of humanity are doing their best to prove this theory right. ;)
That said, if I got offered a booster shot, I likely won't refuse. I'm all for buying time and I'm fervently hoping that with the time bought there are good investments made into solutions that might actually work.
But we still have the 'humanity is stupid' as fallback, so maybe nothing works at all. :P
To give you some perspective the first vaccine caused the virus to shift from its original form to the delta variant. This is approximately 3x to 4x more contagious than the original virus.
The more contagious a virus is the more people need to be vaccinated to reach herd immunity.
Which means if we keep using the same vaccination approach as a "temporary" measure, with continually creating new variants of vaccine to combat each new virus, then you will get ever increasing R0 numbers (how contagious it is).
By the time we have a solution that might work the thing will be so damn contagious that the herd immunity threshold will be too high to reasonably reach and despite the vaccine being effective we will no longer be able to fight the virus anyway.
Its like the antibiotic problem but instead of evolving over the course of decades it evolves over the course of months. I'm not sure you realize just how devestating going the vaccine route will be as long as it only remains a temporary option.
@freemo It depends on how far those mutations go. The delta variant is still affected by the current vaccine as in that the vaccine is still (largely, partially) effective enough to reduce the chance for the most terrible results.
Herd immunity is already out of the window, we're not going for that at all. We're using the vaccine to prevent ending up in the hospital in the first place, the very hospital that's now already overflowing. So trying to avoid ending up in the hospital in itself is already a very big thing.
I understand your concern, I do. I'm just having a more optimistic view, and I could be very well wrong.
And I fully agree that we have to invest in your 1) idea, we need ways to battle the symptoms so that less people end up in hospital so that vaccinations wouldn't be that necessary anymore, so that we can tell this virus to STFU and GTFO already.
> It depends on how far those mutations go. The delta variant is still affected by the current vaccine as in that the vaccine is still (largely, partially) effective enough to reduce the chance for the most terrible results.
There is no good data that supports this assertion. Older indirect data that made a weak argument (but the only data we had at the time) would suggest this was true. Newer data that actually has sampled people and examined their viral load, so much more direct data, suggests the vaccine does **not** actually help fight the delta varient at all.
The data is too new to make any solid assertions either way, but as we discussed the earlier suggestion that the vaccine helps with delta is now showing to more likely be completely false.
> Herd immunity is already out of the window, we're not going for that at all. We're using the vaccine to prevent ending up in the hospital in the first place, the very hospital that's now already overflowing. So trying to avoid ending up in the hospital in itself is already a very big thing.
Thats the problem, recent data suggest the vaccine isnt keeping us out of the hospital at all. Delta in and of itself just has less people int he hospital if your vaccinated or not. The people who wind up in the hospital lean towards being unvaccinated most likely due to other factors (for example unvaccinated people are less likely to socially distance as they are more likely to dismiss the virus).
This is why direct evidence is so much more important than indirect evidence. Its easy to assume looking at who winds up in the hospital that the vaccine might be effective, but being indirect evidence there are a host of other explanations for it as well (such as the one I just gave).. but the direct evidence, that suggests the vaccine has no effect at all on Delta.. so that is the stronger evidence.
@freemo Just as an aside, I wanted to hook up on your first paragraph solely. You said the delta variant is a result from the vaccine, but isn't it originated in India and were they not woefully undervaccinated in that country at that time? I had the impression that variant has developed without the need of selection bias due to the vaccine.
It doesnt take much vaccination for a variant to take hold. Consider the data. India began vaccinating in january of this year. Likewise delta variant began to be detected in very small prevelance in january as well. As the vacination rate of india grew so did the delta variant. By the time vaccination rate reached 20% then the delta variant finally became the dominant variant crossing the 50% threshold. As of today about 50% of india is vaccinated and delta variant is now pretty much the only strain in the wild with high 90's percentage range of prevelance.
So yea vaccination in india directly correlated and strongly correlated with the delta variant spreading.
Respirators work against all the variants, past, present and future.
Also, I think the mutation rate is more a function of number of times the virus replicates rather than a straight function of time, so if the numbers can be controlled with other prophilaxis, then the virus will have fewer cycles in which to have a mutation occur.
Mutation rate is a function of a few things, the number of times the virus replicates, the viral load produced when it replicates, and the accuracy of the transcription. The vaccine does **not** cause the mutation rate to increase. What vaccines cause is mutations to be **selected for**, thats where people get confused. When mutations arent selected for then they happen all the time and almost all of them will just die off as quickly as they come into existance. When they are selected for, however, then even if far fewer mutations occur the ones that do occur stand a much higher chance of proliferating once they come into existance. Thats the problem.
Yeah, Darwin for viruses.
If the overall number of cases can be kept down using other means, like respirators, testing, etc., then there are fewer absolute number of replications. I think the delta variant came from all the uncontrolled cases in India, if I remember. The more people who are infected, the more chance of a new "successful" variant.
@Pat
There is no doubt resperators will decrease cases if used properly (they often arent but thats another matter). So it would mean less invesment in ventilators and ICU and more managable rates.
That said I dont think respirators are where we should focus anymore. Not because they fail to work but because it isnt reasonable to expect the world to wear respirators for the rest of our lives (or on and off for the res tof our lives).
If it were up to me we would ditch resperators, ditch vaccines, ditch social distancing, just go back to acting like the virus doesnt exist. Divert all of that money into expanding ICU wars and increasing our stock of ventilators. Wear a mask or respirator in nursing homes or around elderly but otherwise just let the virus run its course.
@freemo Have you considered the need for boosters in your equation, though? Long covid and risk of needing hospitalization so far seems to have decreased hugely with the vaccine.
The current ones needing hospitalization despite being vaccinated are the ones who got vaccinated the first in the timeline, and also very usually are either elderly or have more ailments than just this virus. They're highly due for boosters now.
That's the same situation in Israel. I remember us chatting about this, and the Israelians (is this a word? Well, it is now.) were among the first to get vaccinated. Not too surprising that about 6 months later there was another surge.
Vaccinations aren't 100% effective, but we already agreed on that. Boosters would be a likely necessity, but we already knew of that. That's why the current talk is now 'BOOSTERS!'. We'll see how that pan out, I think they might help.
@Pat