[ExI] bikers again

[spike at rainier66.com]

> On Behalf Of Keith Henson via extropy-chat
Subject: Re: [ExI] bikers again

On Fri, Sep 4, 2020 at 10:29 PM Dylan Distasio via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
> On Sat, Sep 5, 2020, 12:33 AM spike jones via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>
>> Keith was the one who hipsterized me to how viruses don’t have DNA, they have RNA.  But I had heard that polymerase chain reaction is not a reliable amplifier of RNA, only DNA.
>
> Two comments, many viruses do have DNA.   CV-19 is not one of them though.

>...Correct.

>...I have no idea how Spike could have gotten such inaccurate information from me... Keith

My misunderstanding Keith, apologies sir.

I had forgotten that piece of information I might have known a long time ago, and referred to the Covid DNA.  As I vaguely recall you pointed out that Covid has RNA, not DNA.  I incorrectly extrapolated that all viruses have only RNA.

Now I know that they don't all, but this one (the only virus I care about at the moment) does have RNA.

I do know that polymerase chain reaction amplifies DNA but I hadn't heard that it works on RNA.  But now I am hearing that it does work on RNA, and that it is being used in Covid test kits.  Then I hear that the process is not really standardized regarding how many generations of PCR the kits use.  This could make the kits more false-negative tolerant or more false-positive tolerant, depending on how many generations of PCR they use?  Indeed?  I hear from a nurse cousin that these tests are all over the map and she doesn't trust them.  Well, she aughta know.

So if the kits have some uncertainty, does that help us explain why the bikers appear to have half the usual new case rate and perhaps less than a tenth of the fatality rate they could have expected had they stayed home?  I am one of the guys who suggested to my own bike club that we cancel Sturgis this year.  But if going there reduces risk of a Covid fatality by an order of magnitude, my advice was poor indeed.

So now I am left grasping at straws.  Extra sunshine gave the bikers a dose of vitamin D?  The bikers were chpre-selected from among non-nursing home residents?  The test kits are insufficiently reliable?  (And if so on that last one, why the one-way business?  They intentionally mix-source those kits, in case one source or process has a negative or positive bias.)  Did we get to herd immunity in July?  And if so, did we somehow get there simultaneously from all the places the bikers came from?  And is there some mechanism whereby Sturgis created a kind of temporary herd immunity by some unknown factor such as stinky bikers naturally gave each other more space?  Or somehow the masks are not only ineffective, they somehow contribute to infection?  Biker dies of covid and granny doesn't take him to the coroner, but rather buries him in the back yard with her other late husbands and never reports?  

This is a big signal here.  We have one, exactly one, Sturgis rally covid fatality, and even that one is already over in the start of the ambiguous zone: it is possible he could have caught it back home after the rally.

Keith or anyone, any plausible ideas on this?

spike