[ExI] bikers again and smallpox

[Keith Henson]

On Sat, Sep 5, 2020 at 8:44 AM spike jones via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

snip

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

You are looking at too small a picture.  Consider smallpox, a DNA
virus.  Not only are there frozen samples, but the entire genome is
out on the net.  It was demonstrated not long ago (with a related
virus) that it is not much of a job to make an active virus.  Smallpox
has a 30% death rate, weaponized versions may be a lot higher.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox#Biological_warfare

If you go down to where the Soviet Union is mentioned . . . well, read
it yourself, 20 tons, wow..  I worked an intentional release of
smallpox into the background of The Clinic Seed long ago.

> 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.

You don't need to depend on a family member.  If Wikipedia isn't
enough, use the articles they reference or Google.

> 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 don't think there is a chance of getting good epidemic data on the
number of people who scattered over most of the US especially given
the high background rate of infections.  So far the number tested is
under 1000 out of the 450,000 or so who came.  But if you care, the
current infection rates for N and S Dekota are the highest in the
country.

>  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.

You are always making decisions of this sort based on incomplete
information.  I would have made the same decision, but COVID would not
have entered the picture.  (I don't ride bikes.  Too many friends
killed or spent months in the hospital.  Not that I don't appreciate
the rush.  I once rode an underpowered scooter from Tucson to
Springerville, AZ.  The ride on US 60 down into the Salt River Canyon
and back out was a memorable experience.)

snip

>  Did we get to herd immunity in July?

It might have been a factor.  Bikers tend to spend a lot of time in
bars (or so I understand) so a lot of them could have already been
infected.  A good random sample for antibodies when the raley started
could have answered that.  However, getting blood out of a 1000 or so
bikers would have been a daunting task.

But on the US population scale, I really doubt it.  Latest projecting
is 410,000 deaths by Jan 1.

> 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?

That's behavior modification, unrelated to herd immunity.  I don't
know if bikers give each other more space, but non-bikers often do.

> 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?

Good idea for a story, but statistically unlikely.

> 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?

I don't think you have a signal.  The US average (which is good data)
is about 12 per 100 k of the population (though that does not count
all the asymptomatic cases).  For the 450k bikers, that would mean 54
a day or 540 over ten days just for background.  Deaths lag infections
by at least a month.

Keith