CharonY

Also, starting in Victorian times in the UK and elsewhere vaccines against e.g. smallpox were mandatory. Fines were implemented due to non-compliance. It was basically the same issue as now. If there was a slippery slope, we would expect progression somewhere. Yet here we are pretending that this new, indicating that no slope is present. We are back at the top of the presumed slide again. Moreover tax burden have gone up and down over the long term, when accounting for inflation. See below a plot of tax burden in Canada, which clearly refutes the always increases parts. While there is discussion to be had regarding impact, we should make sure we keep the facts straight. Moreover, we have over 100 years of precedence of pretty much the same discussion, so it is not like we are in entirely new territory. Rather than a "it's starting" situation we are in a "it's happening again" sort of thing. Perhaps the next pandemic will happen soon enough that we don't forget, but considering all we have seen i am prepared to assume that we will be absolutely surprised again on all levels and rehash all points. I will say that it is unclear whether fines are more effective than e.g. mandates and social media likely has changed the game.

! Moderator Note Please keep all the very similar topics contained to this thread.

I do not disagree, though I do see that a surprising number of students are unwilling or unable to, say, read the syllabus. It is annoying if you spend 10 minutes explaining what they are supposed to do (with slides) and the next question is basically asking how you are supposed to do it without any indication that they listened to what I was just talking about. Bonus points if the answer is actually on the slide that is still on.

I think the discussion is missing another component and I think it is a bit related to how some students thing about assignments. It appears that some think that the purpose of such assignments is to figure out the right answers. However, especially at lower level, the idea is to learn how to think critically and write assays. That does not happen in a vacuum. Rather, you get instructions on the approach (what are sources, which sources are for what purpose, how to do you read sources, how do you distill information) as well as either the specific or at least related topics and then you are expected to first at least try to emulate what you learned. From there you get a critique about what you did well and what not. The latter is then used to improve on your next assignment. Unfortunately folks often think in terms of failure or success and do not try to improve if they don't hit it out of the park on their first try. Copying gives a feeling of success (if one happens to get away with it) and I fear that this what most folks are after (well and grades). I also think that the grading system has become screwed up. In the past you used the whole range so that folks have a range where they can see their improvement. Now the evaluation bands have become so narrow it is almost like a pass/fail system.

I think folks that want to invoke the slippery slope should provide some historic data to substantiate such claims. Too often it just a single data point extrapolation. The whole current situation looks like a repeat of the 1918 pandemic (or measles or smallpox etc.), but in colour.

Well the target would depend on what you are actually taxing (say, unprotected sex). But there would be a lot to unpack here, especially as sodomy laws were actually on the books, but for entirely different reasons. Also, with regard to HIV there are actually protective laws in place and in many countries, where it is required to disclose HIV positivity to potential sexual partners. IOW, there are laws in place targeted at curbing transmissions. I will also say that this discussion is not new. Smallpox vaccinations in the early 20th century was made mandatory in many countries. In the fines for non-compliance went to the supreme court and was upheld. In fact, it is part of a much longer discussion regarding how much a society should compel individuals to minimize risk to themselves and others and it is not an easy either/or situation. But it is also not a simple slippery slope situation, either. Looking back we had have many, many of those regulations, some based on moral considerations, others based on immediate emergencies and so on. Some of those have been eventually removed as society changed their attitudes, others still persist. But what has not happened is that our society has been increasingly constrained by ever-expanding regulations or governmental control. Things have come and gone, depending on the attitudes of a given generation and if anything, the world now appears more complex due to the availability of more information and higher interconnectivity. Finding the right approach appears more difficult than ever, but in part it is because we realized that things we did actually do not work.

I think that is a false equivalency. Neither of these conditions are contagious. Edit: Also, alcohol is already severely taxed in Canada, so is tobacco. Assuming these measures are ideology-based, it would indicate that they are historically ingrained. Likewise, I presume, measures like fines for not wearing seatbelts and drunk driving. The latter are perhaps a better comparison as those also increase of risks surrounding the individual.

I suppose we can just state that neither is conducive to learning or critical thinking and then move on.

It seems to me that dimreepr might conflate plagiarism (passing someone's thoughts as one's own) with parroting.

It's great that it wasn't more severe. Looking at the current spread we are somewhat lucky that it only arrived after vaccines were available and more expertise in treating patients have been developed. If the first or second wave happened at that speed, the outcome would have disastrous, even if severity was lower on the individual level.

Well, to be honest part of it is the procedure involved in fully failing students. It is a rather drawn out process, students are now much more likely to appeal even without grounds and you have document a lot things, which I frankly do not have the time for. On top Dean's is overloaded due to the spike during online teaching so there is a bit of pressure to get things over as fast as possible. Also, we are not allowed to block students (or at least heavily discouraged from doing so). Our Admin unfortunately has given in to the "students are clients" attitude and, to my disappointment, it is seeping through. Students are in for the certificate and those with genuine interest seem to be getting fewer and fewer each year. But then, I do not see myself as a gatekeeper of competence (except for my research group). If that is what students, administration and politics think how educations is supposed to be I do not have the energy to fight them.

Absolutely. Or rather, I think that the idea flip-flops depending on how you approach it. Obviously the connection is well-recognized, otherwise we would not use so many psychoactive drugs for treatment. And we have long known that our psychological sensations are integrated in the brain. Yet, we do not fully understand the connections and it is often simpler to talk about the one or the other. Placebos are one of the fascinating areas where both heavily overlap.

That is very likely to be true. In our own analyses we found that within ~2.5 weeks of showing up it has pretty much replaced Delta. So there are a few things related to that. First, yes ACE2 receptors are docking sites of the virus and in Omicron one piece of the puzzle seems to be that the spike protein-ACE2 receptor interaction is much tighter than with earlier variants. However, the upper respiratory tract has also high levels of ACE2 receptors (as well as other organs) and the upper respiratory tract is known to be an entry point also for earlier variants (the often reported loss of smell is one of consequences). The question then becomes why it does not spread or colonize the lungs that efficiently. There are are several lines of investigation underway to look at that. In vitro studies suggested (Zhang et al., cannot recall the journal of the top of my head) found that two additional serine proteases promote the entry of SARS-CoV-2 (TMPRSS2 and 4). Conversely, Omicron seems not to use that pathway to enter, instead using a TMPRSS2-independent endosomal fusion pathway (i.e. a different way to enter after docking). These proteases are abundant in the lung, but much less so in the upper respiratory tract which would at least explain much higher efficiency in colonizing the upper respiratory tract. That being said, this data alone does not entirely explain why they seem to colonize lungs somewhat less efficiently yet.

There are a lot of medical microbiology textbooks specifically for nursing students.

If you just copy, you don't understand.

In that case I may have misunderstood or misremembered what I heard in the presentation from the NHS staff. They were talking about the implementation and the issues they had and the original system was apparently quite annoying even to NHS staff. Upon re-reading I should not have stated "often", I started the sentence thinking of the broader population, in which (at least when we had the briefing, which is a while back) the uptake was spotty, but then switched half-way through to the NHS staff part, which apparently had a lot of complaints (e.g. the need to put in all your information every time at the beginning). So my apologies for that. But it is great that things are seemingly eve more streamlined now. I wished we would follow suit.

I think what annoys me most is the that volume of cheating has increased while the effort into cheating has declined. I am used to a certain rate among pre-professionals, but unfortunately especially during the pandemic the biology majors has have engaged quite a bit in it. We had online exams and often it is quite obvious (e.g. clearly copy/pasted answers from one of the notorious answer websites). I cut down points and move on, but the lack of effort is just disappointing. At least it tells you which folks you should not try to recruit for grad school.

Yes, that is an issue for direct comparisons in many areas. Testing regimen have changed and while e.g. Canada has started using more rapid tests, the reporting mechanisms are very inconsistent to non-existent in the various provinces. In the UK there is a more centralized way, but uptake has been spotty and in a recent meeting the folks who record the data mentioned that even health professionals often do not submit the data as they felt that it was pointless. They have started engaging people more which improved data submission but obviously different time periods will have different accuracy. That as a whole introduces uncertainty in the analyses of the data sets. That being said, the UK still has one of the best reporting and testing systems, especially compared to North America and many parts of Europe (we often use UK data to figure out oddities elsewhere, if we can).

I would say it is both. Plagiarism is an ethical issue, but engaging in it also inhibits learning.

I think it is also a mindset issue. Folks focus on giving right answers to a question for points in the most efficient way, but without engaging intellectually. Often they copy wrong answers as they have not even thought about the problem properly. Likely only some words were googled.

So that is a bit more complicated and I am not a specialist for that. For the most part upper respiratory infections are more likely to cause complications and children and the elderly, whereas in adults they tend to be more self-limiting. However, complications are more common in areas with limited access to healthcare. Moreover, one of the complications is that the pathogen can also eventually colonize the lungs and thereby cause severe issues. i.e. if Omicron was mostly self-contained in the upper respiratory tract, it would not necessarily expected to cause more issues in children. Moreover, the rate of serious illness in the very young is still lower than in adults. I.e. they are actually still at lower risk. However, it now seems that with omicron the risk might have increased very slightly or at least it does not seem to have been reduced as some data on (vaccinated) adults might suggest.

I don't thinks so. All clinical data I have seen suggest that folks might have symptoms earlier, but do not remain sick longer. I.e. within roughly 10 days or so folks either recover or become seriously ill. The more likely explanation is the lag now longer because more folks need to be infected in order to have persons ending up in hospital. Another thing to add, I believe that in contrast to previous waves in the UK folks are only PCR tested when they show symptoms (and referred to rapid testing otherwise). I am not sure when that was implemented, so one cannot directly compare the rates easily. Edit: a thought that I had with regard to @geordief's question was to compare hospitalization rates of children who are not yet eligible for vaccines (0-4 years). Here we see that in the US as well as UK the hospitalization per 100,000 individuals have been increasing compared to the earlier waves. This is of course not conclusive evidence especially as it is still a very rare event. Nonetheless it indicates that at least for young, unvaccinated children there is no evidence that the disease is actually milder. For children 5-14 years the rate has been steady despite vaccinations, but the vaccination rate is overall low.

Potentially. In many areas we have got extremely high test positivity rates, but that is also skewed by the fact that quite a few areas have been switching to symptom-only testing. But all evidence still point to the fact that we undertest more than we did before. Not necessarily. The issue is that due to increasing vaccinations, the baseline susceptibility of the population shifts. I.e. we do see more vaccinated folks getting infected, but since the vaccine still prevents more serious damage, it might appear milder. What we need to check is basically the outcome among the unvaccinated, but as the number is getting smaller, it is also getting more biased. We have generally more unvaccinated among the younger population, for example, who generally have better outcomes. So we would need to look at unvaccinated folks in an age matched cohort. However, we do not have the data (yet). It would also be important to figure out risk among the elderly, especially if vaccine protection wanes. Moreover, the lung studies were conducted on animal models. So why they provide clues, it is not entirely clear whether it can be translated directly to humans. And especially elderly people are difficult to simulate in animal models. Together, I would still be somewhat more careful in declaring Omicron less virulent, so far we are looking at milder outcomes, but it may not (solely) because of the properties (i.e. virulence) of the virus, but external factors (vaccination, age) are almost certainly contributing. I am fairly certain that we will get an update relatively soon. Yes, there is always underreporting. The reported clinical cases are always the minimum known numbers. Depending on testing situation, testing strategies and also willingness to get tested the accuracy of reports has likely varied quite a bit. There is evidence that we have more underreporting than before, though.

I don't know Zooniverse, but there are quite a few projects in various areas where volunteers can contribute. Typically (but not always) it does not rely on any specific expertise. Rather, volunteers help out with e.g. collecting samples, or being participants in a range of studies. These are very important for the scientific community. However, most of these initiatives are still researcher driven. I.e. we propose projects and then try to recruit folks for specific tasks. I am certain that there are also projects driven by citizen scientists, but I would suspect that their success can be highly dependent on who organizes them.

I think one important bit is that because more vaccinated folks are getting infected now due to reduced protection against infection, but it still provides decent protection against severe symptoms. As a result the ratio of infected to hospitalized persons looks better, compared to the Delta wave, but given the fact that current tests seem to severely underestimate infections, we will end up with an overrun health care system. I believe the WHO has given out a similar warning, since quite a few folks seem to misinterpret the milder outcome of Omicron.