CharonY

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.

It has always been an issue, but as MigL pointed out, the internet made folks even lazier. Often, they are easy to catch for that reason (e.g. if you see lots of nonsensical sentences and then a perfectly logical conclusion, or leave in hyperlinks from wiki and so on). It is just a ton of work to find them and there is not a lot of incentive from the admin point of view of penalizing them, unfortunately. What is worse is that students are also more willing to fight instructors, even if cheating is blatant, so you have to go through all the additional work of reporting documenting etc., which is just tiring and time-consuming. During the pandemic plagiarism and cheating has skyrocketed, which is not making things easier. And I am not surprised that highschool teachers are cheating. From what I have heard from the recent batches of new students, there is not a lot of emphasis in many schools regarding critical thinking. Rather, there is an insane focus on pushing grades. Incoming students are confused that we just don't give them answer lists that they could memorize, for example. Edit: there is also a smaller but increasing group of students who seem to be unable to grasp the concept of plagiarism. Despite the fact that we explain what plagiarism is and why it is not acceptable, some just do not get it and claim that it was OK in high-school and therefore must be alright now. So that trend is worrisome, though it gets drowned out in the pile of worry we got.

As others said, link 1 and 3 suggest behavioural modification (i.e. unmedicated ADHD patients have a harder time to take care of themselves). The second link makes me believe that OP might think that high white blood cells are somehow a good thing. Rather, they are indicative of a range of conditions including inflammation, which is decidedly not a good condition to be in. As a whole the studies do show that behaviour has a big impact on infection risk. On that end it should probably be noted that some of the studies showing the strongest benefits have been (most notably the now retracted pre-print from Elgazzar et al.) have been found to be flawed. Luckily there are drugs coming to the market which have decent evidence that they work, and hopefully the arsenal for COVID-19 management. This is especially important for the transition time to an endemic disease (and management once that point is reached).

Are you using it for qpcr or pcr? Not using those plates but they do not seem be made for either application based on well shape and lack of wall thickness info.

There are several studies hinting at mechanisms (mostly animal models, I can dig them out, I have them on paper only atm. The one to look at would be Diamond et al. "The SARS-CoV-2 B.1.1.529 Omicron virus causes attenuated infection and disease in mice and hamsters"). There are some other in vitro and animal studies, but in summary it appears that the virus accumulates mostly in the upper respiratory tract and is less effective in infecting the lung, where most of the critical damage is happening. That actually often results in more issues (e.g. cytokine storm). When it comes to the immune system, perhaps somewhat counter-intuitively a stronger response is not automatically better. It depends a lot on the type of the response. In fact, stronger immune responses have been associated with more severe progression of the disease in COVID-19. In addition, the fact that folks test positive, indicate that the virus has established itself and propagated. If it was cleared early on, folks would remain below the detection limit. Omicron has shown to reduce protection to infection especially with the AstraZeneca vaccine (where it basically circumvents it without boosters) and reduces infection protection with other vaccines, too. So that definitely affects broad numbers. The issue is that comparisons are not easy, as the vaccination landscape (e.g. boosters), but also reporting methods have changed over time. At this point we need more data from well-characterized cohorts, which are starting to become available. Previous variants were pretty good at infecting young folks. But we just did not notice because many had no symptoms. There are huge regional differences (e.g. only testing of symptomatic patients, use of rapid testing etc.) so the data is difficult to compare. A reason why more young people are detected and hospitalized in some areas is likely because omicron is basically sweeping through the population. There are a lot of briefs coming out but so far it has not widely spread among those population (which also is the highest vaccinated group). So far the basic assumption is that it is still high risk until sufficient evidence to the contrary has come out. Edit: crossposted.

I mean, the chemistry behind is is somewhat complex as there is quite some interplay between the various chemicals. When it comes to chewyness, for example, the wheat proteins (gluten) play a major role. If allowed to interact with water, the glutenins and gliuadins form a strong network that can become rubbery and chewy. Adding fat, inhibits this interaction, making the resulting product more crumbly. The choice of fat also affects how the cookies expands with thinner cookies being perceived as more crisp. By playing around with the water content of the ingredients (e.g. shortening vs butter, granulated sugar vs brown sugar) and the temperature, texture of the cookies can also be changed. I.e. there are a lot of factors to play around with, even if only few ingredients are used.

Well, and to be fair a significant proportion of the population is just unwilling to make even minor (much less major) sacrifices for the community and not only in the US. Especially among the younger folks I keep hearing the mantra: "I did my bit, stayed home for a while, wore a mask and got vaccines so now I am entitled to live my life". Older folks are still terrified. I have not seen the movie it yet, but I fear at least the concept of the movie seems a bit like Idiocracy and the issue is that it does not seem like a clever treatise of the issues we have, but rather just take things as they are and dial it up like in a sketch show. Unfortunately, reality is catching up in real time, and if reality overshadows satire, what is the point? I think folks that look at the whole thing and can at least feel a bit smug about it, can enjoy it. Those that that see to many depressing parallels and are already annoyed that the current reality of things might not.

I am pretty sure that PLOS Biology also requires one to enter contribution into the system, but in a general way. (e.g. X contributed to manuscrupt, y did data analysis and contributed to manuscript, etc.). While most journals have guidelines regarding contributions for authorship, reality is that each group hashes it out according to internal consideration. For example, most of data could be generated by the first author, but they may not have written much of the manuscript. Often PhD students get to write the first draft, but especially if the supervisor is very experienced, not much might be left in the final manuscript. Sometimes, middle authors are on it, because it benefits the group and so on.

I think we need more context to establish what the author means at this point. For all I know it could be a throwaway comment which basically only tries to establish the rather simple fact that a lot of biological processes arise from interactions rather than a top-down program.

Exactly. And it is not like folks are not constantly trying to pursue new ideas. Especially younger scientists starting their own group are expected to go their own directions. It could be true that radical new ideas will have trouble getting funding, as obviously it is difficult to predict whether a new idea will pan out, but if you can break it into chunks and provide evidence that your direction makes sense, you do increase your chances of funding. In theoretical sciences I am not sure how established scientists could actively prevent you from working on what you want.