Covid-19 might very well be an accidental release from the level 4 biosecurity lab in Wuhan where they just happened to be working on bat coronaviruses. It might have been caused by employees illegally selling used lab animals to the nearby wet market where the first cases were detected. That's one theory. We also know that some workers there had an unspecified illness a couple months earlier, which isn't that unusual. We might never know.
But even if that's the case, it surely wasn't a weapon. If it was, they surely would not release it in their own country and they could have easily released something far more lethal like smallpox, ebola, Marburg, or anthrax. With some engineering they could have designed a contagious variant of rabies, botulinum, or some completely new toxin carried by a common cold or flu vector. China's response was swift. They were the first to identify and characterize the new disease, sequence it, and develop tests. Their extreme lockdown, confining a city of 10 million to their home for months, seemed entirely appropriate, given their experience with SARS (10% fatality rate) and MERS (30%), based on an initial estimate of 5%. We now know it is 0.4% varying by age and health, such that the risk of dying is the same as from 4 to 6 months of ordinary living. The error was caused by the scarcity of tests, so they were only used on the sickest patients. In hindsight, the best course of action at that point would have been to do nothing. The average fatality had 12 years of life expectancy before infection. The overall effect on life expectancy is 0.4% of 12 years, about 2 weeks. This amounts to a 10 week delay in global progress in increasing life expectancy, now 73 and increasing at a rate of 0.2 years per year. Life expectancy is strongly correlated with income and education. Doubling income or GDP increases life expectancy by 5 years, both within and between countries, and over time. Each year of higher education adds 1.5 years of life. You kill just as many people by freezing economic growth for 10 weeks or closing schools for 10 days. We did far worse than that, and really have nothing to show for it, as all the masks, lockdowns, quarantines, and border closures led to protests and destabilized governments (especially Myanmar, Belarus, Hungary, and the USA) while utterly failing to contain the virus. The one bright spot is the vaccines. I just have a hard time believing that this is a massive conspiracy between thousands of scientists all over the world (USA, Europe, China, Russia, India, even Cuba) to track us or kill us or whatever, and not a sincere attempt to protect us. I get that censorship on social media to get that message across backfired, and only made the conspiracy theorists more credible. It's probably too late to fix that now. But use your head. If you don't think you need the vaccine because you are young and healthy, or you already had covid, or you're scared of needles or a sore arm or feeling blah for a day, I get it. I realize that every medical procedure has risk and you can't do long term testing in the short term. But try to get out of your news bubble. I found that in every political issue that both sides have legitimate arguments, whether or not I agree with them. AGI connection: when cheap nanoscale printing and DNA computing become widely available, somebody WILL create something more deadly. This was a test. We failed. On Tue, Nov 23, 2021, 6:25 AM John Rose <[email protected]> wrote: > An AGI should be able to model cells, quite easily actually, better than > AI: > https://www.brighteon.com/4c2922ea-7239-478d-8780-6fb80d4df3f4 > *Artificial General Intelligence List <https://agi.topicbox.com/latest>* > / AGI / see discussions <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi> + > participants <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/members> + > delivery options <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription> > Permalink > <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/Tfc4d42f7fb128a4f-M0a16aade9d9abd6e814c3ddc> > ------------------------------------------ Artificial General Intelligence List: AGI Permalink: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/Tfc4d42f7fb128a4f-M99724c7902b8dc2b1c8e23c2 Delivery options: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription
