epidemiologist: "although buried a bit, a mask does NOT protect you from catching it, it keeps an infected person from transmitting it. All the other is good to go."

the buried bit is this part in the article: "Physical means might prevent the spread of virus by aerosols or large droplets from infected to susceptible people (such as by using masks and distancing measures)"

so there is no evidence on the efficacy of healthy people wearing masks. of any sort, it would seem. at least in this review.

a medical mask is not required, as no evidence is available on its usefulness to protect non-sick persons. However,masks might be wornin some countries according to local culturalhabits.

Wearing medical masks when not indicated may cause unnecessary cost, procurement burden (medical staff can't get it, I guess) and create a false sense of security that canlead to neglectingother essential measures such as hand hygiene practices.Furthermore, using a mask incorrectly may hamper its effectiveness to reduce the risk of transmission.

Hint: 98% Accuracy on MNIST with only 5 lines of code!

A step by step guide for implementing one of the most trending machine learning algorithm using numpy

He got to go on stage in the debates and attack Sanders and Warren. We don’t know if that boosted Biden, but it likely didn’t hurt him. With Biden now in a much stronger position than when Bloomberg entered the race, you could argue that Bloomberg provided what he and other more center-left figures wanted — to steer the race towards a more moderate nominee.

He hired people in numerous states for his presidential campaign, and his employees were reportedly told that they would have jobs through November. It’s not clear if Bloomberg will end up retaining these staffers for some kind of operation to boost Biden against Sanders and Warren in the primary, have his team start focusing now on the general election against Trump or simply wind down his apparatus. But I expect him to stay out of the primary and focus on Trump.

As of 20 February 2020 and 12 based on 55924 laboratory confirmed cases, typical signs and symptoms include: fever (87.9%), dry cough (67.7%), fatigue (38.1%), sputum production (33.4%), shortness of breath (18.6%), sore throat (13.9%), headache (13.6%), myalgia or arthralgia (14.8%), chills (11.4%), nausea or vomiting (5.0%), nasal congestion (4.8%), diarrhea (3.7%), and hemoptysis (0.9%),
and conjunctival congestion (0.8%).

Question How do the profits of large pharmaceutical companies compare with those of other companies from the S&P 500 Index?

Findings In this cross-sectional study that compared the profits of 35 large pharmaceutical companies with those of 357 large, nonpharmaceutical companies from 2000 to 2018, the median net income (earnings) expressed as a fraction of revenue was significantly greater for pharmaceutical companies compared with nonpharmaceutical companies (13.8% vs 7.7%).

Meaning Large pharmaceutical companies were more profitable than other large companies, although the difference was smaller when controlling for differences in company size, research and development expense, and time trends.

Question How much do drug companies spend on research and development to bring a new medicine to market?

Findings In this study, which included 63 of 355 new therapeutic drugs and biologic agents approved by the US Food and Drug Administration between 2009 and 2018, the estimated median capitalized research and development cost per product was $985 million, counting expenditures on failed trials. Data were mainly accessible for smaller firms, products in certain therapeutic areas, orphan drugs, first-in-class drugs, therapeutic agents that received accelerated approval, and products approved between 2014 and 2018.

most of the measures used in China to stop the virus were traditional public health moves that are broadly accepted — and the draconian measures were rarer.

I think the key learning from China is speed — it’s all about the speed. The faster you can find the cases, isolate the cases, and track their close contacts, the more successful you’re going to be.

Since coming back from China, everybody I talk to begins with, “We can’t lock down a city of 15 million people like China.” I say, “Why would you ever want to?” And I ask, “Does your population know x, y, z [about the virus]?” I learn they haven’t started with the basics.

So, No. 1, if you want to get speed of response, your population has to know this disease. You find any population in the West and ask them what are the two presenting signs you have to be alert to. ... the two initial symptoms most common [are] fever and dry cough... [But many still think] it’s a runny nose and cold. Your population is your surveillance system. Everybody has got a smartphone, everybody can get a thermometer. That is your surveillance system. Don’t rely on this hitting your health system, because then it’s going to infect it.

the key is public information and having an informed population, finding those cases, rapidly isolating them. The faster you isolate them is what breaks the chains. Making sure close contacts are quarantined and monitored until you know if they’re infected. Somewhere between 5 and 15 percent of those contacts are infected. And again, it’s the close contacts, not everyone.

China took a whole bunch of steps when they realized they had to repurpose big chunks of their hospital systems to [respond to the outbreak]. The first thing is, they said testing is free, treatment is free. Right now, there are huge barriers [to testing and treatment] in the West. You can get tested, but then you might be negative and have to foot the bill. In China, they realized those were barriers to people seeking care, so, as a state, they took over the payments for people whose insurance plans didn’t cover them. They tried to mitigate those barriers.

The other thing they did: Normally a prescription in China can’t last for more than a month. But they increased it to three months to make sure people didn’t run out [when they had to close a lot of their hospitals]. Another thing: Prescriptions could be done online and through WeChat [instead of requiring a doctor appointment]. And they set up a delivery system for medications for affected populations.

People keep saying [the cases are the] tip of the iceberg. But we couldn’t find that. We found there’s a lot of people who are cases, a lot of close contacts — but not a lot of asymptomatic circulation of this virus in the bigger population. And that’s different from flu. In flu, you’ll find this virus right through the child population, right through blood samples of 20 to 40 percent of the population.

Originally, I was a big believer in the idea that we should swab millions and see what’s going on [how many have the virus]. But the data from China made me rethink that. What could be done instead is that every hospital should test people with atypical pneumonia for Covid. People with flu-like symptoms — test for Covid.

Panic and hysteria are not appropriate. This is a disease that is in the cases and their close contacts. It’s not a hidden enemy lurking behind bushes. Get organized, get educated, and get working.

"It's not a cold. It's not a runny nose. It's not a sore throat. Those are relatively rare symptoms in COVID," he said.

In reckless individuals, the researchers found that a part of the brain involved in assessing whether there is enough information, called the inferior frontal gyrus, was atrophied. Thus, their brain signals did not trigger information-seeking behaviour, she says.

A new poll finds that about only one in 10 registered voters want the equivalent of Medicare for all if it means abolishing private health insurance plans.

All of the candidates are proposing big improvements to healthcare — but experts are critical of their plans to pay for it.

The University of Constantinople, founded as an institution of higher learning in 425, educated graduates to take on posts of authority in the imperial service or within the Church.[7] It was reorganized as a corporation of students in 849 by the regent Bardas of emperor Michael III, is considered by some to be the earliest institution of higher learning with some of the characteristics we associate today with a university (research and teaching, auto-administration, academic independence, et cetera). If a university is defined as "an institution of higher learning" then it is preceded by several others, including the Academy that it was founded to compete with and eventually replaced. If the original meaning of the word is considered "a corporation of students" then this could be the first example of such an institution.

You might have come across Judea Pearl's new book, and a related interview which was widely shared in my social bubble. In the interview, Pearl dismisses most of what we do in ML as curve fitting. While I believe that's an overstatement (conveniently ignores RL for example), it's a nice...

ffmpeg livestreaming to youtube via Nvidia's NVENC and Intel's VAAPI on supported hardware - ffmpeg-livestream-to-streaming-sites-vaapi-nvenc.md

Donald Trump meets many criteria in a historian's checklist of what defines a fascist, and he echoes a wave of extremist movements in some European countries.

No matter how you design a single-payer public health insurance system, it would have lower overall health care costs, so long as for-profit private health insurers no longer exist to drive up health care costs.

"the meme gives Internet users a clear opportunity to think critically about shallow references to the Nazis or the Holocaust. And it exposes glib Nazi comparisons or Holocaust references to the harsh light of interrogation."

not due to the meme's fault, but due to incessant glib and spurious invocation of Nazis, have all modern comparisons, however thoughtful, lost all ability to be taken seriously and lead to thoughtful consideration? I worry the latter. due to the large number of valid comparisons not being made, we've somehow lost the ability to learn the ample lessons this egregious historical example allows.

do people "use Godwin’s Law to force one another to argue more thoughtfully" or to off-hand dismiss legitimate comparisons to Nazism because they bear superficial similarity to spurious comparisons, and don't bother with the difficulty and emotional burden to consider the harsh reality that there may be some truth to the comparison?

"The best way to prevent future holocausts, I believe, is not to forbear from Holocaust comparisons; instead, it’s to make sure that those comparisons are meaningful and substantive."

I hope people do make those difficult comparisons. and he gives some examples of such. I much more worry about the willingness of the public to consider such harrowing and extreme-sounding ideas.

"But I’m hopeful that we can prod our glib online rhetorical culture into a more thoughtful, historically reflective space"

I wonder what he thinks now, having made that statement in 2015.

"Should opponents of a regime that has shattered norms respond in ways that presume those norms still exist?"

what enlightened centrism this is! Americans not liking nazis destroying democracy and villifying Jews is clearly the same as Nazis disliking our democratic socialism, certainly.

"Why did so many Americans choose to act as if Hitler was like any other leader, Germany like any other country? I don’t think it was a product of strategic calculation, but of conceptual failures. It was easier to maintain established modes of courtesy, greetings and theology, than to consider alternative responses."

"Americans, including American Jews, didn’t want to be consumed by the fascist threat across the ocean. They wanted to live their lives. The best way to do that, and still be considered a good and moral person, was to pretend the news was exaggerated, that the persecution would ease in time."

everyone prefers a quiet life, in favour of being outraged by the destruction of norms around you. that's exhausting. I worry that's much more so the case nowadays in the world of unlimited on-demand entertainment at our fingertips. no one wants to go outside, much less to protest.

"Nasty anti-Nazi protests therefore were unnecessary and staged by nasty people. Similarly, Donald Trump may not mean the awful things he says. It’s performance, reality television. If he’s just kidding and yet the opposition gets down in the dirt, then his opponents are indeed the ones responsible for the decline in civil discourse."

"The only way to avoid the same conceptual failings, which admittedly still might not remedy the fundamental problem, is to perceive situations clearly. German representatives were monsters. Conditions in Germany were horrible. Making nice and being polite didn’t make Nazis nice and polite.

We see that now. We could have seen it then. The response then and now is not civility, but ruthless honesty."