Doctoral candidate working on electrochemical energy storage.
PPaul
I have LeechBlock for both Chrome and Firefox and don’t experience any desire to use Edge instead
More thoughts from Trevor Bedford. He is more convinced that it is more transmissible.
I might be missing something, but where in this link do you see the dominance? If it is the large proportion of sequencing showing B.1.1.7 (18/33 for Italy and 4⁄13 for Israel), isn’t that due to increased surveillance, like testing positive people coming from the UK?
Caveat: Most locations outside the original focus have not reported sustained transmission and many cases have known travel links to the focal location. Increasing numbers of international cases is currently likely due to increased surveillance and vigilance.
I read people claiming that the first doses first strategy could cause evolution of the virus to escape the vaccine. Is there any truth to that? Does that factor into the cost-benefit analysis?
(From this retweet from a Prof at Geneva Centre for Emerging Viral Diseases)
Does that assume that the amount of mutations (and therefore the risk of an immune escape) is only dependent on the size of the viriome? But isn’t it possible that the risk of an immune escape mutation in the 1-dose vaccinated population is much higher than in the rest of the population? I think if that was much higher, it could swamp the benefit of reduced overall chance for dangerous mutations occurring due to the reduced infections from vaccinating more people (as compared to 2 doses). Not sure of any of this, just trying to think through your intuition.
A follow up thought: What do we know or what can we guess about the effect of 1-dose on reducing transmissibility? If we vaccinate twice as many, but they are still very much infectious (compared to 2-dose), could that be a problem?
I did not read McQuarrie and Simon but instead fell in love with “Physical Chemistry from a Different Angle” by Georg Job and Regina Rüffler. It is >> Atkins, Wedler It finally made me understand thermodynamics quite intuitively (!) and is very friendly towards people relatively uncomfortable with calculus. In general, it makes great efforts to teach, instead of just going through the material.
Topic I’d recommend it for: Physical chemistry (including thermodynamics, transport phenomena, electrochemistry, chemical kinetics)
The only caveat: They use somewhat different notation and formulations of much of physical chemistry mathematics. I think that theirs is much better and undoes a lot of the idiosyncrasies of the past 150 years, while explicitly explaining why those happened. This alone helped me understand much of classical thermodynamics better. In the last chapter, they explain how the usual formulations are related to theirs.
Transport Phenomena (Bird, Stewart, Lightfoot) Fundamentals of Momentum, Heat and Mass Transfer (Welty, Wicks, Wilson, Rohrer) Analysis of Transport Phenomena (Deen)
Physical Chemistry: A Molecular Approach (McQuarrie and Simon) Physical Chemistry (Atkins, de Paula)
When I have read McQuarrie and Simon, I can recommend one of the last two over the other and Wedler’s “Lehrbuch der Physikalischen Chemie” (which I already like less than Atkins).