Lipsitch predicts that, within the coming year, some 40 to 70 percent of people around the world will be infected with the virus that causes COVID-19. But, he clarifies emphatically, this does not mean that all will have severe illnesses. “It’s likely that many will have mild disease, or may be asymptomatic,” he said. As with influenza, which is often life-threatening to people with chronic health conditions and of older age, most cases pass without medical care. (Overall, around 14 percent of people with influenza have no symptoms.)
Lipsitch is far from alone in his belief that this virus will continue to spread widely. The emerging consensus among epidemiologists is that the most likely outcome of this outbreak is a new seasonal disease—a fifth “endemic” coronavirus. With the other four, people are not known to develop long-lasting immunity. If this one follows suit, and if the disease continues to be as severe as it is now, “cold and flu season” could become “cold and flu and COVID-19 season.”
[...]
Overall, if all pieces fell into place, Hatchett guesses it would be 12 to 18 months before an initial [vaccine] could be deemed safe and effective. That timeline represents “a vast acceleration compared with the history of vaccine development,” he told me. But it’s also unprecedentedly ambitious. “Even to propose such a timeline at this point must be regarded as hugely aspirational,” he added.
Even if that idyllic year-long projection were realized, the novel product would still require manufacturing and distribution. “An important consideration is whether the underlying approach can then be scaled to produce millions or even billions of doses in coming years,” Hatchett said. Especially in an ongoing emergency, if borders closed and supply chains broke, distribution and production could prove difficult purely as a matter of logistics.
[...]
The real problem is that preparedness for this outbreak should have been happening for the past decade, ever since SARS. “Had we not set the SARS-vaccine-research program aside, we would have had a lot more of this foundational work that we could apply to this new, closely related virus, ” he said. But, as with Ebola, government funding and pharmaceutical-industry development evaporated once the sense of emergency lifted. “Some very early research ended up sitting on a shelf because that outbreak ended before a vaccine needed to be aggressively developed.”
I'm well aware that AMP is politically unpopular and many, many articles have been written attacking it. I've read some of them and come away unconvinced; people are out to get Google these days...
Exemplary
I'm well aware that AMP is politically unpopular and many, many articles have been written attacking it. I've read some of them and come away unconvinced; people are out to get Google these days and it shows.
The kind of thing that would convince me would be a technical comparison of similar web pages with and without AMP showing that the AMP versions are significantly more harmful to users than the web pages that news sites normally serve.
I'll do a quick, shallow comparison here. Let's compare the Atlantic article I shared with and without AMP. I just opened them now in my desktop browser. First impressions:
The AMP link has narrow margins for a desktop, but not unreadable. Everything is in a single column and the ads every few paragraphs are annoying because they break the flow. It otherwise looks okay.
The non-AMP link was blocked by Atlantic's paywall, so I opened it in Incognito mode instead. (Unlike for some other sites, this actually works.) It also has ads, but they are mostly in a separate column rather than interrupting the flow. It also has an unremovable footer saying to sign in or subscribe.
Now let's look at them in developer tools.
In the Network tab, the AMP page makes 300-500 requests and loads in 650 ms. (Oddly, the number of requests changes with each reload.)
The non-AMP version makes 300-500 network requests over 5-7 seconds. It has ads from many different places, including Google and Amazon. It loads fonts from the Atlantic's CDN. It loads scripts for Google Analytics and something from Facebook. It also loads Javascript files from cdn.ampproject.net.
There are many, many web pages on the Internet with all sorts of ads, dubious tracking, and bad JavaScript. AMP looks to me like a somewhat faster than usual JavaScript framework, certainly not as good as web pages that have minimal JavaScript and no ads, but not particularly bad by today's standards for news sites, which are extremely low.
We share a lot of different links to news sites on Tildes and unfortunately a lot of them are user hostile, due to paywalls, tracking, and annoying ads. Singling out AMP pages for a special boycott will not do anything to help Tildes users. It doesn't even avoid JavaScript from the AMP project if you think that's specially icky.
We cannot protect our users from tracking or ads by avoiding certain kinds of links, because that would mean sharing hardly any links at all. If you want to avoid tracking and ads, install an ad blocker.
Not trying to be rude, but I don't really care what your personal preference is. When you post an AMP link, you are forcing everyone to make the same choice as you, and I don't think it's very...
Not trying to be rude, but I don't really care what your personal preference is. When you post an AMP link, you are forcing everyone to make the same choice as you, and I don't think it's very controversial to say that forcing everyone to see the internet through google's proprietary lens is bad.
Isn't that true of any link? If I post a link to a page that uses React and you click on it, I am forcing your browser to load React. If it has Facebook widgets on it then they will load. I don't...
Isn't that true of any link? If I post a link to a page that uses React and you click on it, I am forcing your browser to load React. If it has Facebook widgets on it then they will load. I don't think it's reasonable to expect people to manually vet links for web technologies that other people don't like.
Not really sure how you can consider React and AMP to be comparable technologies. I get that the web is kinda sucky a lot of times, but is it really too much to ask that I get the regular...
Not really sure how you can consider React and AMP to be comparable technologies. I get that the web is kinda sucky a lot of times, but is it really too much to ask that I get the regular un-google-fied website when I'm linked somewhere?
Both versions of this web page use AMP. One of them has "amp" in the URL and other doesn't, but they both use it. If you want to avoid AMP, maybe subscribe to the print magazine?
Both versions of this web page use AMP. One of them has "amp" in the URL and other doesn't, but they both use it.
If you want to avoid AMP, maybe subscribe to the print magazine?
From the article:
[...]
[...]
If someone changes it, I guess that's up to you, but I'm not going to avoid posting AMP links because I see nothing wrong with them.
There's SO much wrong with AMP. Here's a quick perspective: https://80x24.net/post/the-problem-with-amp/
I'm well aware that AMP is politically unpopular and many, many articles have been written attacking it. I've read some of them and come away unconvinced; people are out to get Google these days and it shows.
The kind of thing that would convince me would be a technical comparison of similar web pages with and without AMP showing that the AMP versions are significantly more harmful to users than the web pages that news sites normally serve.
I'll do a quick, shallow comparison here. Let's compare the Atlantic article I shared with and without AMP. I just opened them now in my desktop browser. First impressions:
The AMP link has narrow margins for a desktop, but not unreadable. Everything is in a single column and the ads every few paragraphs are annoying because they break the flow. It otherwise looks okay.
The non-AMP link was blocked by Atlantic's paywall, so I opened it in Incognito mode instead. (Unlike for some other sites, this actually works.) It also has ads, but they are mostly in a separate column rather than interrupting the flow. It also has an unremovable footer saying to sign in or subscribe.
Now let's look at them in developer tools.
In the Network tab, the AMP page makes 300-500 requests and loads in 650 ms. (Oddly, the number of requests changes with each reload.)
The non-AMP version makes 300-500 network requests over 5-7 seconds. It has ads from many different places, including Google and Amazon. It loads fonts from the Atlantic's CDN. It loads scripts for Google Analytics and something from Facebook. It also loads Javascript files from cdn.ampproject.net.
There are many, many web pages on the Internet with all sorts of ads, dubious tracking, and bad JavaScript. AMP looks to me like a somewhat faster than usual JavaScript framework, certainly not as good as web pages that have minimal JavaScript and no ads, but not particularly bad by today's standards for news sites, which are extremely low.
We share a lot of different links to news sites on Tildes and unfortunately a lot of them are user hostile, due to paywalls, tracking, and annoying ads. Singling out AMP pages for a special boycott will not do anything to help Tildes users. It doesn't even avoid JavaScript from the AMP project if you think that's specially icky.
We cannot protect our users from tracking or ads by avoiding certain kinds of links, because that would mean sharing hardly any links at all. If you want to avoid tracking and ads, install an ad blocker.
Not trying to be rude, but I don't really care what your personal preference is. When you post an AMP link, you are forcing everyone to make the same choice as you, and I don't think it's very controversial to say that forcing everyone to see the internet through google's proprietary lens is bad.
Isn't that true of any link? If I post a link to a page that uses React and you click on it, I am forcing your browser to load React. If it has Facebook widgets on it then they will load. I don't think it's reasonable to expect people to manually vet links for web technologies that other people don't like.
Not really sure how you can consider React and AMP to be comparable technologies. I get that the web is kinda sucky a lot of times, but is it really too much to ask that I get the regular un-google-fied website when I'm linked somewhere?
Both versions of this web page use AMP. One of them has "amp" in the URL and other doesn't, but they both use it.
If you want to avoid AMP, maybe subscribe to the print magazine?