[This](https://www.ft.com/content/a2e0340c-fe7b-4d89-aea5-e07ff84b20fb) article out today in the Financial Times is a nice round-up of what the US IC currently thinks: > - US military and intelligence officials believe that Russia is planning to hold a big nuclear weapons exercise this month as a warning to Nato not to intervene if President Vladimir Putin decides to invade Ukraine. - The US believes that the optimum time for a Russian invasion would be from mid-February to the end of March. - The US has not determined if Putin has decided to invade Ukr...

@predictors After extensively discussing this question's resolution, we have decided to unresolve it and leave it open so it can be settled in June 2022 (the original resolution date), since more information will probably be forthcoming in the next few months regarding the views of the various bodies of the intelligence community (IC) on this subject. So by 1 June 2022, we will hopefully have more clarity on what all the IC bodies think and how their statements can be translated to probabilities (i.e., whether at least one IC body believes there is a >50...

There's a new [technical briefing](https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/950823/Variant_of_Concern_VOC_202012_01_Technical_Briefing_3_-_England.pdf) out from Public Health England. An especially relevant section is where they track the % B.1.1.7 samples of all samples with 69 and 70 amino acid deletions (which causes the S gene dropout in diagnostic PCR testing) over time. >Week beginning | Per cent VOC of all Δ69-70 > 2020-10-12 | 03% > 2020-10-19 | 15% > 2020-10-26 | 29% > 2020-11-02 | 6...

Nate Silver puts the probability of a Dem trifecta at 60-65%

@nextbigfuture This does not seem like a credible news source.

@(FranekŻak) Agreed, I've added this to the resolution text. I've also made it clear that only some multi-valent booster candidates would count toward positive resolution: > - The booster dose formulation can also include formulations that target other variants (e.g., Delta) so long as the Omicron variant is specifically targeted as well. - Multi-valent booster candidates, such those [being developed by Moderna](https://investors.modernatx.com/news-releases/news-release-details/moderna-announces-strategy-address-omicron-b11529-sars-cov-2), would count...

There's a [new analysis](https://twitter.com/TWenseleers/status/1343575693544796160) out today by biostatistician Tom Wenseleers (not peer reviewed). He predicts ">90% of all infections will be by this strain across the UK by February 1st" and argues that the growth rate of this strain in the UK "translates to selective advantage of 56%-87%." This builds on CMMID COVID-19 working group's 23 Dec [epidemiological/modelling paper](https://cmmid.github.io/topics/covid19/uk-novel-variant.html) that finds the UK strain is "56% more transmissible (95% credibl...

@(EvanHarper) There is a lot to rebut in that article, but at the very least the main claim that "it is a remarkable coincidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was researching Ebola and SARS-associated coronaviruses in bats before the pandemic outbreak" is a demonstrably...odd claim. The SARS epidemic, which largely afflicted China, gave research on coronaviruses an ["enormous infusion of energy and activity"](https://journals.lww.com/pidj/Fulltext/2005/11001/History_and_Recent_Advances_in_Coronavirus.12.aspx) and a Chinese team based at the Wuhan ...

I have extended the time this question is open through the end of August. This question also now has a sister question that pertains to rioting across the entire US instead of a 100km radius. Note that the resolution criteria for this new question require 3x the number of deaths, arrests, or property damage for positive resolution.

— edited by juancambeiro1015

The IFR for 74-year-olds is ~4%.

[Preliminary results](https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/04/23/842818125/coronavirus-has-infected-a-fifth-of-new-york-city-testing-suggests) from a large serosurvey (to my knowledge, the largest done anywhere to date) completed by New York's state government shows ~21.2% of people in NYC have antibodies against SARS-CoV-2. 21.2% of NYC's population of 8.4mil = ~1.78 mil infected New Yorkers. The [latest NYC fatality data](https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page) is 15,411 deaths. 15,411/1.78mil = IFR of ~0.87%. Ve...

@Linch And....drum roll...it's the right prediction! Great job, team!

"The Food and Drug Administration's staff released a briefing document on Wednesday endorsing Johnson & Johnson's one-shot coronavirus vaccine as safe and effective."

This Nature news article is an excellent overview of studies that try to calculate the IFR. TL;DR: it's probably 0.5-1%

h/t @Jgalt

Aubrey de Grey:

I now think there is a 50% chance that we will reach longevity escape velocity by 2036. After that point (the "Methuselarity"), those who regularly receive the latest rejuvenation therapies will never suffer from age-related ill-health at any age.

I passed on these questions to VDH and this is what they've said in response to questions by @Sergio: > 1. We are currently reviewing the demographic data associated with vaccines. When the vaccine unit completes their review, we will post an update to our disparity ratios, including updating or publishing all prior months. Unfortunately I do not have a timeline on that. But we will have July numbers, I expect by the end of July. We schedule the data pull for the 22nd of each month, however that may vary slightly. So the July data will be cumulative thr...

There remains a large gap between what New York's Democratic party establishment thinks and what the base thinks: > ["Most New York voters are satisfied with Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s explanation of the sexual harassment allegations made against him and barely a third want him to resign, a Siena College Research Institute poll released Monday morning found ... Critically for Cuomo, only 25 percent of Democrats are calling for him to go."](https://www.politico.com/states/new-york/albany/story/2021/03/15/siena-poll-just-35-percent-of-new-york-voters-want-cuomo...

@ethulin @Jgalt @predictors Sorry about the confusion, for this question we mean the date that the letter is sent to the United Nations. I've changed the resolution language to clarify this — "This would mean that the Biden administration is sending a letter to the United Nations with the intention to rejoin and resolves as the date that this letter is sent."

See my reasoning here: https://twitter.com/juan_cambeiro/status/1343…

Very encouraging [results from a Phase I trial](https://www.iavi.org/images/phocadownload/IAVI-G001-Fact-Sheet.pdf) for an HIV vaccine were recently presented at an HIV/AIDS conference. This trial used a novel approach pioneered by [Steichen et al.](https://science.sciencemag.org/content/366/6470/eaax4380.editor-summary) in which broadly neutralizing antibodies (bnAbs) are induced to target conserved regions of the rapidly-mutating and genetically diverse HIV-1 virus. The team behind this approach now expects to do another Phase I trial later in 2021 usi...