@(Anthony) First of all I want to say that I think I have learned a lot from these Metaculus questions about COVID Origins - I am thankful to the authors and the community. As an individual, I am open to personally losing points from this question if the lab hypothesis would be confirmed. I have started from the low priors for the lab leak (probably too low), but I am reading a lot on the topic and I have not yet came to conclusion about the probability but I guess I would be somewhere between 30% and 55% (still need to study more since the topic is ver...

@ClayGraubard @nostradamnedus It is not that the question was bad - if it was opened at least a few days ago and would ask about shorter time frame I think it would have been interesting.

@CrabMan @yagudin @jarluck @qumidium @AdamRen the question is now open thanks to Sylvain - I thought you may be interested.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/moon-landing-india-spacecraft-historic-lunar-landing-attempt-live-stream-today-2019-08-06/ So according to Sivan base rate for soft landing was only about 37% (I wish I knew it was that low before - I could not find enought data to compute it myself, so I only knew that it was lower than 50%). I will lose a few points but anyway a great lesson for me. That was a great question! I enjoyed making these forecasts :) >Before the descent began, Sivan acknowledged the challenge of successfully landing on the moon but said ISRO en...

@traviswfisher I have the same problem on Android - I tested Chrome, Opera and Brave browsers and on all of them metaculus UI for range questions is broken but I also tested Miui browser which was preinstaled on my phone by Xiaomi and metaculus UI worked well. So I also installed Firefox on my android phone and it works well from what I have seen. So if you would like you can check Firefox on your mobile.

@traviswfisher I think you could also try using https://elicit.ought.org/ to interact with metaculus range questions on android. Good luck!

@D0TheMath I think that @notany and @EvanHarper had in mind that it should not decrease with time, but they do not suggest it should increase, rather stay the same. Superforecaster Bruno Jahn taked about similar situation in this great NonProphets episode: https://nonprophetspod.wordpress.com/2017/11/… (question about Japanese Prime Minister)

It has happened: >New districts in the red zone From Saturday, October 17, the list of counties that will enter the red zone is expanding. A total of 152 districts qualified for it, including 11 voivodeship cities. >Which district will be in the red zone? (...) >Mazowieckie voivodship: Garwolin, Legionowo, Maków, Otwock, Przasnyski, Radom, Szydłowiec, Siedlce and **Warsaw** districts Source: [this government website](https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=pl&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.gov.pl%2Fweb%2Fkoronawirus%2Fnowe-zasady-profilaktyki-prz...

@(Sylvain) Yes, probably that is the problem with exponential (or close to exponential) growth of pandemic - we wanted to ask it earlier about yellow or red zone but had to change the question because it became clear that Warsaw would be announced a yellow pandemic zone before the two day period before question start would be over. I now realize that probably all of you received very little points from predictions on this question. I am sorry if you feel it was not worth your time. I can say I appreciate the efforts of all of you who predicted - it rea...

Very interesting analysis: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china…

I agree with @bzial that this should be resolved to negative since there was no reports of any direct involvement of any of these mainland forces.

@alexrjl interesting

@PeterHurford currently Earth but that might change if I am lucky ;)

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hongkong-protests/china-rotates-hong-kong-garrison-as-protesters-call-for-democracy-idUSKCN1VJ06B?feedType=RSS&feedName=newsOne "The Chinese military began sending a new group of troops into Hong Kong on Thursday, a move it described as a normal annual rotation of its garrison in the city but one that was being closely watched because of months of political turmoil. (...) After the rotation of troops last year, the military said the number of troops and equipment was the same as the previous year. Lt. Col. Han’s stat...

Slightly old news (from Aug 20) and could be part of the intimidation campaign but I think it is worth sharing here: https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asia/hong-kong-protests-china-pro-beijing-legislator-carrie-lam-11825716 "EARLY SEPTEMBER AS DEADLINE FOR CALM During the interview, Mr Tien, citing his political sources, said that Beijing has set its own timeline for resolving the situation. Come Oct 1 - when Beijing celebrates the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China - the central government would want the media focu...

Related question: Before April 2022, will martial law be on in any five federal subjects of Russia excluding all the territories annexed after 2013?

@yagudin I thought that you might be interested (I hope it will be opened soon as well).

You can take a look at the data I manually took from the 56 pdf files* from the website of District Sanitary and Epidemiological Station in the Capital City of in Warsaw and my analysis here

*) I was able to use Octoparse to extract COVID data on the Voivodeship level, but with PDF it was the faster way for me than writing a custom python script.

— edited by michal_dubrawski

``` Abstract The SARS-CoV-2 B.1.617 lineage emerged in October 2020 in India 1-6 . It has since then become dominant in some indian regions and further spread to many countries. The lineage includes three main subtypes (B1.617.1, B.1617.2 and B.1.617.3), which harbour diverse Spike mutations in the N- terminal domain (NTD) and the receptor binding domain (RBD) which may increase their immune evasion potential. B.1.617.2 is believed to spread faster than the other versions. Here, we isolated infectious B.1.617.2 from a traveller returning from India. W...

Quite interesting compilation of opinions from some pundits: https://saikungbuzz.hk/2019/08/25730 They are rather pessimistic however many sources (for example https://www.ft.com/content/5bb1e600-bdc7-11e9-b350-db00d509634e) indicate that intervention would be very costly for the Chinese government. Question is what is their perceived cost of not intervening with the situation like that (their rule was challenged). I think that they are going to wait some more time and try to solve it with Hong Kong Police with possible unofficial reinforcements from th...

Hong Kong leader formally withdraws controversial extradition bill