Nelson Lowhim: Storyteller
According to the usual suspects the Glorious Russian Winter Offensive has begun in Zaporizhzhia Oblast. It is super effective, the Russians are gaining ground rapidly, Ukraine is on the verge of total military collapse. Surrender now ye Hohols.
Back in reality initial information on the Russian attacks in Zaporizhzhia Oblast looks very bad for the Russians. There were attacks across a large section of the front, most of the attacks appear to have been conducted by mobilized personnel with BMP-1 and T-62 tanks. (Both built in the 60s, both outclassed by the 80s) Russian air support remains limited though claimed shootdowns by Ukraine spiked in the past 3 days.
It appears that to save on vehicle losses Russian infantry are dismounting well short of their objectives and walking towards Ukrainian lines while the Russian armor sits back and provides distant fire support.
This gives Ukrainian artillery time to set up and dial in with devastating results.
It is possible that this is not the "real" offensive. It is possible that the Russians are engaging the Ukrainian lines with disposable conscript troops. It is possible they will attempt to breakthrough with professional soldiers armed with relatively modern equipment in Zaporizhzhia or elsewhere.
But at this point it looks like they fed thousands of conscripts and a bunch of 1960's equipment into the meatgrinder for no real gains.
On 11 August 1950 Baudouin took the constitutional oath as regent before the united Chambers of the Belgium Parliament. During the proceedings, one of the Communist deputies present shouted "Vive la République!" ("Long Live the Republic!"). Lahaut was reported to have been the deputy responsible, though in the confusion of the moment this remains unconfirmed. A week later, on 18 August 1950, Lahaut was assassinated by two unknown gunmen outside his home in Seraing.
A metaphor that I have been using imagines our immune system as a photo collection. It takes a snapshot of every pathogen it encounters so that it can recognize the bad guy for next time. This is how our immune systems fight back. The photos don’t fade because they aren’t looked at for a few years; they just sit there until they are needed. When a virus mutates, it’s trying to disguise itself to evade detection. But, with Covid, the virus is also punching holes, fading or wearing out the photos—making them less and less useful as tools for identifying other viruses. Instead of immunity debt, we should be thinking about immunity theft.
There have been studies looking at the way Covid causes T-cell exhaustion. We now know that the virus can directly infect T cells (the guardian cells that spot infections and help defend the immune system), which we didn’t know before. There was also a study conducted by a group of pediatric specialists at several American hospitals where they looked at three groups of babies. The first group had RSV and Covid at the same time with very high viral loads, which sounds bad; the second group had RSV and Covid at the same time with low viral loads, which sounds less bad; the third group was babies who had RSV and had previously recovered from Covid. It was this last group that was by far the sickest—the ones that had to be ventilated. But it was a small study. You need more participants in order to get a consistent result. And of course it could be a giant coincidence, but it is frighteningly in keeping with this idea of immune system harm.
Shame that it seems all public officials are going bonkers, liberal or GOP (it's just the presentation as it were). I do think we just need more studies on all of this. And that should allow us to move to "normal" in a much easier fashion.
That being said, that doesn't mean covid messes with T-cells, so we'll have to wait and see about what studies show in the future.
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