Cybersecurity researchers warn that misinformation campaigns from convincing bots are fueling much of the social media debate about lifting coronavirus lockdowns and reopening the economy.
A Carnegie Mellon University team analyzed more than 200 million tweets discussing coronavirus or COVID-19 since January. And they found that between 45% and 60% of them came from bots, aka automated user accounts that mimic human interactions on Twitter TWTR, +1.68%, such as tweeting content and retweeting anything posted by a specific set of users or featuring a specific hashtag.
Whatâs more, 82% of the top 50 most influential coronavirus/COVID-19 retweeters were bots, as were 62% of the top 1,000 retweeters, according to the report.
âWeâre seeing up to two times as much bot activity as weâd predicted based on previous natural disasters, crises and elections,â wrote Kathleen Carley, a professor in the School of Computer Scienceâs Institute for Software Research and director of the Center for Informed Democracy & Social - Cybersecurity (IDeaS.)
My wife worked at home for a couple of months when there was a risk of epidemic in Taiwan. She preferred it.
As for civil servants, I had to renew a passport during UK lockdown. It took so long because of social distancing I was forced to get an emergency extension on my ARC. Which, of course, being Taiwan took avout 20 minutes. I donât know what the civil servants in the UK were doing when they were working from home.
Dude, yer off base here. End of the year it was like being on call 24/7. Kids were doing working and screaming for help all hours of the day and night. I never knew how many students simply donât sleep at night. God forbid I go to bed with my school email account open on my phoneâŚding ding ding dingâŚemails all night long. âMr., what do I do? How???â
During the day, on call, on video with groups, whoever shows up, then a series on non stop one on ones with kids who couldnât wake up for âclass time.â Then meetings with other teachers and admin and professional trainingâŚ
I tend to have a UK take on things. It might have been different with you. Prior to the summer break remote learning was a disaster in the UK:
Right now itâs estimated that children of lower income backgrounds have lost 3 months of learning. Boys over 4 months. Children in fee paying schools are fine.
I should have clarified⌠2 weeks to do something that takes Taiwanese government 20 minutes to do, IF there is nothing wrong. Should anything be wrong (whether be it work backlog, or anything else), multiply that timeframe by 20.
Again: no one does from AIDS, the virus destroys the immune system and every opportunistic infection moves in.
Same with COVID. No one dies of high blood pressure, immune disease, even obesity will not kill you right away nor in those numbers. The COVID kills you more easily if you have those conditions. It thickens the blood, which in an immune compromised, already swollen circulatory system, it means the chance of stroke is higher. That is why they are finding mini strokes in even âhealthyâ, asymptomatic patients. For example.
Those people did not have to die. Their conditions were not terminal - unless they had cancer, and even so- but their bodies were not in condition to fight COVID.
It is like outrunning a tiger. Problem is this tiger goes after everyone. And will not stop after getting the old, the sick. It will swat at the healthy too, it just depends on how much they can bleed without dying.
I understand, but thats not my point. Itâs not going to kill healthy people in most cases.
The real discussion is how unhealthy Americans are imo. Most of the underling health issues are preventable. In fact, over 50% of the medical cost is from health issues related with being over weight in the US. Many of these people did not have to die if they took care of their health to began with. Harsh but true.
A lot of these people were probably not going to live that long with these underlining issues to tell the truth. The US is a sick country and we pretend itâs normal for people to be obese and on 10 different medications instead of just living a healthy lifestyle.
If a tiger gets its claws on you, you will not walk away unhurt.
Now imagine you get to wear an armor of sorts. Even if the tiger attacks you, unless he has a can opener, he wonât hurt you. Thatâs the mask.
Now, until we can lock the tiger away, thatâs the best we can do. Saying if you are healthy you can outrun it even if you are bleeding is not the best scenario. Best scenario is to avoid getting bitten it clawed.
And I could tell you a myriad of underlying conditions that make people overweight or how difficult it is to lose weight, both physically and economically. But it has been discussed ad nauseum.
A 600 pound person is probably housebound anyways and not best candidate to catch COVID. Most likely candidate is the overweight trash collector or bus driver, a person of color with lack of access to fresh produce and reduced means, which means a poor diet and lack of a access to medical help. And when they get it, it is from judgemental practitioners who blame the victim/poor person mentality but not the actual lack of means.
Lots of meds benefits a system based on profit, not service.
Depends. If this thing keeps on gaining strength, mutating into more vicious contagion, then it might be higher. Each strain us becoming more contagious.
That is possible, but unlikely. From an evolutionary perspective itâs illogical for a virus to kill its host. Becoming more virulent makes sense. Turning more into the common cold.
