Snippet: COVID Repeat Repeat

You don’t offer these if the pandemic’s over, done, and dusted.

And yet I see almost no-one wearing masks any more. Just because the media isn’t covering it any more doesn’t mean it’s gone, it means we have a short attention span the media reacts to that and only puts on the latest nine-day-wonder.

I also wondered if this was the only thing we had to look forward to, and I see I’m not the only one…

It’s a bit worrying that there are so many bugs in the picture, all potentially just one mutation away from becoming the next pandemic. What we need is for the computer machine-learning program that solved the protein folding problem to be put to work figuring out where on a DNA strand their TACG signature lies, and maybe we can start figuring out where on a virus / bacterium we can disrupt any variant that’s likely to be a problem.

Enter The Machine

When I was just getting started with the Internet way back when, computers were just fairly simple things that we wouldn’t be able to even run modern programs on. Not an exaggeration. But. Between tens of thousands of those basic PCs, we were able to filter SETI messages and a range of other tasks. With the more powerful educational and or government supercomputers – and programs of the time – they were able to decode the human genome in under a year, something that was tipped to have taken the entire scientific community ten or more years to compute.

It wasn’t “AI” – nothing we have yet is really AI – it was basic algorithms. When the modern computers figured out protein folding, they weren’t running AI. ChatGPT isn’t running AI, it’s a generative algorithm with a shitload of data behind it. When it was discovered that given a person’s medical history to date, a similar algorithmic program could fairly accurately predict what diseases that person would contract and roughly when along their future, that was noted but it isn’t being used.

When it was shown that another algorithmic program could tell who had – or who’d recently had – COVID, that was also noted and then silently set aside.

A program that could take in a series of symptoms and a medical history could diagnose the illness as well as a GP. Another program can perform surgery every bit as well as the most skilled surgeon in the particular field it’s working in and do so with less delay, less incidental scarring/damage, and as good a recovery rate as a surgeon if not better.

Why we aren’t using the algorithms and machine learning to work out a series of vaccines to immunise us against the viruses is beyond me.

We have a medical crisis – medical personnel were incapacitated or even killed by COVID, of those that stayed, many left the field due to stress and PTSD. Fifteen years ago I could ring the medical centre and get an appointment with a doctor that day or the next. Today I have an app that I can do that with but the nearest appointment I can get is a week away, and more often than not, three.

Why we aren’t using the algorithms and machine learning to diagnose simple illnesses and triage more difficult ones to suitable registered medical centres, practitioners, and hospitals. I estimate this could immediately cut the workload on human personnel by 25%. Add in repeat prescriptions for lifelong conditions and you could almost halve that workload.

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