User talk:Anna Horvath

Week 2 Feedback

• Thank you for submitting your assignment on time. Here is the feedback on your assignment.
• You wrote something in the summary field for 16 out of 27 saves (59%) since Week 1, remember, we are aiming for 100%. Be in the habit of typing something before clicking "Save changes".
• The purpose that you wrote was more of a "learning" purpose instead of a "scientific" purpose.
  • You wrote: To better comprehend how diseases can spread throughout a population, as well as how the transmission of a disease's parameters can be visualized. Furthermore, it will aid in an increased comprehension of the spread of COVID-19, while allowing us an insight into bioinformatics.
  • I would revise it to be: The purpose of this assignment is to explore the SIR model of infectious disease transmission by altering the model parameters and interpreting the results. The results will be related to the current COVID-19 pandemic.
• With regard to your questions from the video:
  • How can this model's application to the pandemic be made more widely known outside of the scientific community? Is there a way to present this simplified math to help everyone understand the risks of the virus?
    • This is really the aim of public health. A more concerted effort at science communication could help in different venues, television, social media, etc.
  • As the pathogenicity of COVID-19 is hard to determine (as we are unaware of how many people are asymptomatic carriers of the virus), how can the model accurately help infer the number with the disease at any given time?
    • That is why more widespread testing is necessary. We need to randomly test individuals in the community, not just those with symptoms or who are at risk from exposure. This would give us the epidemiological data we need.
• Your interpretations of the model graphs after you manipulated the parameters were good.
• Your explanation of the Giordano et al. (2020) was good.
• Beyond making fun of people who make models, the XKCD comic is referring to how models have assumptions that can be limiting (in this case about the amount of mixing college students would do).
• Your conclusion needs to also be more specific. Restate in more detail some of the main findings that you made from manipulating the model parameters, not just what they were about.
• To answer your questions that you posted in the class journal:
  • When will scientists be able to accurately predict how long antibodies last for an individual? Will we need to continually receive vaccines for the first few years to prevent subsequent outbreaks?
    • We need more data, i.e. following recovered individuals and measuring their antibody levels. We might need repeated vaccinations.
  • How long would FDA approval for a vaccine not from the US take? Would a vaccine produced in the US have a faster approval time?
    • I'm not sure, but we could research this.
  • If people are getting reinfected but are sicker the second time, does that mean the virus has mutated in between the time the individual first caught it and the second time they became sick?
    • Not necessarily. A mutation of the virus could be the problem, but there might also be changes in the patient to make the disease progression worse.

— Kam D. Dahlquist (talk) 12:36, 1 October 2020 (PDT)

Week 1 Feedback

I will be posting the feedback on your weekly assignments on your talk page. You will be able to earn back the points you lost on the Week 1 assignment by making the changes listed below by the Week 3 deadline on 12:01 am, Thursday, September 24. Here is the feedback for Week 1.

• Thank you for submitting your assignment on time.
• You completed all of the tasks except for the following:
  • You wrote something in the summary field 36 out of 37 saves (97%). That is excellent! Keep up the good work!
  • For your snail mail address, use "Department of Biology" instead of LSB 101 (building and room numbers aren't used on the official postal mail addresses.
  • Note that you should italicize genus and species names. Enclose the words you want to italicize in double apostrophes, i.e., ''word to be italicized''.
  • Also note that you shouldn't skip lines in the code for a bulleted list.
  • You need to have three levels of headers, and you only had two. You had the "==" and "===", but you need to go down one more level to "====".
  • For your list of assignments and class journals on your template, go back and add labels to the links. For example, instead of [[BIOL368/F20:Week 1]], use [[BIOL368/F20:Week 1 | Week 1 Assignment]].
  • Note that there is no Week 13 assignment, so you can remove that link from your list of assignments, individual journal, and class journal links.
  • Because you have a link to your template on your template page itself, you don't need to provide it on the user page. Right now you've got two redundant links to your template. The one on the user page can be removed.
  • Please cite the Denning and Janovy readings in your References section.
• I liked how you tied your role as a teacher (TA for BIOL 111/112) to your identity as a biologist. I don't think Janovy really talks about this, but teaching feels integral to being a scientist.

— Kam D. Dahlquist (talk) 09:28, 17 September 2020 (PDT)