Resumen La actual crisis del coronavirus ha causado una gran perturbación a nivel mundial. Numerosos expertos admiten ahora que la gestión de crisis estuvo lejos de ser óptima desde el principio. En el documento, primero resumimos la información disponible sobre la crisis y su gestión. A continuación, enumeramos los factores que llevaron a la forma elegida de gestión de crisis. Posteriormente, cuestionamos si los líderes religiosos podrían haber obtenido suficiente información para no haber apoyado los bloqueos, etc. en marzo de 2020. En nuestra opinión, podrían haberlo hecho si se hubieran dirigido a expertos confiables con una lista de preguntas profesionales razonables. Luego analizamos la cuestión de si las medidas coercitivas hipotéticas están justificadas en el caso de que sean efectivas para disminuir la mortalidad general pero causen la muerte de varias personas. Nuestra conclusión es que tales medidas no están justificadas éticamente, y la implementación de poderes de emergencia solo está justificada en caso de guerra. Finalmente, formulamos varios problemas importantes destacados por COVID-19 para ser discutidos en el futuro. Palabras clave: salud pública; ateísmo; responsabilidad del sacerdocio; Toma de decisiones; elección

On January 30, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared SARS-CoV-2 a global pandemic, based on a high infection rate and a high case fatality rate (CFR). The combination of these two points led WHO to forecast a high expected mortality rate of approximately 2% of the population. The phenomenon of Simpson’s paradox teaches us that we should be careful when we combine two variables together. Indeed, despite the high mortality rate in several places, this forecast seems to have collapsed. We believe one of the reasons for the erroneous forecasts is that combining the above points ignored a confounding variable – many of the virus carriers are asymptomatic and therefore not diagnosed.

There is evidence from experimental, ecological, and epidemiological studies that low doses of ionizing radiation may be beneficial to human health by causing an adaptive response. A quantitative phenomenological model has been reported earlier, where the time-evolution response to gamma radiation was modeled like the time-evolution of a damped oscillator. The model predicted that an organism’s resistance to radiation stress can be considerably improved by “radiation training” -pre-irradiation. Here, we report an improved more realistic model, taking into account not only the radiation dose rate but also the total radiation dose. The model, if verified by future experiments, might be used to considerably improve efficacy of radiation therapy by enabling increased therapeutic doses.

The relevance of ionizing radiation effects is high in the field of radiation oncology. Namely, radiation toxicity is a crucial limiting factor in dose administration. To address this concern, by adopting an empirical approach it is possible to uncover certain truths that might not be attainable through rigorous biophysical analysis, as the human body represents a complex system. That is, even possessing complete knowledge of interactions between its elementary units (cells) may prove insufficient in explaining the overall system’s reactions. An empirical mathematical model for adaptive biological response to time-dependent irradiation of arbitrary time-shapes was developed. The model was based on the damped-oscillator analogy from physics. The research reported here is a generalization of the damped-oscillator model by introducing a biologically relevant inverted Gompertzian-like shape, rather commonly employed in adaptive response modeling, with practical implications for biologists and oncologists. Based on the developed model, a practical approach is suggested to improve radiation therapy protocols by radiation training (priming) through administration of low, gradually increasing total-body irradiation doses. Following this priming, individuals should be capable of withstanding higher therapeutic doses, maybe up to five times the regular amount. Initial estimations propose a training time of approximately six weeks and a training dose of up to approximately 600 cGy. If the model is correct, effectiveness of radiation therapy can be significantly improved by radiation priming, since administration of considerably higher therapeutic doses would be enabled through priming procedures.