Fellow academics, when are we going to start fixing our urgent structural problems that strain family bonds and present ongoing barriers to diversifying our educational and scientific leadership? You wonder, what the heck is this guy talking about?
1/n

We’re all very familiar what I am talking about, actually: the impossibility for most academics in the life sciences to do their jobs in a reaonable amount of time, due to more and more demands on writing grants, and to a lesser degree, papers.
2/n

As of yesterday I hadn’t intended to write about this subject, but was wondering as I finished a Saturday of straight work, what happened to all my time? Why has WFH not reduced my pile of tasks to do? Instead why is my to-do list growing bigger and bigger?
3/n

I decided to figure out how much time our jobs actually require. I estimated per year (m=month, w=week, d=day, h=hour):
Teaching: 20h/w x 20w = 400h
Meetings of all sorts: 10h/w x 48w= 480h
Replying to email: 2h/d x 365d = 730h
Attending and giving talks: 2h/w x 50w = 100h
4/n

Papers: If each person needs 2 papers during a 5y stint, and you run a 7.5-person lab, then you need 7.5 papers per 2.5y = 3 papers/y. Throw in a review and it’s 4 papers. If you need 15d at 8h/d per paper, that’s 480h writing papers.
5/n

There have been a lot of stories recently on the search into COVID19/SARSCoV2 origins, but they have been written to tell stories of intrigue or mystery, not to summarize known facts.

Thus I thought it might be useful to succinctly summarize what we actually know...

1/n

I'll say from the outset we know zero about where sarscov2 itself came from, so the only facts we can list are those that could be proximally relevant. That is, each of these facts is either about SARSCoV2 discovery or just one potential step removed from SARSCoV2 origins.
2/n

First, the briefest bit of background: SARSCoV2 is in the clade or coronaviruses called the sarbecoviruses, named after its first known member, SARSCoV1, the cause of SARS discovered in 2002. SARSCoV1 and SARSCoV2 are 80% identical.

3/n

They essentially cause the same range of pathologies (flu-like disease which then progresses sometimes to inflammatory pneumonia and sometimes systemic inflammation), but with very different outcome distributions

4/n

Now, on to the circumstantial facts.

1. The 1st known case of SARSCoV2 disease was detected on 2019/12/8 in Wuhan, China. Most cases in the next 3 wks were linked to the Huanan seafood market, but the 1st case, and 4 of the first 5, were not.