Vaccines let us destroy smallpox. By my reckoning, most of the anti-vaxxers were born after it was eradicated, and most of those old enough to remember it were first in line to get their Covid vaccine. The newest version of the Covid-19 vaccination is out. Get it.
So, today is the day after Thanksgiving and I’m just now getting my Thanksgiving post posted. Traditionally, I look at various disasters that haven’t befallen us, yet, so that we can give thanks that we’re still here. I do this because I worry about us, about the future, and in particular, the future of civilization.
The problem is this. Modern civilization is a one-time event. If it goes away, it isn’t coming back.
There’s a number of ways this could happen. Think of what a civilization-ending asteroid impact might be like. If a sufficiently large asteroid (or comet) hits in the Pacific Ocean — the most likely event — everything on the Pacific Rim disappears in the super-tsunami. Or maybe it lands in Siberia (the last two did), so we get world-wide firestorms. Whatever happens, the materials thrown into the atmosphere will likely give us two or five or ten years of nuclear winter. Everybody starves. Well, everybody in First World Europe and Asia and North America. Equatorial peoples are the most likely to survive. Even if there are enclaves in the First World, they’re not likely to include a particularly wide range of technology skills — they’ll be tinkerers, not engineers. I’m not going to go into detail because that’s not what I want to discuss. I’m assuming an impact big enough to destroy all but a fraction of modern civilization while allowing a biggish chunk of humanity to survive. How big of a rock is that? You decide. You want more detail? Read Niven and Pournelle‘s 1977 book Lucifer’s Hammer, then turn it up to eleven.
Or think of a catastrophe that’s somewhat less…catastrophic. Say, a fast-acting global pandemic. Or maybe a slow-acting global pandemic that one segment of our society ignores and downplays. One that, unbeknownst to most, leaves a long-term legacy of diminished physical and mental capacity. One which opens us up to other pathogens, enough to take down a significant majority of the world’s population, depopulate the cities where the technological knowledge is, and break down global supply chains.
Or maybe it’s a heat-driven catastrophe. One that brings drought to formerly green lands, and floods to all of the cities along all the coasts — all the ones that haven’t been leveled by wildfires. One that, like the pandemic, brings down global supply chains so that technology can’t be shipped around the world.
We could even see the catastrophe setting off local wars that turn into local nuclear wars that turn into a global nuclear war. And it doesn’t even need to be an all-out nuclear spasm. A modest exchange, followed by a sudden-but-too-late burst of sanity might be enough.
The real question is, what happens when the majority of the survivors of a global catastrophe get knocked back to at best an early 18th Century mode of existence (and at worst an early 8th Century mode), mitigated by a dwindling cache of manufactured goods and a vague memory of what is possible? It took us 250 years to go from the technology of colonial America to our current 21st Century position. Can we do it again? In 250 years? Not likely.
You see, modern civilization is knowledge intensive. Knowledge about what is possible and how to do it. And that knowledge is stored in three places: brains, books, and computer drives. Brains are obvious. Human experts hold the knowledge needed to build the things we need to maintain civilization. But if those experts have frozen, starved, or coughed themselves to death, the knowledge goes away. Books are obvious. They hold a cache of frozen knowledge in a relatively compact form, one that’s nicely flammable, and suitable to help desperate survivors survive another winter. And of course computer drives are where all the best and latest information is stored. Drives that can be wiped clean by an electromagnetic pulse, that require specific technologies and specific knowledge if their information is to be retrieved. Drives that will be so much rust pancakes and silicon slabs once we lose knowledge and technology and power.
Because in addition to knowledge, modern civilization is energy intensive. Cheap energy intensive. Which for the last couple of centuries has meant petrochemicals. The reason it’s so hard for us to give up our oil dependency is that oil is the only resource that checks all the boxes for energy density, transportability, and so forth — here’s a pair of comparison tables from Do The Math.
More to the point, the movement from a society dependent on 18th Century technology to one that wears 21st Century technology on its wrist requires an enormous amount of energy. So, solar panels can provide energy, but where do we get the energy to go from steam engines to a wafer fab for solar cells? Access to today’s coal resources requires the ability to dig tunnels a thousand feet beneath the ground, or to remove the top thousand feet off a mountain. Most of today’s sources of oil now require high-tech methods to access and process them. Can you spell deep ocean drilling? Hydraulic fracturing? Cyclic steam stimulation? Combustion overhead gravity drainage? The few remaining sources of easy oil are likely to be used up heating the homes and powering the cars of third-world locals, until those resources are also gone. I’d be off on a rant about the last peasants using the last of the oil, if I weren’t pretty sure that at the same time the last Americans and last Europeans weren’t burning the last books, to keep from freezing.
This is not even a rant about our using all the easy oil. That’s a sunk cost. We thought we had good reasons for doing what we did, at the time we did it, and now we are where we are. This is a warning that we only get one shot at creating a viable civilization, one that doesn’t outgrow its planetary resources, and one that’s dispersed enough across the solar system to keep us safe from the real dinosaur-killer rocks that are out there. If we fail, it will be a double failure — a failure of vision and a failure of resolve. Vision, in that we, as a society not just some Cassandras, did not foresee the risks, and Resolve, in that we did not have the backbone to take the actions needed to offset the risks that we could foresee.
So, yesterday I got my latest Covid vaccination — the bivalent anti-Omicron variant. I’ve had every available vaccination as soon as they came out, plus the Evusheld immune system booster. I do this because the virus keeps mutating so that we’re still in a Red Queen situation. In addition, I have grave concerns about Long Covid, particularly those aspects dealing with brain fog. I like my brain just the way it is.
Up until now, all my shots have been Moderna, but the local clinics are all out, so I got the Pfizer drug instead. Some reporting I’ve seen suggests that a mix-and-match of vaccines gives slightly improved protection. On the other hand, there have also been reports that when you do that, the side effects are worse.
So far, the only side effects are a slight pain at the injection site, and a golfball-sized knot on my arm a few inches below the injection site. Plus a mild case of the dire-rear.
Finally, two and a half years into the pandemic, we are starting to get additional tools to fight the virus. The latest one is a pair of monoclonal antibodies (Tixagevimab/Cilgavimab), combined under the name Evusheld.
In the US, Evusheld is approved for people like me: old, fat, and cancerous, with diminished immune response. It’s given as a pair of shots, high up on the butt, one drug on each side. They promote an improved immune response, but are not a replacement for the vaccine. Instead, they help the vaccine kick-start the immune system.
I got mine yesterday. It went pretty smoothly, despite the fact that the facility was so busy they had to set up an additional shot station in a room normally used for storing sheets and towels. Twenty minute wait, then two shots, bang-bang, and I’m done. Well, except for a one hour wait in another improvised sitting room to make sure I didn’t have a falling-down-dead response.
Afterwards, I felt a little bit achy, but that might just have been due to the passage of a low pressure zone. All my joints feel that sort of thing. Otherwise, no side effects, and I haven’t gotten Covid yet.
AKA Shooting yourself in the foot.
So, Republican and Republican-supporting media like Fox News, downplayed the Covid pandemic from the start, started pushing back against masking requirements as soon as they were announced, and spread disinformation (AKA lies) about vaccines and vaccination even before they were available. As a result many Americans, especially older watchers of Fox, came to distrust the Covid vaccines, then all vaccines, then doctors. The result was fewer people getting vaccinated and fewer people masking up.
The other result? American life expectancy dropped by over two years in under two years. Interestingly enough, in 2021it was elderly whites — you know, the Republican base — who suffered the largest drop. Blacks and Hispanics, who don’t watch so much Fox, didn’t see nearly the same drop.
Looking at excess deaths — deaths over and above what we’d expect based on prior years — we see that over roughly the first 18 months of the pandemic we had just over one million excess deaths. That includes both the with and from variants of Covid-related deaths, plus Covid-adjacent ones, like dying from a heart attack while waiting to get into a Covid-flooded ER.
So, we’re down a million people, most of whom — based on the number who died begging for one of them vaccine shots — were staunch Republican voters. Now the GOP leadership isn’t dumb, just evil, and they had to have known that this was the most probable outcome. My conclusion is, they just didn’t care. It’s been said that a modern Republican is someone who’ll burn down their house just to lower their neighbor’s property values, and it looks like this is a good example.
One of the problems we have in fighting the Covid pandemic is that humans tend to think in linear terms, while the virus grows exponentially. This means that health professionals who try to get ahead of the virus are often accused of “overreacting”, while the fact is that we might not be reacting early enough. Here’s an example.
Zvi Mowshowitz, over on Don’t Worry About the Vase, has been collecting statistics on, and modeling, the growth of the various Covid variants. I’m going to use his numbers as an example of what it’s like, fighting an exponential pandemic.
Here’s part of his model of what the Omicron variant might do over two months, broken into eleven five-day reporting periods:
| Week | Cases |
| 1 | 4000 |
| 2 | 12000 |
| 3 | 35889 |
| 4 | 106783 |
| 5 | 315532 |
| 6 | 919414 |
| 7 | 2588874 |
| 8 | 6723925 |
| 9 | 14948844 |
| 10 | 26377858 |
| 11 | 35177953 |
And here’s what the graph looks like, with the blue line representing exponential growth of cases:
Now, suppose there’s an intervention, like boosters, or N95 masks, or Ivermectin suppositories for all, that will take, say, five weeks to implement and fully deploy across the nation. Not just start, but substantially complete, enough so that the game is changed after that completion point. Also suppose that we wait until there’s “enough” data to fully justify the disruption and expense — so maybe we wait for 100,000 cases before we start. That has us starting deployment on Week 4, and completing by Week 9, by which point there have been almost 15 million cases diagnosed (red line). On the other hand, suppose we overreact to the early data and start deployment in the second week. In that case, we are fully deployed by Week 7, at which point there have been just over 2.5 million cases reported (yellow line). Overreacting by two weeks saved us almost 12 million cases, and choose your own death rate.
Of course, having moved fast held the case count down to one fifth of what it might have been. As a result, we’ll find that the nay-sayers will complain the new variant wasn’t so bad after all, and that we overreacted.
You can quibble all you want about base rates and growth rates and implementation times, but the fact is: Covid, particularly the Omicron variant, particularly in the early days, grows at an exponential rate, and when you are dealing with exponential growth you have to overreact on limited data, or you will fail.
And here’s another way of looking at it:
I have to laugh when I see all the angst and handwringing by the anti-vaxxers in the military. The SecDef says that very soon they will make vaccination against Covid mandatory for all service members. Already, there’s been wild speculation about what penalties might ensue — everything from non-judicial punishment to courts-martial.
When I was a lad, they just lined us up and jabbed two or three needles in each arm, everything from plague to dysentery, with never so much as a by-your-leave. Kids today think they have it rough.
In September of 2019, three months before the Covid-19 outbreak was first identified in Wuhan, China and six months before WHO declared a global pandemic, the US Naval War College ran a table-top exercise examining the political and military issues surrounding a major outbreak of a respiratory disease in a large, third world urban area.
The participants were 50 people with experience in humanitarian response situations. They came from U.S. and international militaries, humanitarian nongovernmental organizations, the U.S. government, international agencies and the private sector
This exercise was just the latest in a long series of wargames addressing major geopolitical issues. Back during the Cold War, I headed up the Soviet Tactical Aviation element of AFIN, in the Pentagon. One of the perks was that I got to play part of the Red Air Team during the NWC Summer War Games. They took place at the NWC, in Newport, RI. What made the games so interesting was they brought in high level political people to role play in high level political posts. So, they couldn’t get the President to be there for a week, but they could get a Deputy Secretary of State, and so forth. Naturally, there were many flag rank officers, as well. One of the scenarios they played was a long war variant of WWIII. Their introduction pointed out that in August of 1914, everyone expected WWI to be over by Autumn.
The point of this is that the Navy, long considered the most intellectual of the services, has spent a lot of time thinking about the complexities of modern geopolitics and the issues that surround them. It is not at all surprising that they would wargame the problems associated with a major disease outbreak (even if they didn’t play it as a global pandemic), and raise the issues that might arise so that they could be addressed early on.
Of course, they couldn’t foresee, and probably wouldn’t be allowed to play, a situation where the President, the Legislature, and half the state Governors did their best to sabotage efforts to fight the outbreak.
Vaccines let us destroy smallpox. By my reckoning, most of the anti-vaxxers were born after it was eradicated, and most of those old enough to remember it were first in line to get their Covid vaccine.
Just a brief note to supplement what I’ve said earlier. Let’s set the stage with a discussion of the concept of framing, the way one structures an argument, going in. The words used at the outset of a discussion will alter our entire picture of what we’re trying to decide. Are we reaching out to people who are in dire need of assistance, or are we creating additional and costly government programs? Are we promoting the growth of freedom in the world, or are we embarking on expensive foreign adventures? Which set of phrases you use will ultimately decide the question.
The frame that I use for dealing with the pandemic, is that we are in a war. The invader is attempting to take over our country, take over our culture, and substitute their own. If the virus wins, we will descend into a third world darkness, and become a nation of short-lived long haulers, broken into hostile camps of maskers/anti-maskers and vaxxers/anti-vaxxers, with small pockets in lockdown, struggling to survive; if we win, we will once again ascend into the sunlit uplands of indoor dining and unmasked rock shows. Once one thinks of the problem from this perspective, a lot of things become not only clear, but simple.
In a war, the central government decides on the overall strategy, on what forces are needed and on how they will be applied. In practical terms the government decides what equipment is needed, directs industry to make it, and pays them. The government enlists soldiers to do the fighting, using volunteers if they can, but forcibly via conscription if necessary. After which it tells them where to go and what to do, and pays them. It’s no different with a pandemic.
So, at the outset, the President should have issued a proclamation:
Citizens, you are all conscripted into the war on Covid. Unless there are compelling circumstances, which we will define, your duty station is at home. Go there. Stay there. We will pay you to do this, just as if you were a front-line soldier, because that’s what you are. Essential industries, we will tell you what we need, and how much and when. We will pay you for this. Non-essential industries, our directive to you is to shut your doors and not let anyone in. We will pay you for this.
Now, it’s a little late for this kind of proclamation. Four years of domination by Trump and his collection of quisling enablers have left us ill-prepared for the kind of national response that won WWII. It’s as if the French threw off Nazi rule in 1942, and set out to recover the rest of Europe, unaided.
Still and yet, this is something that is do-able and worth doing. The Biden recovery plan (recovery, not stimulus, get your framing right) is a step in the right direction, but it doesn’t go far enough. What about $1500/month for every unemployed adult who doesn’t look for work, and $5000/month for every small business that agrees to close until Fauci gives the all clear. What about selling a ‘mask-free’ license of $3000/month to everyone who doesn’t want to wear one, with a $10k fine for those who go maskless without a license, along with a $5k fine every time a business fails to enforce the ‘No shirt, no shoes, no mask’ mandate.
So, who’s gonna pay for all that? Howsabout we tax the survivors? You know, those who didn’t die, because we enforced the lockdown? So far, over half a million people in the US have died from Covid-19. Now, a lot of those were old and retired (like me), but most were not. How much tax could we have collected from those who were young, working, and alive? It’s too late to get money from the first half-million, but what about the next group?
Or, howsabout we borrow the money? You know, sell war bonds. But doesn’t that saddle our grandchildren with debt? Well, given that it would be nice to be alive to have grandchildren (and they’d likely thank us), I’ll just point out that the current U.S. Federal Funds Rate is 0.09 percent. That’s within rounding error of zero. Back in the day, we called that ‘free money’. A ten dollar ‘Covid Survival Tax’, imposed starting a year from now, should cover the interest nicely.
But might some of this spending be un-needed and wasteful? You betcha. But we’re at war, damnit, and in a war you don’t ask penny pinching questions about winning it on the cheap.
The point is that, as aggressive as the Biden/Harris Administration is about fighting the pandemic, they still haven’t really changed their framing, or come over to a wartime mentality.
The Germans know how to do it.
What with Biden coming in and the vaccine ramping up, and me getting my first shot, I’m not sure this series does anything useful any more, and judging from the number of hits it’s gotten, pretty much everybody on the Interwebs agrees with me. So this will be the last of the Pandemic series, unless something untoward happens.
Quotes of the day
We should immediately be more aggressive about mask-wearing and social distancing because of the new virus variants. We should vaccinate people as rapidly as possible — which will require approving other Covid vaccines when the data justifies it.
People who have received both of their vaccine shots, and have waited until they take effect, will be able to do things that unvaccinated people cannot — like having meals together and hugging their grandchildren. But until the pandemic is defeated, all Americans should wear masks in public, help unvaccinated people stay safe and contribute to a shared national project of saving every possible life.
“We’re concerned [about B117],” Jay Butler, CDC’s deputy director for infectious diseases, told STAT. “We want to sound the alarm and urge people to continue to do the things that we know work…Efforts to prepare the health care system for further surges in cases are warranted,”
A new, very large #SARSCoV2 household transmission study (27K households, 30K cases, 58K contacts):
—age ≥ 60 and infants most likely to get infected
—<age 20 most likely to infect others (1.6X)
The problem with vaccines is that most of them fail. That’s been true for the Covid19 vaccines too. We’re seeing a bunch of fairly successful ones showing up now, but over a hundred firms started this race and most of them disappeared. Even now, there are questions about how good a bunch of the vaccines actually are.
Meanwhile
UPDATE: NIOSH mask assessments.
UPDATE: Vaccine Summary.
Using language AI to predict viral escape mutations.
Surviving B117. Note: not the aircraft.
Two shots. You need them.
Do your neighbors want to get vaccinated? A map.
Lancet study on who gets it and who gives it.
Possible new treatment.
What the insurrection did for Congressional Covid.
Two Dose vs One Dose — the business managers guide
Mask up. It works, stupid.
Stuck @ Home?
Look up at the sky. Tell a story.
Good news and bad news.
Quote of the day
Mixing different coronavirus vaccines without any data to suggest the safety and efficacy of the practice is “a huge gamble,” Dr. Colin Furness, an infection control epidemiologist and assistant professor at the University of Toronto said. “I think it’s irresponsible … it’s unethical because we don’t know what that does,” he said. “We don’t know what the effectiveness is, we don’t know what the side effects are.”
Turns out that COVID-19 can affect the blood brain barrier too, potentially leading to problems like dementia, and Alzheimer’s disease later in life. Other than that, and the cardiac and pulmonary damage, it’s exactly like the flu
On Biden’s proposal to distribute the full vaccine supply: the bottleneck now is not supply, but the “last mile” between getting the vaccine to distribution sites & injecting it into people’s arms. Speeding up this process should be the focus, or else vaccines will just sit in different freezers.
Meanwhile
I don’t care what the politicians say. Get both shots.
Tales of a Covid survivor. Not hospitalized. Not fun.
AstraZenica goes halfsies. What did they know and when did they know it?
Technical details of RNA Vaccines. Well written and understandable.
Good news: Scientists say if you had COVID-19, your immunity may last for years
Bad news: Scientists say if you had COVID-19, your immunity may last less than 90 days
Stuck @ Home?
Let your future self tell your past self about the pandemic. Three min vid. Part 1 of 4.
Listen to some Byzantine tales of horror.
Happy New Year — for some suitably low value of ‘happy’.
Quote of the day
[The US may not have been aware of the new strain of Covid because]…the U.S. doesn’t sequence coronavirus samples frequently and the sequencing that does get done often happens in private labs, meaning that the government doesn’t really trace viral genomes. “In the U.K., they’re sequencing about 10 percent of all the samples, here we’re doing a fraction of 1 percent,” Gottlieb said during his appearance on Face the Nation. “We probably need a better approach…”
Comment on a Reuters report that a California nurse tested positive over a week after receiving Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine: To achieve 95% effectiveness, you need to wait 10-14 days after the *second* dose. This was less time than that after the *first* dose. And 95% is not 100% anyway.
Meanwhile
Reverse engineering Pfizer. You can actually print it on your home DNA printer. Long, but surprisingly readable (the article, not the DNA printout).
Peer reviewing Moderna. Looks good.
Vaccination rant. We knew it was coming, but the government President didn’t act.
And here’s how they do it in Florida. First come first served for 20% of the population. I suppose that’s better than piling them all in a football stadium.
Not so fast with the Remdesivir. There are side effects. Also known as ‘effects’.
AstraZenica. Speed, Quality, Price. Pick two.
Roughly 3 million vaccinations in 2020. Only about 17 million short of the goal.
Stuck @ Home?
Mostly research links this time, but Merry Christmas anyway.
Quote of the day
Are you proud to be an American, where at least you died mask free?
And I won’t forget the men who lied, and gave that right to me.
And I’d gladly stand up next to you and defend her still today.
But I’m on a respirator, and I got no way to pay
No one, especially children who are in the peak of their social and mental development, is meant to sit in a room for a month. I would not be surprised if in a few months or years, we swapped the COVID-19 pandemic for a mental health one without being creative about ways to think upstream and prevent this. When we emerge from the pandemic, it will be crucial to offer support, such as providing free or affordable counselling, training more physicians in mental health and teaching children coping strategies in schools.
What if instead of a vaccine we just were able to get exposed to a weak version of the virus that enabled us to build the antibodies we need to fight the real thing?
Meanwhile
Fauci’s Warning and R0. We may need 90% vaxing to get to herd immunity.
Super spreaders….viroids gonna find me. Like they always do. But I won’t feel blue. ‘Cause somewhere in this crowd is you.
Black churches. You have to trust the messenger.
People are actually pretty smart. Except of course for Idaho. And Florida.
Mask and maintain your distance.
Non-pharmaceutical modelling. Is it better to quarantine before limiting class size, or to close businesses after social distancing?
Risk Alert Levels. And what to do with them.
NEJM on prior infections. TLDR: protects for about six months.
Stuck @ Home?
Watch some African wildlife. Difficulty — when it’s daytime here, it’s nighttime there.
Learn about exponential growth.
Listen to a forest. Most are pretty quiet, so jump to the next one.
Some links are hopeful.
Quotes of the day
As powerful as this virus is and what it does to us, we still have a great deal of power in our own control. I have boiled it down to one simple thing: Stop swapping air.
We keep hearing that a total of 170 cases were detected during this trial. These are cases that were detected within the analysis window. The start of the analysis window is not the day of enrollment or the day in which the treatment began (i.e. the first shot). The analysis window starts seven days after the second shot and ends at the time of analysis (which was November 14). The briefing disclosed that 325 cases, not 170, were documented during the trial. The other half occurred after the first dose and before seven days after the second dose, and are excluded from the headline analysis. NOTE: My takeaway is that a single dose is not particularly effective.
“When we ask if COVID killed somebody, it means ‘Did they die sooner than they would have if they didn’t have the virus?’” Lessler says. Even a person with a potentially life-shortening condition such as heart disease may have lived another five, 10 or more years, had they not become infected with COVID-19.
The residents of Mitchell, SD, who since voting down a mask mandate have been ravaged by COVID-19 and lost some of their most notable civic leaders to it, would like you to send them some prayers. Maybe a thought or two. Whatever you can spare.
Meanwhile
Just so you know, the Pfizer vaccine was developed by a pair of Turkish immigrants at a company in Mainz, Germany. And the Moderna vaccine was developed by a team led by African American Doctor Kizzmekia “Kizzy” Corbett at the NIAID/NIH Center in Bethesda, MD.
Quick, cheap, at home Covid pre-test. Wake up and smell the coffee.
Summary of Covid stuff. From Slate.
Chart of the effectiveness of the Pfizer vaccine trials. Not much help in the first ten days, then by day 14 it takes off and never looks back.
Household contacts of people with Covid. Kids are sneaky.
Time your tests. When and what kind are important.
People with these conditions were not included in the Pfizer trials, so we don’t know what side effects the vaccine will have.
Does the data support a single dose for Pfizer vaccine? It’s technical, but probably not.
Interview with an epidemiologist.
Article by a statistician. In two parts. Also, Moderna.
But what happens if I have side effects? Does the term ‘SOL’ mean anything to you?
Stuck @ Home?
Try brewing some beer. You’ve got time.
I read all this horrible news so that you don’t have to.
Quotes of the day
…factors related to implementation will contribute more to the success of vaccination programs than a vaccine’s efficacy as determined in clinical trials. The benefits of a vaccine will decline substantially in the event of … greater epidemic severity. Our findings demonstrate the urgent need for health officials to … encourage continued adherence to other mitigation approaches, even after a vaccine becomes available.
Absent a vaccine, herd immunity is a myth. How many thousands of years did Smallpox survive just fine, how many millions of people did it kill? In fact, have them name one virus that herd immunity protects us from without a vaccine.
Percent of wages currently subsidized by governments due to COVID:
Japan: 100% for small businesses; 80% for large firms
Netherlands: Up to 90%
Norway: Up to 90%
Germany: Up to 87%
France: Up to 84%
Italy: 80%
United Kingdom: Up to 80%
Canada: Up to 75%
United States: 0%Maybe someone should write their Congresscritters.
In people who had covid but were only mildly ill, the immune protection that can prevent a second infection may wane within a few months. “Those people might benefit more from the vaccine than others would,” said Bill Hanage, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Americans killed in the Pearl Harbor attacks 79 years ago: 2,403.
Americans who died of COVID on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday of last week: 2,610; 2,885; 2,857; 2,637
Pfizer chairman: “We’re not sure if someone can transmit virus after vaccination” — just like the flu vaccine:
Meanwhile
Biosecurity and the pandemic. This one was natural. The next one might not be.
Do I need to say it again? Masks reduce deaths.
Three steps to safety. Don’t spend any time indoors with the unmasked; don’t hang about indoors, even if all are masked; wear a mask outdoors if you are spending time near others. “If I had a birthday candle in my hand and you’re too far away to blow it out, I can’t inhale whatever you exhale.”
Carrying a passenger? Stick them in the back seat and open all the windows. Sorry, Dear.
What’s your risk of infection? Good article with a dozen well-illustrated scenarios. May be a little wonky in some browsers; keep scrolling.
How mRNA vaccines work.
Vaccines have one job — keep you from getting sick.
Why we can’t have nice things.
Covid complications. You can get these for free, in every case of Covid.
Vaccines work better if everybody isn’t sick.
Stuck @ Home?
Would you like to play a game?
The links just keep coming.
Quotes of the day
Politics is making things harder in Kansas. I have been Wilson County’s health officer for the past eight years. This year, county commissioners gained more control over COVID-19 health decisions. I recently proposed a new mask mandate given our rising numbers. I explained that masks would not only save lives, they would help businesses stay open and keep employees at work. The commissioners voted it down 3-0.
Transmission risk scales positively with the duration of exposure and the closeness of social interactions and is modulated by demographic and clinical factors. The lockdown period increases transmission risk in the family and households, while isolation and quarantine reduce risks across all types of contacts. The reconstructed infectiousness profile of a typical SARS-CoV-2 patient peaks just before symptom presentation.
If the surge takes a turn of continuing to go up and you have the sustained greater than 100,000 infections a day and 1,300 deaths per day and the count keeps going up and up … I don’t see it being any different during the Christmas and New Year’s holidays than during Thanksgiving — Fauci
Meanwhile
Filter your air. It’s easy. And if you live in the Far West, it also helps with smoke.
The Oxford Vaccine, How they did it.
Who to vax? Depends on your goals. Here’s a summary of the latest guidance.
…and the full report.
Sturgis and MN. Other nearby states presumably similar.
What’s the matter with Kansas. Other than the fact that a quarter of them won’t wear masks and they have funny ideas about science?
Covid seasonality. As predicted.
Nurses are starting to break. Thanks, Fox News.
Vaccines and herd immunity. Better than just catching it and not dying.
Stuck @ Home?
Mask Up
Quotes of the day
“We need to think about lags,” says David Anderson.
- Deaths lag ICU admissions.
- ICU admissions lag hospitalizations.
- Hospitalizations lag diagnostic test results.
- Diagnostic test results lag infections.
“It’s getting bad and it’s potentially going to get a lot worse,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “The months ahead are looking quite horrifying.”
“It’s time to buckle up and lock ourselves down again,” Zeynep Tufekci says. “Remember: We are barely nine or 10 months into this pandemic, and we have not experienced a full-blown fall or winter season. Everything that we may have done somewhat cautiously — and gotten away with — in summer may carry a higher risk now, because the conditions are different and the case baseline is much higher.”
ER doctor on Thanksgiving:
Meanwhile
Here’s how the Germans did it. 2min vid.
Another new vaccine. This one’s 95%. Both of them look solid. And here’s how to equitably distribute them.
The New Yorker on Pandemic Winter.
Canadians test some masks. Yeah, the blue ones are best.
One year to normal, he says.
Will the SARS-CoV-2 virus evolve to become less deadly? Only Darwin knows.
The first nine days are the worst.
Covid hypoxia. How to drown while breathing.
Don’t use remdesivir. It only helps Gilead’s bottom line.
Catholic? No vaccine for you.
Stuck @ Home?
The links just keep coming, but not all of them are bad. This time.
Quote of the day
“People ask me what’s the most dangerous aspect of getting vaccines – the most dangerous aspect is driving to the location to get the vaccine.”
Meanwhile
Covid — where to get it. Not a complete list. White House missing.
The Third Wave. Difficulty — not Toffler.
The latest on the Pfizer vaccine. The one they didn’t use any Trump money to develop.
For all those seeking “herd immunity”, did we mention that Covid causes mental illness in 20% of its victims?
Winter is coming. What can Canadians do, eh? Well, what about Canadian businesses?
How the SARS virus hacks the immune system. Like WannaCry, only without help from NSA. Probably.
Why masks work. … and how to choose one.
Thank your llama. Mine is named Llamamoto.
How Japan did it. They believed the government. Of course, they had a believable government.
It’s not the virus that kills you, it’s the side effects. But beta blockers might help.
Recovery @ home. You can do it. They can help.
Pandemic deniers. A decades-old playbook that started with polio.
Stuck @ Home?
Links to distract your mind this election day.
Quote of the day
“All of a sudden, [the White House] didn’t like what the message was because it wasn’t what they wanted to do anymore… They needed to have a medical message that was essentially consistent with what they were saying… And one of the ways to say the outbreak is over is [to say] it’s really irrelevant because it doesn’t make any difference. All you need to do is prevent people from dying and protect people in places like the nursing homes. … The idea of this false narrative that if you don’t die, everything is hunky dory is just not the case. But to say, ‘let people get infected, it doesn’t matter, just make sure people don’t die’— to me as a person who’s been practicing medicine for 50 years, it doesn’t make any sense at all.” Anthony Fauci
Meanwhile
What do we mean by a 50% effective vaccine? And for how long?
Wiping out all coronaviruses… virii.
The damage is in the dose. Masks help keep down the dose.
Ugly toes? Maybe it’s Covid. Or maybe it’s just you, ya know?
Remdesivir, approved / not proved.
Think Covid-19 is bad? Just wait for Covid-38.
Stuck @ Home?
Play some 1-dimensional chess.
The links just keep coming.
Quote of the day
We literally left this White House a pandemic playbook that would have shown them how to respond before the virus reached our shores. They probably used it to, I don’t know, prop up a wobbly table somewhere. We don’t know where that playbook went. Eight months into this pandemic, cases are rising again across this country. Donald Trump isn’t suddenly going to protect all of us. He can’t even take the basic steps to protect himself. Just last night, he complained up in Erie that the pandemic made him go back to work. I’m quoting him. He was upset that the pandemic’s made him go back to work. If he’d actually been working the whole time, it never would’ve gotten this bad. — Barack Obama
Meanwhile
Got Covid? Your immune system is screwed.
…and the antibodies don’t last. Well, the antibodies decline normally.
About those vaccine trials. They are not going to tell us what you think they are.
The Long Covid. Men die, women go long.
Lancet article. TL;DR — all this ‘herd immunity’ hokum is, well… hokum.
Lab study of masks: they protect in both directions.
Trump and Great Barrington. Just because it has ‘great’ in the title doesn’t mean it is.
Remdesivir study shows the impact of political influence.
Dexamethasone study. It’s complex.
Pandemic risk. Warning, there’s math involved.
Stuck @ Home?
Watch some modern documentaries.
Look at some Ghibli stills. Free to use.
Find out what words appeared the year you were born. Unfortunately for me, does not include words from 1066.
We’re Number One!
(NYT 6 October)
Some links are less encouraging than others.
Quote of the day
And yet, despite everything that we have already endured, the virus now threatens to cause another nightmarish wave this winter. To prevent reaching four hundred thousand deaths by the end of the year, social-distancing measures … will continue for the foreseeable future. The approaching holiday season will likely be lonely for many people, as travel and large indoor gatherings will need to be prohibited in much, if not most, of the country. The fact that political leaders will continue to have a say in how people behave does not help. There is no panacea for this virus, but other countries have at least committed to certain strategies, and thereby achieved low community transmission. Federal leaders here have yet to offer a coördinated plan for safely easing community lockdowns. — Carolyn Kormann in The New Yorker
Meanwhile
The winter forecast. Remember summer? Not fondly? Wait ’till you see what’s coming.
anti-aerosol protections. What we know works. (spoiler: masks).
Disease progression. Helpful NYT explainer.
Disease severity. Are you 7, or 70? Some helpful charts. (spoiler: don’t be 70)
Covid treatments. It helps to be President.
How do pandemics end? If there’s no one left to hear them, do they make a noise?
Contact tracing at the White House. If they don’t do it, we’ll do it for them.
Covid virus can last for up to 28 days on smooth surfaces, like touchscreens, or Australian money.
Got the Covid?
Stuck @ Home?
Watch some opera at the Met.
Process some hi-def photos of Mars and Jupiter
Back in the day, say half a century ago, one of the things the Indications & Warning community worried about was what was called a decapitating first strike, a small, no-warning nuclear attack that would kill the President and others in the chain of command, to be followed immediately by a somewhat slower follow-on strike. The idea was that the initial attack could be executed by forces close to the US — SLBMs off the East Coast — and be effective within 15 or so minutes. The ensuing confusion would give the follow-on attack time to hit before the US forces could launch from under.
All this is based on an external threat.
Today, we are faced with a decapitating strike from within. By now, everyone knows that President Trump has tested positive for Covid. Fortunately (for some ghastly value of fortunate), he’s been on the campaign trail, and has not been in contact with most of the leaders of our government…as far as we know. But how many unmasked, small room (e.g. White House Situation Room) meetings with the various Department Secretaries (Defense, DHS, HHS, etc) or the JCS were held but not publicized? How many junior staffers were not following masking protocols and then going to meetings elsewhere in DC?
It’s not likely to work out this way, but it’s food for thought — what happens if most of the top layer of government ends up sick?
Some links are more encouraging than others.
Quote of the day
Tax evasion is part of a “structure of sin….It has become evident that those who do not pay taxes do not only commit a felony but also a crime: if there are not enough hospital beds and artificial respirators, it is also their fault.” — Pope Francis
Meanwhile
Why modeling Covid is so hard. Systems Dynamics, Neural Networks, Agent Based Modeling…it’s all Systems Science, and that’s what I do.
Isolation and your body. Not just the quarantine fifteen, but not as bad as Covid and your body.
Covid is in the air.
Testing. Testing.
Face shields don’t work.
About that new strain of Covid. Not so much of a much.
First wave. <10% of the population showed antibodies, and <10% of those with antibodies were diagnosed
Pets will help your mental health during lockdown. Post-lockdown you need to worry about your pets mental health.
Covid, the hidden killer.
Covid recovery. We’re a long time coming back.
Developing a vaccine. False positives.
Stuck @ Home?
Build a desktop PC.
Lots of links this week.
Quote of the day
“The most effective vaccine in the world is useless if no one will accept it,” Talaat said. “I think people will die because of a lack of faith in the system.” She pointed to wavering CDC testing guidelines and the optics of political interference in FDA decisions as undermining the credibility of U.S. health agencies. Others say vaccine makers need to commit to being more transparent.
“You can’t talk your way into trust,” Talaat said. “You need to demonstrate that you’re trustworthy, and that the process is trustworthy.” — Stat News.
Meanwhile
How are we doing? US vs EU daily deaths per million population
Even home-made masks help.
Eyeglasses also help, but ya gotta wear them all day.
It may never go away. Just like the common cold.
More reasons to get vaccinated. You survive other diseases better if you never had measles.
How to control vaccine costs. Open source taxpayer-funded drugs.
Long haulers. Covid is forever.
Do your knees hurt? Have you tried Covid?
Want to know how a vaccine trial works? Here’s the Moderna protocols.
How will we know if a new vaccine works? Count the bodies?
Some Covid scenarios. Even the best is pretty dire.
Stuck @ Home?
Virtual worlds. For when you’re scared to go out in the real one.
Walk to Rivendell. Difficulty: you have to supply your own elves.
The links just keep coming.
Quote of the day
Trump was not called to greatness. He wasn’t even called to above-average competence. He was called to implement a game-plan we’d already written with a disease control bureaucracy that was the envy of the world, the administrative infrastructure and personnel of the world’s most dominant and powerful state, and a practically bottomless well of resources….But Trump didn’t just fail to do what needed to be done. He didn’t just refuse to do what needed to be done. He actively and aggressively undermined both federal and state efforts to contain the virus. — Wilkinson in Niskanen
Meanwhile
Masks vs Vaccines. A mask will protect you if the vaccine doesn’t work, better than a vaccine will protect you if your mask fails.
Covidians amongst us.
Be careful what you read online. This blog is OK, of course.
You can insert it nasally. But what color should it be?
Pfizer refuses taxpayer money for vaccine development. Does this mean they can charge what they want?
Stop and sniff. “More COVID patients have loss of sense of smell than have a fever,”
Stuck @ Home?
Watch a baseball fly mach 1.3.
Learn about farming in history. I, II, III
Viewing links through the smoke.
Quotes of the day
It was an apt introduction to the transition between the United States and Canada. On one side of the border, almost everybody took the virus seriously—and few people had it. On the other, the reverse….it’s pretty obvious that the real policy of the United States is to claim the rewards of successful virus management—a return to schools and universities, reopened bars and restaurants, resumption of sports—without first doing the work of successfully managing the virus — The Atlantic
… Even if a vaccine is proved to be safe and effective, rolling out a new one correctly is no small thing. It requires lots of coordination across multiple state and federal agencies,…academia, and the public and private sectors. All that requires public trust. If millions of Americans are going to voluntarily agree to have someone inject something into them to prevent a disease they don’t already have, they need to have faith in the agencies that put the effort together and in the government backing it. So for the vaccine to appear in such short time and for Trump to get the credit, he’ll need people to trust the experts at the FDA, the CDC and other regulatory agencies he has spent so much of his presidency publicly denigrating or undermining. Given the usual time required for developing a vaccine — which includes enrolling tens of thousands of volunteers to receive two doses of the vaccine or a placebo a month apart and then waiting to see if they become infected — and the fact that Trump has delegitimized so much of that process, producing a vaccine that a large share of Americans are willing to trust and receive does not seem realistic for the fall…Washington Post
[Herd immunity] involves a calculation of the percentage of people in a population who would need to achieve immunity in order to prevent an outbreak. The same concept offers little such guidance during an ongoing pandemic without a vaccine. If it were a military strategy, it would mean letting the enemy tear through you until they stop because there’s no one left to attack. -The Atlantic
Meanwhile
Got Covid? Recovered? You’re screwed.
Vaccine roundup. Getcher program here. Can’t tell the vectors from the recombinants without a program.
No benefit from convalescent plasma in a randomized trial of 464 patients. At least it doesn’t kill you, like Hydroxychloraquine does.
What a smoky bar can teach us about covid.
Stuck @ Home?
Orbit the Moon.
Explore an abandoned lab. Very Jurassic Park.
Listen to a two hour BBC series on Rome. If nothing else, I love the voices.
The links just keep coming.
Quote of the day
Those states [North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, Arkansas, Missouri, Indiana, and Illinois] are starting to see an increase in the percent positive of their testing; that is generally predictive that there’s going to be a problem…If we’re careless about it, then we could wind up with a surge following Labor Day. It really depends on how we behave as a country. — Fauci
Meanwhile
How to protect yourself from covid aerosols. A Google Docs FAQ.
With Canada and Mexico borders closed, Americans are trapped in their own health-care system.
What did the President know, and when did he know it?
Travel safe in 2022. With a passport?
Covid on steroids. Only if you’re really sick.
False positives. It’s dead, Jim.
Stuck @ Home?
Listen to the happy woodland creatures.
Life, the universe, and covid.
Quote of the day
“I got a newsflash for Mr Biden,” Mr Pence said. “We think there is a miracle around the corner. We believe it’s very likely that we will have one or more vaccines for the coronavirus before the end of this year,” he said. “All that is attributed to president Trump’s leadership”.
Meanwhile
Winter is coming. Is your hospital ready?
And by the way, simulations show the covid virus may be mutating to become more infectious.
So Go buy a goat. It can’t be worse than planting oleanders.
And Wear a mask. Save $56.14
Learn about exponential growth. Quick, before it grows.
Deaths are leveling off — at a higher level than last April
OK, we’ve got a vaccine. Now what?
By the way. That whole thing about being immune once you recover from covid? Yeah, about that.
and even if you are, it might not last, ’cause antibodies tend to decline. Don’t we all.
Stuck @ Home?
Spend the morning on a narrowboat.
All your doomscrolling in one place.
Quote of the day
The worst-case scenario would consist of the following: (i) mid-level or significantly more asymptomatic carriers than symptomatic, (ii) exposure does not confer immunity, and (iii) a vaccine is elusive as it has been for other coronaviruses that cause the common cold. This unfortunate state of affairs could reduce the life expectancy of our entire species. — San Antonio study
Meanwhile
San Antonio study. What if nothing works? With a link to the original.
Immunity. What’s it all about, anyway? What does it say about a vaccine?
Oleandrin. Another Darwinist cure. Don’t do it.
Covid-19 and America. Well, at least the American Century outlasted the Thousand Year Reich — by almost eight years.
You get less sick if you wear a mask. So you don’t have to worry about being altruistic.
Stuck @ Home?
Explore the Black Music History Library.
The links just keep coming.
Quote of the day
The U.S. economy is about to look the way it did in 2009-2010, and we know a lot about that kind of economy. First, the Federal Reserve can’t save us. Once interest rates are close to zero, the Fed is “pushing on a string” and can’t engineer a recovery. Second, government spending can save us. Economists agree that the Obama stimulus helped reduce unemployment; it’s just too bad that it wasn’t bigger. Third, in a depressed economy deficits aren’t a problem. Remember all those predictions that government borrowing would lead to soaring inflation and interest rates? It never happened. But Donald Trump seems determined to take advice from people who got everything wrong during the last crisis and learned nothing from the experience. We have a very good road map to guide us, but we’re being led by people dead set on driving us into a ditch. — Paul Krugman
Meanwhile
Here’s the latest and best estimates of the future of covid. TLDR: we don’t know.
Seasonal viruses. Many virii, many seasonii
Is your friend symptomatic? No? You probably got infected by them.
and here’s how you get to be asymptomatic. You may already have won. Here’s a more technical discussion.
Hard data on masks. TLDR: best (after N95) is 3-layer surgical (1), single swath/multi layer polypropylene (4), and poly/cotton/poly (5). Worst is knitted (3), bandana (12), and fleece (11). Fleece breaks up drops into smaller aerosols and is worse than nothing.
Testing, testing. Also, Texas testing.
The pandemic. How Trump got us where we are. Long, and political-sounding, but factual. And the rest of the world is horrified.
Anti-covid mouthwashes …if you’ve got it, they limit transmission. Otherwise, not so much
Stuck @ Home?
Too bad. I got nothing. Go play a game. Not Twister.
This week there aren’t any links that tell you to wear a mask, but do it anyway.
Quote of the day
The “gee whiz” articles about vaccines are derived (sometimes copied) from press releases by the companies that hope to make gazillions of dollars from those vaccines. Every development that can be spun as good is hyped to increase stock prices. We have no way of knowing which press releases are accurate.
Meanwhile
Pandemic USA, a summary of where we stand.
Systems Science attacks the pandemic. Analysis from the Santa Fe Institute. Stops just short of actually describing solutions.
Vaccine reality check from The Atlantic. Like I used to tell my students about introducing new technology to their company:
“Assume that the technology works exactly as the sales person described. What else has to work in order for it to be useful for your company? Things like: where in your office will we put it; will the drop ceiling framework support it; can it run on the existing network; is Washington really DC?”
Epidemiologists got it right. People don’t understand lags.
Testing, testing. Overfishing the coronavirus lake.
Vaccine trials. A statistician expresses alarm.
Hydroxychloroquine works, but only if you’re a green monkey.
How covid kills your smell. Well, sense of smell.
Chart of per capita deaths for a few states.
Covid mutations. So far, so good.
Here’s a collection of important Science Journal articles on Coronavirus. If you are interested in how to deal with prefusion-stabilized SARS-CoV-2 spikes, this is the link for you…
Stuck @ Home?
OK, now we’re getting desperate.
Think you’re depressed now? Read the links.
Quote of the day
“Last October, 21 panel experts across the globe assessed the preparedness of 195 countries for the next global pandemic. At the top of the rankings stood the United States of America. It has since become clear that the experts missed something” .
Meanwhile
Why are we trying to hide our vaccine research? This is a global pandemic.
US compared with them. So, even Ghana is doing better than we are. Oh, and did I mention Cuba?
Big operation like this, you gotta expect some losses.
Decaying antibodies. Unrolled thread.
Legal vaccination. Also, legal masks.
Masks, the official data. A BYU study.
Details of good mask construction.
Masks don’t protect you 100%, but they do cut down on the viral load to you. A lot.
Stuck @ Home?
Links you might find useful.
Quote of the day
If RBG can stay on the Supreme Court despite multiple cancers and infection for the good of the whole country, you can wear a damn mask. — George Takei
Meanwhile
Rating masks. Kindof like Consumer Reports.
Historical insights from the Annals of Internal Medicine.
So, what if we don’t find a cure? Ya wanna live forever?
Kids and covid. They’re safe. Relatively.
Covid death rates. Are they really dead, or only merely dead?
So, how good does a vaccine have to be to be useful?
…and what are our latest results? (TLDR: no show stoppers, but too early to tell.)
Australian ICUs are saving 85% of their COVID-19 patients. “But you wouldn’t want to live there, because we all know nationalized healthcare is the worst, right?”
I know people are dying, but people die all the time. The key question is, how’s the economy doing?
And what do Canadian health experts think, eh?
Stuck @ Home?
Learn how to teach kids online.
Take a break and look out someone else’s window.
Scary links.
Quote of the day
Hopefully the database column for daily COVID cases was not a 16-bit unsigned integer, because the United States just passed that number.
Meanwhile
Death by Covid, some comparisons: one third of Wyoming, or all of Grand Rapids.
Death is a lagging indicator. Final, but lagging.
Economic impact of counter-pandemic actions.
Economic impact of future Congressional action.
Israel hits a snag. Schools harbor disease, who knew?
Mask materials: most masks don’t protect you that much. (here’s the original .pdf, look at the charts at the bottom)
And a different study that says … most masks don’t protect you that much.
Bottom line: Anything is better than nothing, but only high quality masks (and vacuum cleaner bags) are really effective. … And they’re still not 100%
Stuck @ Home?
Some retro found footage for you.
Home electronics project that won’t shock you. Probably
Some long links for you.
Quote of the day
For months, both epidemiologists and economists have been trying to tell policymakers and business types that there was no trade-off between fighting the pandemic and economic growth. That is, if we didn’t get Covid-19 under control, any short-term gains would soon vanish, and we’d find ourselves getting the worst of both worlds — more deaths plus economic stagnation. But that message was ignored, and here we are..
Meanwhile
Risk assessment poster for you.
T-Cells. There’s more than one kind of immunity. Long twitter unroll.
The airliner crash metaphor for our pandemic response. Long Atlantic article.
Air conditioning makes it worse. Long, hot summer.
Think like an epidemiologist. Long but interesting thread
Group testing. Bring your friends along.
Recovered from covid? Are you sure?
Covid drugs. State of play.
A doctor chews out his patient.
Pandemic heroes.
The geography of the pandemic in the US is determined by our original regional differences.
Stuck @ Home?
Get someone to explain it to you.
A bunch of good links in this one.
Quote of the day
It doesn’t take an official lockdown to push local economies back into recession – many people will pull back as the number of cases and hospitalizations rise.
I do expect another round of disaster relief in July … Without this relief, the entire US economy might slide back into recession in August. But even with another round of disaster relief, it seems likely the recovery will stall unless progress is made in slowing the spread of the virus.
After a decade of making fun of bearish analysts and writing “the future is bright”, it pains me to be pessimistic. I hope I’m wrong on the virus, but if I’m correct, then I expect every major economic forecast will be revised down for the 2nd half of 2020 and for early 2021.
Meanwhile
Science by press release. Very good. Long.
How we missed it. Long. Also good.
Coronavirus and cancer. L…G…
We’ve only just begun. Wasn’t that a Carpenters song?
Getting a vaccine. Harder than you think.
About all those dead people that got paid. Yeah, about them.
What covid and cancer teach us about US healthcare system.
…TL;DR: It sucks.
…and an insurance company exec admits they lie about it. Also.
Stuck @ Home?
Recreate your own Bayeux Tapestry.
Watch some free international films. Some require that you speak international.
Lots of links. No joy.
Quote of the day
The pandemic has laid bare the inequities in the American health care system and economic safety net. Black and Latino Americans are dying at much higher rates than white Americans. “When we talk about preexisting conditions, it isn’t just if I’m obese, it’s our society’s preexisting condition,” says medical anthropologist Carol Worthman of Emory University, an expert in global mental health. The scientific study of psychological resilience is not a new field. But COVID-19 is fairly unique in that it’s triggering a wide range of stressors, from the death of loved ones, isolation, and massive financial loss to uncertainty about what happens next.
If researchers meet the challenge of COVID-19, says psychiatrist Dennis Charney of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, “there will be a whole new science of resilience. We could learn how to help people become more resilient before these things happen.”
Meanwhile
The EU is opening up, but is thinking of blocking visitors from shithole countries once they do.
What kind of mask is best?
No second wave. Just exponential growth.
But if there is a second wave, here’s how to avoid it. TL;DR: Do what we should have done for the first wave.
How to breath during a pandemic. Just the reverse of what you might do naturally.
Covid won’t just kill you, it will make you really sick.
Lies my coronavirus website told me.
Stuck @ Home?
Take up fencing. “We have masks…we have gloves…we stab anyone coming within 6 feet of us!”
Be inspired by neural networks. Strange recipes.
Read a free Standard Ebook. Pretty printing for Project Gutenberg.
The links just keep coming.
Quote of the day
The point of lockdowns was to both clamp down the rate of infection and create breathing space for the government to set up the more fine-grained test-trace-isolate containment systems. That is what’s already happening in many Asian and European countries.
Instead President Trump has squandered the last two months doing nothing, and it couldn’t be more obvious he isn’t going to start, ever. The rickety political consensus about sticking rigidly to containment procedures is therefore dissolving.
All this is a recipe for 1,000-2,000 deaths per day for the next year or so, and quite possibly many more than that. I had previously suspected that a second coronavirus wave would come in the fall, as happened during the 1918 influenza pandemic. But it looks terrifyingly likely we won’t have to wait that long.
Meanwhile
Black Lives Matter protests have been ongoing across the country for three weeks — but do not appear to correlate with any increased rate of coronavirus. Protip for non-statisticians: because correlation is not causation, statistics can’t prove anything (although they can make a really strong case). What they can do is disprove an idea — If there’s no correlation, then there’s no causation.
Dexamethasone helps. But you don’t want to qualify for it.
Predicting the covid. Wuhan bats, coronavirus, wet markets. Entire book on the topic. Eight years ago. Nobody listened.
Am I immune? Short answer…maybe.
Female leaders and the pandemic. Maybe ’cause testosterone makes it worse?
Calculating deaths. Died with or died from?
Covid forecasts, IHME.
Herd immunity. You don’t want it yet.
Doctors and patients. You can still get sick from other stuff.
How does the US rank on healthcare? Well … um … we’re ahead of China!
Scientific American paints a picture of covid.
Stuck @ Home?
Generate yourself some Chinese landscapes.
The links — more than before.
Quote of the post
You have to be strict and you have to be patient, staying the course until the pandemic is over, not giving in to the temptation to return to normal life while the virus is still widespread.
So it is, as I said, a kind of marshmallow test. And America is failing that test.
In many parts of the country — including our most populous states — the disease is still spreading. Overall, new cases are plateauing and may be starting to rise. Yet state governments are moving to reopen anyway — Paul Krugman
Meanwhile:
An epidemiologist talks about the pandemic. Very long. Very much worth reading.
Cool Covid graphics. How does your state tilt?
Fiscal recovery policy. Lower the VAT. Too bad we don’t have one of them.
Reopening universities. Good luck with that.
In case you wondered. The shutdown worked… as far as we let it.
Testosterone makes the COVID more virile.
Hospital traffic and web searches in Wuhan suggests the virus was active in early Fall. Here’s the actual study (2MB pdf). Note that this doesn’t necessarily mean that people recognized that it was a new virus at the time.
US Navy/CDC study shows 60% of the crew were infected, 20% of infected sailors were asymptomatic.
Heat and humidity kill covid. Hours of sunlight available to stroll down to the bar help it spread.
The immediate future: roller coaster.
Stuck @ Home?
Watch some random YouTubes that nobody else has watched. Here’s the link.
Cook a wolf. The kind that might be at your door right now.
The links — more than before.
Quote of the post
However, we are plainly still light-years from full economic recovery, and America will need further economic rescue to avoid becoming trapped in a severe depression. If Republicans keep declaring premature economic victory, they will do untold damage to Trump’s re-election prospects. — Ryan Cooper
Meanwhile:
COVID is forever.
Modeling the molecule.
Reopening risks. Eh?
Hydroxychloroquine. Don’t do that.
Flattening the curve. What works. …about what you’d expect.
Office cough simulation. So, how high do the barriers need to be?
BCG vaccine. Never heard of it? That’s OK, ’cause it don’t work.
The once and future pandemics. We’re doomed.
Stuck @ Home?
Japanese radio taiso exercises. Three minute YouTube vid. Here it is in English. Everybody in Japan does these, including construction crews at the start of a shift.
Suspension trainers. Not the shoes.
The Ickabog. No Harry Potter, no magic, except of course the magic of JK Rowling. Read to your kids. Draw the pictures.
The links — few but mighty.
Quote of the post
I’m cautiously optimistic that with the multiple candidates we have with different platforms, that we are going to have a vaccine that will make it deployable. While the number of deaths from Covid-19 are profound, largely people recover from this disease. Recovery shows that there is an immune response that can clear the virus. So if the body is capable of making an immune response to clear the virus of natural infection, that’s a pretty good proof of concept. Having said that, there is never a guarantee. Dr. Anthony Fauci
For some reason there hasn’t been much reporting on the pandemic this week, but here’s what we’ve got:
COVID in France. In November.
Asymptomatic. 80% of those infected.
Getting to a vaccine. Short article, long time.
Yeah, China dragged their feet. Like they always do.
Wearing a mask reduces your risk by up to 85 percent. Gritty details.
also…social distancing.
Even what little data there was supporting hydroxy is now suspect.
Heat cuts down on infections. Unless it’s a dry heat.
Stuck @ Home?
PE for shut-ins. Dodgeball?
Have we got some links for you!
Quote of the post
Brazil surpasses the United States in number of daily coronavirus deaths. Of course once the weather in Brazil gets warm, the coronavirus should just vanish.
Meanwhile
Trump and the American response. This would be overtly political, if it wasn’t all so true.
Remdesivir helps. Some. No mention of hydroxys.
Why to wear a mask. If you could smell someone’s cigarette smoke at that distance, you can breath their aerosols.
Questions raised about hydroxychloroquine study. Well, all hydroxychloroquine studies.
Stuck @ Home?
The links just keep coming.
Quote of the post:
We’re retreating to a new strategy on covid-19. Let’s call it what it is… At the beginning of the outbreak, the United States had a chance to contain the novel virus by identifying each person bringing the infection into the country and stopping it before it spread in the community. We failed, with a lack of testing largely to blame…What’s next, then? The administration has yet to use these words, but it appears that we’re adopting a strategy that I recognize from other aspects of public health: harm reduction.
Meanwhile
Advice from Canada. On working from home.
It’s not enough to have a plan. You have to read it.
Antimicrobal turns out to work on viruses also.
Qualified immunity. We won’t know if you stay immune for a year until a year has passed.
Advice from the CDC. Don’t eat poop.
Cloning the virus. We’re doomed.
Masks and separation. How they work.
Stanford antibody test. Flawed.
Freedom in the time of covid. My position is that it’s even simpler than they say. You’ve been drafted. Uncle Sam wants you…to wear a mask.
Stuck @ Home?
Fish mask. For your mask. Some assembly required.
Another Coffee filter mask. For use in emergencies, like drowsiness.
It just keeps chugging along.
Quote of the post
The virus may become just another endemic virus in our communities, and this virus may never go away. HIV has not gone away, but we’ve come to terms with the virus and we have found therapies and we have found the prevention methods, and people don’t feel as scared as they did before. When it comes to a vaccine, there are no promises in this and there are no dates, and even if one is created, that does not mean the coronavirus will instantly be eliminated. Recent measles outbreaks are proof of that.
Meanwhile
Paul Krugman tells why we should be running bigger deficits right now.
COVID Recession. Global. Long. Hysterical.
Women and COVID. Taking the risks, bearing the burdens, with fewer resources.
Politics and compliance. Democrats listen to governors. Republicans listen to Trump.
Risk assessment. A practical guide.
Glass shortage. Systems theory says that everything is connected to everything else.
Hydroxychloroquine don’t work. Two studies so far.
But Vit D helps.
The pandemic is no reason to cut social security. Even Trump knows that, but the GOP at large?
No requirement to cooperate.
Stuck @ Home?
Stuff to read. Classics
Yet another covid simulator.
Time to herd immunity simulator. What happens without a vaccine.
4-second bike exercise. Well, it’s really 4 minutes
7-minute floor exercise. With details.
I must admit it’s getting better…isn’t just a Beatles song. Includes a link to a Hans Rosling TED talk. Well worth the time.
Herewith, yet another batch of scary links.
Quote of the day
It’s highly likely that we’re not going to see the next thing coming, so we need to build more resilience into our society and ensure we’re adaptive to whatever comes. The fact that everything is unraveling amid what’s actually a relatively mild pandemic does not bode well.
Meanwhile
There’s more than just a pandemic out there. Threat profiles the Intelligence Community didn’t want to publish.
COVID vs the Global Economy. Recovery won’t look like Victory.
Overpromising on a vaccine.
A history of COVID, starting with the times of Ghengis Khan
Testing, testing…
Testing. Antibody testing is different from diagnostic testing.
Don’t count on summer.
Straining the virus. There’s only one strain of SARS-CoV-2, with multiple isolates.
Virologist with the virus. At least it wasn’t Ebola.
What can one sick person can do? Shut down South Korea, for one thing.
Finally, I get some porn in this series.
Stuck @ Home?
Staying sane during shutdown. Plan for the worst and hope things don’t go downhill from there.
Tangiplay. If you want your kids to grow up to be coders.
Herewith, some more links that you might not have seen, or that you really should see, or that might just be interesting.
Quote of the day
We still have a high level of infection in this country. We’ve reached a plateau, but we haven’t seen the kind of declines that we were expecting to see at this point, and as we start to reopen the country, cases are likely to go up, not down.
I think that we need to understand, this may be the new normal. We may not be able to get transmission down much more.
Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb
Meanwhile
Stonekettle on civilization, leadership, and acting responsibly.
Post-pandemic Pre-dictions.
Adult children and responsibility
What happens next? This? More probably this. Note that, if we assume that early October is when the electorate makes up its mind, then that will be based on actions taken in late August.
CDC projections. Internal document, not vetted, not good news.
Modeling social distancing. This is a systems dynamics model. An alternative would be agent-based.
Early France. First case was in December.
What the economy needs. Hint: it’s not what Trump is doing.
Extra deaths due to reopening are not likely to show up much before Memorial Day.
SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2. More than just a model change.
Speaking of SARS-CoV-2, have you seen the new G614 model? You can’t get anything for the old D614’s since they came out.
Roast your mask. 185F for 20 minutes for a N95 mask. No word on the ignition temperature of my microfiber cloth.
NYT on cleaning. TL;DR You should let the disinfectant sit on the surface for at least a minute.
Stuck @ Home?
Exercise and ARDS — it’s never too late to buff up against COVID. Well, OK, it’s too late for you, but you’ll feel better about how you look in a hospital gown.
Cartographic puzzles. When you’ve done all the others
Herewith, some more links that you might not have seen, or that you really should see, or that might just be interesting.
Quote of the day
There are some viruses that we still do not have vaccines against. We can’t make an absolute assumption that a vaccine will appear at all, or if it does appear, whether it will pass all the tests of efficacy and safety.
Meanwhile
Covid forecasts for May. ~40K +/- 15K deaths on top of the current 60K.
Test reliability. It depends
It ain’t over yet. It will go on and on — Maybe forever.
Good News: Covid dropped CO2 emissions by 8%.
Bad News: We’ll have to triple that to fight global warming
Covid tracing apps — they don’t work.
Covid and your immune system. You may not want a fast response.
Experts predict surge in GA covid. Over 1,000/day
It also attacks your gut.
The post-virus economy.
Stuck @ Home?
Here’s another covid simulator.
Library of Congress hip hop sampler tool — the name of the tool is HipHop, the collection goes back a hundred years, probably doesn’t include a lot of hip hop.
Worn a hole in the heel of your old gym sock? No problem. Here’s how to turn it into a mask.
FoundOnWeb 
