We've been a bit more lax, but we have the advantage of having miles of hiking/biking trails to hang out at, and we resumed outdoor playdates for the kids in the past few weeks. No shared surfaces is the rule; one can't make four-year-olds otherwise socially distance. We're also doing swim lessons.

But, too: basically everyone I know works for the university, and we've all collectively been home mostly isolated since March. We're all likely to be screwed in September once everything resumes, especially because the prevailing attitude here is that the virus is just made up.

They released school guidance on Friday that is completely unrealistic:
https://boston.cbslocal.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/3859903/2020/06/Guidance-on-Required-Safety-Supplies-for-Re-Opening-Schools.pdf
The only thing that's unclear is whether this is the current situation so really only applies to camp and summer classes or if that's what they expect in the fall. Main point is max 10 kids and 2 staff per room. Class sizes of less than 20 were considered unusual so that's more than two shifts, even if 2 shifts (morning/afternoon or alt days) were feasible for parents I don't even see how they can do that.

I guess I've gone over the wall on this. A long-time friend was in town, dropping off her son for his first job out-of-college, and we spent several hours indoors gabbing. She thinks she had the covid back in February. I think the actual odds of that are low, yet still higher than the odds that either of us gave it to the other on Saturday.

2: 24-7 schools! Four 5-hour shifts every day of the week.

I'm still mostly not going inside buildings other than my own home. But Newt's living at home and is less careful, so who knows.

5- Did you get an electric bike for when you have to commute? If I need to take public transit, I think I feel more comfortable with the bus than the subway, because the airflow is better. We get all these e-mails about how we don't need to be 6 feet apart at work as long as we wear masks and we should feel safe on the T, because they will make sure people maintain adequate distance and wear masks. A lot of people, teenagers in packs especially, are not wearing masks, and I have no ability to enforce it, but outside I can walk away which I can't do in an underground subway car.

I didn't. My office isn't reopening for another month or more yet, and when it does reopen, we're splitting into two teams who work four days in the office on alternate weeks, so everyone is four days on, ten days off. Four days in a row, and then a week off, I can handle the pedaling.

Bad weather is still going to stink, but an ebike wouldn't fix that.

The kids have restarted seeing their friends, but they don't hang out with indoors. I go to the office every day, because I'm either there alone or with one other person, who's way down the hall and not breathing my air. I shop for groceries. I never stopped. But I use hand sanitizer before and after and wear a mask during. If the schools reopen in the fall, which I'm currently thinking they probably won't, we'll have a dilemma on our hands: further isolate the younger boy, or take a risk that seems obviously silly. The older boy is delaying the start of college for a year, a development that's making him pretty unhappy, but only really because he has no idea what to do instead.

I'm sort of boggling at all of the magical thinking I see around me. Literally nothing has changed in the last few months, except that we know the testing is less accurate than we'd hoped, and a bunch more people have sickened and died--but nowhere near enough to confer herd immunity on most population centers. I blame capitalism. No, really, I do. Insofar as I have a role in deciding what's happening at the university, you can put me in the "How about never?" camp.

If anyone has any great ideas for a gap year, wait the appropriate number of comments and then speak up, please.

6: I should say that our last conversation about masks and exercising got through to me -- I'm still dodging to stay away from people while I run, but I wear a mask that I pull up over my face if I'm anywhere close to anyone else. I figure if it makes people more comfortable, it's a good thing whether or not it's overkill.

9: Volunteer contact tracer?

Pacific Crest Trail.

Pacific Northwest Trail.

Great Divide Trail.

10:Awesome.

Further, I think it's BS that the T will be able to enforce masks. My hair salon will, so I'll get a cut this summer.

I'm also doing no indoors with anyone outside the family outside of groceries. Thinking about ramping up more outdoor meetups though, we might have a fire in the backyard with a small group.

The frustrating thing to me is that it really seems like it's ok to be indoors with other people so long as everyone wears masks and no one speaks. But we can't get everyone to agree to wear masks and not talk. We could have mostly safe public transit if we wanted to, but it's not going to happen because we live in a failed society.

We're not so failed that people talk to strangers on the bus.

Screaming obscenities at them still counts.

9: Does he want to send emails harassing a bunch of academic presses into actually sending out history books? I could hook him up!

I am definitely moving slower than the state is. The latest plan I've heard from the school district is to allow young kids (not sure to what level but Selah in third would certainly qualify and Mara in seventh definitely wouldn't) to attend in 10-child pods spread throughout all three district schools while older children have to work from home. I'm waiting to talk to the in-school therapist but as long as she's allowed to zoom with students at the online "school of innovation," I will plan to enroll the older girls there.

And Odile has just told me I should take my cranky self to her apartment for the night. I have to make it by curfew but then I can relax in the quiet and (we hope) come back restored by that. It seems like the right choice and best use of a second space, though she may also want me to check her mail there. I definitely don't remember my last child-free built, but I think her departmental party was late February so probably that. Anyway. I'm not doing welP with the constant-needy-people part of quarantine but that's part of regular life too.

I am so angry about the lack of centralized emergency planning for the k-12 schools. Obviously they need to hire a boatload of teachers. And if they have trouble finding qualified teachers, then qualified assistants that can answer to a central teacher. Like, the workforce should double. And obviously no school district can afford this, and the money needs to come from an outside budget.

I'm very, very worried about all the precarious families. It's just fucking bonkers that the solution is to abdicate the childcare responsibility of public schools rather than pay for a huge increase in teachers.

I'm assuming that ours is going to be some sort of cohort model where your kid attends on MWF mornings or TTHF afternoons or something. They haven't released any information about it, though.

I'm sort of boggling at all of the magical thinking I see around me.

This x 100.

I've been feeing very resigned about our lack of agency around this sort of thing. In the fall, Jammies will be back at the high school five days a week, and I'll be patching together something, and we'll just be at the mercy of whatever happens.

So it feels a bit pyrrhic to be super strict during the summer. We're basically following the same inside/outside bright line that everyone else above seems to be following.

On the OP, I thought it was kind of weird that the response rate was under 10% (550 out of 6000?), and I wonder what that means about the bias of the respondents. Somewhere way down it does have a bunch of responses from people of the form "this is dumb, I'll go by what's happening in the world, not a calendar".

We're boggling at the same school guidance SP is, and have no idea how any of this is going to work. For the moment, we may be relaxing our bubble enough for our kid to have playdates with one other kid his age, who we trust to be careful enough since the mom is a public health/infection control academic. I am very much looking forward to Mr. 7 having an outlet for talking about the endless details of Pokemon that isn't me. But how to manage the summer generally.... I dunno.

(Still haven't been inside a store since March, don't really see a reason to start soon, though there are a few hyper-specific items that I'm missing from one place or another.)

Our town seems to be escalating slightly more rapidly. The bars have been packed with college kids for almost six weeks.

I have this vague half-baked fantasy that the twenty-somethings will all shout and dance at the clubs all summer long, with very little contact with adults, and develop a bit of herd immunity that offer a teeny bit of protection to everyone else in the fall. Kind of like how some of the elderly Japanese scientists volunteered to help get Fukushima under control, except the opposite.

16: There was a thing in The NY Times about somebody who was having people over for an outside event, but then people went to use the bathroom and just started hanging out in the kitchen.

Restaurants here were allowed to open at the end of last week with capacity restrictions and masks everywhere except your own table, so I just made a reservation to eat out for the first time since mid-March. We're all wearing masks in public, and large gatherings are still not supposed to be happening, but with the state's count of currently active cases at 41, it feels pretty safe for now. That will change when the quarantine on out of state arrivals is relaxed, but it looks like that's still at least a month out.

Usually the kitchen is at least bigger than the bathroom.

(shoulda included virologists, too)

My dad is being more lax than I would have expected, given his credentials in this way. He's being basically safe, but he does keep wanting to go to work (in a hospital!) I get that it's kind of like being sidelined during the big game that you've been waiting your entire career for...

Also my parents like to double up on masks before they go out, and it always always reminds me how sternly they warned us in high school not to double up on protection. They'll rub holes in each other!

Re magical thinking: I think this is a manifestation of the difference between "flatten the curve" and "let's nobody get this". We had sort of shaded from the former into the latter, and I think we're shading back. Plenty of people aren't shading back, and wondering what the hell everyone else is thinking, but I think it's just a combination of "gotta eat" and "I'll probably be fine" (which they probably will!)

The other day I found out that my there were a lot of cases at my institution, basically most of the digitization team (a bunch of the assistants share a villa) and no one informed us! I was being asked a few weeks ago to go in and prepare items for digitization so as to keep their team busy to which request I said no way and was backed by my line manager. They fucking knew and still they asked me to put myself at risk. It can wait until we open and I have plenty of things to do remotely. But I'm pissed.

Pola is as careful as I am which is a lot. When it gets to hot out for long walks I'll ask her over to watch a movie and something to eat. I've already asked if she'd be game for that and she said yes. I have another friend I'd ask over, my drinking buddy at the Rugby Club, but he's currently at his farmhouse in Yorkshire. He's looking to get back as soon as the flight restrictions are lifted (and he really has to get back soon for tax purposes). Then I figure I'll wait two weeks and get a better read on how careful he is and invite him over to drink beers and watch TV. And that's basically it for the foreseeable future.

Here on the Roc, no domestic cases for more than 50 consecutive days. They're slightly relaxing mask rules on public transport (may be removed if the vehicle is reasonably empty) but I expect people will voluntarily keep things tighter than required.

to hot s/b too hot, of course.

I can't see going to eat at a restaurant anytime soon. I really miss it. And outside seating is not an option when it's already getting hotter than 110 here in the afternoon. Maybe by October.

to attend in 10-child pods spread throughout all three district schools
I have this vision of schoolchildren swimming gracefully up and down the Ohio, occasionally hurling themselves playfully into the air in bursts of youthful energy.

Berlin is seeing about 20 new cases daily in June, out of a population edging close to 3.8 million. I guess we're still getting some degree of community spread, and of course there's the whole dark-matter thing of asymptomatic carriers. On the other hand, it's down in the range where contact tracing and isolation are possible.

Masks basically universal (and mandatory) on public transport now; masks also required in stores, and the number of people allowed in a store is also limited according to the floor space. We've done some outdoor restaurant meals, but I don't think I'm ready for indoor yet even though it is officially permitted. Bars are also open, but the rest of Berlin nightlife is still shuttered, and I wonder how much of that will come back at all. More likely, the current incarnation goes out of business and in a safer future someone else sets up shop to meet the demand. Schools are struggling to figure out what to do in August when the 2020-21 year is supposed to start. Too many unknowns.

And all of that with a national-level response that has been generally very good. I am sorry for my imaginary friends who are contending with the opposite.

8, 21: There comes a point where most people are going to say "I can't live like this. Fuck it. If I die, I die." I personally can go maybe another month.

29: We could have completely crushed the disease if governmental institutions weren't broken. If we'd spent the equivalent of GDP on fighting it that was destroyed by it, it would already be over.

Things are moving steadily back to normal, except for WFH whenever possible, here in Austria, which doesn't seem crazy given that we're seeing about 20-60 new cases per day (8m population), slowly decreasing, with under 1% test-positive rate.

Not sure if I'm an example of magical thinking here or what, but we're starting to plan summer travel to both Portugal (flat/maybe slightly upward COVID trend, but from a fairly low level) and the USA. We'd be visiting Massachusetts (good trend) and Maine (not so good), and at both places basically just quasi-isolating with family/friends. Obviously the flights/airports are a concern, but it doesn't seem that crazy. Or does it? I'm thinking we should maybe get antibody tests now, because it does seem possible we had it early, and that would make things much less stressful.

36: Do you have easy access to antibody tests? We don't. I have no plans to get them, because we were told that the length of the immunity was unclear and that if we got a positive test from a private lab, we had to present to Occ Health for a PCR test. Maybe they're concerned that you would be tested at the midpoint during an infection when you have both active viral shedding and are starting to produce antibodies. In any case, since I work at home now, would prefer to limit my time on public transit and don't want to make an unnecessary trip to the hospital, I'll hold off on that for now.

You could drive to Portugal, but I wouldn't fly.

37. Last I heard, antibody tests were giving about 30% false negatives, so not my priority either.

I think it's just a combination of "gotta eat" and "I'll probably be fine" (which they probably will!)

I think these are the words people use to themselves, but I think under that there's a second layer of "I use people around me as a barometer of what's safe to do, and everyone is acting like it's safe to resume nearly-normal life, and they don't seem to be dropping down dead." (Nearly the same as the death knell for Nancy Reagan's DARE, except replace "resume nearly-normal life" with "pot".)

28- I thought that meant double up on two methods not use two condoms. And if you can get a condom to rub a hole in a diaphragm, congratulations.

I remember stern warnings about not using two condoms. Perhaps I should have been more specific. Anyway, that's the doubling up that's more analogous to my parents' double masking. They're not wearing one mask plus one, uh, breathing straw that stretches up to the ceiling?

I wear a mask and safety glasses and gloves. For shopping, not sex.

What about shopping for sex?

Puritanical MA isn't opening those stores until a later phase. Except for those that sell six foot long items.

I haven't been wearing gloves to the store. Mostly I just wash my hands.

I haven't, either. We did put them on for rest stops on the way to my parents' house.

The school thing is crazy. Lower student teacher ratios and schools like Brookline are planning to lay off teachers due to budget cuts.

There is no possible way the math adds up unless they hire a bunch of very low paid temps of some kind or just say f it everything is online until we can have larger classes.

I'm kind of assuming in-person classes happen in the fall here. My sanity depends on that happening for a couple of months.

It drives me crazy that our local schools (like Heebie's and so many others) seem to be planning based on what they can do with existing buildings and lower budgets, and then getting really creative on how they can get computers and internet and free meals to people after they decide that school needs to be in pods or cohorts or totally online or something else utterly unsatisfactory. How about getting creative on how we can have in-person school? Because a) my six year old does not do online school and b) if I am working, then he needs someone watching him. And most of our district is MUCH more precarious than I am. And I fail to see how it makes any public health sense to declare school too dangerous, but throw up their hand about what happens to the kids outside of school. This is something that requires money and centralized planning, not school boards being creative as the local tax base disappears. All of which makes it very hard to care about how careful we are this summer, but I am nonetheless not entering buildings except home.

Case rates have been varying between about 1,400 and 1,700 and change here for awhile. And they just announced a 4 phase re-opening plan from June 15 with the final phase on September 1st which seems very premature to me. The 4th phase includes educational institutions so I suppose it means my place will be open but it seems transparently rushed to coincide with the beginning of the school year and not based on sound epidemiology but what do I know. I do know my behavior will not change though I may have to go in to work.

I mean we still have one of the highest case rates per capita in the world.

I thought it was kind of weird that the response rate was under 10% (550 out of 6000?), and I wonder what that means about the bias of the respondents

Seeing some twitter chatter that folks didn't participate because dates vs virus control didn't make sense to them.

53.2 to 51 and I'm not an epidemiologist.

They're just ZERO national conversation about locating extra funding for schools. Granted, there's been a lot of very-needed conversations on other topics for the last two weeks, which has used up the bandwidth. But this is a giant slow motion trainwreck with disastrous consequences. "Hey, I need to adjust my work schedule at the Amazon warehouse because my kid is home on MWF now?" I mean please.

Being a good teacher requires training, but the non-classroom hours could be spent with well staffed tutors at break out rooms or something. You've just got to massively increase your workforce, and there is zero conversation, let alone battle of political will, on the obstacle of $$. It's making me so fucking irate.

(And we will be fine. I mean, my personal situation will be shitty because the childcare will fall to me while I'm trying to do my own job, but at least I can opt to partially teach from home.)

55: Yep. And the local people tell me to be patient and wait and how can I object to plans that aren't made yet. But the local people are all being "practical" and so working within existing constraints. And no one seems to want to say that existing constraints mean a disaster in the fall. Unless your plan is that all women quit their jobs and single parent families become impossible.

We have large numbers of teacher training candidates who could be put in extended practicum hours to help. We could bring in tutors. We could find empty retail space to repurpose. But it would all take money and time, and if we don't start this conversation soon we will have to default to somehow parents make it work. And I don't know how to even start it.

And in the meantime my university decided to "spread out" their schedule to create time to deep clean classrooms every few hours. So now I am scheduled to teach during school pickup, if school pickup is even a relevant concept. And I'll be fine. But I will bet that every single faculty parent now has a schedule that used to be workable with school schedules and now isn't. And aftercares will not be open.

My sister in healthcare in CT had been diagnosed with mild covid (but no PCR test, her doc said just stay home). She just got an antibody test and it was negative. Doctor said "10% false negatives with this test" but that sounds optimistic, not sure I would rely on it. I've heard the 30% figure elsewhere but I have also heard there's a certain "wild west" aspect to antibody testing, with lots of tests provisionally approved without any real data on whether they work. Nonetheless, I also went ahead and got an IgG antibody test yesterday. I had had flulike symptoms in late March which probably were flu (despite flu vaccine and negative flu test during my illness), but I've wondered ever since so I finally did it. Should get results in a couple days.

My state, SC, and my county in particular, which has a tourist economy, are setting records for new cases nearly every day. Wheeee!!! It's almost like "let's open up first, and then we'll take care of the virus after" was the wrong plan.

And more to the point of this post, we are still pretty much homebound. My wife had gotten as far as finding cheap flights to her family in Louisville for her and the two boys but then backed out, thinking they might pick up something during air travel and carry it with them. Now she's considering driving (11hours). I would probably stay here. Kids would rather be going to gyms and/or getting jobs, but for now we're not allowing either, which means they spend the day on video games, essentially. Fall is a total mystery, especially with local cases rising exponentially (with a very high exponent this week!).

The Looming Fall Catastrophe makes me more optimistic about November. (Sorry for your suffering, but you know, it's your fuckup to unfuck.)

We are doing outdoor meet-ups with friends again. I think we've had 3 playdates with xelA in the past 3 weeks, and we met up with my Uncle in a park. All with people we know very well. The kids are not consistently maintaining a 2 metre distance, but they are being pretty good about not touching each other.

I also went out drinking with some friends on Friday. Our local pub is open for takeout, so we walked there, bought some beer in plastic containers, and then walked round to an orchard by the river, and sat outside drinking for a few hours. That was pretty amazing. We were still doing the 2 metre distancing, though, no handshakes, no-one sharing food or drink.

I think it's fair to say that social distancing is becoming more and more patchy here. I don't think many people are meeting up indoors much, yet, but pretty big groups, with no real distancing, are everywhere.

One of the families we met at the weekend for a playdate, two of their kids started back at school yesterday. As per Thorn above, they are in little 8-10 kid pods.

I really want to go to the bar, which has one little table set outside because there's not much sidewalk. But I won't because we're still shutdown and because my stomach is still rejecting beer.

"We're still shutdown" means that if I went to the bar and got the Covid, I would hear of it from now until the day I died.

60: same here. We went into town and had a pint standing outside a pub in Soho, 5m away from all other people, and it was GREAT. And we've had a few outdoor meetups - gardens and rooftops.

My employer's just asked for 30 volunteers to start working from the office three days a week in order to "gather information on the potential challenges we may face". We need a futile gesture at this stage. It will raise the whole tone of the war.

3 new cases on 4,000 tests. We have 2 people in the hospital statewide. There are now 55 active cases -- one in this county, and I think they've been unable to link it to anything specific. Nearly half of the active cases are in or near the Crow Nation, another quarter in nearby Billings, many involving the jail.

Two of the 3 new cases, though, were in Gallatin (Bozeman) which has been the worst hit in terms of positives -- but only 1 death and 152 recoveries. They were at 0 active cases, but it's now back up to 11. Is it the BozAngeles thing? Maybe.

Outdoor recreation still closed to non-locals on CSKT tribal lands.

re: 63.last

My wife is going into her shop tomorrow, and I think maybe Thursday, too. Unfortunately, she is being made redundant (99% certainty, will know 100% in about an hour), but she still has to do some stock transfers and pick up her stuff.

One of my colleagues is in our office today. We moved offices the week of the lockdown, so I think he is in today and tomorrow supervising the delivery of some things that were in storage. None of us are planning to be in the office for a while, though. Although I'm starting to miss spending time with my boss. We do a lot of bouncing ideas off each other around a white board, and knocking each others ideas down, academic style. I would imagine, possibly, towards the end of summer, maybe popping in for the odd day. The new office is small, but it has a balcony, so we could probably do a bit of brainstorming there around a whiteboard, while basically being outside.

Good luck for your wife on finding a new gig that works for her.

62: On the bright side, that might only be a few weeks.

Semi-obsessively tracking the daily cases and deaths here - it's falling but slowing. A very basic extrapolation now looks like minimal new cases per day by the end of the month.

I am trying not to be too optimistic based on this: https://unherd.com/2020/05/oxford-doubles-down-sunetra-gupta-interview/ but it is very tempting. This is the German idea of "immunological dark matter" - that there is a significant share of the population who are immune (either due to COVID exposure or due to exposure to a related but less serious coronavirus) but don't show up on serology. Still, "professor of theoretical epidemiology" is not to be sneezed at.

OK, 64 was yesterday's update. Today it's 6 new cases on 1500 tests. 4 in Gallatin, 2 in Big Horn (Crow Nation?). We now have 5 people in the hospital, which isn't good news at all.

Bozeman is nearly as far from me as DC is from NYC, and Big Horn is farther away from me than Pittsburgh is from NYC. So there's a level of artificiality to viewing places where folks are testing positive as "here." We do kind of live with the man-made constructs of state borders, though, and there's a level of 3 degrees of separation that makes it work.

2nd 66.

Big Horn County has now had more positive tests that Missoula County, despite having only a bit more than a 10th of the population. The fact that Big Horn is 60% Native is, imo, the entire explanation for this.

Yeah, I hesitate to complain because Cassandane and I can both do all of our jobs from home, we only have one kid, and since she's only 4 (5 by the time the school year resumes) it's easy for us to stay on top of her academic benchmarks, and that right there leaves us better off than 90 percent of people, but it's not great.

We try to social distance. This weekend wasn't great on that front. On Saturday we went to a protest downtown. On Sunday we had a friend over for brunch Cassandane went grocery shopping and stocked up as much as she could. On Monday I got my hair cut. (For whatever it's worth, the friend lives alone and has been good about social distancing, and the barber lives across the street from me and wore a mask the whole time.) We're definitely being good about it for the next two weeks because that's when we're flying to California to see Cassandane's parents. We'll see how crowded airplanes really are these days.

In addition to the usual reasons to see family, it'll be easier to socially distance in a rural area like their town, and we hope they'll be able to help with Atossa. It's not a great idea but we figure it's the best of several bad options.

68: The linked article on Gupta (taken by itself) seems a bit hand-wavy and infused with motivated reasoning. Her main piece of evidence is that every place has roughly the same viral death trajectory. Eyeballing Drum's charts, I think I see some significant differences, though your eyeballs may vary.

Still, Gupta acknowledges that New York City was different. She offers this:

"When you have pockets of vulnerable people it might rip through those pockets in a way that it wouldn't if the vulnerable people were more scattered within the general population."

Maybe. Or maybe New York reacted differently than other locations.

This reads very oddly to me:

"Remaining in a state of lockdown is extremely dangerous from the point of view of the vulnerability of the entire population to new pathogens. Effectively we used to live in a state approximating lockdown 100 years ago, and that was what created the conditions for the Spanish Flu to come in and kill 50m people."

That's counter-intuitive, and requires a bit of explanation. None is forthcoming - though maybe that's the fault of the reporter rather than the professor.

I wasn't familiar with the publication, but its mission statement is of a sort that I distrust:

UnHerd aims to do two things: to push back against the herd mentality with new and bold thinking, and to provide a platform for otherwise unheard ideas, people and places.

It goes on in this vein, making a special point of saying that its views are neither of the right or left. This might be a faulty heuristic, but I tend to take with a grain of salt the contents of any publication that can describe its mission over six paragraphs without saying something about telling the truth.

I've read a few things with Gupta and they make no sense to me. I'm not in any way medically qualified, though. But all reads a bit "Spiked".*

* UK specific reference, I think.

I'm having a hard time thinking of mobilizing to fight a world war as 'approximating lockdown.'

Or demobilizing. Or having mass gatherings to celebrate (or mourn) the outcome.

When they say they are deep cleaning things to prevent the spread of Covid, does that actually do anything?

re: 75

Quite. And social mobility and the amount of social contact 100 years ago was super high. Does she think that 20th century London, or New York, say, was like some medieval peasant village in which no-one travelled or regularly met anyone except the same 50 people.

Her explanation of why New York might be different seems ... bullshit. I'd want to know why New York was different from Seoul, or Tokyo, or Berlin.

More inequality and Mets fans can't be expected to understand the need to not lick doorknobs.

Obviously the flights/airports are a concern, but it doesn't seem that crazy. Or does it?

Does to me! I'm not even contemplating international travel until next year, (assuming current infection trajectories continue) and certainly not by plane before then. Are you even going to be allowed in to Portugal? Last I heard they hadn't set a date for reopening the border even with Spain, let alone outside the EU.

Austria and Portugal still in the Union last I checked.

I always get the kangaroo one and the Hitler one mixed up.

Fair. Commonwealth, Reich, practically the same word.

Speaking of never, Mossheimat is being forced to the IMF for the first time. Stings more than I expected.

Ha, misread Australia for Austria. Less insane, then, but I still wouldn't do it myself. I don't really do summer holidays anyway, though, so that might be colouring my opinion a bit.

I have wondered if NY just literally got unlucky. I've been reading that the variation in how many people each case infects is very high -- lots of people infect no one or one person, a few people infest dozens. If we randomly got hit with with a statistically unlikely number of super-spreaders in February and March, that seems like it might be enough to explain a lot of the difference between NYC and other places that weren't hit nearly as hard.

We were slow to lock down, but not that slow.

My wife's back in the shop, and it has customers inside again -- no longer curbside only -- so that's our primary infection concern. Otherwise, I've only visited grocery stores since the lockdown, but we've scheduled next Th/F off for a day hike in the local, just reopened, National Forest.

I am planning on joining a few friends for a weekly RPG campaign, probably inside, in a week or two. It's nowhere near as tight as just two people meeting, and given the length of roleplaying sessions we're not planning on staying masked throughout. It's probably not the wisest and entailed some negotiation with my wife; I won't be heading out for food if there's a mid session break -- restaurants still seem much more worrisome to us both, however many cleaning promises are made -- though the state is (foolishly, it feels) allowing dine in at reduced capacity.

85: Perhaps simply the densest American city? I expect equivalently dense poor-world cities will eventually fare worse.

86: How's the Moosequeen doing?

81:It'd have been nice if the Romans and ancient Germanic folks had gotten together and agreed to not have their respective words for "southern" and "eastern" sound so similar.

10: I'm glad you're masking up more. It's still quite concerning when somebody runs by, but even if it's just a social good--a statement that we're all in this together and should be watching out for each other--there's value to that.

Not socializing is easy when you don't know anyone else in your city. Sucks, of course. We've taken a few more walks but that's it. Then again, I'm going to try to go to a protest tomorrow, since there'll be one in a nearby square (Parliament and the US embassy are too far away). So I guess I'm not consistently being irrationally overcautious.

85: Trump's snap European travel ban forcing everyone to cancel their vacations and fly back immediately in one wave seems likely to have been that superspreader source -- if nothing else, they kept every cooped up in the airport after their return too. (Weren't there the stories of the long lines and no social distancing as they tried to pass people back through screening and customs?)

Technically, Pennsylvania is a commonwealth. It means that every resident gets $10 off their federal income taxes.

87: I guess, but we're not really that different from Boston or Chicago, and things were much worse here.

90: Yes. Incompetence is an ethos.

This isn't the most helpful comparison since average population density is an awful measure of experienced density, but NYC has double the population density of Boston and triple that of Chicago.

88: She's doing well, thanks! She actually had a legitimately good day of sales on Saturday, which came after she was a part of a brief TV interview about the challenges of reopening safely. A number of regulars mentioned that seeing the piece on the news was the push they needed to fight inertia and get out of their house. Many picked something up -- enough that the light restocking that she's been doing with the suppressed demand left the store looking a bit picked over by the end of Sunday.

Part if it too was that she'd staffed for the slow sales we'd been having, not the normal+ sales that we actually had, so she and the other employee hustled most of the day. Being busy is a huge help in distracting from the otherwise dire "this is how stores die slowly" musings that plagued her during the very slow days of curbside and after the first day or two rush of in store sales.

92: You're much denser. Our major superspreader event involved a bunch of educated and entitled Biotech executives. My theory is that New York housing is so small that people socialize out of their homes that much more often than we do in Boston.*

Also, it got introduced in New York first, so Boston had the opportunity to say, "Let's not turn into New York."

*Basing that on a comment Bave made when he was here for law school.

76: In our case "deep cleaning" I suspect means "wipe down the desks and chairs and boards and computer keyboard with disinfectant". Which is more theater than useful given students interacting all over campus, but can't hurt. And it does seem to mean that they are going to hire people to do it, rather than asking all professors to please sterilize their classrooms on the way out.

Chicago has an alarming amount of land given over to quarries.

97: Adjuncts.

Big Horn County has now had more positive tests that Missoula County, despite having only a bit more than a 10th of the population. The fact that Big Horn is 60% Native is, imo, the entire explanation for this.

Have people seen the COVID Tracking Project's Racial Data Dashboard? Some of the states have really astounding disparities.

The county map in Utah is quite striking. Don't have to look anything up to know that San Juan County must have a lot of minorities in it.

That's where the Utah portion of the Navajo Reservation is.

95: Good to hear.

Unherd has some silly-clever Right wing contrarianism but it also publishes worthwhile pieces. I climbed off the bus on that dark matter immunology story at the same point as everyone else -- anyone who thinks that the later stages of a world war, followed by mass demobilisation, is a lockdown, has not got their head screwed on right.

A demob suit is like a hazmat suit?

104: And even leaving aside the lack of anything resembling a lockdown, how does a lockdown abet the spread of disease? Or is the claim that a lockdown makes disease more deadly? Native Americans were in a sense locked down from smallpox -- until they weren't. Is that what Gupta is trying to say? If so, that's dumb as shit.

Even in cosmology, I'm suspicious of dark matter. It sounds like a conspiracy to me -- like all the physicists all got together said said, hey, these equations work out beautifully -- all we need is for 90% of the universe to be undetectable. Any day now, I'm expecting the bastards to "discover" that pi is exactly equal to 3, and that Pluto is a planet again.

Like a hazmat suit, except that it protects you from women of low morals -- it's the suit you got issued on leaving the army.

They also got a hat and a standpipe.

106. Nature paper this month about improved survey looking at dispersed baryons suggests that the problem was poor detection technology.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2300-2.epdf?fbclid=IwAR2sqZ-2ssL1X_RVrvSdM-LUud512tJDyi8-ki5SxyhD75sQUk8Tm7ABKRk

I think density is highly overrated as an explanation for why NYC's first wave was so bad. It's just not the case that density has played a key role elsewhere in where the outbreaks were the worst. I think number of travelers from Lombardy played a much much bigger role. 790K people per year fly from Milan to JFK. Miami is second for US destinations at 175K/year. Third is Newark at 145K/year. That's your whole explanation right that.

109: Fake physics!

My guess is that NYC had a lot of traffic from Italy right when everything hit the fan, it's a big city with lots of things like conferences, and time matters a *lot* when dealing with exponential spread. The earliest place hit hard in Utah was Park City -- due to travelers at ski resorts and bars. One more week would have taken us all the way through spring break, and we shut down March 12.

106: OMG, dark matter is not a conspiracy. It has occurred to approximately every physicist that maybe the large-scale laws of gravitation are wrong. If they are, and you are the one who figures out the right ones, you will be the most feted physicist since Einstein. The Nobel Prize will be the least of your rewards.

The preponderance of evidence is that dark matter is real. The initial evidence was that galaxies are heavier than expected, but you can potentially explain that by modifying the laws of physics, so it was unclear. But then physicists realized that if you have two galaxies that collide, the collision will affect the dark matter and regular matter differently, and they can measure the difference. They did the measurement for such a collision, and it fit dark matter.

It's also easy for a theory to generate a candidate for dark matter. Theories created for other reasons tend to lead to the prediction of dark matter. The current leading theory is axions, which were proposed to solve a completely different puzzle, but could also explain dark matter.

109: That's actually an unrelated problem, called the missing baryon problem. Dark matter is not baryonic. Physicists know there is more baryonic matter than they can account for just by looking, but also, they know that there isn't enough of this missing baryonic matter to explain why galaxies are so heavy. The missing baryon problem is less glamorous, because it could just be something boring, like a diffuse intergalactic gas.

I thought all the good physicists were working on modeling bouncing breasts for video game companies.

I mean, present company excluded.

106 is a fantastic, if inadvertent, Walt-troll.

String bikini theory.

113: Informative, thanks! cite for colliding galaxies?

115 is how dark matter gets created.

118: The original measurement was the Bullet cluster.

So, apparently they were having such a hard time making sense of our new Missoula case -- first in over a month -- that they had the person retested. The original test was a false positive.

So, the 13th chime of the clock. How many other false positives are out there?

There was an apparent false positive in rural Alaska recently. A retest came back negative, as did tests of about half of the village population.

Thank god Walt responded before I read that and my head exploded.

In the off chance there are any academics here who haven't already seen it, please look to the broader interwebs for discussion around #ShutDownAcademia, #ShutDownSTEM, and #Strike4BlackLives and consider taking tomorrow off academic work to focus on activist work. It's become a whole thing in a way I did not anticipate. The arxiv is on board, as are a bunch of department chairs and deans and whatnot. Hopefully it will lead to more than one day of conversations.

We're all consultants now.

essear!

essear!

I just got an email saying we may partially reopen with reduced staff, activities, and visitors at the beginning of July. We have consistently had new cases between 1,300 and 1,800 daily. We've flattened but the curve is not bending down. I don't like this one bit.

116: It was explosive essear-trolling, but I threw myself on the grenade. Because I'm a hero.

And now your dark matter is all over my goddamn monitor. Thanks, hero.

I'm having a hard time thinking of mobilizing to fight a world war as 'approximating lockdown.'
Or demobilizing. Or having mass gatherings to celebrate (or mourn) the outcome.

That really puzzled me - the only way I could make it make sense was that she was using "a hundred years ago" as a rough term, and meant "in the early 20th century there was, in general, lockdown, at least at an international level, because you couldn't just get on an airliner in Wuhan and be in London the next day; the journey would take about three months".

That makes sense as a charitable explanation, but she was talking explicitly in the context of the Spanish flu. That is not "100 years ago" as a vague term. And, although it is before air travel, it's also a time of the mass transport of armies all over the place, a notorious spreader of epidemics.

But she's saying - I think - that that's why, when WW1 and the Spanish flu happened, it was so devastating - because it was hitting a world that up until that point had been in effective lockdown.

There's also this recent Guardian interview https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/05/the-costs-are-too-high-the-scientist-who-wants-lockdown-lifted-faster-sunetra-gupta which is more focussed on her view that the cost of lockdown outweighs its benefit for everyone under about 75 or so; quotes Mark Woolhouse at Edinburgh who is kind of midway between the extremes and wants a lockdown for the most vulnerable only, for mainly economic reasons.

This seems to be the dark-matter argument again:

She suspects that while physical distancing and the lockdown have helped suppress the epidemic, infections may have waned because of people's natural resistance to the infection, for example through antibodies that fight related coronaviruses which cause common colds - but which would not necessarily show up in Covid-19 antibody tests. "The epidemic has in many places displayed a pattern which suggests it's been brought down by natural processes, which does not just include acquired immunity, but perhaps cross-protection from having other related viruses, and possibly some innate level of resistance to start with," she says.

I think everyone would agree that the detected level of seroprevalence is a minimum; there are going to be a few false negatives, and the idea of cross-protection doesn't sound ludicrous either. Neither does innate immunity. There are virtually no pathogens IIRC that don't meet some level of innate immunity in humans.

133 That's contrary to just about everything I've read. There seems to be near universal agreement among virologists and epidemiologists that we have no innate immunity to this. She seems to be an outlier here.

||

Curious to hear NW's take on the latest revelations regarding the assassination of Olof Palme.

|>

Barry, this from last month https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/01/opinion/sunday/coronavirus-vaccine-innate-immunity.html is mostly talking about nonspecific immunity from other vaccinations, but there seems to be quite a lot of interest in it. People like Robert Gallo are at least not dismissing it out of hand.

134- I think you mean we have no adaptive immunity. Innate immunity is the nonspecific first-wave response of the immune system to infection- fever, inflammation. Adaptive or acquired immunity is the antibody system that recognizes specific pathogens the immune system has seen before.

Further as 135 suggests- the argument is that if you've had other vaccines in the last few years your innate immune system is revved up to deal with something new even though the vaccines had nothing to do with making antibodies to the new viruses. One argument for why kids are less affected. Very young kids naturally have a higher innate immune response because they have to for survival as they don't have much adaptive immunity developed yet.

the only way I could make it make sense

American journalists have this same problem with Trump -- they are in the business of making things make sense, of telling a coherent story. This is why they often fail to convey the president's incoherence.

You and I treat Gupta the same way, but even the most charitable interpretation -- mine in 106.1 and yours in 130 -- is gibberish.

Gupta's reasoning is worse than a mistake. It's an analogy. Gupta compares the isolation of populations from other populations to the isolation of individuals from each other, and even by her own logic, gets it exactly backwards. It was the inefficacy of the "lockdown," in her analogy, that led to the Spanish flu pandemic -- not the lockdown itself.

Native Americans were in a sense locked down from smallpox -- until they weren't. Is that what Gupta is trying to say? If so, that's dumb as shit.

This bit actually is not dumb as shit. Native Americans were locked down from a load of diseases (not just smallpox), and so were extremely immunologically naive, and when Europeans arrived they suffered huge losses. If there had been regular contact across the Atlantic all the time, there wouldn't have been huge epidemics of diseases brought from Europe. Or, at least, not as many. Because the Americans would already have encountered milder related diseases, so when the nasty variants came along a lot of them would have immunity.

I kind of feel that I should err on the side of assuming that the professor of theoretical epidemiology knows what she's talking about here. And, to be clear, some of her peers are disagreeing with her, but none AFAIK are saying that she's talking gibberish, they're just saying that they think her assumptions are wrong.

This bit actually is not dumb as shit. ... I kind of feel that I should err on the side of assuming that the professor of theoretical epidemiology knows what she's talking about here.

I absolutely have given Gupta every benefit of the doubt. The problem is, a point arrives where there is no longer any doubt. When you say something that is indefensible, it doesn't matter that you're a professor. I'm not sure how I can be more clear than 138.last, but it is absurd to analogize the historical isolation of populations over centuries to the deliberate isolation of individuals over weeks and months. Saying that we should be exposing people to Covid-19 in order to suppress the disease is gibberish.

And let's not forget that Gupta didn't even provide the Native American example. That was me trying to pluck some element of coherence out of nonsense. Again, Gupta:

"Remaining in a state of lockdown is extremely dangerous from the point of view of the vulnerability of the entire population to new pathogens. Effectively we used to live in a state approximating lockdown 100 years ago, and that was what created the conditions for the Spanish Flu to come in and kill 50m people."

The idea that isolating people for a period of weeks or months will increase the vulnerability of a population to a disease is ridiculous. It took centuries of isolation, along with the absence of vaccines and treatments, to devastate Native Americans. And guess what? Europeans didn't have an easy time with smallpox either, but even they had enough goddam sense to quarantine individuals.

For the record: I really do understand that dark matter has been satisfactorily demonstrated. I endorse the reasoning that led astronomers to declassify Pluto as a planet, and do not believe they would capriciously alter that classification. I know that mathematicians would not screw around with pi.

But I have to admit, the initial journalistic reports of dark matter did make me suspicious. As a layman, it looked to me like it could be a case of data-fitting. (Our measurements work if we assume a universe suffused with spherical, invisible cows.)

But in that case, I really was prepared to defer to authority because the smart people were saying it's true -- and they weren't literally talking about spherical cows, the way that Gupta is spouting obvious nonsense.

I think Pluto should be classified as a planet but not Mercury.

Also, as a society, we've decided to just go ahead and bring on the worst case scenario for Covid. Or at least as close as you can get to the worst case without mandatory open mouth sessions with coughing people.

without mandatory open mouth sessions with coughing people.

Don't be too hasty. This is basically a good description of a church service.

So, 6 new cases: 4 in Gallatin, 2 in Big Horn. No longer a single active case in Montana west of the Continental Divide. Obviously, we should socially distance from the Atlantic Ocean.

Glacier is re-opening, but only west of the Divide. There are no active cases on the Blackfeet Nation, but they don't want you coming there anyway, and the Park Service is deferring.

[Oops, 8 new -- 6 in Gallatin. It's probably an out-of-state zillionaire thing, but they're not really telling . . .]

A gentleman never does.

I wonder what the impact a year off with have on bears and wolverines.

The marmots will have to learn to live without stealing chips from the careless.

I need to go west. I haven't been to the Rockies since 1992 (unless you count changing planes in Denver).

I need to save up and get my well and an electrical rv panel put in so I can just go up there with a little trailer and not be dependent on whether the campgrounds get opened.

It's pretty on-brand for Trump to take advantage of the chaos to legalize bear baiting.

Before I looked it up, I was thinking "bear baiting" was being used in the older way.

The ambiguity was intentional.

I draw the line well before dogs and bears, but I still don't see what's wrong with cock fighting.

Mech fighting between sentient robots, that's where the action is.

I think I'd rather fight a mecha-sized bear than a bear-sized mecha.

I don't like birds much, except at a distance or cooked.

cock fighting

No, that's Delaware Chancery.

152: The changes, published in the federal register on Tuesday, roll back 2015 prohibitions adopted under President Barack Obama. They open the door for hunters and trappers to take:

• Black bears, including cubs and sows with cubs, with artificial light at den sites.
• Bears using bait.
• Wolves and coyotes, including pups, during the denning season.
• Swimming caribou.
• Caribou from traveling motorboats.
• Black bears using dogs.

Bears who have artificial den lighting, bears using bait, and bears using dogs are asking for trouble. Caribou traveling by motorboat also.

A caribou who owns a motorboat is probably a Republican so I'm surprised they're targeted.

Bummer of a motorboat, Hal.

62 - nice one ajay, I thought I was the only one old enough to remember "Beyond the Fringe"

63 now; it was 62 a minute ago, honest.

Re:124, Heebie do you have any insight into whether there's anything productive to be done in terms of getting UT to rename RLM tower?

Just be sure they don't take off the last part only.

Does this mean I don't have to keep washing my hands?

165: that's a great question. I will inquire.

167: Similarly, Kevin Drum keeps posting these things about how shutting down schools is irrelevant to transmission, and I don't understand.

169: Exactly. No-one pays attention anyway.

169: He also said that closing churches didn't have an effect. I find that really hard to believe in general, but I think it would depend on the particular style of worship. I mean, shaking hands to pass the peace is likely to lead to transmission. Singing seems to. Opening your hands to receive bread and then drinking from the same cup also seem like they would lead to transmission. We were going to use a lot of hand sanitizer before we shut down and stop the wine, but if you kept up with the regular services, I think it would be problematic.

169,171: Kevin Drum says a lot of things, for which I forgive him on account of his many years of sensible posts.

At my church, ever since the coronavirus hit, we now each have to have our own separate snake. No more everybody handling the same couple of snakes, that's how infections get around.

They didn't like the bleach wash?

Are the masks a problem for rolling on the floor and speaking in tongues?

159: No, that's Chuck Tingle.

Kevin Drum keeps posting these things about how shutting down schools is irrelevant to transmission, and I don't understand.

There are a few ways this could be true:

Say you're an adult, and sick. If the schools are closed, your healthy kid will have to stay at home with you, and will get sick. If they went to school all day, they'd not be around you and so would be less likely to get sick. In-school transmission is stopped by closing schools, but in-household transmission is enhanced.

It's possible that in-school transmission was low anyway, because the minimum infective dose for kids could be very high. Much higher than it is for adults. So maybe an adult who spends ten minutes talking to a sick kid in close quarters gets sick, but a kid has to spend half an hour face to face with a sick person to soak up enough virus to get sick. Even if there's one sick kid in the school, no other kid is going to spend enough time in close proximity to that sick kid to get sick themselves. But you close the schools and send that sick kid home, and they're hanging around their parents all day, dosing them up with more virus than they would have passed to any single other kid - and it takes less virus to get an adult sick anyway.

I think the big problem with church services would be the mass singing. Surface contact transmission seems to be less of a risk. But the congregation singing a hymn basically is Moby's mandatory open mouth session with coughing people.

They are all-in on the idea that schools don't spread COVID here. They only closed schools in the first place because there was basically a nationwide parent strike -- parents collectively decided to stop sending their kids -- and when they reopened schools, the government's statement was a whiny "We didn't want to close them in the first place."