You give your cats a B+ when they don't finish the work? That's ridiculous grade inflation.
I let them grade themselves, and they don't bother to finish the self-reflection portion of the review.
yes, I thought cats were supposed to get an F for FU.*
*actually we've brought home a 2 month old kitten who is charming the pants off everyone except the dogs even though he seems to like to climb straight up bare legs.
It's clear to me that as a society, we are teetering on the edge of seismic changes. If only 10% of households were at risk of eviction, that would be alarming; in fact, it's easily north of 20%, probably around 40%.
If community spread were occurring in several states, that would be alarming. In fact, it's essentially everywhere.
If 10% of the working population were out of a job, that would be catastrophic. It's way worse.
The lived experience of those that survive in ten years is going to be markedly different than what we had been experiencing in the before times. We have everything we materially need in order for that new lived experience to legitimately be good and healthy and adaptive. But, since our political and memetic systems are so utterly corrupted, it seems more likely we'll devolve into an increasingly brutal and miserable police state.
This is like a forest fire, full steam ahead. And wherever there's human wood to burn, it'll do it.
No reason to, but even if you grant the grotesque charlatan fuckwads (and this includes you, Dr. Birx) their "embers" rhetoric. the embers were sill glowing in a parched, windy environment with tons of unburnt dry fuel everywhere.
After living in Europe for a pretty long time, I became pessimistic about its future versus the US -- it seemed permanently stuck in the shadow of the US. And then the US abruptly committed suicide.
It's more that part of America wanted the other part dead.
Here's another thing that freaks me out: over the summer, several major universities were planning on holding F2F classes. At the last second, they decided the covid case numbers were too serious, and they all switched to online.
Now we're all used to those numbers. The universities that are planning on opening up very soon are complacent to the same environment (actually worse!) that spooked them just two months ago. The difference is that it grew dramatically during June, and has not continued exponentially, so the shock has worn off and they can get back to the business being callous assholes.
Did you guys read this heartbreaking plea from a superintendent in Arizona?
It's like how people will reelect politicians based on rate rather than level- if unemployment is 10% and drops to 8% people think their leaders are great, if it's 4% and goes to 5% get the pitchforks. COVID cases are falling from 70k to 60k so everything thinks we're fine even though they freaked out when cases were at 1000 and growing to 10k (although the early numbers were surely underdetecting far more than now.)
Maybe this is commonly observed, but it feels like people have a deep and wide array of social and perhaps biological coping mechanisms that make us good at adapting to random tragedy and natural disasters, the ability to say "we can't do anything about it, we just have to grieve and move on," but now we use those mechanisms to cope with ills that governments could prevent or that they actively cause.
I think people have just internalized that's there's going to be a half million dead regardless.
9: I think of it as being "we only notice the first derivative, not the actual function values".
I thought this blogger made this point well. For context, she's letting her daughter attend outdoor cheer practice over the summer.
We were talking about our certainty about cancellation when Alexis made an observation. Last week, cheer practice was cancelled because of rain and thunder. They have always cancelled outdoor activities immediately if lightning strikes within 5 miles or something like that.
Rain isn't enough, but if there's thunder and lightning? CANCEL NOW.
Alexis looked up the stats on fatalities related to lightning. For the record, it's been around 30 per year in the United States for the past few years. Fatalities only account for about 10% of all people struck by lightning - another 90% have some degree of disability after being struck. Regardless, 30. Per year.
And now Grandma Alexis would very much so like to know why we cancel kid sports for a potential 30 deaths per year but not a pandemic that has taken over 150,000 American lives.
The lightening rule is because of the insurance policy.
Nobody suggest to Republican legislators that they just give sports groups immunity from lawsuits when kids get struck by lightening.
12- I hope someone asks Trump about that since the dumbass can't even read bar charts.
13- This is the other problem with human brains, that once something is solved no one thinks about why it was solved. Haven't had a pandemic in a century, who needs a pandemic readiness plan? Cases went down so why do we keep wearing masks? 30 people/yr die from lightning because people go inside when there's lightning!
13: I read something recently about that. The statistic "30 people killed by lightning each year" might look really low and therefore you might think that lightning is almost harmless, but the denominator of that fraction is all the people currently alive. If you narrow the population you're looking at down to people playing sports in the rain in wide open fields during thunderstorms, the denominator would be a lot smaller and lightning would look a lot more dangerous.
Not sure if that weakens or reinforces your blogger's point (if lightning is like COVID-19, not playing sports is like social distancing, I guess), but it's another example of why analogies are banned around here.
Certainly the hiking/backpacking people are all about lightening preparation. It's not treated as a small risk to anybody who has been outside in a storm.
National Weather Service says an average of 49 a year in the US. So the denominator there is the US population.
And by "outside," I mean outside with no way to get to shelter.
18: I'm pretty sure that's not the primary reason backpackers care about lightening things.
I'm a subscriber to Backpacking Light, but not Backpacking Lightning.
We're in for a continued rough time over the next couple years, but I think heebie's take is a little too pessimistic. There's no doubt that we will be dealing with this disease forever, just like we're also dealing with every other disease that has ever existed except one. But things change over time, a vaccine will help a lot even if it isn't 100% effective or doesn't confer permanent immunity, and dealing with it forever doesn't mean being in the current state of botched response and massive uncertainty forever.
I'm just a lab accident away.
24 is correct. All the news regarding the possibility of vaccines and immunity is good in the long run. The bad news is all regarding the Trump administration deciding not to control the virus in the short term, and taking advantage of the situation to sabotage the post office, sabotage the census, sabotage public schools, sabotage local government budgets, get people evicted, make small businesses go out of business, make colleges go out of businesses, force women to stay home and homeschool, cease all immigration indefinitely, etc.
I've been trying in conversations to gently let people in on the realities of vaccine development, manufacture, and distribution because I know lots of people are fragile and looking for glimmers of hope. But a shockingly large number of people I have talked with are at least hopeful that a vaccine could be finished by the start of the year and everything better by next summer which is maybe more likely than aliens landing with a cargo ship full of magic pills, but probably less.
I was just watching some biohacker (with A LOT of earrings) livestreaming and it was... something. I tried to gently correct him in the chat when he said something egregiously wrong and he was defensive about how he was right and you just can't argue with that. Supreme overconfidence and self-experimentation, what could go wrong? OTOH he's probably used to dealing with people watching these things who are totally scientifically illiterate so I would probably also be inclined to dismiss comments, but then again I am actually aware of the limits of my expertise.
I was thinking of getting a chip planted in my head, to make it easier to interact with all my favorite brands.
27: I have talked with are at least hopeful that a vaccine could be finished by the start of the year and everything better by next summer
This is the scenario that Fauci is "cautiously optimistic about," right?
(I'm not a fan of him or Birx, for what it's worth. They benefit from the comparison to Trump, is all.)
24: "Every other disease except one" is a little overstating things. There's no longer humans getting SARS-COV1. The English Sweat disappeared from England after 1551 (though there was a related disease in Picardy for a couple centuries). That said, this one is likely to stick around for a long time.
I had English Sweat last June, I think.
30: Finding a vaccine with some degree of efficacy by the beginning of the year is possible. But that's just one step in a pretty long process even under the best of circumstances, including safety testing, validating manufacturing procedures, securing raw materials, establishing distribution infrastructure, figuring out how to pay for it, etc. And it isn't clear to anybody that a vaccine can even confer broad, long-term immunity instead of for a few months at a time or if it might have variable efficacy across subgroups or bad reactions with other comorbidities, etc. Everybody is flying blind. A big chunk of people will be hesitant to take a first-generation vaccine produced on a massively compressed timeline, and that hesitance won't be unjustified.
31: Yeah, fair enough. Also the number of diseases successfully eradicated by humans has actually been two since rinderpest was eradicated in 2011. But, you know, cows.
Pfizer is counting on it being a seasonal re-immunization wrt their revenue projections.
I do kinda think that endemic SARS-COV-1 may look more like other endemic coronviruses in terms of symptoms. The 1918 flu pandemic is still with us, H1N1 is the descendants of it, but it's not nearly as deadly now as it was during the pandemic. This is likely a combination of the protective effects of having gotten it before (which are especially strong if it was the first strain you got), together with perhaps the most virulent strains being outcompeted by the less virulent strains. I think it's pretty plausible that in the long run most people get SARS-COV-1 for the first time as a child and the vast majority get mild or no symptoms, and then subsequent infections look more like a cold. It's entirely possible that this has already happened before: the 1890 "Russian flu" was likely human coronavirus OC43 which now is just a cold. It'd still be more deadly with very old people, but viral pneumonia is already a huge cause of death among old people, some of which are already caused by coronaviruses.
In other terrible things, I thought to myself yesterday, "Well, how hard could it be to cut my own hair if I'm just running clippers over the sides and back? They have a guard on them. I have a college degree."
Harder than I'd reckoned, it turns out. At least if you're invested in the outcome. On the upside, nowhere to go anyhow. On the downside, all my work meetings are over Zoom. August is hat month, I guess.
Sorry, typo, SARS-COV-2, got confused by my previous post.
together with perhaps the most virulent strains being outcompeted by the less virulent strains
Yeah, one of the interesting things I've learned from reading up on this stuff recently is that it's maladaptive for a virus to be too virulent, at least if it confers long-lasting immunity, since it runs out of new susceptible victims. (It's also maladaptive for it to be too deadly for the same reason.)
Pfizer and viruses have similar incentives.
40: Also both encapsulated in a layer of fat and proteins.
The 1918 flu pandemic is still with us, H1N1 is the descendants of it, but it's not nearly as deadly now as it was during the pandemic. This is likely a combination of the protective effects of having gotten it before (which are especially strong if it was the first strain you got), together with perhaps the most virulent strains being outcompeted by the less virulent strains.Uh, I don't think this is accurate to the history. From the NHS: https://www.nhs.uk/news/heart-and-lungs/h1n1-traced-to-1918-pandemic/#:~:text=The%20new%20swine%20flu%20virus,medical%20and%20public%20health%20advances.
The new swine flu virus is a fourth-generation descendant of the 1918 virus. It appears that successive pandemics and pandemic-like events generally appear to be decreasing in severity over time. They say this is probably due to medical and public health advances.But also, for a pathogen to evolve, its lethality has to affect its ability to reproduce. In the case of SARS-Cov-2, since so much of spread is asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic, that seems .... unlikely at best. And last, the flu mutates quickly; SARS-Cov-2, by contrast, has proofreading/correction mechanisms in its genome that resist mutation.
All of this makes it (it would seem) unlikely that covid will evolve in any reasonable time-frame to become less lethal, nor (of course) less contagious.