Man Not Sure He Can Take Another 6 Weeks Of Barely Following CDC Guidelines https://t.co/UM8m8o0lQx pic.twitter.com/sgsx5577sq
— The Onion (@TheOnion) May 1, 2020
• • • google suggested • • •
• • • some of the things I read in antisocial isolation • • •
A Trove of Sad, Funny, and Familiar Stories From the 1918 Flu Pandemic
A UCLA librarian has built a remarkable collection of century-old letters, diaries, and photographs.
“The package may be small, but you will know it does not need to hold the love I send, for that cannot be confined,” Hildreth Heiney wrote to her fiancé in 1918. The man in the photograph, identified as John, may be her brother. Embiggenable.
ON NOVEMBER 21, 1918, AN Indianapolis schoolteacher named Hildreth Heiney wrote to her deployed fiancé, Sergeant Kleber Hadley, about the sudden appearance of face masks in response to the global influenza pandemic. “Yes, I wore one, and so did everybody else,” she wrote cheerfully. “There were all kinds—large and small—thick and thin, some embroidered and one cat-stitched around the edge.” An order to wear masks in public had just taken effect in Indiana, and Heiney seemed to take it in stride. “O, this is a great old world!” she went on, poking fun at funny-looking mask-wearers. “And one should surely have a sense of humor.”
Heiney’s colorful letters are part of a remarkable collection of “personal narratives, manuscripts, and ephemera” about the 1918–1919 flu in the biomedical library of the University of California, Los Angeles. There are letters from California mayors about influenza death rates; Thanksgiving postcards written by children; and laconic Yankee diaries, such as this tragic entry from a Mrs. Slater: “Rained. Spent the day home. Veree Clark died of influenza. E.F. King’s wife funeral. Buzzed wood home.”
Russell Johnson, a curator of history and special collections for the sciences at the UCLA Library, says that he created this intimate collection “from scratch.” Originally slated for a career in behavioral neuroscience, Johnson ended up in library school instead, where he studied the history of neuroscience and medicine. “I fell in love with cataloguing,” he says.
These soldiers from Fort Riley, Kansas, were hospitalized for influenza at Camp Funston.
Today, the influenza collection includes boxes of original letters, diaries, and photographs from 1918 and 1919. In these century-old artifacts, civilians and military personnel recount harrowing and sometimes humorous experiences of life in the shadow of influenza. Many of them have special resonance in the time of COVID-19. Atlas Obscura asked Johnson how he amassed the collection, what unique lessons can be learned from these personal stories, and what became of a soldier named Alton Miller. …
Why the Coronavirus Is So Confusing
A guide to making sense of a problem that is now too big for any one person to fully comprehend.
On March 27, as the U.S. topped 100,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19, Donald Trump stood at the lectern of the White House press-briefing room and was asked what he’d say about the pandemic to a child. Amid a meandering answer, Trump remarked, “You can call it a germ, you can call it a flu, you can call it a virus. You know, you can call it many different names. I’m not sure anybody even knows what it is.”
That was neither the most consequential statement from the White House, nor the most egregious. But it was perhaps the most ironic. In a pandemic characterized by extreme uncertainty, one of the few things experts know for sure is the identity of the pathogen responsible: a virus called SARS-CoV-2 that is closely related to the original SARS virus. Both are members of the coronavirus family, which is entirely distinct from the family that includes influenza viruses. Scientists know the shape of proteins on the new coronavirus’s surface down to the position of individual atoms. Give me two hours, and I can do a dramatic reading of its entire genome.
But much else about the pandemic is still maddeningly unclear. Why do some people get really sick, but others do not? Are the models too optimistic or too pessimistic? Exactly how transmissible and deadly is the virus? How many people have actually been infected? How long must social restrictions go on for? Why are so many questions still unanswered?
The confusion partly arises from the pandemic’s scale and pace. Worldwide, at least 3.1 million people have been infected in less than four months. Economies have nose-dived. Societies have paused. In most people’s living memory, no crisis has caused so much upheaval so broadly and so quickly. “We’ve never faced a pandemic like this before, so we don’t know what is likely to happen or what would have happened,” says Zoë McLaren, a health-policy professor at the University of Maryland at Baltimore County. “That makes it even more difficult in terms of the uncertainty.”
But beyond its vast scope and sui generis nature, there are other reasons the pandemic continues to be so befuddling—a slew of forces scientific and societal, epidemiological and epistemological. What follows is an analysis of those forces, and a guide to making sense of a problem that is now too big for any one person to fully comprehend. …
RELATED: Coronavirus antibody tests aren’t as accurate as they seem
THE SIM
Antibody tests for SARS-CoV-2 are hard to interpret. Many health experts agree that the tests, which search a blood sample for signs of past infection, are key to reopening the economy, calculating the true death rate of Covid-19, and estimating how close we may be to “herd immunity.”
But the results can be misleading, even when the test performs as advertised (which is often not the case). The trouble is, when the prevalence of an infection in a population is low, the total number of people who receive false positives can match or even exceed the number receiving true positives.
Confused? Allow 1,000 of our friends to explain: …
How the face mask became the world’s most coveted commodity
The global scramble for this vital item has exposed the harsh realities of international politics and the limits of the free market.
If Ovidiu Olea is astonished by the fact that he’s gone from being a finance guy to a mask mogul in four months, he shows no sign of it. The transition started innocuously. Late in January, when the coronavirus spread beyond Wuhan, Olea decided he would buy masks for his staff. He lives in Hong Kong, where he runs a payment technology firm. His staff isn’t large – just 20 employees – but finding even a few hundred masks proved hard. Part of the problem was that last year, after protesters in Hong Kong used masks to hide their identity, the Chinese government restricted supplies from the mainland. Before the pandemic, half the world’s masks were manufactured in China; now, with production there shifting into overdrive, that figure may be as high as 85%. If China isn’t sending you masks, you likely aren’t getting any at all. We have no masks, local pharmacies told Olea, but if you find some, we’ll buy them from you.
Olea got to work. In a journal article, he read that epidemiologists spoke highly of N95 respirators, masks that filter out 95% of small particulate matter. Stealing time out of his day job, Olea began phoning N95 suppliers in Mexico, Turkey, Indonesia, Ireland. Each one turned him down. “The answers ranged from ‘No’ to ‘We only sell to accredited buyers’ to ‘Come back next year,’” Olea told me. After three days, Olea found a South African firm named North Safety Products, which had 500,000 masks in stock. Olea bought them all, at less than a pound per mask, certain that he would be able to sell the surplus.
During their conversations, North Safety Products executives warned Olea to be careful. There were “interested parties” lurking outside its factory gates, ready to bribe truck drivers for their cargoes. Olea hired a security detail to ride alongside his truck of masks as it drove to the airport in Johannesburg. (He sent me a photo of the team: six grim men packing pistols and rifles, clad in camo and bulletproof vests. “They asked if I wanted machine guns as well. I thought not. We’re not invading Lesotho. Let’s keep it reasonable.”) In mid-February, two weeks after he placed his order, his shipment touched down in Hong Kong. Within six hours, the buyers he had signed up had collected nearly all of the masks. “Even if I’d had 5m masks,” Olea said, “I’d have sold out.”
Olea, who has a keen nose for business opportunities, quickly became possessed by this new line of work. Since February, as the pandemic has streaked around the planet, he has bought and sold on another million N95 masks from North Safety Products. In March, Olea became a middleman for Chinese-made three-ply masks, too, the simple kind that just about everyone everywhere is now opting to wear. He sold masks to the Hong Kong government, to European countries, via their diplomats in Hong Kong and China, and to European companies, which wanted them for their employees. All told, Olea reckons he’s sold about 48m of them.
By April, Olea decided he might as well take the next step. He bought a mask-making machine from a Chinese manufacturer: an eight-metre-long assembly line, which shapes and cuts sheets of plastic into masks. When I spoke to him, in mid-April, I was reading about mask prices close to £6 a pop, and Olea was waiting with giddy excitement for his machine to reach him. He was still running his payments firm, and masks were a departure from that work. “But these are weird times,” he insisted. “We all must do something to survive.” …
PREPARE TO SPEND A WHILE; it’s The Long Read.
Spa Treatments That Went Nightmarishly Wrong
Spas are meant to be places of relaxation, where the stress, strain, and something else starting with ‘S’ in your life just disappears in a cloud of incense. Meant to be, because as these stories show, spa treatments have the potential to leave you off way worse than you were before you walked through the door …
5. Two People That Contracted HIV, Got “Vampire Facials” At The Same Spa
In recent years, a new beauty trend has taken off among celebrities, influencers, and lifestyle websites like Goop called a ‘vampire facial’ — in which a patient’s blood is smeared across their face to benefit from some mystical age rejuvenation properties. It sounds insane, but would Goop support something like this if it was bullshit? Yes, a thousand times, yes.
As you can probably figure, science doesn’t have a place in this process or the technique. But it should at least be involved in the clean-up, right?
In 2019, the New Mexico Department of Health announced that two people who received vampire facials at the VIP Spa in Albuquerque tested positive for the same strain of HIV. Unless they were involved in the same unprotected three-way, that means the spa was more than likely the origin site of their infection.
According to the DOH, the issues with this spa — which has since closed — were first raised after it failed a health inspection and was found to be putting clients at risk of contracting bloodborne infections including HIV, Hep B, and Hep C.. The two cases of HIV were discovered after a sweep of the spa’s client list by the DOH; during which time they tested the blood of 100+ people that received a treatment. Free counseling was offered to anyone afflicted — even though the only thing that could really prevent this from happening in the future is deleting Instagram off of everyone’s phones. …
UNRELATED: Alex Jones’ Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Month
The coronavirus situation has brought out all kinds of craziness in people who might otherwise have been perfectly fine. Conspiracy theorists are having a field day, but with one notable exception — the patron saint of dumb conspiracies, Alex Jones.
Jones has had a hell of a month. Due to a combination of ongoing court stuff and the media’s (thankfully) newfound reluctance to give him much attention, you may have been tricked into thinking he’d been quiet lately. But, we’re going to start with a deposition and barrel straight through into ass-eating, so buckle up.
Trying to put a wrap on his Sandy Hook trial, Jones claimed under deposition that he’d been going through a, quote, “form of psychosis” when making all the false claims about the Sandy Hook shooting being a conspiracy. He’s effectively stating that after further investigation, he believes there was a mass shooting where children died. The bravery. Well, at least he’s admitting he has problems, and that’s the first step, right?
Wrong. He’s back in the saddle, not caring about children again. His ex-wife, Kelly Jones, had to take his ass back to court because lo and behold, he brought their kids to a rally full of unprotected people in Austin, Texas. Kelly didn’t want to let the kids go back to their dad after finding out — so he drove over and picked the girls up from her place without Kelly noticing. She asked for an emergency 14-day custody of the kids, out of caution over the coronavirus so that Alex could be sure he wasn’t infected. That would make perfect sense, but this is the world of Alex Jones, so that request was denied. …
Cholera and coronavirus: why we must not repeat the same mistakes
Cholera has largely been beaten in the west, but it still kills tens of thousands of people in poorer countries every year. As we search for a cure for coronavirus, we have to make sure it will be available to everyone, not just to those in wealthy nations.
Flooding in Sana’a, Yemen, where a cholera outbreak is ongoing.
We log in every day at 7.45am. One by one, we join an array of faces on our screens. We doctors aren’t used to video-conferencing like this, and still greet each other with excited waving hands. Since the coronavirus crisis began, these daily virtual meetings have proved an invaluable way to keep up to speed on clinical guidelines, in-house protocols and staff wellbeing – all of which are changing every day.
But these meetings also bring us news that we take more personally: how many of our patients have symptoms? How many have tested positive? How many have died? These are important questions, for sure, but my public health training reminds me to think globally. The coming year will see developments that will allow us to bring the virus under control in the west, but what about in other countries? I cannot help but think of my relatives in India, and what this pandemic will mean for them – not just now, but in the future. The really important question is not who will die of coronavirus tomorrow, but in 200 years’ time.
For coronavirus is not the only pandemic the world faces. There is another one raging right now. Since cholera first spread across the globe, two centuries ago, it has killed about 50 million people. In the time it takes you to read this article, another five people will have died from it. It is now mostly ignored in the west, but in other parts of the world, it has never gone away.
While I will surely be able to offer my patients in England a coronavirus vaccine in a year or two, and while western health systems will be reinforced to be more ready for a potential future outbreak, I worry that we may repeat the mistakes of cholera: conquering coronavirus everywhere except for the poorest parts of the world. …
PREPARE TO SPEND A WHILE; it’s The Long Read.
SOMEWHAT RELATED: The degrowth delusion
To abandon growth is to declare an end to progress. Socialists must reject the politics of eco-Thatcherism.
We are standing still. That was the conclusion of BP’s chief economist upon the release of its latest statistical review of energy—the annual report that all global warming specialists hold as the gold standard of climate and energy data. He was referring to a chart that stopped him cold. It showed how in 2018, the non-fossil share of the global energy mix was the same as it was in 1998, the year the UN Kyoto Protocol was agreed.
More than two decades of climate diplomacy, carbon pricing, and, in recent years, a record build-out of variable renewable energy such as wind and solar, with very little so far to show for it all. We have barely moved.
The democratic socialist explanation for this state of affairs should be fairly straightforward. If the market is left to its own devices, there will continue to be an incentive to produce any commodity so long as it is profitable, regardless of what we know of the harm that good or service may inflict. Fossil fuels are perhaps the contemporary example ne plus ultra of such irrational production.
Meanwhile, if we know something to be beneficial, so long as that good or service is not profitable, or even insufficiently profitable, there is no incentive for it to be produced, again outside of some non-market intervention. Here, the most acute example of this form of irrational production lies in the realm of public health, where the retreat by large pharmaceutical firms some three decades ago from research, development and production of new classes of antibiotic due to their poor return on investment has threatened humanity with the rise of multi-drug resistant bacteria. Researchers and public health officials warn that we may be entering a ‘post-antibiotic era’ of medicine, in which even minor surgery becomes impossible, and infection-related mortality rates return to those of Victorian times. …
‘A reckoning for our species’: the philosopher prophet of the Anthropocene
Timothy Morton wants humanity to give up some of its core beliefs, from the fantasy that we can control the planet to the notion that we are ‘above’ other beings. His ideas might sound weird, but they’re catching on.
Tim Morton, ecologist and philosopher.
A few years ago, Björk began corresponding with a philosopher whose books she admired. “hi timothy,” her first message to him began. “i wanted to write this letter for a long time.” She was trying to give a name to her own singular genre, to label her work for posterity before the critics did. She asked him to help define the nature of her art – “not only to define it for me, but also for all my friends, and a generation actually.”
It turned out the philosopher, Timothy Morton, was a fan of Björk. Her music, he told her, had been “a very deep influence on my way of thinking and life in general”. The sense of eerie intimacy with other species, the fusion of moods in her songs and videos – tenderness and horror, weirdness and joy – “is the feeling of ecological awareness”, he said. Morton’s own work is about the implications of this strange awareness – the knowledge of our interdependence with other beings – which he believes undermines long-held assumptions about the separation between humanity and nature. For him, this is the defining characteristic of our times, and it is compelling us to change our “core ideas of what it means to exist, what Earth is, what society is”.
Over the past decade, Morton’s ideas have been spilling into the mainstream. Hans Ulrich Obrist, the artistic director of London’s Serpentine gallery, and perhaps the most powerful figure in the contemporary art world, is one of his loudest cheerleaders. Obrist told readers of Vogue that Morton’s books are among the pre-eminent cultural works of our time, and recommends them to many of his own collaborators. The acclaimed artist Olafur Eliasson has been flying Morton around the world to speak at his major exhibition openings. Excerpts from Morton’s correspondence with Björk were published as part of her 2015 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Morton’s terminology is “slowly infecting all the humanities”, says his friend and fellow thinker Graham Harman. Though many academics have a reputation for writing exclusively for their colleagues down the hall, Morton’s peculiar conceptual vocabulary – “dark ecology”, “the strange stranger”, “the mesh” – has been picked up by writers in a cornucopia of fields, from literature and epistemology to legal theory and religion. Last year, he was included in a much-discussed list of the 50 most influential living philosophers. His ideas have also percolated into traditional media outlets such as Newsweek, the New Yorker and the New York Times. …
PREPARE TO SPEND A WHILE; it’s The Long Read.
Struggling United States Purchased By Private Equity Firm https://t.co/6Wh88FjT78 pic.twitter.com/yADAaysqkb
— The Onion (@TheOnion) May 1, 2020
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
Pawnee’s most dedicated civil servant, Leslie Knope, is determined to stay connected to her friends in a time of social distancing. Sponsored by State Farm and Subaru. Donate to http://www.feedingamerica.org/Parksan….
THANKS to NBC and Parks and Recreation for making this program available on YouTube.
The CDC is issuing new guidelines in the fight against Covid-19. Hear why health officials now believe that if you got it, you should flaunt it.
THANKS to SHOWTIME and VICE News for making this program available on YouTube.
Bill recaps the top stories of the week, including the president’s sagging approval ratings and the decision by some states to reopen public spaces.
THANKS to HBO and Real Time with Bill Maher for making this program available on YouTube.
Bill shares a few fun “facts” about former vice president and 2020 Democratic nominee Joe Biden.
In his editorial New Rule, Bill argues that people should fight the coronavirus by strengthening their immune systems, rather than by sanitizing the universe.
Shake Shack founder and CEO of Union Square Hospitality Group Danny Meyer addresses the controversy over the PPP small business loan that Shake Shack applied for and returned and how the restaurant industry might look post-pandemic.
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Social Distancing Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.
Any big predictions for May?
Thanks to his revealing Tweets about the quality of this program, everyone knows that President Trump tuned in to A Late Show last night to watch Stephen Colbert’s interview with Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer.
THANKS to CBS and A Late Show with Stephen Colbert for making this program available on YouTube.
CAUTION: Some language may not be appropriate for work or children.
Here’s me and Mozza commentating on an epic pub brawl that occurred in Tasmania, Australia, January 2020. Seriously, drink responsibility, look out for ya mates, don’t punch them. Cheers, Ozzy Man & Mozza.
Not. The. Pouch.
箱に入ったらすごいんです。In fact, Maru is slim?
FINALLY . . .
Greenland Has a Grand Canyon Beneath Its Ice, Carved by Ancient Floods
Ancient topography lurks beneath the white expanse.
Northern Greenland is covered in rock and ice. The longest and deepest canyon on the landmass is buried miles below.
ON ITS SURFACE, GREENLAND DOESN’T exactly live up to its name. It’s very cold and covered in a massive ice sheet that’s nearly two miles thick in places. But beneath that sheet there is a giant, rocky island that wasn’t always frozen over, with an undulating topography of valleys and river corridors, including one canyon as deep as the Grand Canyon in places and longer than its famous cousin—spanning the distance from New York to Washington, D.C., twice over.
“The Grand Canyon is something you can stand on the edge and see,” says Benjamin Keisling, a geologist and lead author of a new study on the formation of Greenland’s canyon published in the journal Geology. “The Greenland canyon we only know about through radar that can see through three kilometers of solid ice.”
According to the study, the canyon in northern Greenland came to be through repeated heavy flood events that forced water through the bedrock. “The canyon has been mapped before by other teams, but it’s also been enigmatic why it exists, and what relationship it has with the ice sheet itself,” says Keisling, a geologist now at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, who conducted the work as a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. “We proposed a mechanism for how the canyon may have formed.”
Greenland’s massive canyon, the dark red-brown feature at center, is as big as the Grand Canyon, but entirely beneath the island’s ice sheet.
Temperatures on Earth have long fluctuated, most recently in the famous ice ages of the Pleistocene, which ended a little over 10,000 years ago. Over the course of many older fluctuations, dating back more than two million years, the Greenland ice sheet—the second largest in the world, to Antarctica’s—has had the chance to thaw, refreeze, and thaw again. Keisling’s team proposes that in times of rapid thawing, water may have collected in the depressed bedrock, and then broken through ice dams in diluvian outbursts, scouring the land with immense pressure. …
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Likely, if I find nothing more barely uninteresting at all to do.
Good times!
Need something more barely uninteresting at all to do?
Right now there’s one bird sitting on what appears to be a bunch of eggs. The other bird is absent, probably looking for something tasty to kill.
Ed. Yes, that’s a cut-and-paste of another day.
This Week's Onion Magazine: https://t.co/FozYi8zYVB pic.twitter.com/E9GYCy0zr3
— The Onion (@TheOnion) May 1, 2020
About Yesterday • • •
I was on strike yesterday in support of essential workers, so I rode my bike rather than cobbling up these errant ramblings barely uninteresting at all things.
Ironically, I was also scheduled to work.