onfocus

"Now that we have safe, effective vaccines, we can give people immunity without causing dangerous disease. That puts us into a global race against the virus. The more people who see the vaccine before they see SARS-CoV-2, the fewer severe cases, long-term health problems, and deaths. Faster worldwide rollout will save lives. It really is that simple."

A great explanation of why it's the novelty of the coronavirus that makes it deadly and explains some of its seemingly unique properties.

As Scientific American reported last fall, the drop-off in flu numbers was both swift and universal. Since then, cases have stayed remarkably low. “There’s just no flu circulating,” says Greg Poland, who has studied the disease at the Mayo Clinic for decades.

I wonder if masks could help with keeping flu numbers down post-covid.

"The good news is that this one is different. We now have an unparalleled supply of astonishingly efficacious vaccines being administered at an incredible clip. If we act quickly, this surge could be merely a blip for the United States. But if we move too slowly, more people will become infected by this terrible new variant, which is acutely dangerous to those who are not yet vaccinated."

Excellent snapshot of where we are with covid-19 and some good information about where we're headed, like this:

"Herd immunity is sometimes treated as a binary threshold: We’re all safe once we cross it, and all unsafe before that. In reality, herd immunity isn’t a switch that provides individual protection, just a dynamic that makes it hard for epidemics to sustain themselves in a population over the long term. Even if 75 percent of the country has some level of immunity because of vaccination or past infection, the remaining 25 percent remains just as susceptible, individually, to getting infected."

tl;dr: lots of light at the end of the tunnel but we're still in the tunnel.

"But daylight saving time doesn’t just fail to deliver the single most important benefit expected of it. It also generates a slew of harms. In the days following the onset of daylight time each March, there is a measurable increase in suicides, atrial fibrillation, strokes, and heart attacks. Workplace injuries climb. So do fatal car crashes and emergency room visits. There is even evidence that judges hand down harsher sentences."

There's also evidence that several programmers quit the profession every year because calculating date differences while accounting for hour shifts across time zones drives them out. But yeah we're not really getting energy savings through mass interference with our sleep schedules.

To Rowe, the doctor at Connecticut Children’s, it’s frustrating to see so much innovation in making vaccines, and so little in actually getting them to people. “How much money was put into the science of making the vaccine? How much money is being put into the distribution?” she asks. “It doesn’t matter that you made it if you can’t distribute it.”

Just over here screaming internally after every paragraph of this article.

"The study concluded that 'lifting [eviction] moratoriums amounted to an estimated 433,700 excess cases and 10,700 excess deaths' between March 13 and September 3. The infections and fatalities occurred across '27 states that lifted eviction moratoriums' during the study period."

This is what our entire national conversation should be right now. Where is congress?

"The countercultural movement’s pursuit of peace, love and understanding was a worthy goal. This time around, let’s make sure our quests for self-transformation and world-transformation are aligned."

My friend Stuart on the need for new ethics around mental health treatment with newly legal psychedelics.

"But it seems those who are asymptomatic may not be entirely free of changes wrought by the virus. MIT researchers have now found that people who are asymptomatic may differ from healthy individuals in the way that they cough. These differences are not decipherable to the human ear. But it turns out that they can be picked up by artificial intelligence."

Whoa if true. This is some living in the future stuff.

"The president’s aides appeared to be giving wealthy party donors an early warning of a potentially impactful contagion at a time when Mr. Trump was publicly insisting that the threat was nonexistent."

These are just the worst people.

"Our students in general have been extremely mindful of health issues and I hope that continues, not only for students but for community members throughout the county."

No, the university made the decision to open campus in a pandemic with full knowledge that outbreaks are happening at campuses across the country. They are risking the health of the community and they shouldn’t frame it as up to the students.

"Here we are, this is August. We are the only country in the world where we waste the most money on tests. Fix the reimbursement."

Gates has a great point here. If companies weren’t reimbursed for tests that take longer than 48 hours to return you’d start seeing results faster than 14 days which is next to useless.

"There are two key mitigation strategies for countering poor ventilation and virus-laden aerosols indoors: We can dilute viral particles’ presence by exchanging air in the room with air from outside (and thus lowering the dose, which matters for the possibility and the severity of infection) or we can remove viral particles from the air with filters."

Time to think about filtration and ventilation.