Mrs Merkel sounded the alarm on Tuesday after announcing tough new restrictions including a lockdown over the Easter holiday.
“We basically have a new pandemic,” Mrs Merkel told reporters in Berlin in the early hours.
“Essentially we have a new virus, obviously of the same type but with completely different characteristics,” she added.
Unless the coronavirus gets the memo about evolution being only a theory, Coronapanic now, coronapanic tomorrow, coronapanic forever?
(Note that Angela Merkel has a Ph.D. in quantum chemistry, but the misogynists at the Evening Standard call her “Mrs.” and not “Dr.” as would befit a colleague of Dr. Jill Biden, M.D., Ed.D.)
A late-1990s photo from Munich. Note the cultural appropriation (“Chinesischer Turm”) and the sitting ducks for a respiratory virus.
From the same trip (visit to Siemens, a major adopter of our ArsDigita Community System software), tourists try to cram themselves into Neuschwanstein.
Looking at these photos how humans used to behave, what is most shocking is that viruses didn’t drive us into our bunkers centuries ago.
… a very small study using objective measures — weight measurements from Bluetooth-connected smart scales — suggests that adults under shelter-in-place orders gained more than half a pound every 10 days.
That translates to nearly two pounds a month, said Dr. Gregory M. Marcus, senior author of the research letter, published on Monday in the peer-reviewed JAMA Network Open. Americans who kept up their lockdown habits could easily have gained 20 pounds over the course of a year, he added.
Many of these people were losing weight before shelter-in-place orders were issued in their states, Dr. Marcus noted. “It’s reasonable to assume these individuals are more engaged with their health in general, and more disciplined and on top of things,” he said. “That suggests we could be underestimating — that this is the tip of the iceberg.”
3.5 percent identified as Black or African-American; about 3 percent identified as Asian-American.
What was the precise mechanism by which we went from fat to obese?
An earlier study by U.C.S.F. researchers looked at daily step counts, as tracked by smartphones, among nearly half a million people in nearly 200 countries. The number of steps people took declined by 27 percent a month after the World Health Organization declared the pandemic.
The concern about exercise also extends to children, who are known to pack on unhealthy pounds during the summer recess months when they are not in school. The risk is even greater for Hispanic and Black children than for white children, said Andrew G. Rundle, an associate professor of epidemiology at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, author of a recent paper that expressed concern that school closings would exacerbate existing racial health disparities.
My own recent efforts to diet with hushpuppies at Southern Soul Barbeque, a short walk from KSSI (St. Simons Island, Georgia, which also has an on-field hotel).
But why walk or waddle when you can drive? This car from Avis had ample horsepower (485, which is more than 2X the engine in a Cirrus SR20) for accelerating even the heaviest American into a low Earth orbit.
(There is no surer way to feel stupid than driving a Dodge Charger around a sleepy golf resort! It might have been smarter to take a crew car from the FBO.)
The coronavirus will never make it through our layers of blubber!
I wouldn’t recommended the experience for those who are anxious about COVID-19. While you’re constantly being reminded about how hazardous COVID-19 is, there isn’t enough room in the airport to be truly distant from those who are potentially infected. People sit glumly with their masks on, waiting to see how the Russian roulette game that they’ve chosen to play will turn out. Unless you believe in the effectiveness of crude non-N95 masks, it’s the same risk level as being in a crowded Miami club, but a lot less fun.
One of the great things about Internet, which even Facebook hasn’t managed to destroy, is that reader comments can be much more interesting than the original post. From RS:
Can we just say that about all other aspects of life? I would love if people who are anxious about COVID-19 would just stay home so the rest of us can get back to normal life. It feels like they’re holding society hostage so they can have the illusion of protecting themselves without having to do the one thing that actually protects them (staying home).
With a handful of exceptions (Florida, South Dakota, Sweden, Russia), it seems as though the coronanxious are in charge and able to force those who don’t mind coexistence with this virus and its myriad variants (the “covidiots”) into various forms of shutdown, mask theater, etc. The coronanxious have pretty much sat at home for a year anyway. It wouldn’t have cost them anything or increased their personal risk if they’d let the non-anxious carry on with their lives, education, and careers.
So that raises the question… why is it obvious that the coronanxious would prevail in setting government policy? (i.e., could we have predicted Mass Karenhood?) Is it because leaders tend to be old and therefore personally vulnerable? Is it because the restrictions imposed don’t hurt the elite and the elite are indifferent to the suffering imposed on the non-elite? (public school shutdowns aren’t a problem when your children and/or grandchildren are in private school…)
Note that more than 20 percent of Florida’s residents are over 65 (and therefore potentially vulnerable to COVID) while just 14 percent of Californians are over 65. So the COVID death rate among the elderly in Florida is almost surely much lower than in masked-and-shut California.
An objective measure of panic from one of America’s principal vendors of panic, the New York Times (March 18, 2021):
First of all, it is unclear whether the 1-5% hospitalized answer is actually “correct” if you consider “with Covid” to mean “could produce a positive PCR test”. With the CDC estimating that more than half of Americans have been infected with coronavirus, is it conceivable that COVID-19 means a 5 percent risk of hospitalization? We should have seen 2.5 percent of the folks we know carted off to the hospital (with a median personal network size of 472, the typical person should know 12 people who’ve been hospitalized with COVID). Leaving that aside. Casual inspection of this chart shows that 88 percent of Democrats overestimate the risk of hospitalization from COVID-19 while 70 percent of Republicans do. The journalists at the New York Times nonetheless report that “Republicans tend to underestimate Covid risks”. Based on the chart, it would be more accurate to say “Four percent of Republicans tend to underestimate Covid risks.”
In the 1970s, at MIT’s Center for Cancer Research, Phil Sharp discovered RNA splicing and revealed the potential of mRNA. … In the 1980s, Moderna cofounder Bob Langer, PhD ’74, was pioneering new ways to deliver medicines, including RNA—work that ultimately contributed to the development of the new vaccine. .. Noubar Afeyan, PhD ’87, another cofounder of Moderna and its chairman, got into biotech after earning his doctorate in biochemical engineering.
One thing that is awesome about the Moderna vaccine, at least for computer nerds, is that it comes from the building formerly known as “545 Technology Square,” the home of the MIT Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science labs. Awesome thing #2 is that production happens with the help of Ginkgo Bioworks, founded by Tom Knight, a titan of AI/CS research at MIT (also helped by a $1.1 billion loan to Ginkgo from the Trump administration).
As with previous issues of MIT’s alumni news (see COVID-19 and the MIT community), the March/April 2021 edition suggests that American elites aren’t been substantially harmed by either COVID-19 or coronapanic. There are many reports of deaths among the roughly 140,000 living MIT alumni, for example, but none mention COVID-19. MIT alumni die “peacefully at home” or succumb to cancer. Nobody seems to have lost a job or money as a result of coronapanic shutdowns.
Faculty at the 1998 graduation…
See also this New York Times story on how the elites managed to stay home, have everything delivered, keep their jobs, etc. Excerpt:
Czechs, who have dug out their sewing kits in recent days to take part in a DIY drive to create their own protective face garbs, after a regulation issued on 18 March made it compulsory to wear either a surgical face mask or other mouth and nose-covering apparel when in public, one of the few countries in the world to issue such a demand.
On Monday evening (23 March), the government announced that restrictions of free movement and business closures, which were supposed to end the following morning, will remain in place for another week, until 1 April. Education Minister Robert Plaga has said that schools are likely to remain closed until the middle of May.
While the U.S. and other countries are debating the potential value of a universal face mask rule in combating the spread of coronavirus, here in the Czech Republic that debate was settled weeks ago: it absolutely works!
Last month, at the earliest appearance of Covid-19 cases in this central European country of 10 million, the Czech government was among the first on the continent to shut down all non-essential businesses, impose severe restrictions on public gatherings, and close its borders. This society quickly adopted the physical-distancing and hand-washing regimen that has now become standard all over the world. But what sets the Czech Republic apart from almost every other country in Europe was the decision two weeks ago to require everyone to wear a face mask covering the nose and mouth at all times outside the home.
Today, when I venture out to walk my dog, I rarely see anyone on the streets of Prague without a face mask. Despite the inconvenience and discomfort of having to breathe through a mask, it has become a badge of honor and a form of social bonding to have one’s nose and mouth covered. Wearing a mask is a signal of each person’s willingness to play his or her part in this epic battle against the pandemic. Those who defy the law by carelessly pulling down their masks to drink a coffee or smoke a cigarette are subject to a hefty fine and also run the risk of being confronted and ostracized by fellow citizens. The government has now banned cigarette smoking outside, for this reason. With few exceptions — there are fools everywhere — it appears that most people here have embraced the universal face mask rule with a philosophy of shared determination and collective responsibility for preventing the coronavirus from ravaging this country.
There are clear indications that the extreme measures being enforced here — particularly the universal face mask requirement — are keeping down the per capita numbers of those who have tested positive for coronavirus, compared to many neighboring countries such as Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and of course Spain and Italy. So far, the Czech Republic has had fewer than 50 deaths from Covid-19.
Last month, the Czech prime minister, Andrej Babiš, sent out the following tweet addressed to President Trump: “Mr. President… try tackling virus the Czech way. Wearing a simple cloth mask, decreases the spread of the virus by 80%! Czech Republic has made it OBLIGATORY for its citizens to wear a mask in the public. Pls retweet. God bless America”
As an American who is witnessing the positive developments taking place in this small, tightly knit, socially disciplined country where everyone now wears a protective mask, I hope he listens.
Part of an email to family members from a PhD. in physical chemistry (like Angela Merkel!):
The mRNA vaccines (Moderna & Pfizer/Biontech) or viral-vector (vv) DNA vaccines (J&J, AZ/Oxford, Russian Sputnik vaccine, some Chinese vaccines) absolutely do inject foreign genetic material into our bodies and cells to produce the spike protein. Calling them a giant ‘genetic engineering’ experiment on tens of millions of people is appropriate and honest in my opinion, even if the manufacturers, governments and press don’t use that terminology for fear of a backlash against these vaccines. They are deliberately ignoring these scientific long-term questions, and would rather ‘sell us the vaccines’, due to their compelling short-term benefit-to-risk ratio, then call them a large-scale genetic engineering experiment on humans – but that’s what they are. (The AZ/Oxford and J&J vv-DNA vaccines use adenoviruses: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adenoviridae, with double-stranded DNA genomes).
I just wish some traditional vaccines were available today that use attenuated, non-viable SARS-CoV-2 virus itself to product the spike protein antigens so that my immune system can get trained! That would be so much less risky than injected mRNA or DNA into my body and cells, and hoping that this massive genetic engineering experiment on tens of millions of humans will not have any ‘off-target toxicities’, like the CRISPR genetic engineering experiments, which last years were shown to have fundamentally inevitable off-target affects in an inherently interactive 3D genome.
Another vaccine strategy would be to inject expressed spike proteins, if we can protect them from immediate degradation, rather than mRNA or DNA genetic code, as that would dramatically reduce the plausible, but unproven threat of genetic engineering on our germline, immune system or somatic cells. Note that neither of these vaccination strategies would prevent an immune overreaction with potentially increased autoimmune disease.
He recommends that anyone who has ever tested positive for COVID-19 and/or who has had a positive antibody test try to avoid getting stuck with the as-yet-unproven high tech vaccines. I’m not sure that this is practical given that governments may not allow the unvaccinated to leave their houses (but they’ll still be “free” to watch Netflix and Disney+). A more practical approach might to be travel to a country where one of the old-tech Chinese-developed vaccines is available. “Covid: What do we know about China’s coronavirus vaccines?” (BBC, January 14):
The Beijing-based biopharmaceutical company Sinovac is behind the CoronaVac, an inactivated vaccine. It works by using killed viral particles to expose the body’s immune system to the virus without risking a serious disease response.
By comparison the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines being developed in the West are mRNA vaccines. This means part of the coronavirus’ genetic code is injected into the body, triggering the body to begin making viral proteins, but not the whole virus, which is enough to train the immune system to attack. “CoronaVac is a more traditional method [of vaccine] that is successfully used in many well known vaccines like rabies,” Associate Prof Luo Dahai of the Nanyang Technological University told the BBC. “mRNA vaccines are a new type of vaccine and there is [currently] no successful example [of them] being used in the population,” Prof Luo adds.
Sinopharm, a Chinese state-owned company, is developing two Covid-19 vaccines, which, like Sinovac are also inactivated vaccines that work in a similar way.
Where to go? How about Dubai?
However, the United Arab Emirates, which approved a Sinopharm vaccine earlier this month, said the vaccine was 86% effective, according to interim results of its phase three trial.
Tried-and-true method Chinese vaccines are also approved in Serbia, Turkey, Ukraine, Hungary, the Philippines, and Indonesia.
Here’s your hotel in Turkey… (from a 2007 trip to Cappadocia):
Among the middle-aged, the folks I know who are most afraid of COVID-19 are the least likely to have received it. I wonder if this is why we hear so much about people who are upset by the government-run vaccine programs (the same folks, of course, want the government to take over additional sectors of the economy).
One 40ish friend lives in Southern California, sends children to an in-person private school (public schools are closed, of course), and is a lockdown denier. Rather than wait in his bunker for an army of Latinx essential workers to deliver what he needs, he has been a habitual in-person Walgreen’s shopper during our year (so far) of “14 days to flatten the curve”. He left his phone number for the pharmacists in case they had any extra vaccine doses, received a call the next afternoon, and had a shot 30 minutes later. Friends who stayed in their bunkers clutching N95 masks? They got maxed out web sites, infinite hold times on phone calls, and no vaccine.
A friend in his 30s regularly attends in-person social gatherings. His circle of irresponsible Covid-spreaders includes a dentist. The dentist called him in January and said “I made an appointment for you to get a vaccine. Show up tomorrow at 11 am.” He did and he is now vaccinated.
Friends who have been volunteering for various charitable organizations, accepting the coronarisk of various in-person programs, have all been vaccinated as “essential workers” or “first responders” or similar. Friends who’ve been cowering while denouncing Trump on Facebook? No vaccine for them because they don’t fit any favored category.
Consider the young American who doesn’t wish to become a test subject for a vaccine whose own manufacturer characterizes it as “investigational”. He/she/ze/they will still have all of the freedoms guaranteed to him/her/zir/them under the Constitution. It is simply that he/she/ze/they will not be able to work, leave the house, go into a store, get on a commercial airliner, eat at a restaurant, check into a hotel, etc.
From a vaccine-skeptical reader:
I’ve been thinking, since I now walk around in a Joe Biden sized mask, safety goggles and a winter hat, how easy it would be to find someone to take the vaccine on my behalf?
Vaccination sites can’t demand identification (“documentation”) because otherwise America’s 22 million (or maybe 29 million) undocumented wouldn’t be able to get vaccines.
Why wouldn’t it be practical to pay someone to get an additional vaccine and take home a vaccination certificate in an arbitrarily selected name? In fact, folks who are most enthusiastic about vaccines might be delighted to do this for a small cash payment. If two shots are good, maybe three or four shots are better. If there is some immunity from Moderna, why not add additional immunity from J&J?
In order to get a shot that he did not need, a healthy slender fit work-from-home 32-year-old whom I know volunteered for 8 hours at a vaccine clinic in northern California. “People are supposed to have appointments,” he said, “and prove this by coming with a printout. But nobody checks because we had no way to look up anyone’s name or what appointments had been booked. Everyone who said ‘I don’t have a printer’ got a shot.” Did young-looking people have to bring proof of conditions or status in order to get shots? “No,” he replied. “Restaurant workers qualify, so you might think that a pay stub should be required, but unemployed restaurant workers also qualify and they can’t be expected to have a pay stub since they’re not getting paid.” Anyone who identifies as an unemployed restaurant worker with an appointment, even if showing up with no documentation, will get a shot.
The work-from-home Shutdown Karen featured blaming “Latinos” in Assumption that masks are effective leads to conclusion that people of color are responsible for coronaplague went down the hill from his all-white enclave into Oakland to the vaccine clinic set up to ensure that “communities of color” get shots. He and his wife are in their 50s and reasonably fit. They were seeking afternoon leftover shots and found that the clinic was undersubscribed and happy to inject them. They then asked if their college-age and high-school-age children could come the next day. Appointments were made for these not-at-risk cower-at-home individuals as well. Nobody in the household has any reason to leave the house nor to be concerned about COVID-19 and yet all are now vaccinated.
It seems that the only Californians who can’t get shots are those who wish to follow the state’s elaborate guidelines and procedures.
Here’s my personal nominee for someone who should get a shot. A Samoyed is depending on her! (or was depending on her back in 2004 when I took the photo)
I’ve been referring to everything that happened prior to March 2020 as “BC” (Before Corona, not to be confused with “BCE” for years prior to Jesus’s birth). We’re just beginning Year 2 “AC”, therefore. Public sector workers have been mostly relaxing at home for a year, still drawing full paychecks, e.g., Boston Public School teachers. Should one of these folks fall ill due to COVID-19 or any other cause, he/she/ze/they will be paid via disability insurance.
What’s it like in the private sector? A housecleaner I know had to continue working, accepting whatever risk of COVID-19 was entailed, if she wanted to be paid. She’s around 60 years old and therefore has more age-related COIVD-19 risk than the average public sector worker (many of whom are eligible to retire at 50 or younger). She recently suffered a fall on a narrow staircase in a Beacon Hill home (these structures are fully compliant with all building and safety codes… of the early 1800s; see “For $20.5 million, Beacon Hill town house next to John Kerry” for an example) and broke both radius bones in her forearms. She’s unable to work, of course, and won’t be receiving payments from a disability policy. She’s expected to recover and has a lot of support from family (Brazilian immigrants), but the story made me reflect on the precariousness of a lot of folks’ existence.
(The teachers aren’t “relaxing at home,” you say, because they have to be present on Zoom for some hours each week? While down in Florida in January, I met a Massachusetts public school system employee nearing full retirement (early 60s). She didn’t enjoy being on Zoom so she began to use the months of sick leave she’d accumulated over the years. “It will run out by next fall,” she explained, “but the union says that I’ll be able to use days from the sick bank until I’m eligible for maximum retirement benefits in November.” In other words, she will have been paid in full for 1.5 years without having to get closer to the Massachusetts school than Florida and without having to appear on Zoom.)
Now that economic opportunities exist only when governors give permission, is it more important than ever to prepare young people for careers as government workers?
Loosely related, from February 19, 2021 in Waltham, Massachusetts:
We still have plenty of opioids for anyone who is depressed about losing a private sector job!
