As of today, the CDC says that the U.S. has had 20,732,404 “cases” of COVID-19. Multiplying by 8, that’s 165,859,232 (important to have 9 digits of precision when guessing wildly for #Science). The Census Bureau’s pop clock says that the U.S. has 330.8 million residents (though Yale says that the error bars on undocumented migrants are in the millions).
I’m not sure that we’ll ever get a better estimate so it is reasonable, in my view, to say that today was the day when the majority of Americans had been infected, at least to some extent, by the virus we call “COVID-19.”
For lovers of Antarctica exploration tales, The Impossible First is worth reading. Struggling to muster the energy to head out into a windy Boston January to walk the dog? The author, Colin O’Brady, walked into 50-knot headwinds in -25 degree temperatures while pulling a 300 lb. sled containing supplies for a solo unsupported unresupplied coast-to-coast trip, via the South Pole, across Antarctica.
An endurance athlete, the 33-year-old O’Brady was racing against 49-year-old Louis Rudd, who also managed to finish the trip. To me that was even more inspiring.
One thing I learned from the book is that if you have enough money you can do almost anything that you want in Antarctica, including sleeping in a heated tent at the South Pole. A.L.E., the Antarctic Logistics company, will arrange everything. Climb a mountain, hassle some Emperor penguins, or just walk from the ski plane to your tent.
The author is not a gifted writer and there are a fair number of flashbacks to only loosely-related mountain climbing expeditions (including Everest, way more crowded near the top than Manhattan during coronapanic). Feel free to skim this filler if you’re more interested in Antarctica than in the author’s personal journey.
One question is how people today are able to do the coast-to-pole-and-back or coast-to-coast trip so much more easily than the original explorers, notably Amundsen, Scott, and Shackleton. Today’s adventurers don’t need companions, dogs, ponies, depots, etc. Seemingly more often than not, they are actually successful in accomplishing whatever they set out to do. Is it because the modern ultramarathon athlete is way more fit than the heroes circa 1900? Is it because the routes are mapped and today’s travelers have GPS? Is it because they can travel with a thinner margin of supplies, knowing that if the weather turns against them or if equipment fails a helicopter or ski plane rescue is a Garmin inReach message away? [See Update below for the main reason; O’Brady traveled a shorter distance, starting and finishing via aircraft rather than via ship.]
The author sold clothing companies, such as Nike and Columbia, on sponsoring the project with the idea that his story would inspire kids and ordinary folks. Maybe they couldn’t climb Everest, but they could climb their Everest. With even young healthy Americans generally too afraid to leave the house, this is kind of funny to contemplate. Maybe the most that we non-athletes can take away from this is that we shouldn’t complain if we have to bundle up for a 15-minute evening dog walk.
Mindy the Crippler is never a whiner… (from this afternoon)
Update: Paul (see comments) highlighted this National Geographic article, which shows the vastly longer distance traveled by Borge Ousland in 1997. Ousland was solo, but sometimes used a kite to help move the sled.
Looking at a map of Antarctica, you might wonder how O’Brady’s 932-mile route can be considered a crossing of “the entire continent,” as he calls it, since it appears to start and end several hundred miles inland, especially compared to the much longer journeys of Ousland, Mike Horn (who completed a daring 3,169-mile solo kite-ski crossing of Antarctica in 2017), and others.
Ousland skied from water’s edge on the Ronne to water’s edge on the Ross. When he undertook his expedition two decades ago, this was considered the only way to claim a crossing of Antarctica.
“To me, Antarctica is what you see on a satellite map,” says Ousland, noting the ice shelves have been a part of Antarctica for at least 100,000 years.
But there is a continent somewhere under there, detectable with remote sensing equipment. In recent years, adventurers have begun claiming a crossing by citing this unseen “coast.” Some, in order to please sponsors and media, did this only after failing in their attempt at a full crossing. Suddenly an Antarctic “crossing” had shrunk in half.
… adventurers eager to shorten the feat quickly seized on the new abbreviated definition. An unsupported couple crossed in 2010, skiing 1,118 miles. A solo woman crossed (with two food drops) in 2012, skiing 1,084 miles. But O’Brady took the invisible coastline strategy to its extreme—his journey was nearly 200 miles shorter than these earlier trips, and the shortest route yet that anyone had claimed as a “crossing of the continent.”
Put another way, it’s not so much that no one had been able to cross Antarctica this way before, it’s that no one had defined a crossing in such achievable terms.
Maybe this is the athletic/exploration equivalent of “A good lawyer knows the law; a great lawyer knows the judge.”
Second of a series… near the peak of foliage season (mid-October) we decided to fly from Boston to Bar Harbor, Maine, following the shoreline, in a Robinson R44 helicopter. Tony Cammarata was in back with a door removed (frosty!) and a Nikon D850. Instrument student Vince Dorow was with me in the front seats.
Here are some of the images, in 8K resolution, starting just north of Portsmouth, New Hampshire:
The 226-room Cliff House just south of Ogunquit (maybe one of the COVID-19 billionaires will purchase this as a personal quarantine residence for the next round of mutant virus?):
From my moles in the retirement-industrial complex (a.k.a. “Mom and Dad”)… Two CVS technicians showed up to their “independent living” retirement apartment building in Bethesda, Maryland yesterday with the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine. They started at 9:00 am. Each of the 250 residents came downstairs and proceeded through a waiting room, then to get stuck, then to a rest area with juice and cupcakes (because it is like giving blood?) for 15 minutes. CVS packed up and left at 1:00 pm (31 shots per hour per technician).
Mom and Dad report no side effects of any kind, not even soreness at the injection site.
There does not seem to be any effort made to track who is vaccinated. Maybe that’s impossible in a country without a national ID card system, as is conventional in Europe and Asia. My parents were supplied with paper cards inscribed with pencil and instructed to bring the cards back for the second shot (my Dad already lost his or maybe was never given one). (I am inferring that if there were some sort of tracking database that my parents wouldn’t have to bring the physical card to the second shot appointment.)
France injected 352 people in all of 2020 (i.e., if you include the staff, for whom CVS had stopped by the day before, about the same number of people got vaccinated in my parents’ building as in all of France for all of December)
This Statista bar chart has been suggesting for months that the all-cause death rate in Sweden for 2020, a year in which the country gave the finger to the deadliest virus within the memory of Humankind, will be lower than the death rate in 2010, an unremarkable year from a disease point of view.
90,487 residents of Sweden died in 2010, when the population was 9.34 million (Google). The population today is 10.4 million (Statistics Sweden, a government agency).
The 2010 death rate applied to the 2020 population would be consistent with approximately 100,750 deaths.
The Statistics Sweden folks make fine-grained death data available for download. The latest iteration, released today, shows 95,022 deaths for all of 2020. However, it seems that the data are incomplete starting on December 21. If we normalize Dec 21-31 with averages from 2015-2019, we would expect Sweden to experience an additional 1,846 deaths in 2020, for a total of 96,868 (i.e., well below the 100,750 who would have died if the 2010 death rate occurred).
[Update: The January 18, 2021 version of the spreadsheet shows 97,941 deaths for all of 2020. More than the above guess, but still occurring at a lower rate than in 2010. It seems that the 2022 versions of the big official spreadsheet describe 98,124 deaths (sum Column G in Table 1), which is still a lower number than the 2010 death rate applied to the 2020 Swedish population size (as noted above, the result would have been 100,750.).]
It will be worth checking back in a couple of weeks for the near-final 2020 number. (The Swedes will publish their final number for 2020 on February 22, 2021, seven weeks after the end of 2020. Their U.S. counterparts at the CDC, published their final numbers for 2018 in January 2020, 13 months after the end of 2018.)
Summary: the Swedes sent their unmasked children to school, sent their unmasked selves to work, sent their unmasked selves to the gym and social events, and generally went right into November before losing their nerve (adopting masks on public transport and cutting “public events” (not private house parties) back to 8 people max). They’ve emerged from what in most countries was the Year of Coronapanic with their psyches, civil liberties (freedom to gather, freedom to travel), education, and work skills intact. They’ve suffered more deaths than in some previous years (but maybe partly this was due to having fewer-than-expected deaths in the most recent years), but have had a lower death rate than they had in 2010 and they’re not even on the first page of countries ranked by COVID-19-tagged death rate.
(What does a moderately northern place with a big city look like when the Church of Shutdown is worshipped and the Ritual of the Mask is observed? The Maskachusetts COVID-19 death rate per 100,000 people is 182 (CDC). Sweden’s rate is 86.)
Separately, for those who are interested in questions of government efficiency, particularly in a declared time of crisis/emergency .. I sent a question to the Statistics Sweden public email address using the World’s Greatest Language (i.e., not Swedish). It was the middle of the night there. I received an English-language answer at 9:47 am Swedish time the next day, also in the world’s greatest language. The answer, from Tova Holm, addressed the apparent discrepancy between the Statista numbers and the spreadsheet numbers (Statista’s chart was correct, but based on an earlier version of the spreadsheet), pointed me to specific sheets within the Excel file, etc.
Readers: If you emailed a U.S. government agency with a random question, how long would you expect to wait before receiving an answer? (Probably not worth asking what would happen if we turned the languages around and queried the U.S. government in Swedish!)
First of a series… near the peak of foliage season (mid-October) we decided to fly from Boston to Bar Harbor, Maine, following the shoreline, in a Robinson R44 helicopter. Tony Cammarata was in back with a door removed (frosty!) and a Nikon D850. Instrument student Vince Dorow was with me in the front seats.
Here are some of the images, in 8K resolution, starting in Newburyport, Massachusetts and going through Hampton, New Hampshire:
Up through Rye, New Hampshire:
and then to Portsmouth, New Hampshire:
I’m also working on an 8K YouTube video, tied up for some time in a copyright dispute due to scammers downloading public domain music from musopen.org, rolling it into profit-seeking YouTube “albums”, and then claiming it as their own original copyright material. (The copyright claim seems to be cleared now, but YouTube’s servers are still crunching away to build 4K and 8K versions.)
The push by American progressives to have Joe Biden’s incoming administration forgive $50,000 of student debt per borrower is deeply stupid, but at least clarifyingly so.
More polite language fails to capture the absurdity of singling out college attendees for an unprecedented $1tn transfer of wealth — equivalent to the total spent on cash welfare in the last 40 years. The top sources of US student debt are professional business and law degrees. [Brookings]
(The comparison to “cash welfare” is misleading because nearly all U.S. welfare spending is officially “not cash” and, for Democrats, “not welfare”. A person who gets a free “means-tested” house, a free “means-tested” health insurance policy, free food via SNAP/EBT, and free phone service via Obamaphone is not “on welfare” and is not receiving “cash welfare”.)
The article contains some other fun facts. College here costs 2X what it costs in Germany or France. Only one quarter of the folks who sign up at two-year community colleges earn a degree within six years. And the author points out that young people would be stupid not to take the opportunity to enjoy “sports and parties, sex and alcohol” for four years at taxpayer expense.
What the author doesn’t mention is that Black Americans will be paying for this while white Americans will be the ones primarily enjoying the sports, parties, sex, and alcohol.
If 2020 was the year that old white rich Americans stole a year of life from young healthy slender Black Americans (by locking them down to “protect” them from a disease from which they faced minimal risk), maybe 2021 will be the year that young white rich Americans steal massive quantities of cash from Black Americans via student loan forgiveness?
Related:
“Who owes the most in student loans: New data from the Fed” (Brookings): The highest-income 40 percent of households (those with incomes above $74,000) owe almost 60 percent of the outstanding education debt … The lowest-income 40 percent of households hold just under 20 percent of the outstanding debt. … education debt is concentrated in households with high levels of educational attainment. In 2019, the new Fed data show, households with graduate degrees owed 56 percent of the outstanding education debt—an increase from 49 percent in 2016. The 3 percent of adults with professional and doctorate degrees hold 20 percent of the education debt. These households have median earnings more than twice as high as the overall median.
Julian Assange cannot be extradited to the US to face charges of espionage and of hacking government computers, a British judge has decided.
Delivering her ruling the judge said said the WikiLeaks founder was likely to be held in conditions of isolation in a so-called supermax prison in the US … “I find that the mental condition of Mr Assange is such that it would be oppressive to extradite him to the United States of America,” she said.
But she accepted the evidence of prominent medical experts, including details of how Assange had suffered from depression while in prison in London. “The overall impression is of a depressed and sometimes despairing man who is genuinely depressed about his future,” said Baraitser.
My Facebook friends assure me that government-imposed isolation is no hardship whenever the person who is isolated has access to Zoom. Perhaps the U.S. could obtain Assange if we promised the UK that we would let him have access to unlimited video chat?
Separately, Jan Steen’s painting of Londoners (those fortunate enough to live in a multi-person household) trying to make it through their Nth lockdown… (from the (real) National Gallery)
From London, 2017, #AheadOfTheCurve:
And a Messerschmitt car to keep you safe while traveling solo during COVID-19 (London 2007):
The Sitting Ducks of St. James’s Park (2007):
Related:
Los Angeles’s mandatory quarantine-after-travel order: Except as otherwise provided in this Directive, all persons traveling into Los Angeles County, …. must quarantine for at least 10 days after arrival. For the purposes of this Directive, “quarantine” means staying at home or another place of temporary shelter and away from contact with others, including those in one’s household … for a period of 10 days
We have been barraged by emails from our kids’ schools during the Christmas vacation week. If we traveled, the public school administrators want to know where and when and they want to see medical records of a PCR test (required under the governors’ travel orders, though at this point most other U.S. states have a lower rate of COVID-19 cases within 7 days compared to MA). Example:
We will be strictly enforcing the Governor’s Travel Orders and sending students home when we learn about travel and have not received notification and verification of required test results.
The school actually requires additional testing and quarantine days (14) beyond the referenced travel order, which requires 10-day quarantines and testing for those 10 and older:
Children who are 10 years or younger are not required to have a test. However, without a test, they must quarantine before returning to school. So, families will need to choose to either have their children tested and provide the result of the test to the school nurse so that they can return to school immediately if the results are negative or they will need to keep their child home in quarantine for 14 days if a negative test is not provided.
(i.e., if children can keep quiet about that trip to Disney World, they can continue to receive an education!)
The kicker to all of this is that COVID-19 tests aren’t available, except to the mostly-imprisoned college students who don’t need them (they get tested twice/week). Here’s one self-pay $80/test service (recommended by a private school administrator) that you might think would have slots because they don’t take insurance and don’t provide the taxpayer-funded testing that was supposed to be Americans’ right:
As of Sunday morning, it would be possible to get a test on Friday evening in the Cambridge location:
So the result would come back on Monday? That’s 8 days later and the governor’s travel order requires a 10-day quarantine. So the effort and $$ for the test shortens the quarantine period by only 1-2 days.
Separately, one thing that is great about Americans is that we won’t give up our passion for bureaucracy and paperwork even after we declare an “emergency”. For example, although a non-physician (the governor) orders subjects to get tested after travel, a subject can’t actually be tested without paying a physician in addition to paying the lab. From the CIC Health site, regarding pricing for organizations:
To cover the physician who provides the legally-required referral, the clinician to oversee the test, the software for ordering and reviewing results, and logistics support. This fee ranges considerably based on the components required, and range from $5-$35.
As there is no medical treatment for COVID-19 (remdesivir is approved by the FDA, but considered useless by the WHO) and the vast majority of folks who test positive for COVID-19 have no symptoms and the person getting the test probably isn’t sick to begin with, what is the point of paying a physician?
Finally, let me note that rich white people seem to be ignoring the travel order. Friends with vacation houses in other states go to and from freely. A friend recently met up with us for a dog walk in the woods. He talked about having just returned from a ski trip to another state. I asked “Unless you were skiing in Hawaii, didn’t you have to get a Covid test to comply with the governor’s travel orders?” He responded that he hadn’t bothered and wasn’t going to bother. What’s his day job? Physician.
beacontesting.com, a massive project; on January 3, the site showed “no upcoming times are currently available” at any of the Boston-area locations, but a 2.5-hour round-trip drive to New Bedford, MA would have enabled a test on January 4
Update: Patrick, below, asked whether the situation was better in Western, Maskachusetts, e.g., Pittsfield. The answer seems to be “no”. As of January 3 at 2 pm:
Update from a friend who is considering a brief trip from his all-white COVID-free exurb of COVID-plagued Boston (he’s locked down in a 12,000 square foot house on 10 acres) to rural Maine:
I see. So if I leave MA, go to Maine, and come back – I must quarantine for 10 days. But if I go to Boston and back, I don’t need to. Got it.
One evergreen fun activity for American Democrats is saying that Republicans are idiots because they purportedly don’t believe in the theory of evolution. (As Democrats generally live in cities that are devoid of Republicans, it is unclear how Democrats would know what Republicans actually do and don’t believe.)
The same folks are also saying that forcing every American to be injected with a COVID-19 vaccine will end the frightening coronaplague that has lead to coronapanic and shutdown.
Are these points of view consistent?
Why can’t the coronavirus evolve its way around the vaccine, in the same way that influenza evolves to defy our vaccination attempts? And why can’t it evolve to spread even among a mostly masked-and-cowering-Clorox-armed population?
In the early months of coronascience, we were told that the virus was mutating more gradually than influenza. And presumably the most successful mutations will be less deadly (killing one’s host is a suboptimal strategy for a virus).
(Why does this matter? Shutdowns, mask wars, school closures, etc. make sense only if you think coronavirus is a temporary one-and-done phenomenon. If coronavirus will be an influenza-style permanent companion to the 8 billion humans on Planet Earth then it doesn’t make sense to do anything now that we aren’t willing and able to do for the next 50 years.)
Should we schedule a reminder to look at this in February 2022? What’s a threshold of cases and/or COVID-19-tagged deaths that we should use from, say, September 2022-February 2022 in the U.S. to declare vaccine victory or vaccine disappointment?
Update: A Facebook friend updated his profile picture to say “When It’s My Turn, I’m Getting Vaccinated! Goodbye COVID”:
In other words, he’s denying the possibility of the virus evolving its way around the vaccine, as well as assuming that the vaccine prevents transmission (as yet unknown) and that the vaccine will prevent deaths among the old/sick (also as yet unknown because never tested). His tagline is “Yes: Facts,Equality,Justice,Freedom, Intelligence,Confidence. No: Ignorance,Intolerance,Corruption.” so presumably this is an “intelligent” perspective. (My Facebook tagline: “I like to do everything in the dumbest way imaginable.”)
