What’s the coronaplague situation in Peru?

by philg

From NPR, March 24, “I’m An American Stuck In Peru — Glad To Be On Lockdown To Avoid COVID-19”:

Peruvian President Martín Vizcarra had just declared a total quarantine for 15 days, halting all air and land transportation, even taxis. With fewer than 150 cases of coronavirus identified at the time, the Andean country was immediately going into lockdown to stem the spread of the virus. … We have followed the daily White House briefings, where U.S. leaders often insisted what a great job they were doing but stopped short of announcing a national lockdown. … By contrast, on Friday in Peru, President Vizcarra addressed his nation in a speech that sent his popularity skyrocketing. He insisted on the urgency of the quarantine, then chastised those Peruvians who disregarded it and the local authorities who didn’t enforce it “with the strictness this situation requires.” … In the next few days, TV news showed images of residents on their apartment balconies cheering on police and public health enforcers in the streets. … Peru’s swift shutdown of intercity travel is likely to help reduce the spread of the virus. The government’s actions, the nation’s solidarity and seriousness of its approach have raised our hopes that the quarantine will expire as planned on March 31, and the disaster will be controlled enough to permit limited travel for folks like us to return home. … At least the measures here mesh with the lessons The New York Times drew from a study of Italy, the new epicenter of the virus: “that steps to isolate the coronavirus and people’s movement need to be put in place early, with absolute clarity, then strictly enforced.” U.S. infections have surged each day yet the federal government has remained reluctant to impose drastic actions. Other countries such as Italy and Spain have enforced quarantines, but too late to stop COVID-19 from ravaging them. … When we do get out, what scares us most is the life we may encounter when we get to the U.S.

From June, Christian Science Monitor:

Peru set a global example of quick action in the face of COVID-19, implementing a nationwide lockdown March 16, soon after its first confirmed case. The government invested in respirators and hospital beds, and offered bonuses to medical professionals. It designed an economic relief package that not only offered low-interest loans to businesses and helped employers keep workers on payrolls, but also targeted the poor, vulnerable, and self-employed with vital cash transfers.

In other words, the country did everything right thanks to effective leadership. However…

Despite Peru’s lauded response efforts, it now [in June] has one of the world’s longest lockdowns, and the second-highest tally of COVID-19 cases in Latin America, with more than 264,000 cases and more than 8,000 people killed. In the region, Peru ranks only behind Brazil, which has taken a decidedly less deliberate approach to halting the pandemic. Where things went wrong, experts say, was in misunderstanding the dynamics of poverty in a country that has gained “middle-income” status over two decades of growth.

Peru took the same kind of muscular action that was credited with keeping Covid-19 deaths in Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam to 0. But the virus went in a different direction in Peru, suggesting that humans do not control the virus. The WHO dashboard shows Peru having the world’s highest COVID-19 death rate, having surpassed (female-led) Belgium, Spain, the UK, Chile, the wicked scoffers in Brazil, the unfortunate Italians, the wicked Swedes with their anti-lockdown anti-mask MD/PhDs, and we Americans, so sorely lacking in the national leadership that would intimidate the virus.

Peru has had a lot of problems with drug-resistant tuberculosis. Maybe it is a place where microbes infecting the lungs happens to flourish?

Readers: What do we know about Peru right now? Can it be said that the God of Shutdown is a fickle god and is punishing truly righteous Peruvians for reasons that we will never understand?

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Can a university fire a professor who admits to not being Black?

by philg

“Professor Jessica Krug admits she lied about being black: ‘I cancel myself’” (New York Post):

Despite publicly living as a black woman for years, George Washington University associate professor Jessica Krug admitted Thursday that she is actually a “culture leech” — who is white.

“For the better part of my adult life, every move I’ve made, every relationship I’ve formed, has been rooted in the napalm toxic soil of lies,” Krug, 38, writes in a brief but life-shattering Medium post titled “The Truth, and the Anti-Black Violence of My Lies.”

The self-proclaimed “historian of politics, ideas, and cultural practices in Africa and the African Diaspora” goes on to detail a lengthy trail of public deception.

Krug has a Ph.D. and is the author of the book “Fugitive Modernities: Kisama and the Politics of Freedom,” which “interrogates the political practices and discourses through which those who fled from slavery and the violence of the slave trade in Angola forged coherent political communities outside of, and in opposition to, state politics,” according to her GW faculty profile.

Can the university, which I attended as a 14-year-old back in the Jimmy Carter malaise years, fire her? If so, on what grounds? Can they say “We hired you because of your skin color and we would never have hired such a weak thinker and scholar with white skin”?

(The Medium essay is pretty awesome. I think she deserves her job:

I have eschewed my lived experience as a white Jewish child in suburban Kansas City under various assumed identities within a Blackness that I had no right to claim: first North African Blackness, then US rooted Blackness, then Caribbean rooted Bronx Blackness. … my continued appropriation of a Black Caribbean identity is not only, in the starkest terms, wrong — unethical, immoral, anti-Black, colonial — but it means that every step I’ve taken has gaslighted those whom I love.

as the story unfolds, I think we will learn that she is primarily a victim:

When I was a teenager fleeing trauma, I could just run away to a new place and become a new person.

)

Loosely related…

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Will the post-plague world change the work-versus-welfare tradeoff?

by philg

Some of my friends were discussing whether adjustments due to coronapanic will make it irrational for more Americans to work, rather than to set themselves up for welfare (means-tested public housing, Medicaid, SNAP, and Obamaphone). As with child support profits, there is a a lot of variability from state to state. From Cato’s work-versus-welfare trade-off 2013:

What’s changed with coronaplague? The desk jobs are less fun: sit at home and stare at a screen all day. The non-desk jobs are more dangerous: work in a supermarket and be exposed to hundreds of people every day, any one of whom might kill you with a breath.

What about spending? An MBA friend’s perspective:

I guess the worst-hit people will be those who earn $80-150k

They used to be able to afford a lot of “near luxury” stuff despite not being eligible for the good welfare gravy train and despite the high taxes that the government hits them with to support the welfare gravy train. but now they will be stuck at home. Near-luxury goods such as restaurant meals, airline tickets, theater tickets, and theme park tickets all go way up in price due to mandated de-crowding measures,

Everything will cost more. so the difference between their lifestyle and a welfare family will become minimal. since they won’t be able to afford meals out anymore. they would be better off not working, playing Xbox and swiping EBT card for food. do some cash labor for luxuries (if cash isn’t outlawed under the pretext that it spreads coronavirus!).

Readers: What do you think? Except for those who can earn well above the median, will working be a completely irrational choice for an American?

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Rich college kids immune to coronaplague?

by philg

A friend who is a professor at NYU told me that so far they’ve found only five students who test positive for coronavirus. He says that this is a population of 24,000 undergraduates who converge from all corners of the U.S. (there are additional foreign students, ordinarily, but presumably they are being barred from entry to the U.S. due to the Trumpenfuhrer’s cruel entry bans that were imposed in February and March).

From an official NYU update:

7,772 COVID-19 PCR diagnostic tests were performed on students (including those who arrived early for quarantining) at the two NYU testing centers — Gould Plaza and 6 MetroTech — established for testing students. Five tested positive; all are in isolation, are being monitored by the COVID-19 Prevention & Response Team, and will not be permitted to enter NYU facilities until cleared.

and regarding the prison camp that they’re running…

Last week, some 2,700 students moved into residence halls to begin a two-week quarantine period, which the University sought to support by opening the residence halls early and delivering meals (both at no cost to students).

The move-in went well; the meal service less so. The food service was an unprecedentedly complex undertaking for the University and its food vendor, Chartwells, involving delivery of three meals per day to the door of each of the 2,700 students’ rooms, a substantial percentage of which were individualized, specialized meals. We fell short of the plans we had in place. Chartwells has taken a number of measures to correct the initial missteps — including doubling the food preparation and delivery staff — that have helped, and we are continuing to make efforts to improve meal service for the quarantining students in the residence halls.

So the $80,000/year “hybrid” education starts with two weeks of incarceration!

American Pravda says that the U.S. has roughly 40,000 new cases per day. That’s nearly 300,0000 per week (reasonable length of infection for a 20-year-old?). Assume that there are two people who would have tested positive, but didn’t get a test, for every actual positive test? That’s close to 1 million. Based on a U.S. population of 330 million, we should have at least 1 in 400 people currently infected with coronaplague, right? But NYU had at least 7,772 tests and only 5 positives, only 1/4 the expected rate. What can we infer from this? The U.S. actually is testing everyone who might conceivably be positive? Asymptomatic infection is less common that we thought? Families that are rich enough to pay $80,000/year for an education that is no better than what is available at the local State U are not infected? What?

(How does the $80,000/year education actually work? Roughly one third of the students show up in person to any given lecture. The teacher tries to manage a forest of newly installed Zoom monitors so as to be able to interact with the two thirds of the students who are present via Zoom. There is a tech support hotline number in case the teacher is not a desktop computer system administration wizard. Classes start today.)

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The absurd conspiracy that Wall Street elites are manipulating American politics

by philg

My Facebook friends like to conjure a bogeyman somewhere in the South or Midwest. He is wearing camo, carrying an AR-15, driving a car with a Trump/Pence bumper sticker, and spouting an absurd conspiracy theory about Wall Streeters manipulating American politics far beyond their coastal elite districts.

Showing just how wrong this conspiracy theory is: “Bloomberg pledges $60M to boost House Democrats” (The Hill). (This will also be great for allaying the concerns of those who believe that rich Jews have too much influence in the U.S.!)

Readers: What do we think of all of these campaigns that are financed by money from outside the districts that politicians are supposedly representing? I see Facebook ads all the time for politicians who are running states where I don’t live.

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Joe Kennedy III is more progressive than AOC, but not progressive enough for Maskachusetts

by philg

“The age of incrementalism is over,” Markey said. “Now is our moment to think big.” (Boston.com)

Ed Markey, who might be running to replace President Harris in 2028 when he will be a young 82 years of age, defeated Joe Kennedy III in the Maskachusetts Senate primary by declaring that Kennedy was not progressive enough and winning the endorsement of AOC. Yet ProgressivePunch says that, during the 2019-2020 session, AOC had a “Progressive Score” of only 94.94 percent (based on her votes). Kennedy, by contrast, voted correctly 96.2 percent of the time.

In other words, a candidate who was actually more progressive than AOC lost the election here in Massachusetts.

(This was the only race on my Democratic primary ballot in which there was a choice; all other candidates were running unopposed.)

From Newburyport, MA yesterday, a multilingual Hate Has No Home Here message that welcomes migrants right next to a No Trespassing sign. The owner is also apparently an Ed Markey fan:

Related:

  • “It is the duty of the revolution to put an end to compromise, and to put an end to compromise means taking the path of socialist revolution.” (i.e., the age of incrementalism was also over in 1917; V.I. Lenin)
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Science is a great career if you don’t mind waiting until age 87 to be recognized

by philg

The New York Times ran what seems intended to be an inspiring success story,“Myriam Sarachik Never Gave Up on Physics”:

The New York-based scientist overcame sexism and personal tragedy to make major contributions to the field, for which she received recognition this year.

The phenomenon is now known as the Kondo effect, after Jun Kondo, a Japanese physicist who successfully explained what was going on. The Kondo effect has turned out to be a central component needed to understand the behavior of electrons in solids.

But Dr. Kondo, as a theorist and not an experimentalist, was not the first to show that his supposition [that electrical resistance may increase as some metals are cooled] was correct.

That instead was Dr. Sarachik, 87, now retired after a career spanning more than a half-century as a professor of physics at the City College of New York.

The experiment was just one of the accomplishments for which Dr. Sarachik received this year’s Medal for Exceptional Achievement in Research, a top honor of the American Physical Society.

The article closes with some gender binarism:

“Women are no better and no worse at doing physics than men are,” she said. “They are, however, at least if they’re my age, more persistent. It’s tenacity. It’s the will not to be pushed out.”

What about people with the other 48 gender IDs? Are they persistent when it comes to physics?

As with a lot of articles in publications controlled by those who took their last science course in high school, I think one theme is promoting to young people the greatness of careers in science. But how many people would want to wait until age 87 to be recognized for a huge achievement?

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Tesla short pays off today: stock down to $500

by philg

My investment advice is almost as good as Nobel laureate Paul Krugman’s. On February 8, I implied that Tesla stock was overvalued. It was trading at around $700 then. Today it is only about $500. Now I can start an expensive subscription investment newsletter!

More seriously…. In a mostly static world where the average person has a car that will last another 15-50 years (depending on what travel and business restrictions his/her/zir/their state governor decides to order), how is this company worth $400 billion? Is it the incredible lameness of Tesla’s competitors? (Do any of them have Dog Mode yet? That was an obvious idea in 2003. Tesla introduced it in 2019.)

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Zoom should treat baldness electronically?

by philg

The highest-paying American employers celebrate diversity… so long as all of the diverse individuals are between 20 and 40 years of age. If interviews and work are virtual, though, could an older person slip in via the magic of image processing software?

In Achieve college student skin color diversity via image processing? I looked at whether Zoom could help colleges achieve the rainbow of skin tones that they seek. For interviews and long-term work, why not image processing to make an older person look reasonably young? Younger men are typically slimmer and have more hair than older men. Why not use image processing to bring the hairline back down towards the eyes and to slenderize the face, neck, and torso? For the righteous Silicon Valley employers, add skin tone to whatever the employers are seeking at the moment.

Readers: Is there any reason to show up to a job interview as a fat bald 60-year-old? Why not show up as a slim 35-year-old with luxuriant hair, like Brendan Fraser as the Colombian drug lord in Bedazzled:

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Why are we still out of paper towels and spray cleaner?

by philg

It has been six months since coronapanic started. Why is the local Target still out of paper towels, spray cleaners such as Formula 409, cleaning wipes, etc. People are actually using way more of these items? The Chinese can build a hospital for 5,000 patients in 10 days, but American factories can’t expand production in 6 months?

From August 26, 2020, the Target store in Watertown, Maskachusetts:

(shoppers were continuously reminded via the overhead audio system that wearing a mask was required, a bit like being at an airport and hearing warnings about unattended baggage over and over again)

Maybe AOC and Ed Markey are right? Capitalism is a failure?

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