When we wear masks, does the coronavirus thank us for our service?

by philg

For the coronavirus to become truly American, it needs to learn to say “Thank you for your service”. But when should the virus say this? Suggestion: whenever we wear our masks.

Case 1: Masks don’t “work” (i.e., don’t slow the transmission of coronavirus).

Suppose that masks as worn by the general population don’t work. Just as #Science tells us in “Postoperative wound infections and surgical face masks: a controlled study”:

It has never been shown that wearing surgical face masks decreases postoperative wound infections. On the contrary, a 50% decrease has been reported after omitting face masks.

and just as we’d expect from learning that masked-up Japan has 2.5X the flu death rate of the unmasked U.S.

Coronavirus is thankful when we wear masks because our misplaced faith in masks leads us to delay taking effective action against the virus, e.g., building shade structures and holding school outdoors (changing the calendar in northern states so that the school year is during the warm months), decluttering retail stores, etc.

Case 2: Masks “work” (i.e., slow the transmission of coronavirus).

Suppose that masks as worn by the general population work precisely as advertised. Maybe that still helps the coronavirus.

Consider what happens in an unmasked “give the finger to the virus” population, such as Sweden. The virus flourishes for about three months and then fails. Compare to the slow burn of the mostly-masked U.S. and the not-fade-away of completely-masked France:

Maybe the masks protect enough people that the virus can sustain itself at a low-to-medium boil. Especially in a geographically large area in which epidemics have been on different schedules, the virus keeps finding mask-protected populations to infect. The virus stays topmost in our minds, our hearts, and our media. Shouldn’t coronavirus then thank us for our service to it?

Readers: (1) are we doing the virus a favor, whether the masks work or not? (2) which of the below masks do you think is more stylish?

Related: a neighbor with female-identifying handwriting thanks “Pool Guys” for their service…

Note the relative prominence of 2 out of 50 gender IDs for parents:

And an expression of my deepest personal feelings, ordinarily kept out of this blog as best I can…

Related:

  • Cornell University, via testing, tracing, and a variety of restrictions that would be generally familiar to convicted felons on probation, is carefully tending a population of tens of thousands of fresh hosts for the coronavirus (as soon as these folks leave the restrictions of the bubble to which they’ve voluntarily subscribed, the virus will be happy to infect them)
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Fewer retail stores in cities due to higher insurance rates going forward?

by philg

“$1 billion-plus riot damage is most expensive in insurance history” (Axios):

The vandalism and looting following the death of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police will cost the insurance industry more than any other violent demonstrations in recent history, Axios has learned.

Why it matters: The protests that took place in 140 U.S. cities this spring were mostly peaceful, but the arson, vandalism and looting that did occur will result in at least $1 billion to $2 billion of paid insurance claims — eclipsing the record set in Los Angeles in 1992 after the acquittal of the police officers who brutalized Rodney King.

Shops in the suburbs weren’t torched or looted, right? Rational insurance companies will therefore charge higher rates going forward for retail stores in urban areas. Combined with the extra risk of being shut down due to coronapanic, the risk of losing customers as richer city-dwellers flee during coronapanic, and the higher minimum wages that some cities mandate relative to surrounding suburbs, why would rational business owners decide to continue operating a lot of these shops? So the white suburbanites who came into the cities to join the protests, ostensibly to help their Black brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters, will have ended up permanently degrading city life for Blacks of all gender IDs.

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How’s the first day of school where you live?

by philg

Here in Maskachusetts, today is the first day for public schoolteachers to teach. Negotiations with the union resulted in a startup delay of more than two weeks so that teachers could receive training and come up with a plan for the various bizarre forms of teaching that they’re going to be doing. Plainly there was no way for the teachers to do any prep in April, May, June, July, or August. (Private school teachers figured out how to teach remotely back in March, sometimes in only a day or two; see Massachusetts private school students zoom ahead.)

A popular system here seems to be “hybrid” in which students will attend school in-person two mornings per week and the rest of the time is “learning at home” (i.e., Xbox; back in 2009 it was the adults who were on the 99 weeks of Xbox plan!)

Another feature is that the school days are shortened. Where they previously escaped at 2:50 pm, now the school day ends at 1:45 pm. The reason for this is unclear. A teacher told me that it was to give teachers additional time to plan assignments and that teachers would never be expected to interact with students after 1:45 pm.

A friend in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania shared a plan from the public school system there (featured for its mediocrity in Smartest Kids in the World: Poland). Students will attend school Monday through Thursday, but then be dumped on the parents on Fridays. If it is safe for the students to attend Monday through Thursday, why can’t they also go Friday? If it is unsafe to be at the school on Fridays, why it is safe for them to be there Monday through Thursday?

These schedules, which feature a lot of time at home, seem ideal for boosting the pay of tutors and also for increasing inequality. “Parents are spending $70,000 for their kids to learn in ‘pods’” (New York Post):

Now that most NYC-area schools have released their plans for the upcoming school year, with a combination of remote and in-person learning, parents of elite students are scrambling to supplement what they believe will inevitably be lost if students aren’t in the classroom — by hiring private educators.

Known as “pods,” small groups of four to 10 students in the same grade led by a tutor or teacher, have become the solution for weary and wealthy parents who are paying thousands of dollars — on top of five-figure private school tuitions — for the extra help monitoring kids during their school’s remote learning schedule.

Christopher Rim, founder of the education and college consulting firm Command Education, has been inundated with calls from “desperate parents” demanding leaders for pods that they’ve created with other families. He’s already staffed four pods in the Hamptons with tutors and expects to close in on 10 by the time the school year begins, with kids expected to rotate learning at a different home each week. One Water Mill parent already volunteered her 13-bedroom manse as the permanent home base of her kid’s 11th-grade four-person learning pod. He charges $3,500 a week per student, but offers a flat rate of $70,000 per kid if you pay the whole year up front, which covers 30 weeks of school.

Rim, a 25-year-old Yale grad with a BA in psychology who started the company in 2015 out of his dorm room, trains his tutors, who are all Ivy-league educated and under 30 years old. Some have teaching degrees and are certified to teach in public schools but not all. Said Rim, “This is not a replacement for school. This is not an accredited program. This is a supplement to make sure the students are on track.” All his tutors will be tested for COVID weekly, and will follow CDC guidelines for social-distancing whenever possible.

It’s also a matter of pride. Parents aren’t broadcasting the fact that they’re spending $70,000 a year on top of the $50,000 private school tuition to friends, Rim said, because “They don’t want other parents to gossip about them, that their kid needs a tutor in order to survive the school year.”

Readers: Any good tales from your necks of the woods?

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We have now had 50 governor’s orders here in Maskachusetts

by philg

The City of Cambridge recently emailed to say “Governor Baker’s COVID-19 Order #50 made certain Phase III adjustments, including extension of outdoor dining provisions and opening of indoor and outdoor gaming arcades”. This reminded me that we’ve now had 50 governor’s orders related to this virus.

What’s in the latest one? First, a reminder of how awesome it is to have the power of being a state governor:

(sorry for the images, but the governor distributes these as scanned PDFs without OCR). Then, just as the City of Cambridge says, two pages regarding under what circumstances the state and local License Rajs might allow restaurants to serve alcohol outdoors and might allow arcades to reopen.

What about a never-shut never-masked country with less than half the COVID-19 death rate compared to Massachusetts? Sweden seems to have had about 10 new regulations in the past 6 months and they’ve either been laws passed by the legislature or regulations issued by bureaucracies, not orders coming down from a muscular executive such as the Prime Minister. Sweden is being governed, even in what Americans have characterized as “an emergency”, by consensus rather than via dictates from individuals.

(How is Sweden doing with plague right now? The WHO dashboard shows them at 578 deaths per 1 million residents (i.e., only 99.94 percent of Swedes remain alive). The U.S. is at 584. So, despite our shutdown, the U.S. caught up to Sweden just as the former chief scientist of the European CDC said (in April) that we would.

What if we compare to the state where I live? Maskachusetts is at 1,134 deaths per million (Statistica). The latest dashboard:

Whatever we have done with shutdowns and/or masks seems to have ensured that we will have a “long tail” of infections/deaths rather than the exponential decline to near-zero that Sweden has had.

Note that this is the dashboard from which deaths-by-age statistics were removed last month just as officials were deciding whether to reopen schools: Maskachusetts: When people aren’t scared enough, change the Covid-19 dashboard )

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Will Black Americans have more spending power after receiving reparations?

by philg

Suppose that President Kamala Harris writes every American who identifies as “Black” (including Rachel Dolezal and, everyone’s new favorite Black American, Jessica Krug) a fat reparations check. Will Black Americans have greater spending power as a result?

Some Blacks are on means-tested welfare programs, such as public housing, Medicaid, or SNAP. If they receive a reparations check, maybe their “means” will now be greater and they’ll have to pay more for housing, health insurance, and food. A 2015 Census report:

At 41.6 percent, blacks were more likely to participate in government assistance programs in an average month. The black participation rate was followed by Hispanics at 36.4 percent, Asians or Pacific Islanders at 17.8 percent, and non-Hispanic whites at 13.2 percent.

The Son also Rises (Clark 2014; Princeton University Press) contains a survey of the academic literature regarding the effect of family wealth and unearned cash transfers on children. In 1832 there was a land lottery in Georgia where winners received a parcel of land roughly equal in value to the median family wealth at the time (i.e., the typical winners ended up with twice as much wealth, about $150,000 extra in today’s money). How did the children of the winners do?

They were no more literate than the children of losers. Their occupational status was no higher. Their own children in 1880 (the grandchildren of the 1832 winners) were again no more literate. Worse, they were significantly less likely to be enrolled in school than the grandchildren of the losers. … Wealth is not statistically higher for lottery winners’ children…

(Clark also reviews a study of Cherokee Indians who, starting in 1998, received substantial boosts to their income from casino profits. For children who had not been living in poverty, “there was no measurable change in any educational outcomes, including high school graduation rates…” This was despite the fact that a child who graduated high school would immediately become eligible for his or her own $4,000-per-year payment.)

“Divorce laws and the economic behavior of married couples,” by Alessandra Voena, a University of Chicago economist, concluded that an increased opportunity to obtain cash via a divorce lawsuit reduced reduced married women’s labor force participation rate. Similarly, successful child support plaintiffs generally reduce their working hours so that cash from the defendant is not turned into a higher standard of living for the child, but rather increased leisure time for the adult plaintiff.

See Long-term effects of short-term free cash (guaranteed minimum income experiments) for a reference to a paper regarding how just a few years of free government cash resulted in a lifetime of reduced labor force efforts. Those who got the cash were more likely to end up on disability and, if not Hispanic, to divorce their husbands and wives (additional gender IDs were unavailable in the 1970s).

Readers: What do you think? Will the free government cash result in higher spending power and standard of living or reduced working hours and additional leisure time for Americans who identify as “Black”?

Related:

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Can University of Chicago expel students who lose interest in Black Studies?

by philg

The home page of the University of Chicago’s Department of English currently contains the following statement:

The English department at the University of Chicago believes that Black Lives Matter, and that the lives of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and Rayshard Brooks matter, as do thousands of others named and unnamed who have been subject to police violence. As literary scholars, we attend to the histories, atmospheres, and scenes of anti-Black racism and racial violence in the United States and across the world. We are committed to the struggle of Black and Indigenous people, and all racialized and dispossessed people, against inequality and brutality.

For the 2020-2021 graduate admissions cycle, the University of Chicago English Department is accepting only applicants interested in working in and with Black Studies. We understand Black Studies to be a capacious intellectual project that spans a variety of methodological approaches, fields, geographical areas, languages, and time periods. For more information on faculty and current graduate students in this area, please visit our Black Studies page.

I’m wondering how this can be enforced. Suppose that an accepted student, a few months after enrolling (which means turning on Zoom from his/her/zir/their mom’s house?), decides “In demography and in the workforce, Blacks in the U.S. are being replaced by Hispanic and Asian immigrants, so in looking toward the future I would rather do a thesis in Hispanic Studies.” Can the university then expel the student? The department says:

all scholars have a responsibility to know the literatures of African American, African diasporic, and colonized peoples, regardless of area of specialization, as a core competence of the profession.

What if, after a year of reading these literatures, a student says “these authors are terrible compared to what Japanese-Americans and Chinese-Americans have written in English; I want to do my thesis on the lyrics of K-pop”? Does that student similarly get expelled?

From a cross-country trip in the Robinson R44:

Update, September 22: the home page has been edited to remove the Black Studies-only limitation. But the brave language lives on at archive.org:

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Rich Californians complaining that they aren’t getting federal disaster money from Donald the Cruel

by philg

My Facebook feed has been alive for weeks with Californians complaining that the Great Father in Washington does not love them and therefore is not showering them with federal disaster relief cash despite their worse-than-usual fire season.

(As with many complaints about Trump, emotions may be more important than facts. The Great Father actually declared a disaster in California and approved federal aid last month: “California Wildfires Burn Million Acres; Trump OKs Disaster Aid” (VOA, August 22))

Suppose that Trump had not approved federal aid for the richer-than-average state. The fire are upsetting, yes, and sometimes tragic. And of course we can all sympathize with anyone who has lost a loved one or a home. However, in light of their own cherished values, third and thirdmost of which is fighting inequality (avoiding COVID-19 and BLM being #1 and #2, of course), should Californians even ask for aid? California is a rich state with 40 million people. Why does it need to be bailed out by lower-middle-class taxpayers in Arkansas, Indiana, Maine, and Kentucky? Why not use state funds to assist those who have been affected by the fires?

The standard Righteous Californian response to this on Facebook is that he/she/ze/they believes that there is already at least some wealth redistribution from California to lower-income states. Perhaps there is, but California remains much richer than average. So if we hate inequality (and of course I hope that everyone does), this redistribution should be intensified, not reversed via emergency relief funds. Californians should be able to tax themselves, e.g., with an income surtax, a car registration tax, a higher gasoline tax, or a statewide property tax, to buy whatever they want, including disaster relief for those who have us suffered this fire season.

Another issue with taxing low-income folks in the Midwest to buy things for rich people in California is that Californians seem to change their minds regarding infrastructure. Federal taxpayers paid for a jet-capable airport in Santa Monica, for example, and Californians then decided to destroy it. Why should a worker in Iowa pay to protect some rich Californians’ infrastructure if the rich Californians may later decide that they didn’t even want that infrastructure?

Readers: How can it make sense for those who decry inequality to demand federal funds for a state that is much richer than average? (Above, the Golden Gate Bridge, whose most recent federal bailout was $30.2 million in May. Thus, low-income taxpayers in New Mexico and West Virginia get to subsidize the owners of brand-new Teslas and Mercedes SUVs as they glide across to their Marin estates.)

Related:

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Back to School Ebola Decontamination Lessons

by philg

A friend’s son goes to a rich kids’ all-boys private school. She has received at least 50 pages of COVID-19-related material in the past few weeks. A sampling…

We are two weeks away from the start of school. We have two weeks to make this work. Please take extraordinary measures for the next 14 days to be sure our boys are ready to go. These include…

Creating a morning routine of taking his temperature, checking his wellness, and completing the Magnus app. No student will be allowed into our building to attend classes if this is not done daily.

Practicing the proper method of wearing a mask, over his nose and mouth. If your son is bothered by the mask resting behind his ears, consider adding an “ear saver” or string to hold the mask ear loops away from his ears. We will provide students with mask breaks regularly throughout the day. Students who do not comply with mask guidelines will be removed from the classroom and could be sent home for the day.

Purchasing a mask that complies with CDC guidelines and the School’s dress code policy. Please no masks with valves. Additionally, the School has adopted a no gaiters policy. Consistent with our dress code philosophy masks should contain no large text, logos, or images ([Rich kids’ school]-branded masks are permitted). Masks are to be worn as students exit a vehicle on campus and all day except during lunch or in designated spaces outside of our buildings. During lunch in our building, we will ask the students to eat quietly while their mask is removed.

Learning how to properly wash their hands. We will ask students to wash their hands multiple times a day. We also have plenty of hand sanitizer, but boys are welcome to bring a small bottle of their own.

Learning how to properly wipe down their materials. At the end of every day, we will ask students to wipe down their computer, their desk, and their chair before washing their hands and leaving the building.

Creating an entrance procedure when your son returns home to include leaving shoes outside of the home, changing and washing school clothes daily, and showering/bathing upon entering the home. [This is my favorite! Decontamination for elementary school kids as though they had just come from a shift in the Ebola ward of the local hospital]

[a few days later]

Boys will be required to wear masks. Gators and vented masks are not allowed at [Rich Kids’ School]. Please be sure your son has an appropriate mask for safety reasons.
The boys will not have access to water fountains, so I would recommend that the boys fill up two water bottles to bring to school each day.
Lunches will be delivered to the classroom, but if you are packing your son’s lunch, please know he will not have access to a microwave.
We will have hand sanitizer in the classrooms, but if you could also send in a smaller personal hand sanitizer for your son to keep at his desk for snack, that would be fantastic.

Like the poster says, “Fall down 7 times, get up 8.” This is the attitude that will get us through the year. [Not “give the finger to the virus” like the infidels in Sweden!]

Beginning on Wednesday, September 9, the Lower School building will open at 7:30am. Once checking in at the front of the Lower School, the boys will proceed through a hand sanitizing station in the Lobby and then go directly to their homeroom.

Please remember to complete the Magnus App each morning by 7:30am. We will be requiring families to complete the health screening before allowing your son into the Lower School each day.

Please remember to send your son with a mask each day, he will need to be wearing it as he exits the car and it will need to remain on throughout the day (except when permitted to remove it at the direction of his teacher). Neck gaiters and masks with valves are not permitted.

[from the nurse?]

Our Health Staff is available for a drive up medication drop off to receive medications required for administration at school including all emergency medications. We will follow all CDC guidelines for COVID-19 procedures during drop off. Please email our Health Office at [] or call directly xxx-xxx-xxxx to confirm arrangement.

All medications delivered to school require a current physician’s order on file in your Magnus Health account and must be delivered in their prescribed container or they will not be accepted. Please store in a clear plastic bag labeled with your son’s name, grade, and date of birth.

Please have your ID and the student’s medication prepared for drop off as noted above. Please wear a mask when our staff meets you at your car to obtain the medications.

Where: Lower School Entrance – a table will be set up and COVID-19 procedures will be in place.

Please do not wait to access your mobile app. Your son’s COVID-19 screening tool is available now. Completion of the symptom surveillance tool is to be completed by 7:30 a.m. for timely submission. If unable to complete timely, please save a screenshot of your son’s final “Pass” to show for school entry.

Directives to set up your Magnus Mobile v2 APP and user credentials are here. Reminder: You must login to MyBackpack and access the Magnus Health portal ONLINE first to create your Mobile App username and password. Hover over YOUR name and choose “CHANGE Credentials”. [… three pages of instructions followed … ]

Parents will need to update the app to the latest Version 20.08.26. Parents using an iPhone can do this by installing the update within the Apple Store, or by deleting and reinstalling the app. Android users are able to perform the same update by updating via Google Play Store, or by deleting and reinstalling the app.

If you have a student at [Rich Kids School] and other schools using Magnus Health for student information or COVID-19 screening (i.e. [some other schools for rich kids in the same city],…anyone using Magnus Health)..you must log out of the account created for your son’s account for the MOBILE APP and log into your parent account for your other child with the username and password created to access their health information and surveillance tool.

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RFID chips in the necks of college students

by philg

“A University Had a Great Coronavirus Plan, but Students Partied On” (NYT) is about how humans did not behave the way that the scientists assumed they would:

At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, more than 40,000 students take tests twice a week for the coronavirus. They cannot enter campus buildings unless an app vouches that their test has come back negative. Everyone has to wear masks.

Enough students continued to go to parties even after testing positive, showing how even the best thought-out plans to keep college education moving can fail when humans do not heed common sense or the commands from public health officials.

What the scientists had not taken into account was that some students would continue partying after they received a positive test result. “It was willful noncompliance by a small group of people,” Dr. Goldenfeld said.

Some of the students who tested positive even tried to circumvent the app so that they could enter buildings instead of staying isolated in their rooms, university administrators said in a letter to students.

Attending university is a privilege, not a right. Why not an RFID chip in the neck of everyone who chooses to attend a school? With sensors over each door, each student can be tracked, even if he/she/ze/they fail to carry his/her/zir/their phone. It works well for dogs. Mindy the Crippler has never complained about her chip. The universities can buy kits on Amazon for $14 each, which includes a one-time-use syringe. From a consumer:

Chances are, you are planning to use this kit to microchip your animal yourself and skip the vet visit. If so, you are going to be very pleased. It is super easy to use – implanting the chip takes just a few seconds and registration takes about 5 minutes online (the chip also comes with a snail-mail paper registration form if you prefer). You may feel a little squeamish about the process but as long as you implant the chip quickly and confidently, your animal will probably barely notice. I just chipped my 7 week old Lab puppy and she barely even flinched. It would be a good idea to have somebody hold the animal still so you have both hands free – the needle is EXTREMELY sharp and you don’t want to risk jabbing too deep or potential jabbing yourself.

So the chipping of undergrads could be done by the graduate students who live in their dorms and whose job is keeping them out of trouble. If a student who is marked COVID-19-positive in the database tries to go through a door with a reader, Campus Police is summoned automatically to shepherd the errant soul back to quarantine. (Or, to cut down on policing encounters and costs in the Age of BLM, doors on campus could be covered in plywood and replaced with PetSafe dog doors that open only in response to a recognized RFID chip. The 11×16″ standard size opening would give students an incentive not to load up at the dining hall.)

Mindy the Crippler proudly displays her chipped neck:

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Time to love smokers again?

by philg

Strolling by the smokers’ ghetto outside one of our local airport’s FBOs made me wonder when it will be time to abandon our fanaticism regarding the occasional whiff of tobacco smoke. We are certain that any of our fellow humans may kill us with a breath of coronavirus. Why do we worry about the unpleasantness of someone smoking a cigarette 5′ from an exterior door versus 20′? Do we still need Mini-Mike Bloomberg’s 2011 ban on smoking in various outdoor places, such as beaches and parks?

Do we have the energy to fight the anti-smoking battle at the same time as the anti-coronaplague battle? When do we admit that we’re not as capable as Adolph Hitler and his loyal Germans and even they had trouble fighting on multiple fronts?

I’m not a smoker, but I’m now ready to welcome my smoking brothers/sisters/binary resisters with a hearty “You could be exhaling a lot worse!”

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