Coronavirus News (192)

Elon Musk, interviewed by Maureen Dowd https://t.co/8zxSHaJxBZ

— The New York Times (@nytimes) July 25, 2020

Elon Musk, Blasting Off in Domestic Bliss The billionaire space oddity on life with Grimes and Baby X, Trump, Tesla, tunnels, short shorts, stock surges, Facebook fumbles and everything else under the sun. .............. Grimes, the singer and artist, and Elon Musk, the rocket man and Tesla magnate, have an otherworldly romance. Which works out well since Mr. Musk wants to occupy Mars, in case malevolent robots or an engineered virus threaten Earth, and then die on Mars, just not on impact......... the prince of the internet, with memes about how he cries in old-school A.O.L. dial-up tones, X begins crying. ..........  His personal life has been as vertiginous as his professional life: married three times, twice to the same woman, Talulah Riley, an actress who played a lethal sexbot on “Westworld.” He has six children. ..........  A fan on her Reddit page described her as a hybrid of a fairy, a witch and a cyborg — pretty much Mr. Musk’s dream girl — and she has talked about going through a Wiccan phase in seventh grade. ..........  “She’s one of the most unusual people I’ve ever met.” I wonder how it works with two such exotic birds. “We’ve had this debate of ‘Are you more crazy than me or am I more crazy than you?’” Mr. Musk said. ..................  “If I’m not in love, if I’m not with a long-term companion, I cannot be happy.” .........  he hates “being in a big empty house, and the footsteps echoing through the hallway ........  Grimes and Mr. Musk made their public debut at the Met Gala in 2018 ..........  Two famous people who thought they were crazy when they were little because there were so many off-the-wall ideas bursting out of their heads somehow found each other. .............  Intending to make a pun about Rococo Basilisk, he was Googling for an image of a basilisk with a rococo flair when he came across a 2015 music video for “Flesh Without Blood,” in which Grimes dresses as a rococo basilisk. .................  Grimes, who supported Bernie Sanders, had an influence on his recent decision to disencumber himself of his houses ............  in some ways, possessions weigh you down ...............   In the Bay Area, for example from 2002 to 2017, I never owned a house and I was there half the week so I would either sleep at the factory or in a friend’s spare bedroom or on a couch or in a hotel. I did that for 15 years.” ..............  He had thought about designing his own “aspirational masterpiece of a house,” but decided that it would take bandwidth away from his work “getting people to Mars and environmental sustainability and accelerating stable energy.” ...........  there was a period from end of 2017 to about, I guess, the middle of last year, that was excruciating.” ............  Mr. Musk is so transparent that he seems heedless at times, in ways that make his investors nervous and his fan boys thrilled. .............   “The people who love him and the people who hate him are equally irrational,” said Ashlee Vance, Mr. Musk’s biographer. “It reminds me of Steve Jobs. It’s way beyond business or celebrity. It strikes me as religious, more than anything. His fans are acolytes.” ........  Mr. Musk is also like Mr. Jobs in his obsession with sleek design ...........  “I’m going to take over the world. That’s going to be a super-crazy process. And therefore, if the roller coaster ride isn’t incredibly scary, I’m doing something wrong.” And after Mr. Jobs, boards learned their lesson about pushing out visionaries in favor of gray-haired corporate suits. ............  Mr. Musk is the first person in almost a century to come out of nowhere and create a car company with that much volume, showing other plodding car companies how electric cars can be cool, sexy and incredibly efficient. .............  a dark time when even masks and ventilators seemed beyond our manufacturing reach and when our government appears so incapable of getting coronavirus under control that the European Union has banned Americans from coming in. ..........  “The rate of progress is too slow and the amount of years he has left is not enough, but I’m still glad he’s doing what he’s doing with Blue Origin," Mr. Musk said. ..........  “I’m, like, not pro-Facebook. I don’t have a Facebook page. SpaceX and Tesla deleted their Facebook pages. SpaceX and Tesla do have an Instagram but I think it’s relatively harmless. So I think Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg still have a lot of work to do to restore public trust in Facebook itself.” ..................  In his spare time, Mr. Musk is working on tunnels that would alleviate urban traffic jams, an idea he dreamed up while stuck in L.A. traffic; spaceports that could catapult you from New York to Shanghai in 39 minutes; a hyperloop that would let you scoot between D.C. and New York in half an hour; a neural net that would be sewn or lasered into brains to fuse us with computers, which would potentially allow us to compete with superintelligent rogue A.I. and could also restore the ability to walk, hear, speak or see; and solar initiatives and lightweight lithium batteries to make mitigating climate change cheaper and more accessible...........  insists he is an engineer, not a businessman or investor. “I tend to bite off more than I can chew and then just sit there with chipmunk cheeks.” ............  “I love going to a restaurant that’s doing something special with food,” Mr. Musk said, “and I think really if you are not appreciating this, then you are not appreciating one of the finest things about living.” ..........  the lords of the cloud who were supposed to improve our lives were carelessly harvesting our data and allowing themselves to be disinformation factories. .........  Mr. Musk was painted as a Luddite, “hysterical” in the estimation of Mr. Zuckerberg, for what his friends called “Elon’s crusade,” his proselytizing that we should figure out safety features for A.I. before it gets smarter than us. .............. “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.” .........  “My assessment about why A.I. is overlooked by very smart people is that very smart people do not think a computer can ever be as smart as they are,” he told me. “And this is hubris and obviously false.” ..............  we’re headed toward a situation where A.I. is vastly smarter than humans and I think that time frame is less than five years from now. But that doesn’t mean that everything goes to hell in five years. It just means that things get unstable or weird.” ...........  He said his “top concern” is DeepMind, the secretive London A.I. lab run by Demis Hassabis and owned by Google. “Just the nature of the A.I. that they’re building is one that crushes all humans at all games,” he said. “I mean, it’s basically the plotline in ‘War Games.’” ...........  objectively, things will be weird when the computers are way smarter than humans ..........  lives out loud on Twitter with 37 million followers ............  it’s good anyway to take a few breaks from Twitter and not be on there 24 hours a day. Twitter can mess with your mind ..........  He said he rounded that number up from $419 in part to amuse Grimes — 4/20 is the stoner’s holiday. ..........  Musk said he’s not a big pot smoker because it makes you too logy. ..............  The herculean nature of turning Tesla into a well-oiled machine, he said, has not been “well appreciated.” ...........  “The logistics are mind-boggling, trying to deliver 7,000 cars per week in 40 different countries" ...........  “I think the reality of Covid is that it is dangerous if you’re elderly and have pre-existing conditions,” he said, adding: “It absolutely makes sense to have a lockdown if you’re vulnerable, but I do not think it makes sense to have a lockdown if you’re not vulnerable.” He said he may have had Covid in January and he wears a mask on the factory floor. ...............  The Tesla-loving liberals were horrified again by a May tweet, “Take the red pill," an allusion to the pill Keanu Reeves takes in “The Matrix” that lets him see the truth. ..........  The red-pill image has become linked with the fringe right and men’s rights activism. It blew up when Ivanka Trump retweeted it and said “Taken!” and when Lilly Wachowski, a creator of “The Matrix,” then cursed out both Mr. Musk and Ms. Trump. (Even Grimes’s mother, a Canadian journalist, tweeted her dissatisfaction.) .............  The president has called Mr. Musk “one of our great geniuses,” likening him to Thomas Edison. .............. I would say the amount of thought that the general public puts into politics is quite low. They’re mostly thinking about their day and their direct relationships and their work.” ..................  He notes that he was such a fervent Obama supporter that he once waited in line for six hours to shake Obama’s hand when he was running, adding, “the poor guy was so tired at the end of the night.” ............. Despite the fact that he wants someone in the White House who has his stuff together, he encouraged Kanye West’s bid for the presidency. .......  while they see each other about once every six months, they text “fairly often.” ....... “I’ve done my best to convince him that 2024 would be better than 2020” ..........  a bizarre Twitter thread in which he contended that his life was like the horror movie “Get Out,” Kim Kardashian put out a statement talking about her husband’s struggles with bipolar disorder.   

 

Great job by @elonmusk in agreeing to build, in TEXAS, what is expected to be the largest auto plant anywhere in the world. He kept his word to me. Texas & @Tesla are big winners. MADE IN THE USA!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 24, 2020

If you succeed within a system it’s hard to see how fucked up it is.

— Andrew Yang🧢🇺🇸 (@AndrewYang) July 25, 2020

Siouxsie Wiles: What the Victoria outbreak means for New Zealand 

Syria Has Come To America

Cartoon via Mike Luckovich

Posted by Robert Reich on Saturday, July 25, 2020

Coronavirus News (191)

Curtis Waters, TikTok king: 'There are no gatekeepers to the industry anymore'  TikTok is fast becoming the new grassroots centre of the music industry, the YouTube generation a relic of the past.  

Uganda - where security forces may be more deadly than coronavirus In Uganda, at least 12 people have allegedly been killed by security officers enforcing measures to restrict the spread of coronavirus, while the country has only just confirmed its first death from Covid-19. .............    The 30-year-old headteacher was one of those allegedly killed by security forces enforcing a coronavirus lockdown. ........  Critics say the force puts guns in the hands of young, poorly trained people who are unable to reduce the tension in a confrontation. .......... "We've found that security forces have been using Covid-19 and the measures put in place to prevent its spread as an excuse to violate human rights"   

Coronavirus in South Africa: Inside Port Elizabeth's 'hospitals of horrors'  exhausted doctors and nurses are overwhelmed with Covid-19 patients and a health service near collapse. ..........  With key staff on strike or sick with coronavirus in the Eastern Cape province, nurses are forced to act as cleaners, surgeons are washing their own hospital laundry and there are alarming reports of unborn babies dying in overcrowded and understaffed maternity wards. .............. South Africa - which held the coronavirus back for months with an early, tough, and economically devastating lockdown - now sees infection rates soar nationwide, prompting President Cyril Ramaphosa to warn that "the storm is upon us". ...........  raises fundamental questions about how those extra months were used, or wasted, by officials. .............   Covid has opened up all the chronic cracks in the system. It's creating a lot of conflict ...............  has seen departments turning on each other, and using Covid-19 as an "opportunity to air every grievance that ever happened" ................. "We have seen unions shut down hospital after hospital. Each time one staff member or patient tests positive, all staff down tools. While all these union demands are being met, nothing happens… for up to two weeks," one doctor complained. ................. Health services were circling the drain for 10 years. Now they've collapsed ..............  staff were "anxious, fearful… and overwhelmed." ............ the provincial health department was generally seen as so inept and dysfunctional that private donors, businesses and charitable funds anxious to help in the fight against Covid-19 were refusing to deal directly with it. ...........  One doctor cited a "culture of not wanting to discomfort your superiors which means people don't often tell it like it really is. ........  a desire by government "to be seen to be doing the right thing", rather than making tough decisions, citing the recent decision to resume community testing for Covid-19, despite the fact that it immediately pushed the entire testing system - including, crucially at hospitals - into a week-long backlog that rendered it almost useless. ...............  But the clearest lesson from Port Elizabeth may well prove to be about human nature, and how we respond under extreme pressure. ................  And then there is a third group. "The plain obstructive - a huge element, passive or overtly aggressive," said another source. For them, any sense "of altruism, or duty, has gone. It went a long time ago".

Why US-China relations are at their lowest point in decades  The message is that China is responsible for the Covid mess in the country, not him. ............  China has added to the recent run-up in tensions with its harsh national security law in Hong Kong and its repression of Muslim minority Uighurs, which triggered several rounds of US sanctions. ............  a speech about China delivered by Mr Pompeo this week. In rhetoric reminiscent of the Cold War, he accused Chinese leaders of being tyrants on a quest for global domination, and framed America's competition with Beijing as an existential struggle between freedom and oppression. ..............  The Chinese do not appear to be looking for escalation, and analysts agree that President Trump does not want a serious confrontation, certainly not a military one ............... unintended conflict. "The buffer that has historically insulated the US-China relationship, the presumption that the goal is to de-escalate and solve problems… has been stripped away" ..................   William Cohen, a Republican politician who served as defence secretary under the Democratic President Bill Clinton, thinks it's dangerous that China is being seen as an adversary across the political spectrum.

Coronavirus: South Africans divided over second alcohol ban  When it comes to coronavirus, South Africa is the hardest-hit country in Africa with more than 275,000 cases. ........... President Ramaphosa also announced a night-time curfew and said the wearing of masks outdoors was now compulsory. 

Covid-19 in Africa: Fighting fake news about coronavirus  what the WHO has called an "infodemic" around Covid-19  

India coronavirus: Online classes expose extent of digital divide  

Trials of a vaccine and new drug raise hope of beating covid-19

Coronavirus News (190)

AOC's best speech to date @AOC @justicedems @JoeBiden @KamalaHarris @ewarren @BernieSanders https://t.co/IE8FF41UpO #AOC

— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) July 23, 2020

 

What if nuclear power had taken off in the 1970s? How would the world look today if more countries had adopted nuclear power after the 1973 oil crisis? A look back on an alternative history from a rather different 2020 The World If Jul 4th 2020 edition Jul 4th 2020 Editor’s note: This scenario is set in a different 2020 from the one we now inhabit, on a timeline that diverged in 1974  ............  March 6th 1974 may have been a turning-point in human history. ..........   Messmer’s announcement was a plan to construct 80 nuclear-power plants over the following decade, and 170 by the turn of the century. ..........  Even two degrees would be enough to bring heatwaves and droughts and to melt polar ice, raising sea levels. Six degrees would turn much of Earth’s surface into a desert.

Coronavirus: Oxford vaccine triggers immune response  A coronavirus vaccine developed by the University of Oxford appears safe and triggers an immune response. Trials involving 1,077 people showed the injection led to them making antibodies and T-cells that can fight coronavirus. ......... The UK has already ordered 100 million doses of the vaccine.  .......  The vaccine - called ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 - is being developed at unprecedented speed. .........  Nearly all effective vaccines induce both an antibody and a T-cell response. ...........  Levels of T-cells peaked 14 days after vaccination and antibody levels peaked after 28 days. The study has not run for long enough to understand how long they may last ........  The study showed 90% of people developed neutralising antibodies after one dose. Only ten people were given two doses and all of them produced neutralising antibodies. ............   but there are side-effects. ........ There were no dangerous side-effects from taking the vaccine, however, 70% of people on the trial developed either fever or headache. ....... More than 10,000 people will take part in the next stage of the trials in the UK. .. There will be a large trial involving 30,000 people in the US as well 2,000 in South Africa and 5,000 in Brazil. ........... It is possible a coronavirus vaccine will be proven effective before the end of the year, however, it will not be widely available. Health and care workers will be prioritised as will people who are deemed at high risk from Covid-19 due to their age or medical conditions.   

Coronavirus News (189)

Navigating a Crisis: Why Company Culture Is Key  the present times call for leadership with “love and humility” and “a growth mindset” .........  “I’ve personally been on a journey to lead with love and humility instead of pride and fear” ..........  In Thailand, everything is about the heart. The Thais have a word for it called jai, and it’s all jai. And since then I’ve personally been on a journey to lead with love and humility instead of pride and fear. ..........  As I came into Amway, I was very clear that my first 100 days were all about “listen and learn.” ........  The biggest challenge we have faced in addition to keeping all our colleagues safe has been essentially around supply chain. ............  online is the new offline .........  management has become democratized through this process. Every person on a Microsoft Teams [meeting] or a Zoom call has an equal voice. ..........  We have three cultural principles: Live to serve, love to learn, and lead from the heart. .........  long-term strategy is the best short-term strategy 

COVID-19 on Campus: How Should Schools Be Redesigned?  Redesigning academic institutions so that they can re-open and function safely in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic is a challenging problem. Part of the value from a traditional education in an elite institution is socialization as a member of the future elites in finance, business more broadly, law, government, and industry. You meet and become friendly with people who will work with you for decades to come, whose trust you likewise will need for decades. ............  We can already see that improper design, even suboptimal design, can be catastrophic. ...........  We need to determine to what extent we can deliver services adequately through virtual online alternatives. We need to determine to what extent we can deliver traditional services effectively through safe redesign, which manages public risks and to convince the public that risks have indeed been managed. And we need to find the optimal balance. ..........  In some industries there is no redesign that saves it from total economic collapse. Movie theaters represent the most extreme example. ...........   The vast majority of movie theaters will never reopen. ........  Retailing will be transformed but that industry already is adapting. ........  Redesigning elite academic institutions provides a concrete example of the most difficult design problem. ........  Military academies understand that their missions are complex, and they must include discipline and trust in your future cohort of peer officers as much as they include tactics, strategy, and military history. ...............  a significant portion of the value of attending an elite institution is the informal time spent with faculty and with other students, and much of this value can be destroyed by improper redesign of the campus before reopening .............   We can also assume that state, local, and federal governments will still be dealing with the massive debt created by the virus over the past several months. Further, we can assume that many families are still dealing with the financial hardship created by the lockdown. ..............  three age groups, corresponding to Students, most Faculty and Staff, and the Oldest faculty and staff. ..........  We assume that essentially all non-academic activities, from sports to drama and music, will have been canceled. .........  We model the transition of individuals from the Healthy population, into Exposed, Infectious Asymptomatic, Infectious Sick, Recovered Immune, or Deceased. ............   First is full PPE or other protection for faculty and staff. Second is mandatory social distancing for students in the classroom. Third is mandatory social distancing for students in dining and student housing. Fourth is social contact tracing without testing. Fifth is social contact tracing with frequent and regular testing. These interventions can be combined to yield various strategies for reopening a campus. ............    Reopen and change nothing is not a viable strategy. .........  Protecting only the senior staff and hoping for herd immunity among the rest of the organization is not a viable strategy. ...........  Unfortunately, there are very few industries where mixing virtualization and traditional labor is effective. ..........  It is difficult to double the spacing between employees in a meat processing facility without doubling the size of the building or reducing output by half. ..............  The combination of protecting senior staff and blending virtualization with traditional service delivery is possible in some industries but not others. Moreover, it is not sufficient in settings where employees or students also live together in close quarters after work, like a university or an aircraft carrier. ............ Strategy 4: Protect the Vulnerable and Slow the Spread of the Virus through Virtual Instruction and Redesigned Dormitory Experience ............  Strategy 5: Protect the Vulnerable, Slow the Spread of the Virus through Social Distancing in the Classroom and Dorms, and Remove the Contagious through Test and Trace ...........   Even in the presence of all forms of intervention described above, testing will need to be constant and universal, with effective contact tracing after the identification of infected individuals. Daily testing across campus will not be possible. And when a significant portion of infected individuals are asymptomatic, hot spots are likely to have grown quite large before they are detected. .............    take samples from entire living groups of maybe 100 or 200 students. ..............  aggressive programs of testing and contact tracing will also be required. ..........  If a university does choose to open in the Fall, it will need to adopt the following practices, all of which are contained in Strategy 5. ...........  Frequent testing and rapid social tracing will be essential to slow outbreaks of the virus, which inevitably will occur. ........   Students are not going to see the risk of COVID-19 as severe for them. They will not be certain that violating a social distancing norm will expose them, or that exposure will lead to illness, or that illness would be severe for them. They are not going to give up seeing friends or lovers. Redesign of living on-campus units will be the most ineffective part of the transformation, and campus living will be the most vulnerable part of the redesigned campus. And students will — quite reasonably — resist tracking through their phones. Where they sleep, and who they sleep with, and how late they are up drinking, and who they drink with, are all data they will not wish to share with their universities or with anyone else. .............. Every student would have a unique RFD token. Without the token they would not be admitted to any classroom building. ............   Super-spreader events should be banned; there probably will not be giant on-campus parties in the foreseeable future. ...........  Contact tracing will be essential and contact tracing must be automatic, secure, and private. ........  Testing must be frequent. Students who have contracted the virus, whether they are symptomatic or not, must be quarantined, and quarantine must be without stigma. Ideally, quarantine of students who reside in dormitories would be in facilities nicer than existing dormitory facilities. Students who live off campus will be expected to quarantine at home. Students who are quarantined will have their RFD tags noted and will automatically be denied access to classroom buildings and dormitories. ...........  Contact tracing must be immediate, compassionate, and anonymous. Students who have been exposed must be notified. They must be told as gently as possible. And they must not be told the name of the individual who may have exposed them. ..........  The entire process must be transparent. Students must know the reason for each measure that has been imposed. And they must be able to know the state of the disease on campus at any time

Coronavirus News (188)

Why We’re Losing the Battle With Covid-19 The escalating crisis in Texas shows how the chronic underfunding of public health has put America on track for the worst coronavirus response in the developed world. ..........  the key to stopping a pandemic was preventing as many people as possible from landing in hospitals in the first place. ............   Decades of research shows that a robust national public-health system could save billions of dollars annually by reducing the burden of preventable illnesses and keeping the population healthier over all. But like most public-health departments across the country, Harris County’s was grossly underfunded. Shah likes to think of his fellow public-health practitioners as the offensive line of a football team whose fans know only the quarterback: clinical medicine. ..............  the pandemic of the century ........  Politics had won out far too often over sound science. As a result, the state’s reopening had been hasty and poorly coordinated. And now, a month and a half in, case counts were rising and intensive-care units were bracing for an onslaught. .........  In other countries, officials locked down entire cities and employed large-scale, high-tech surveillance programs to stop the virus from spreading. In the United States, decades of near-total neglect had left the entire public-health apparatus too weak and uncoordinated to mount even a fraction of that response. ............  Without any clear guidance or coherent national strategy, states were on their own. In March and April, governors found themselves bidding against one another for ventilators and personal protective equipment. In May, several states — not just Texas — rushed to reopen. And by late June, case counts were surging in at least 20 of them. ..............  The country was on track to achieve the least successful coronavirus response in the developed world, with the most total cases, the highest death toll and the worst projections for late summer and early fall: tens of thousands more deaths by year’s end .............  And that wasn’t even accounting for a possible “second wave.” Or for flu season or hurricane season, either of which would almost certainly worsen the current crisis. ...............  Public-health interventions work best when the forces of politics and culture are aligned behind them — when elected officials provide the necessary resources, and citizens abide by the necessary strictures. Even now, with hospitals filling up, such convergence seemed unlikely. ...........  The economy was in tatters now, and the virus was still spreading. ...............  In the past century, the largest gains in human health and life expectancy have come from public-health interventions, not medical ones. Clinical medicine — treating individual patients with medication and procedures — has registered enormous gains. Hepatitis C is now curable; so are many childhood cancers. Cutting-edge gene therapies are curing rare genetic disorders, and new technology is making surgeries of every kind safer. But even stacked against those triumphs, public health — the policies and programs that prevent entire communities from getting sick in the first place — is still the clear winner. “It’s saved the most lives by far, for the least amount of money,” Tom Frieden, a former director of the C.D.C., told me recently. “But you’d never guess that based on how little we invest in it.” ................. Social policies that mitigate economic inequality would be at the base of the pyramid, followed immediately by public-health interventions like improved sanitation, automobile-and-workplace-safety laws, clean-water initiatives and tobacco-control programs. Clinical medicine would be closer to the top. ........  Less than 3 percent of the country’s $3.6 trillion total annual health care bill is spent on public health; a vast majority of the rest goes to clinical medicine. ...............   Americans don’t like being told what to do. ................  We want to be protected from infectious diseases and dirty water and bad food and crazed gunmen. But not in a way that undermines our freedom. That ambivalence was baked into our public-health institutions from the start. ............  At the turn of the previous century, commissioned doctors had the same reputation for service and self-sacrifice as soldiers. .............  C.D.C. powers are limited. ..... “They treat the states like clients,” says Shelley Hearne, a professor of public health at Johns Hopkins University. “They provide funds and issue recommendations. But they don’t hold any feet to the fire.” ...........  the nation’s public-health apparatus. The system, the authors wrote, was arbitrary, reactive and wildly uneven from one part of the country to another. Crises tended to be addressed, or not, based on political will, not scientific knowledge. Investment in public-health programs was thin in many places, and the capacity to gather and analyze essential data was poor. Leadership was also weak and unstable, with health departments increasingly staffed by political appointees instead of career civil servants. And schools of public health had become too academic and divorced from the actual needs of public-health agencies. What’s more, the relationship between medicine and public health was plagued by “confrontation and suspicion.”........................   There also seemed to be no clear coordination among federal, state and local health departments nor much agreement on who was in charge of what. “Responsibilities have become so fragmented,” the authors wrote, “that deliberate action is often difficult if not impossible.” ..............  And if they could not contain the virus once they reopened, the entire shutdown would have been for nothing. ..........  Infectious-disease outbreaks were trickier. Viruses were invisible — and slow. It took weeks to know if any given decision was the right one, and in the meantime constituents clamored for officials to do less, not more. When Hidalgo erected a temporary field hospital in April so that intensive-care units would not be overwhelmed by a surge of coronavirus infections, Republican lawmakers accused her of wasteful overreaction. When she ordered the release of low-risk inmates from the county jail, in an effort to prevent an outbreak there, a district judge ordered the sheriff to ignore her edict. And when she made masks mandatory in all public spaces, Lt. Gov. Daniel Patrick singled her out for rebuke. ..........  It also inspired more citizens to take matters into their own hands. In mid-May, a handful of shops began reopening with the help of heavily armed militias who stood guard in an effort to discourage officials from interfering. ........  By Memorial Day weekend, Texas was almost fully reopened. The state had not met its own criteria for keeping the coronavirus in check. No one seemed certain about whether or how to enforce the social-distancing edicts that remained. And, while Harris County’s case counts had plateaued, case counts in other parts of the state were rising. ............  In the mid-1800s, even as American cities grappled with repeated cholera outbreaks, some officials balked at the expense of sanitation departments and municipal water systems, preferring instead to blame the poor for choosing to live in filth. And during the flu pandemic of 1918, public-health edicts were often subsumed by politics. The mayor of Pittsburgh, for example, ended a ban on public gatherings, not because the city was out of danger but because he had an election coming up and his constituents wanted to celebrate the Armistice with a parade. The city went on to suffer a spike in flu cases, even as the virus waned elsewhere. ....................  These powers were often employed cruelly; quarantines in particular were aimed at minorities who were considered dirty and disease-carrying by nature. During an 1892 typhus outbreak in New York City, for example, Russian Jews were rounded up — some of them literally pried from the arms of distraught family members ...... and forcibly quarantined on an East River island downwind of the city garbage dump. ..................  It was commonly held at the time that Eastern European Jews carried typhus fever. Very few of those who were quarantined turned out to have typhus, but six ultimately died from illnesses related to unsanitary quarantine conditions. ....................   In 1900, when plague emerged in San Francisco, Asian residents were prevented by armed police battalions from leaving the city’s Chinatown section, while European-Americans continued to come and go freely. And Black and brown Americans were often excluded from emerging public-health programs altogether, even as their bodies were used in experiments that advanced the science underpinning those very programs. In an effort to learn more about syphilis, for example, the U.S. Public Health Service withheld treatment from scores of syphilitic Black men in and around Tuskegee, Ala., lying to them about the nature of the study they were participating in and causing many to suffer and die from the disease long after a cure was available. ..............  in the 1940s, in an effort to determine whether penicillin could prevent sexually transmitted infections, the U.S. Public Health Service experimented on prisoners, prostitutes, soldiers and mental patients in Guatemala, infecting them with sexually transmitted diseases without informing them or seeking their consent. .................  “From there, we see growing libertarian rejection of public-health law and less and less exercise of public-health police powers,” Parmet says. “Now we’re in a once-in-a-century global pandemic, and everyone’s scrambling to figure out what the state can and can’t do to protect the public.” ...............  By then, just about all businesses were open at some level, and case counts were rising with alarming speed. Shah felt as though he were trapped in the driver’s seat of a car with a stuck accelerator. “It’s like we’re shouting out the window, trying to tell everyone, ‘Hey, this thing is out of control,’” he told me. “But we can’t do anything to slow it down.” .............  America was a paradox — a beacon of science embedded in a culture increasingly suspicious of scientists ...........    something much more fundamental would also have to change. The coronavirus pandemic has laid bare gnawing questions at the core of America’s many divisions: Are we willing to trust science and scientists in a crisis? What, exactly, do we want from our government? And what are we willing to sacrifice for one another? ............ the anti-mask set is hard to ignore, in part because it speaks to a broader current of American life. “People have grown comfortable putting their individual rights ahead of the needs of their community” ...............     A common complaint among public-health workers is that this “neglect, panic, repeat” cycle makes it impossible to prevent crises instead of merely responding to them. ...........  a new and bitter reality: Because of the economic crisis, which was triggered by the current pandemic, which was worsened by a lack of public-health investment, public-health agencies will probably suffer more budget cuts in the coming years. ........... “It’s a lot of isolated departments across the country, saying, ‘Oh, we’ll just keep doing God’s work over here, and if our budget gets cut again, we’ll just make do somehow.’” .............  “No one is going to vote for you or name a hospital wing after you because you kept them from getting something that they didn’t think they were susceptible to in the first place,” Frieden says. “The people who cure diseases are glorified, not the people who prevent them.” ..............  And the same stories that played out in Wuhan and Lombardy and Seattle and New York were beginning anew. And not only in Texas. In more than 35 states, including some that had previously brought their outbreaks under control, daily case counts are rising, positivity rates are rising and new grim records are being set — and then quickly surpassed. People in Texas, Florida, California and New Jersey are bracing for a second wave of outbreaks in the fall, even as the first wave has yet to fully recede. 

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Coronavirus News (187)

‘Only those with plastic visors were infected’: Swiss government warns against face shields  plastic shields are inadequate protection and should only be worn in combination with a face mask. ...... “It has been shown that only those employees who had plastic visors were infected. There was not a single infection among employees with a mask.” .......  not only are plastic face shields less effective than face masks, they may provide wearers with a false sense of security. 

Covid-19 has exposed India's failure to deliver even the most basic obligations to its people  Far from flattening the curve, India's graph of transmission is swinging skyward like a Mo Salah free kick. ....... India's ratio currently hovers at around 9,231 tests per million -- or 9 per 1,000, compared to 128 per 1,000 in the United States. ........  about a fifth of all deaths in India are not registered and less than a quarter are medically certified. ...... The lockdown of 1.35 billion people has been the subject of competing hypotheticals. What is known is that it flattened the economy -- in June, the IMF predicted that India's GDP would contract by 4.5% in 2020, while rating agency ICRA estimated a contraction of 9.5% -- and signaled the deepest recession in 60 years. The human cost, amplified by images of millions of migrants forced to return home after losing their jobs, is still unraveling. .......... Vulnerability is aggravated by the comorbidity of poor governance and neglect of seven-odd decades. The Indian state struggles to provide what economist and philosopher Adam Smith defined as the most basic of obligations -- water, health, education, power and security. ..........  India is in the company of low-income sub-Saharan countries on the Health Care Access and Quality Index -- trailing neighbors Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Bhutan and Bangladesh . .........  Health care depends on investment in state capacity. For decades, committees and commissions have urged expenditure on health to be raised to between 4% and 6% of GDP -- but it has stayed at less than 1%. ..........  "Wash hands," say doctors and health officials. Yet in 2019, only one in five Indian households had piped water in their homes. Every second home depends on water from wells, unprotected water bodies or tanker water -- 70% cent of water is contaminated, with India ranked 120 among 122 countries in the water quality index. Pneumonia and diarrhoea also kill more than 1.3 million children each year. ............. poor air quality kills over a Million every year. .............  Such is the state of government schools that millions of students have graduated in the past decade without rudimentary skills of reading and math. In 2016, Tharman Shanmugaratnam, then deputy prime minister of Singapore, invited by the government of India, told the audience of policy makers, "Schools are the biggest crisis in India today, and have been for a long time. Schools are the biggest gap between India and East Asia." .........  Seventy years after its independence, India finally managed to electrify all its villages in 2019. Still, quality of supply is another matter. Barring Mumbai, no city in India can boast of 24/7 supply and households and businesses across the country must depend on inverters. ..............  Indians pay for over 60% of heath care costs from their savings -- some even borrow and land in penury . More parents are also opting for private schools, with nearly 40% of students enrolled in non-public education. Water tankers, air purifiers and inverters are other ubiquitous essentials of living. ......... Successive regimes have taken refuge in the diffusion of authority between federal and state governments and evaded accountability. This has been enabled by the nature of public discourse, which is riveted by emotion and rhetoric rather than reflection on realities.

Covid-19 has many faces even when all of the different influenza types (a or b) and subtypes (h1n1, h3n2, etc) were analysed, there were few differences in the ways they presented clinically. Literature on sars-cov-2 suggests, by contrast, that this virus is a master of disguise. ...........  Patients brought into hospital with all the symptoms of a heart attack have later been found to be suffering from cardiac inflammation caused by the virus. It has also demonstrated that it can begin as a kidney infection, or even as meningitis, before sometimes going on to cause its characteristic respiratory problems. ...........  the two-phase activity of sars-cov-2, whereby it starts in the upper respiratory tract and then migrates deep into the lungs, is the critical factor that allows it to travel around the body. “Influenza rarely gets deep into the lungs,” he says. “This new virus gets down there all the time.” ............   As for why the disease sometimes makes its initial appearance in the digestive system, as it did in Dr DeBenedet’s patient, this is probably because ace2, the cell-surface protein that sars-cov-2 binds to, is abundant in the gut as well as the lungs. How the virus gets through the highly acidic stomach unharmed is unknown. But clearly it can, and does. ............   ace2 is also found in the kidneys and the heart, which may help explain why symptoms manifest there, as well. By contrast, the entry molecules preferred by influenza viruses are almost exclusive to the upper respiratory tract.

 

America’s Enduring Caste System Our founding ideals promise liberty and equality for all. Our reality is an enduring racial hierarchy that has persisted for centuries. .........  The owner of an old house knows that whatever you are ignoring will never go away. Whatever is lurking will fester whether you choose to look or not. Ignorance is no protection from the consequences of inaction. Whatever you are wishing away will gnaw at you until you gather the courage to face what you would rather not see. .........  We did not erect the uneven pillars or joists, but they are ours to deal with now. ...........  Like other old houses, America has an unseen skeleton: its caste system, which is as central to its operation as are the studs and joists that we cannot see in the physical buildings we call home. Caste is the infrastructure of our divisions. It is the architecture of human hierarchy, the subconscious code of instructions for maintaining, in our case, a 400-year-old social order. Looking at caste is like holding the country’s X-ray up to the light. ...........  A caste system is an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups on the basis of ancestry and often immutable traits, traits that would be neutral in the abstract but are ascribed life-and-death meaning in a hierarchy favoring the dominant caste, whose forebears designed it. A caste system uses rigid, often arbitrary boundaries to keep the ranks apart, distinct from one another and in their assigned places. ..............  Throughout human history, three caste systems have stood out. The lingering, millenniums-long caste system of India. The tragically accelerated, chilling and officially vanquished caste system of Nazi Germany. And the shape-shifting, unspoken, race-based caste pyramid in the United States. ............. In America, race is the primary tool and the visible decoy for caste. ......... Caste, like grammar, becomes an invisible guide not only of how we speak but also of how we process information, the autonomic calculations that figure into a sentence without our having to think about it. ..........  We know that the letters of the alphabet are neutral and meaningless until they are combined to make a word, which itself has no significance until it is inserted into a sentence and interpreted by those who speak or hear it. In the same way that “black” and “white” were applied to people who were literally neither, but rather gradations of brown and beige and ivory, the caste system sets people at poles from one another and attaches meaning to the extremes, and to the gradations in between, and then reinforces those meanings, replicates them in the roles each caste was and is assigned and permitted or required to perform..........  we have learned from the human genome that all human beings are 99.9 percent the same. “Race is a social concept, not a scientific one” ...........  “We all evolved in the last 100,000 years from the small number of tribes that migrated out of Africa and colonized the world.” ...........  Caste is the bones, race the skin. ...... Caste is the powerful infrastructure that holds each group in its place. Its very invisibility is what gives it power and longevity. And though it may move in and out of consciousness, though it may flare and reassert itself in times of upheaval and recede in times of relative calm, it is an ever-present through line in the country’s operation. ...........   While the requirements to qualify as white have changed over the centuries, the fact of a dominant caste has remained constant from its inception — whoever fit the definition of white, at whatever point in history, was granted the legal rights and privileges of the dominant caste. Perhaps more critical and tragic, at the other end of the ladder, the subordinated caste, too, has been fixed from the beginning as the psychological floor beneath which all other castes cannot fall. .........  “Young people,” he said, “I would like to present to you a fellow untouchable from the United States of America.” ..............  20 million people, consigned to the lowest rank in America for centuries, “still smothering in an airtight cage of poverty,” quarantined in isolated ghettos, exiled in their own country. ........ he realized that the Land of the Free had imposed a caste system not unlike the caste system of India and that he had lived under that system all his life .........  What we face in our current day is not the classical racism of our ancestors’ era but a mutation of the software that adjusts to the updated needs of the operating system. ........  Resistance to the word often derails any discussion of the underlying behavior it is meant to describe, thus eroding it of meaning. ......... What does racism mean in an era when even extremists won’t admit to it? ........   The instinctive desire to reject the very idea of current discrimination on the basis of a chemical compound in the skin is an unconscious admission of the absurdity of race as a concept. ........  caste does not allow us to ignore structure. Caste is structure. Caste is ranking. Caste is the boundaries that reinforce the fixed assignments based upon what people look like. Caste is a living, breathing entity. It is like a corporation that seeks to sustain itself at all costs. To achieve a truly egalitarian world requires looking deeper than what we think we see. .........  Caste is the granting or withholding of respect, status, honor, attention, privileges, resources, benefit of the doubt and human kindness to someone on the basis of their perceived rank or standing in the hierarchy. .........  Caste is insidious and therefore powerful because it is not hatred; it is not necessarily personal. It is the worn grooves of comforting routines and unthinking expectations, patterns of a social order that have been in place for so long that it looks like the natural order of things. .........  For those in the marginalized castes, casteism can mean seeking to keep those on your disfavored rung from gaining on you, to curry the favor and remain in the good graces of the dominant caste, all of which serve to keep the structure intact. ..........   What race and its precursor, racism, do extraordinarily well is to confuse and distract from the underlying structural and more powerful Sith lord of caste. Like the cast on a broken arm, like the cast in a play, a caste system holds everyone in a fixed place. ........  many people — including those we might see as good and kind people — could be casteist, meaning invested in keeping the hierarchy as it is or content to do nothing to change it, but not racist in the classical sense, not active and openly hateful of this or that group. ................ It’s the autonomic, unconscious, reflexive response to expectations from a thousand imaging inputs and neurological societal downloads that affix people to certain roles based upon what they look like and what they historically have been assigned to or the characteristics and stereotypes by which they have been categorized. No ethnic or racial category is immune to the messaging we all receive about the hierarchy, and thus no one escapes its consequences. ........  Its invisibility is what gives it power and longevity. Caste, along with its faithful servant race, is an X-factor in most any American equation, and any answer one might ever come up with to address our current challenges is flawed without it. ...........  The United States and India are profoundly different from each other — in culture, technology, economics, history, ethnic composition. And yet, many generations ago, these two great lands paralleled each other, each protected by oceans, fertile and coveted and ruled for a time by the British. Each adopted social hierarchies and abides great chasms between the highest and the lowest in their respective lands. Each was conquered by people said to be Aryans arriving, in one case, from across the Atlantic Ocean, in the other, from the north. Those deemed lowest in each country would serve those deemed high. The younger country, the United States, would become the most powerful democracy on Earth. The older country, India, would become the largest. .........  Both exiled their Indigenous peoples — the Adivasi in India, the Native Americans in the United States — to remote lands and to the unseen margins of society. Both countries enacted an amalgam of laws to chain the lowliest group — Dalits in India (formerly known as the untouchables) and African-Americans in the United States — to the bottom, using terror and force to keep them there. ............  “Perhaps only the Jews have as long a history of suffering from discrimination as the Dalits,” the American civil rights advocate Yussuf Naim Kly wrote in 1987. “However, when we consider the nature of the suffering endured by the Dalits, it is the African-American parallel of enslavement, apartheid and forced assimilation that comes to mind.” ........ both caste systems live on in hearts and habits, institutions and infrastructures. .........  In both countries and often at the same time, the lowest castes toiled for their masters — African-Americans in the tobacco fields along the Chesapeake or in the cotton fields of Mississippi, Dalits plucking tea in Kerala and cotton in Nandurbar. Both worked as enslaved people and later for the right to live on the land that they were farming, African-Americans in the system of sharecropping, Dalits in the Indian equivalent, known as saldari, both still confined to their fixed roles at the bottom of their respective societies. ...........  What is called “affirmative action” in the United States is called “reservations” in India, and they are equally unpopular with the upper castes in both countries, language tracking in lock step, with complaints of reverse discrimination in one and reverse casteism in the other. ...........  The Indian caste system historically has been said to be stable and unquestioned by those within it, bound as it is by religion and the Hindu belief in reincarnation, the belief that a person carries out in this life the karma of the previous ones, suffers the punishment or reaps the rewards for deeds in a past life, and that the more keenly you follow the rules for the caste you were born into, the higher your station will be in the next life. ............ a fundamental truth of the species, that all human beings want to be free. .........   Some Dalits felt so strong a kinship with one wing of the American civil rights movement and followed it so closely that in the 1970s they created the Dalit Panthers, inspired by the Black Panther Party. ........ In a caste system, the mudsill is the bottom caste that everything else rests upon. ........  “Anything that causes the Negro to aspire to rise above the plow handle, the cook pot — in a word the functions of a servant,” said Gov. James K. Vardaman of Mississippi, elected in 1903, “will be the worst thing on earth for the Negro. God Almighty designed him for a menial; he is fit for nothing else.” ....... the caste lines in America may have at one time appeared even starker than those in India. In 1890, “85 percent of Black men and 96 percent of Black women were employed in just two occupational categories,” wrote the sociologist Stephen Steinberg, “agriculture and domestic or personal service.” ...........  “If white and colored persons are employed together,” the sociologist Bertram Doyle wrote in the 1930s, “they do not engage in the same tasks, generally, and certainly not as equals.” He continued: “Negroes are seldom, if ever, put into authority over white persons. Moreover, the Negro expects to remain in the lower ranks; rising, if at all, only over other Negroes.” No matter how well he does his job, Doyle wrote, “he cannot often hope for promotion.” ...........  Since the early 20th century, the wealthiest African-Americans — from Louis Armstrong to Muhammad Ali — have traditionally been entertainers and athletes. Even now, in a recent ranking of the richest African-Americans, 17 of the top 20 — from Oprah Winfrey to Jay-Z to Michael Jordan — made their wealth as innovators, and then moguls, in the entertainment industry or in sports. ........... Johnson knocked Jeffries down in the 15th round and was declared the victor, to jeers and epithets. It was taken as an affront to white sovereignty and triggered white riots across the country, in the North and the South, including 11 separate ones in New York City, where white mobs set fire to Black tenements and tried to lynch two Black men over the defeat. ..........  What did it mean to be white if someone with actual white skin was not white? ............  A Japanese novelist once noted that, on paper anyway, it was a single apostrophe that stood between rejection and citizenship for a Japanese Ohara versus an Irish O’Hara. ..........  the unyielding rigidity of a caste system, defiant in the face of evidence contrary to its foundation, how it holds fast against the assault of logic. .................  If there is anything that distinguishes caste in America, it is, first, the policing of roles and behavior expected of people based on what they look like, and second, the monitoring of boundaries — the disregard for the boundaries of subordinated castes or the passionate construction of them by those in the dominating caste, to keep the hierarchy in place. ...........  Modern-day caste protocols are often less about overt attacks or conscious hostility. They are like the wind, powerful enough to knock you down but invisible as they go about their work. They are sustained by the muscle memory of relative rank and the expectations of how one person interacts with others based on their place in the hierarchy. It is a form of status hypervigilance, the entitlement of the dominant caste to step in and assert itself wherever it chooses, to monitor or dismiss those deemed beneath them, as they see fit. ...............  Through no fault of any individual born to it, a caste system centers the dominant caste as the sun around which all other castes revolve and defines it as the default-setting standard of normalcy, of intellect, of beauty, against which all others are measured, ranked in descending order by their physiological proximity to the dominant caste. ............  Society builds a trapdoor of self-reference that, without any effort on the part of people in the dominant caste, unwittingly forces on them a narcissistic isolation from those assigned to lower categories. It replicates the structure of narcissistic family systems, the interplay of competing supporting roles — the golden-child middle castes of so-called model minorities, the lost-child Indigenous peoples and the scapegoat caste at the bottom. ............  The highest and lowest rungs are seen as so far apart as to seem planted in place, immovable. Thus those straddling the middle may succumb to the greatest angst and uncertainty as they aspire to a higher rung. ...........  Everyone in the caste system is trained to covet proximity to the dominant caste: an Iranian immigrant feeling the need to mention that a relative had blond hair as a child; a second-generation child of Caribbean immigrants quick to clarify that they are Dominican and categorically not African-American; a Mexican immigrant boasting that one of his grandfathers back in Mexico “looked just like an American” — blond hair and blue eyes — at which point he was reminded by an African-American that Americans come in all colors of hair and eyes. ......................... “No matter what happens, they can never become ‘Black.’” Hacker continued, “White Americans of all classes have found it comforting to preserve Blacks as a subordinate caste: a presence that despite all its pain and problems still provides whites with some solace in a stressful world.” ................ the seductive power of nationalistic appeals to the anxieties of ordinary people .........  “The survival of a group,” Fromm wrote, “depends to some extent on the fact that its members consider its importance as great as or greater than that of their own lives.” .........  “Group narcissism leads people to fascism.” He went on, “An extreme form of group narcissism means malignant narcissism, which gives to rise to a fanatical fascist politics, an extreme racialism and so on.” .........  A person in this group “feels: ‘Even though I am poor and uncultured, I am somebody important because I belong to the most admirable group in the world — I am white’; or ‘I am an Aryan.’” ..........  A group whipped into narcissistic fervor “is eager to have a leader with whom it can identify,” Fromm wrote. “The leader is then admired by the group which projects its narcissism onto him.” The right kind of leader can inspire a symbiotic connection that supplants logic. The susceptible group, Fromm teaches us, sees itself in the narcissistic leader, becomes one with the leader, sees his fortunes and his fate as their own.