Worried About Covid-19 in the Winter? Alaska Provides a Cautionary Tale The state is seeing record case numbers, adding to evidence that the virus is poised to thrive as the weather grows colder. ........... winter could bring the most devastating phase of the pandemic. .......... the coronavirus is more virulent in colder weather and lower relative humidities ........... some viruses persist longer in colder and drier conditions; that aerosolized viruses can remain more stable in cooler air; that viruses can replicate more swiftly in such conditions; and that human immune systems may respond differently depending on seasons. ............. “It’s going to be a very tough fall and winter for the entire world” .............. One of the challenges that Dr. Zink has consistently faced is convincing residents to wear masks and stay distanced, two tools that public health experts have said can help reduce the spread of the virus.
How Data Science Can Win the Debate on Police Reform solving the problem starts with better data. ........ bringing academic rigor and science to what is often a very emotional debate .......... Last year alone, police were responsible for almost 2,000 known deaths in America. It’s a leading cause of death among young men, right after heart disease and cancer. ........... bias manifests at so many levels in the system. ............ we’re massively underestimating the problem because of data limitations and the poor quality of existing statistical analyses. ........... How do you quantify racism? ............. that entire source of bias that went into stopping someone in the first place. ............. What about the upfront work in hiring and training that would help root out bias in police departments? ................. we can dial back or eliminate many controversial aggressive tactics because their purported benefits just aren’t supported by the data. I’m thinking of things like police militarization and no-knock SWAT raids that the data shows seem to damage police from a public perception angle, but they don’t actually make officers safer, which was the promise going in. ................. the role of diversification, which is one of the oldest proposed hiring reforms in policing ................... female officers use far less force. ........ the best evidence we have right now says diversification can help .............. a study in New York looking at stop-and-frisk during the mid-2000s, which was out of control in its volume during that period. Upwards of 90% of people being stopped on the street were found to be guilty of no crime, and the vast majority of these stops were of young Black and Latinx men. .................. officers in many ways are like a lot of other bureaucrats that we’ve studied for a long time. They respond to incentives, they want a paycheck, they want to please their boss or at least not get in trouble. We can use some of those same managerial tools to change behavior. .................. we spent a substantial amount of time over the past year critiquing a study that was published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, one of the most prominent journals in the world. They claimed there was no racial bias in police shootings, and that study was recently retracted after a year of our critiques. The study was widely cited in the media and in Congressional hearings, but when you stripped away all the statistical jargon, it became clear that all it was really showing was that most people who get shot by police are white. .................... Sunlight is the best disinfectant, so we need more transparency about civilian complaints and how allegations of officer misconduct are investigated. .............. We have 18,000 police departments in this country.
A Biden Landslide? Some Democrats Can’t Help Whispering Democrats are still haunted by the ghosts of 2016. But some are allowing themselves to contemplate a Biden victory big enough to reorder the nation’s politics. ......... Biden could pull off a landslide in November, achieving an ambitious and rare electoral blowout ........... Democrats see flipping states like Texas and Georgia as key to a possible landslide ....... a commanding victory that sweeps Democrats to control of the Senate as well would set the stage for a consequential presidency, not just one that evicts Mr. Trump. ......... “That the people want to address climate change in a big bold way. They want to address health care in a big bold way. And they want to address education in a big bold way.” ............ a huge Electoral College victory and help Democrats retake the Senate. ......... “Lincoln was not an abolitionist, F.D.R. not a socialist or trade unionist, and L.B.J. not a civil rights activist,” Mr. Shahid said. “Three of the most transformative presidents never fully embraced the movements of their time, and yet the movements won because they organized and shaped public opinion.”
Late Night Is Too Nervous to Believe in Biden-Leading Polls “It feels like we’re all Charlie Brown going to kick the football, but we know at the last second Lucy’s gonna give us coronavirus,” Stephen Colbert joked on Thursday.
Lies, Damned Lies and Trump Rallies Who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes? ........ It’s not so much that Trump is lying more as that the lies have become qualitatively different — even more blatant, and increasingly untethered to any plausible political strategy. ............. What Trump has been revealing, more clearly than ever before, is that he has a totalitarian mind-set. .......... almost his entire party, and tens of millions of voters, seem perfectly willing to follow him into the abyss.
The Voting Suppression Tipping Point For years, Republicans have made it harder and harder for Americans to vote. Is that strategy backfiring? ........... Even before the coronavirus, the United States had made it harder to vote than any other affluent democracy
Household spread of Covid-19 is common and quick, a new CDC study finds The person exposed or suspected of having Covid-19 should be isolated before getting tested and before test results come back to protect others in the home ......... persons who suspect that they might have COVID-19 should isolate, stay at home, and use a separate bedroom and bathroom if feasible .......... all members of the household should wear masks at all times in common spaces ........ Infection was quick: Over half of the people (53%) who lived with someone battling Covid-19 became infected within a week, researchers found. Some 75% of these secondary infections occurred within five days of the first symptoms in the initial patient. ........... fewer than one half of household members with confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infections reported symptoms at the time infection was first detected ............ clusters of people who live close together are at highest risk of getting it from one another. If children are part of that household, they may show minimal symptoms but still be contagious." ......... and not play with other children -- even outside ........ Have everyone wash their hands at every opportunity. Clean and disinfect all those commonly shared surfaces -- don't forget the refrigerator and microwave handles! ........... Keep everyone as stress-free as possible -- a hard task for sure -- and focus on healthy eating, regular exercise and quality sleep. ............ If you tested positive but had no symptoms, you can stop isolating at home 10 days after the date you had your positive test
America and the Virus: ‘A Colossal Failure of Leadership’ In its destruction of American lives, treasure and well-being, this pandemic marks the greatest failure of U.S. governance since Vietnam. ......... “Of the more than 200,000 people who have died as of today, I don’t think that 50,000 would have died if it hadn’t been for the incompetence.” ............ As many Americans are dying every 10 days of Covid-19 as U.S. troops died during 19 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the economists David Cutler and Lawrence Summers estimate that the economic cost of the pandemic in the United States will be $16 trillion, or about $125,000 per American household — far more than the median family’s net worth. Then there’s an immeasurable cost in soft power as the United States is humbled before the world. ............ A 324-page study by Johns Hopkins found last October that the United States was the country best prepared for a pandemic. .......... Trump argues that no one could have anticipated the pandemic, but it’s what Bush warned about, what Obama aides tried to tell their successors about, and what Joe Biden referred to in a blunt tweet in October 2019 lamenting Trump’s cuts to health security programs and adding: “We are not prepared for a pandemic.” ............. First, China initially covered up the scale of the outbreak. Second, even so, the United States and other countries had enough information to act as Taiwan did. The first two countries to impose travel restrictions on China were North Korea and the Marshall Islands, neither of which had inside information. ............... if Wuhan had been locked down just two weeks earlier, it’s conceivable that this entire global catastrophe could have been averted. ............. Sierra Leone in West Africa had effective tests before the United States did. ......... Japan is a densely populated country that did not test much and yet has only 2 percent as many deaths per capita as the United States. One reason is that Japanese have long embraced face masks ............... can be at least as effective as a vaccine in fighting the pandemic ........... Trump did almost everything wrong. He discouraged mask wearing. The administration never rolled out contact tracing, missed opportunities to isolate the infected and exposed, didn’t adequately protect nursing homes, issued advice that confused the issues more than clarified them, and handed responsibilities to states and localities that were unprepared to act ............ Trump’s missteps arose in part because he channeled an anti-intellectual current that runs deep in the United States, as he sidelined scientific experts and responded to the virus with a sunny optimism apparently meant to bolster the financial markets. .................. if the United States had simply imposed the same lockdowns just two weeks earlier, 83 percent of the deaths in the early months could have been prevented. ......... A basic principle of public health is the primacy of accurate communications based on the best science. ............ “the President of the United States was likely the largest driver of the Covid-19 misinformation.” ........ You wouldn’t want an epidemiologist reviewing your M.R.I. scans, and it’s equally odd to have a radiologist managing a pandemic. ........... the right-wing website RedState denounced “the public health Gestapo” and called Dr. Anthony Fauci a “mask Nazi.” .......... A University of Chicago study found that watching the Sean Hannity program correlated to less social distancing, so watching Fox News may well have been lethal to some of its fans. .............. Americans have often pointed to the Soviet Union as a place where ideology trumped science, with disastrous results. .......... Most striking, Trump still has never developed a comprehensive plan to fight Covid-19. His “strategy” was to downplay the virus and resist business closures, in an effort to keep the economy roaring — his best argument for re-election. ........... More than 40 percent of adults reported in June that they were struggling with mental health ............ More than one-quarter of young adults said they have seriously contemplated suicide. ............ in what is arguably the richest country in the history of the world, political malpractice has resulted in a pandemic of infectious disease followed by pandemics of poverty, mental illness, addiction and hunger. ....... During World War II, American soldiers died at a rate of 9,200 a month, less than one-third the pace of deaths from this pandemic, but the United States responded with a massive mobilization. By 1945, a Ford assembly line was turning out one new B-24 bomber every hour. Yet today we can’t even churn out enough face masks; a poll of nurses in late July and early August found that one-third lacked enough N95 masks. ................. Instead of leading a war against the virus, Trump organized a surrender. He even held a super-spreader event at the White House, for Judge Amy Coney Barrett, and that’s why the White House recently had more new cases of Covid-19 than New Zealand, Taiwan and Vietnam combined. ............. if the U.S. had responded urgently and deftly enough to achieve Taiwan’s death rate, fewer than 100 Americans would have died from the virus.
