CHESSCKERS: you now need to 'hop' over a piece to take it. Captures can be prevented by positioning pieces behind other pieces
CHESSGEONS AND DRAGONS: roll a d20 to move your piece - 1-10 = no movement, 11-15 = move as normal, 16-20 = move twice
All pieces must have names. When taking a piece, describe the epic battle
THE FLOOR IS LAVA: any piece that remains in the same position (aside from starting positions) for more than 4 player turns is lost. Squares containing lost pieces cool and are no longer considered lava
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A lot of people have been talking about it, so I thought I might do a bit of a thread on plausible reasons for the decline in COVID-19 cases in places where behaviour hasn't changed much recently 1/n
2/n The basic background is that there are some places across the world where there hasn't been a reportedly huge behavioural change since Nov/Dec last year where cases are dropping, sometimes quite quickly
So what's causing this?
3/n The explanation proposed by some has been that these places have reached "herd immunity", essentially a threshold where enough people have been infected and recovered such that the disease can no longer spread
This stuff is fascinating. Pay to low-income workers would increase by $509 billion under the bill, but the CBO has assumed that this is a fixed system and that higher wages -> higher prices -> less spending -> fewer jobs
Even more interesting is when you really dig into the weeds. For example, half of all those 'lost' jobs are estimated to be from teens working at the minimum wage
This is a problem that is quite easily solvable. In Australia we have age-adjusted minimum wages for precisely this reason
Always remember the Golden Rule of international comparisons: the most common explanation for a difference between two places is to do with DATA COLLECTION
For example, maternal mortality. Commonly used as a proxy for the wellbeing of a healthcare system
Also, notoriously complex to measure. Here's some examples from the UK, US, and Australia on the measurement
And those are just the top-line statements! The true divergence between the recording across healthcare systems can be massive, because everything from death certificates to doctors' training differs
This is a fascinating example of a complete misrepresentation of risk
- the risk for a 58 year old from COVID-19 is actually quite high (around 1 in 200 risk of death)
- the risk from being inside is complex, but likely minimal
Now, social isolation is harder to assess, and it obviously varies by person, but given the evidence we have on excess mortality in places with long lockdowns that haven't seen a massive increase, it's mathematically impossible for it to be higher than that from COVID-19
Moreover, going out and about during a pandemic has implications for people other than yourself, who may not be aware that you are so blasé about risks
Something that is important to note - despite the somewhat fractious debate about this bad paper, I have not nor will I ever say that closing schools is necessarily a good thing
The issue here is a terrible paper that is wrong in many ways. The scientific community should be shocked and appalled at the actions of journals and authors when mistakes are pointed out in their work
But removing this one impactful study from the literature won't shift the needle that much. The question about opening and closing schools during a pandemic remains, as ever, complex