“The future will not be like the past. Our models are degrading by the day, and we don’t understand — we don’t want to understand — how much in society could topple when they fail, and how much suffering that could bring.” (1/x) nytimes.com/2021/02/25/opi…
“One place to start is by recognizing how fragile the basic infrastructure of civilization is even now, in this climate, in rich countries. Which brings me to Texas.”
“Two facts from that crisis have gotten less attention than they deserve. First, the cold in Texas was not a generational climatic disaster.”
“The problem, as @RogerPielkeJr wrote in his newsletter, is that Texas’ worst-case scenario planning used a 2011 cold snap that was a one-in-10-year weather event. It wasn’t even the worst cold Texas experienced in living memory.”
“Texas hadn’t just failed to prepare for the far future. It failed to prepare for the recent past.”
“Second, it could have been so much worse. ... This was not the worst weather imaginable and this was not the worst outcome imaginable. Climate change promises far more violent events to come.”
“But this is what it looks like when we face a rare-but-predictable stretch of extreme weather, in a rich state in a rich country. The result was nearly 80 deaths — and counting — including an 11-year-old boy found frozen in his bed. I can barely stand to write those words.”
“And Texas will not prove unique, or even all that bad, in terms of how fragile the assumptions beneath its critical infrastructure really were.” (X/x)
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“A negationist is a conscious liar. It is someone who'd rather live in a fabricated reality based on a fabricated past, even if this may mean negating the suffering of millions.” (1/x) bigthink.com/13-8/science-d…
“A negationist lives in a world that only exists in their mind, usually motivated by self-interest; power or money, mostly. Denial is different. Surprising as it may seem, we are all very good at denial.”
“We may deny that we are sick, or that the person we love doesn't love us back, or that we are not competent to do a job. Sports fans of losing teams deny reality and go back to the stadium with hope refreshed.”
“The findings show that covid-19 deaths accounted for 15-20% of all sampled deaths - many more than official reports suggest and contradicting the widely held view that covid-19 has largely skipped Africa and had little impact.” (1/x) bmj.com/company/newsro…
“They also show that covid-19 deaths occurred across a wider age spectrum than reported elsewhere and were concentrated among people aged under 65, including an unexpectedly high number of deaths in children.”
“The absence of data on covid-19 in Africa has fostered a widely held view that the virus has largely skipped Africa and had little impact. However, this may be an example of the ‘absence of evidence’ being widely misconstrued as ‘evidence of absence.’”
"We're now in a path where we're going to have these cycles of coronavirus outbreaks as there are gaps in vaccination across the U.S. and across the world, and as new variants emerge that might be less susceptible to vaccines that we put out into the field."
"We could be lucky. Maybe these variants don't emerge that escape the ability to be neutralized by the antibodies raised by these vaccines, but, you know, we have hundreds of millions of people infected, and while this virus isn't as great a mutation generator as HIV, but..."
In his book American Crisis, Andrew Cuomo addressed his nursing home policy in the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic at some length. It was always a defensive, tone-deaf account; given what we now know about his data falsification, it is outrageous. A thread... (1/x)
"The most painful aspect of the COVID crisis has been its
devastating effect on our elderly in nursing homes," he writes. "Understanding the threat, on March 13, we were taking every precaution that we could think of."
"Even before New York had a single COVID death, we banned visitors from going into nursing homes for fear that they might be transmitting the virus, and we required PPE, temperature checks, and cohorting of residents with COVID."
"Imagine you are setting across the table from two people both of whom are 65 or older, both with underlying health conditions. You have two doses of vaccine, one in each hand...." @mtosterholm on the covid vaccine dosing dilemma. marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolu… (1/x)
"And you say to them I can give two doses to you or to you but then the other person gets nothing. Or I can give one dose to both of you."
"This is what I know. At the very least, one dose is likely to prevent serious illness, hospitalization and death. Two doses will probably even prevent clinical disease with B.1.1.7."
Seasonality, vaccines, variants, caseloads—the country is in a confusing place right now. I spoke with @michaelmina_lab, probably the most incisive epidemiological thinker in this pandemic, about all of it. A thread of his many observations (1/x). nymag.com/intelligencer/…
“My personal feeling is we are seeing the benefits of seasonality hit, which I know some of my colleagues don’t agree with.” The conventional wisdom is that seasonality wouldn’t abate before the spring, but “it’s not uncommon for coronaviruses to essentially start dropping now.”
“Most of the known coronaviruses have something on the order of a three-month window where they’re really infectious — when they’re really transmitting.” We may be leaving that window behind now.