I'm glad @jeremyphoward & I could get our 3rd dose today! However, vax alone isn't enough. We need:
- Govt funding for ventilation upgrades & air filters
- FREE N95s/KF94s & rapid tests for everyone
- public education: #COVIDisAirborne
- public education: #LongCovid is hell
@jeremyphoward Our vaccine clinic had @WHO signs on proper hand-sanitizer use. What we need are signs about MASKS:
WHICH ones: KF94/N95/FFP2 (everyone there except us had surgical or cloth masks)
HOW: many folks weren't covering noses
WHY: b/c #COVIDisAirborne & you do NOT want LongCovid
@jeremyphoward@WHO The "5 Ways to Fight an Airborne Virus" graphic would make for great messaging in a vaccine clinic (& everywhere). 2nd image here:
@jeremyphoward@WHO I also like @RealOzSAGE graphic on making indoor air safer. Workers should not be forced into workplaces with unsafe air, nor should children be forced into schools with unsafe air.
Let's set indoor air quality standards & fight airborne disease.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
Focusing on vaccines ALONE:
- Does not work (many countries tried & failed)
- Hospitals can still collapse
- Sig # of vaxxed get LongCOVID
- Rooted in neoliberalism: individual responsibility as soln to collective problems
We need: vaccines + N95s + ventilation + air filters 1/
Vaccines alone are not enough. We saw this with Delta in UK, Israel, Denmark, & others that reopened w/out masks. Denmark had >90% vax rate for over 12s and here’s what happened with Delta. (for vax: 2x against delta may be like 3x against omicron) 2/
If you are 3x vaxxed, you should still care:
- Breakthroughs not rare
- Significant # of breakthroughs get LongCovid
- You may need functioning hospital system
- Many are ineligible for vax (kids) or can’t mount antibody response (eg cancer patients) 3/
Many leaders say people are fed up w/ restrictions, so we can’t try to do anything about Omicron:
- Premise questionable, as several polls show majority want mask mandates
- There is a TON government could do (but isn’t) that does NOT involve individual restrictions 1/
Things govt could do that are NOT individual restrictions:
Mail everyone free KF94s & rapid tests
Fund ventilation upgrades & air filters
Set indoor air quality standards
Paid support to isolate when sick
Public education: #LongCovid is hell
Public education: #COVIDisAirborne 2/
More things govt could do that are NOT individual restrictions:
Public education: KF94/N95 >>> cloth/surgical mask
CO2 monitors for all indoor spaces, results displayed clearly for all occupants to see
Replace all the "fight covid w/ hand-washing signs" 3/
CDC director says omicron cases doubling every 2 days, but provides no context & no indication that this is VERY BAD. Viewers would need to understand exponential growth, know current state of health care systems, and read between the lines to understand how serious this is 2/
Almost the entire interview is focused on getting vaxxed. She briefly mentions masks & hand-washing (still with the hand-washing) at the very end, but leaves general impression that everything is a-ok as long as you're vaxxed. 3/
Algorithmic mechanism design (eg ad tech auctions such as Google, multi-sided platforms such as Uber) contains an inherent contradiction:
- theory of preserving autonomy & rationality of participants
- reality of opaquely generating & exploiting information asymmetries @jakusg 1/
The point of an auction is to incentivize truthful disclosures of preference & valuation; by contrast, Google, acting as an auction platform & multi-sided mechanism designer, is effectively profiling market actors so that it can extract more surplus for itself. 2/
In privately controlled & highly automated digital platforms, algorithmic market-like mechanisms simulate how a market might behave without necessarily including any of the features necessary to constitute a market, such as freedom to deal or knowable information rules. 3/
How can we think about building systems not for individual end users, but for groups and communities? So much of computer science is limited by the assumption that there is an individual end-user who should be the benefactor of what we build.
- @marylgray keynote #NeurIPS2021 1/
ML gravitates to large scale data, even though it has rarely had a robust account of where that data comes from & under what conditions, and is almost always deeply disconnected from the social relationships that produced it. 2/
Data is power. Because data has become so powerful, we must transfer the tools of data collection, aggregation, & sharing from engineers to the communities in society that carry the risks. 3/