The coldest winter I ever spent
Archive for May 2020
How about some good news? It starts less-good but keep reading: On 5-22 a hair stylist in Missouri was reported as serving 84 clients while symptomatic while wearing a mask. A second hairstylist at the location tested positive, exposing 56 more clients. But as of 5-29, contact tracing hasn’t discovered any people getting COVID-19!
The moral of the story is, wear a mask! Don’t be indoors with people with COVID-19 for long periods of time!
I’ve heard it said that states may be cooking their books with regard to COVID-19 vs flu & pneumonia deaths. The theory is that states want to appear “ready to open” when, in fact they are not. I looked into it and the CDC’s Fluview website shows a modest increase in flu & pneumonia deaths this year. But it doesn’t show a big, smoking gun of hidden COVID-19 deaths.
A well-meaning friend forwarded a fabricated image about the matter today. I spent an hour figuring out that it was fake.
Here is why I believe the data is fabricated. I went to the CDC’s Fluview site as mentioned by Andy Slavitt here. I downloaded the data for Florida in 2018-2020. The numbers on the CDC website regarding pneumonia deaths don’t look suspicious like it does in the above image! In Florida, in weeks 5-21 I count this many pneumonia related deaths in these years:
2020: 5291
2019: 3890
2018: 3999
That is MUCH different than the fabricated image.
There’s a lot of things I don’t know about this pandemic. But now there’s one thing I think I -do- know.
I plan on looking back at this article in 10 years and saying “Heh, yup, that was 4 years of wackyness. We got to the edge of democracy, looked over the precipice and… [well, here in May 2020, I don’t know how it ends!]”
Article posted on NPR.org on May 28, 2020
Stung By Twitter, Trump Signs Executive Order To Weaken Social Media Companies
May 28, 20204:59 PM ET
Bobby AllynPresident Trump on Thursday signed an executive order aimed at limiting the federal legal protections that shield social media companies from liability.
Evan Vucci/AP
Updated at 6:04 p.m. ETPresident Trump signed an executive order Thursday aimed at limiting the broad legal protections enjoyed by social media companies, two days after he tore into Twitter for fact-checking two of his tweets.
“We’re here today to defend free speech from one of the gravest dangers it has faced in American history, frankly,” Trump said from the Oval Office. “A small handful of powerful social media monopolies control the vast portion of all private and public communications in the United States.”
The president said the tech companies have “unchecked power to censor, restrict, edit, shape, hide, alter” a large sphere of human interaction. “They have points of view,” he said.
The Trump administration hopes the order will eventually set the stage for new regulations on tech platforms such as Twitter and Facebook.
But legal experts said they were doubtful the move would have any practical effect on the tech giants. Legal observers described the action as “political theater,” arguing that the order does not change existing federal law and will have no bearing on federal courts.
The president’s latest confrontation with Twitter was set off after the tech company placed fact-checking warnings on two of his tweets that claimed, without evidence, that casting ballots by mail allows for voter fraud. Voting by mail has been used for years in both Democratic and Republican states without reports of widespread fraud.
Trump lashed out at Twitter, comparing the fact-checking labels to censorship and accusing the social media giant of stifling conservative voices, though the president did not provide any examples to back up his assertion.
The president, who often uses Twitter as a megaphone to tout his victories and blast his critics, responded to the fact-checking labels by threatening to shut down social media companies despite not having the sole authority to do so.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said on Wednesday that that platform will continue to warn users about factual distortions on the platform.
“This does not make us an ‘arbiter of truth,’ ” Dorsey wrote on Twitter. “Our intention is to connect the dots of conflicting statements and show the information in dispute so people can judge for themselves. More transparency from us is critical so folks can clearly see the why behind our actions.”
Dorsey’s comment was an apparent response to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who told Fox News earlier Wednesday that social media companies should stay out of the business of weighing in on what is true or not.
“Private companies probably shouldn’t be, especially these platform companies, shouldn’t be in the position of doing that,” Zuckerberg said.
Regulator: Turning the FCC into “the President’s speech police is not the answer”
The White House order takes aim at a 1996 law passed by Congress that has often been at the center of political fights over regulating speech on social media platforms: Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
The law protects Internet companies from being sued over content that appears on their platforms and allows for content moderation, determining when a post should be removed to be left up to the internal rules of companies such as Twitter and Facebook, provided those decisions are made “in good faith.”
Courts have repeatedly upheld the law in favor of technology companies, even when the statute was used to defend websites advertising children who were forced into sex trafficking.
Trump’s order seeks to chip away at that protection by offering a new interpretation of the law. The order argues, in essence, that if the social media companies restrict certain voices on their platforms, the companies should be stripped of their legal immunity, opening the doors to a wave of lawsuits over content seen as defamatory.
Legal experts greeted the order with heavy skepticism, saying, absent a new law passed by Congress, it would not be legally binding.
“It flies in the face of 25 years of judicial precedent, that has been federal precedent in almost every circuit court,” said Kate Klonick, a law professor at St. John’s University School of Law in New York. “It’s not the role of the president to interpret federal law.”
To Klonick, the order was “a very, very clear piece of political theater,” she told NPR, adding that the action is “unlikely to have any kind of weight or authority.”
The order directs the Federal Communications Commission to start a rule-making process to clarify when social media companies should keep protections under the law.
Height Capital Markets analysts Chase White and Clayton Allen described the executive order as “mostly noise without any teeth.”
In a note to investors, they wrote that the FCC only exerts limited control over social media companies, which are not regulated like traditional broadcasters. And historically, the FCC has been opposed to social media regulation, White and Allen pointed out.
Already, some of the five members of FCC are expressing concern about the White House’s action.
“This does not work. Social media can be frustrating. But an Executive Order that would turn the Federal Communications Commission into the President’s speech police is not the answer,” Jessica Rosenworcel said in a statement. “It’s time for those in Washington to speak up for the First Amendment. History won’t be kind to silence.”
Kate Ruane, senior legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, called the order an attempt to punish social media companies for posts that displease the president.
“Ironically, Donald Trump is a big beneficiary of Section 230,” Ruane said. “If platforms were not immune under the law, then they would not risk the legal liability that could come with hosting Donald Trump’s lies, defamation and threats.”
GOP’s Hawley: Companies that act like publishers should be treated like publishers
Backers of Trump’s order, such as Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., said adding warning labels to the president’s tweets is an editorial decision that shows the social media platform is acting more like a publisher than an Internet forum and that the company should lose its special protection.
“It makes little sense to treat companies that publish their editorial comments about others’ content as if they are mere distributors. Companies that act like publishers should be treated like publishers,” Hawley wrote in a letter to Twitter’s Dorsey.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., supports Twitter’s initiative to flag tweets that contain falsehoods. She said Trump’s order directs the federal government to “dismantle efforts to help users distinguish fact from fiction.”
She said the order does not address the proliferation of disinformation on social media, an issue central in the 2016 presidential election and one that’s expected to be influential in November.
“Again and again, social media platforms have sold out the public interest to pad their corporate profits. Their business model is to make money at the expense of the truth,” Pelosi said.
NPR’s Shannon Bond contributed to this report.
The source material:
Trump’s tweets with the notices:
Twitter’s “get the facts” page:
Where do you get your COVID-19 news and epidemiology?
Right now, I get it from:
– https://aatishb.com/covidtrends/
– Medscape News Alert “Where the doctors go!” https://www.medscape.com/today
– https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html and the pages on the site like this one https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality
– https://www.npr.org/ (the most non-political news site I could find)
– links from Facebook friends
– https://www.erinbromage.com/post/the-risks-know-them-avoid-them
– https://www.sltrib.com/news/2020/05/23/your-guide-how
Here’s an article
Wearing a face mask can reduce coronavirus transmission by up to 75 percent, study says
(as close to a source as I could find)
It is super seeing research like that! The next question to our society is: how do we couple mask usage with another “multiplier” so that people can coexist inside a room and not transmit the virus at all?
The case studies that I have seen demonstrate one person spreading the virus to up to 80% of the other people in a room in 3 hours. Reducing that transmission rate by 75% isn’t actually helpful on its own; in simplest terms, now that same 80% gets infected in 12 hours ðŸ™.
Thoughts?
I am very concerned about healthy people taking hydroxychloroquine as prophylaxis / a preventive for COVID-19.
What is your experience with a “-quine” based anti-malarial?
When I was researching antimalarial drugs for a trip overseas in 2010, I found that all of the quinine-based antimalarial drugs I found caused people to have significant negative psychotic effects, from vivid bad dreams to scary hallucinations and psychotic breaks. The literature says “up to 25%” of people have these symptoms but when I put it to my friends, 6 out of 6 people that had taken quinine-based antimalarials like Mefloquine had extremely bad psychotic effects and had to stop taking it for life-threateningly-bad psychosis based reasons. I opted to take doxycycline instead :-).
Yes, hydroxychloroquine has these side-effects (via)
That’s Abigail on the far-right with the inside-out striped dress. This photo accurately represents the vibe on that afternoon! November 4, 2019
I started learning piano. It’s fun and hard! When I play the piece on the right, “Sunrise” it sounds like some too-cool-for-shoes experimental ambient slow-groove space music composition. It’s a good thing I like experimental ambient slow-groove space music!
And thank you Michael!!
Yesterday I made a facebook post that sparked a good discussion:
A family friend wrote an “open up America!” post. Here was my response:
If we open up completely right now, figure 1/4 of Americans will get COVID-19. It’s about 6% fatal. Here’s the math: 300,000,000 * .25 * 0.06 = 4.5 million dead. That seems a high price to pay for freedom. Thoughts?That said, I -hate- staying home and hiding from this thing and I know the loss of productivity is staggering. I’m watching my daughter’s development change for the worse and I hate it.
My friend Tim posted an interesting article and I riffed on it here:
And then, here’s some studies that says my estimates could be way off. I’m happy to be wrong. See Reason article 1 and Reason article 2
“A hundred deaths out of 48,000-81,000 infections corresponds to an infection fatality rate of 0.12-0.2%,” they report.* That’s about the same infection fatality rate the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates for seasonal influenza.”
So maybe if we open up completely, the math looks like this: 300,000,000 * 0.25 * 0.002 = 150,000 dead total.
I wish we knew which way we were headed.
And here is today’s post in the form of a (very long form) question:
So, how dangerous is COVID-19? Should we get back to our lives?
Looking to Sweden’s death toll may be useful to see what may happen in the US. Sweden didn’t shelter-in-place.This page (https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality) shows Sweden having 32 deaths per 100,000 people, (that is a mortality rate of 0.032%) which isn’t the highest mortality rate; why don’t they have a higher mortality rate with their open policies??
If 0.032% mortality is what we can expect in total, and people actually recover, then there is a strong argument for us to just go back to work, yes?What am I missing? With a 0.032% mortality rate, the US would be expected to have a total of 102,400 deaths (calculated by 320 million people * 0.00032). That’s… honestly… not bad. That’s in the realm of a “really bad year with influenza”. There are lots of reports out there that say comparing COVID-19 to the flu isn’t reasonable. Why not? In all seriousness, why not?
Let me try to enumerate the important factors of the pandemic. If we can figure out all the important factors and then address them, maybe we’ll get somewhere:
– Concern about a very high mortality rate among individuals that are older and have co-morbidities
– Concern that COVID-19 leaves people permanently injured
– Concern that people don’t build immunity… and subsequently, that the mortality rate will climb insidiously over time.
– Fear. Fear that there is a new disease that we can readily identify but cannot treat.
– what else? What, specifically, am I forgetting in this list?
So now I am farsighted as well as being nearsighted. Blah. I’ve been trying to get progressive lenses but my reaction to my first pair in February was this mix of “WOW, I can see close up!” and “AGHGHEHAH the world is spinning out of control! Make it stop!”
I’d wear them for 20 minutes and rip them off in frustration. The close-up “in-focus” area is so freaking small! It’s like 1/3 of the width of any 8.5″x11″ paper I’m reading. I can’t wiggle my nose back and forth fast enough to read at a reasonable rate! And I can’t see well outside that area!
Walking around with them makes me dizzy. And looking at a computer screen is weird and frustrating, tilting my head up and down, left and right to try to catch everything. And stuff wiggles and shifts under my gaze in a slightly disorienting way. Not luvin ’em. I’m not sure if this is going to work out :-(
After 2 weeks, I got them adjusted to be closer to my eyes and that helped a little but not nearly enough.
I likened wearing my progressives to wearing my head mounted magnifiers. 
They’re really useful but only good for one thing: looking really closely and carefully at stuff. I -can- wear them for an hour or so but why wear clown-goggles when I can wear my single-vision glasses? Bah!
Roanne has been helping me a ton. When optometrist offices open after the pandemic, I’m going to get some “occupational lenses” with a large near-field. In the mean time, Ro got me some +1 diopter clip-on reading glasses to wear over my current glasses. They were like $12 on Amazon. After a few *seconds* of acclimating, they are great!
I’m now wearing 2 pairs of glasses that don’t have anti-reflective coatings, it’s hard to keep them clean but well worthwhile!
I had asked my friends on Facebook what they thought of progressives and got a wide variety of answers!
Chris D wrote: After several weeks, you’ll stop getting mildly disoriented. I’ve had them for close to 10 years and never had any of the worst warned effects (tripping over curbs, rear-ending cars, etc.) but they weren’t easy to get used to at first. Suffer through, it’s definitely worth it long term.
Zee K wrote simply: I hated them.
Most of my friends were able to get used to them, but some were not. We’ll see how it goes!