Links for you. Science:
COVID lessons from Japan: the right messaging empowers citizens
Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Shark?
What You Need to Know about Monkeypox. First, don’t panic. Second, wear a mask (for COVID, not monkeypox). Third, don’t panic.
Voyager 1 Talks Some Nonsense, But Is Still Working
Association between Self-reported Masking Behavior and SARS-CoV-2 Infection Wanes from Pre-Delta to Omicron-Predominant Periods – North Carolina COVID-19 Community Research Partnership
Elephants in Mourning Spotted on YouTube by Scientists
Other:
I’m from Uvalde. I’m not surprised this happened.
The failed response to the COVID-19 pandemic is best understood as an ethical failure, not a scientific or technical one.
Trump shares CPAC Hungary platform with notorious racist and antisemite
Cowardice is the point of white supremacy, too
Billionaires turn their backs on Biden: Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos go to Twitter to get political
It’s time for Biden to strongly attack the White-grievance industry
50 years ago, D.C.’s first African Liberation Day launched a movement
Gay Men Need a Specific Warning About Monkeypox. Tiptoeing around the issue carries its own risks.
A Lot of DC Women Gave Up or Cut Back on Drinking During the Pandemic
This is What Happens When You Live Under Minority Rule. And this continued inaction is how a government loses its legitimacy
How Workers’ Pension Funds Are Still Funding Insurrectionists. A Trump advisor and private equity tycoon is boosting Republican election deniers — with the help of public pension profits.
How to Get Paxlovid Quickly, If You Get Covid. How to get the 89%-effective Covid cure called Paxlovid, despite government red tape
Failure Points
CalPERS Staff in Fury Over Covid Negligence, Regulation-Breaking Risking Staff, Seniors, and Day-Care Children; CalPERS Lies About Cases and Lack of Compliance
Russia After The War
Thousands of people are leaving Hong Kong — and now it’s clear where they’re going
Bowser Appears to Skip Ward 2 Forum For Brandon Todd’s Birthday Party
COVID-19 Symptoms Linger for Some D.C. Residents
Far right trains its eliminationist sights on LGBTQ community with deluge of threatening rhetoric
Wealthy Mobile Voting Advocate Targets Charles Allen with Negative Ads Over Legislative Dispute: Bradley Tusk, a venture capitalist and Mike Bloomberg confidante, is hoping to pressure Allen to move his bill. (solving a problem that isn’t…)
Inside the race to find the gunman raining bullets on a D.C. school (if this asshole had been marginally more competent, D.C. would have qualified as having a mass shooting)
How Important Was the Single-Family Zoning Ban in Minneapolis? The effort caught national attention, but the real story is the rest of the package of land use reforms that the city council passed to open up the housing market. However, opposition to further reform is growing.
Beloved Principal Who Fought DeSantis Over In-Person Learning Dies After Long COVID Fight
mikethemadbiologist
On the ground here in Tokyo, the self-congratualatory vibe of this article rings false. For example, these three sentences are problematical.
1. “But there is no one silver bullet that can eliminate the virus.”
Well, of course. But if you refuse to expand testing, refuse to do anywhere near adequate contact tracing, refuse to provide ways to isolate confirmed cases (without infecting the rest of the patient’s family), and refuse to spend (enough) money to recompensate the restaurants and bars that really need to close, then you have a lot more disease and death than you’d have otherwise. And if your “government expert panel” is a bunch of blokes with minimal medical, let alone, infectious disease, experience, and political and economic conflicts of interest (the only reason the hospital system was overloaded and care (for both covid and other diseases) became hard to find was that these blokes were unwilling to open up “their” hospitals to covid care). Then you have more problems than you should have.
2. Certainly, Japan’s response has not been perfect and has received criticism.
Understatment of the year. The government’s response has alsways been to put poliutical concerns first. For example, the government decided Japan was going to hold the Olympics, period. The absolute insanity of holding an international event during a raging pandemic never occurred to them. But they did realize it’d look really bad if their elderly were dying like flies, so they did a big vaccination push for the elderly. The national government-level planning for this was completely incompetent, but the local governments (state, city, township) stepped up and did an amazing job, saving the government’s collective rear ends (and lots of lives). And then this twat makes it sound like “Japan” did a good job. No, the Japanese people did a good job, with almost no help from the national government.
(And I haven’t gotten around to mentioning the government’s complete incompetence at planning to acquiring an adequate supply of vaccine. Including a right-wing idiot (LDP politician) making anti-semitic statements the day before Japan was starting negotiations with Pfizer’s president (whose parents were Holocost survivors) for vaccines…)
3. It is true that the country’s initial testing capacity was limited, but extensive testing is not enough to suppress transmission.
It is if you combine it with contact tracing and isolation. And that “initial testing capacity was limited” bit is ingenous in the extreme: they never even tried to significantly expand capacity, and the vibe was that the government really didn’t want to know the actual infection numbers.
The bottom line, though, is that Japan doesn’t have the problem that 1/3 the population consists of insane idiots. By March 15 2020, no one went out without a mask, even though you couldn’t buy one in the stores. And everyone’s still masked. (The current vibe is that masking outdoors isn’t necessary, and you see people with masks dangling from their wrists on the street. No one goes maskless in stores, trains, and the like. Even Buddha*.)
*: https://pbase.com/davidjl/image/171733506