What does the Trump hospitalization mean?

As often happens, the White House is leaking out the bad news about Trump’s condition in dribs and drabs. First he tested positive but had no symptoms. Then they said that he had mild symptoms but nothing serious and would be ‘working’ from his residence. Given that Trump’s ideal workday consists of sitting in his bed in his pajamas and watching Fox News while eating cheeseburgers and drinking Diet Coke and tweeting endlessly, that seemed like he could easily manage that.
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Oh, the irony!

The wildest presidential campaign in modern US history just got even wilder with the news that Trump and his wife Melania have tested positive for covid-19 and are showing symptoms. Given that he constantly downplayed the dangers of the pandemic, mocked taking safety precautions like wearing masks, while at the same time boasting about how well he had dealt with the pandemic, this development has to come as a serious blow to that strategy. The news followed close Trump aide Hope Hicks testing positive yesterday after showing symptoms on Tuesday when she was part of the entourage that went with Trump to Cleveland for the debate. Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows said that the Trumps’ symptoms are mild but given the low credibility of Trump spokespeople, one can be forgiven for not taking those words at face value. Trump is very overweight and is 74 years of age, two big risk factors when it comes to the severity of the disease.
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Scott Atlas is exactly the kind of ‘science expert’ Trump likes …

… because he tells Trump what he wants to hear. But the real scientists among the government’s top health advisors are now openly sounding the alarm about Atlas’s outsize influence with Trump that he is using to spread wrong information.

Dr. Anthony Fauci on Monday joined fellow White House coronavirus task members Dr. Deborah Birx and Centers for Disease Control Director Dr. Robert Redfield in expressing his concerns that President Trump’s new favorite COVID-19 adviser, Dr. Scott Atlas, is feeding the President misinformation amid the pandemic.

On Monday, NBC News reported that while on a flight from Atlanta to Washington D.C., Redfield was overheard criticizing Atlas — a neurologist who hasn’t practiced medicine since 2012 — by proclaiming that “everything he says is false” on COVID-19.

Redfield’s reportedly dim view of the President’s favorite COVID-19 adviser comes a week after CNN reported that Birx, another prominent task force member who has managed to stay in the President’s good graces, has become “distressed” over Trump’s admiration of Atlas.

According to CNN, Birx views Atlas as “somebody who matches what (Trump) wants to believe” as the President continues offering a rosy picture of his administration’s COVID-19 response amid the country topping more than 200,000 fatalities from the novel coronavirus.

Trump loves people who can gauge what he wants to believe and then tell him that same thing.

Say goodbye to privacy

In an article titled The Big Tech Extortion Racket in the September 2020 issue of Harper’s Magazine, Barry C. Lynn discusses how much information Facebook and Google have on us and how their renting out this information to anyone willing to pay results in us being exploited. He says that by rolling back the anti-monopoly protections that had been in place, Congress has given them enormous power over the digital marketplace.
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Hawks and hummingbirds

When seated at my desk, I have a nice view of the hills that surround Monterey. I often see hawks and hummingbirds and I marvel at how evolution has created two such different birds, and I do not mean just in terms of their size. It turns out that the fact that they both are seen in the same vicinity near my home is not an accident. What researchers have found is that hummingbirds nest under hawks because that protects them from their main predator, the Mexican Jays.
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Examples of how anti-science forces use falsifiability

In my recent article in Scientific American, I wrote about one issue that I deal with more extensively in my book The Great Paradox of Science and that is that we should get rid of the idea of falsifiability being both a defining element of what makes a theory scientific as well as it being the driver of scientific evolution. I said that my argument that falsifiability is a myth that does not describe how science operates is borne out by a close examination of actual scientific history.
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A nice survey of research into the origin of life

The theory of natural selection provides a way of understanding how life, starting from one or a few microorganisms, has evolved over time to give us the immense variety and complexity we see all around us now. But it does not, at least directly, tell us how the very first thing that we can call a living organism came about. Natalie Elliot provides a nice survey into what current research says about the origin of life and she says that this research has also resulted in significant changes in what we mean by ‘life’.
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How much physical distancing is safe?

As the pandemic drags on and countries try to grapple with how to achieve some semblance of normalcy in the fact of restrictions, they seem to have arrived at three general recommendations to help slow the spread of the virus. Wash hands with soap and water or use sanitizers, wear masks, and keep one’s distance from other people. While those seem straightforward enough, there are a lot of uncertainties within them. For example, when it comes to masks, while there has emerged a broad scientific consensus that wearing them is a good thing, what types of masks are better and are they meant to prevent the wearer from spreading infections to others or from getting infected by others or both?
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Has the pandemic second wave begun?

As the death toll goes past 200,000, health experts have been warning that we should brace ourselves for a surge in new coronavirus cases in the fall, especially if people start to let down their guard and not follow safety precautions, either because they got tired of being restricted or they felt that the crisis had passed. Recall that with the 1918 pandemic, it too started in the early part of that year, subsided in the middle, and then roared back towards the end of the year and most of the deaths occurred in that second phase.

This graphic from the New York Times suggests that there has been a recent surge in new cases, which is worrying.

This is where anti-science fervor leads

When people have a terminal illness and are confronted with the real possibility of imminent death, one cannot fault them for taking desperate measures in the hope of a miracle cure. This was what we saw in the early days of the AIDS epidemic when people were dying in large numbers and there was no effective treatment. Sufferers felt that the conventional protocols for finding treatments that depended on the usual three phases of trials to ensure safety and efficacy were far too slow and that seriously ill patients should be allowed to try experimental treatments that had not met the standards for approval.
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