The dysfunctional White House response to the pandemic

The verdict is in and the conclusion is that the Trump administration utterly botched its response to the Covid-19 epidemic. Andy Kroll catalogs the many missteps and that the dysfunction extends to the coronavirus task force created by Trump, compounded by the fact that Trump seems to have enormous faith in his son-in-law Jared Kushner to deal with complex matters even though there is no evidence that he is at all competent. He was born with a silver spoon in his mouth just like Trump and they both seem to think that this denotes ability.
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Sports addictions during the pandemic

While addressing the needs of drug addicts is an important concern during the pandemic (and I have discussed earlier coffee and alcohol, and other drugs), there are others whom we sometimes also label as ‘addicts’ because they are incredibly devoted to something, even though this may not be due to ingesting anything. One major category among these types of addictions is sports.

Rhiannon, from over at Intransitive who lives in Taiwan, knowing that I am a cricket fan, sent me a link to a Taiwanese media news item about efforts by cricket fans in India trying to get Taiwan to broadcast their games so that they can be watched in India, even though Taiwanese cricket would have been utterly scorned as a fourth-rate cricket power just a month or so earlier. This is because cricket is apparently still being played in that country and these fans, who are some of the most fanatical fans in the world, are suffering due to being deprived of watching live cricket matches. (I was surprised that Taiwan is allowing games during this time, even though the games are being played in empty stadiums with fans told to stay away.)
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Dealing with addictions during lockdowns

My post earlier today about coffee and caffeine addiction made me think later about other addictions and how they are being handled during the lockdowns. For example, alcohol is a common addiction and while some states have declared alcohol stores to be essential services and thus allowed to be open, others have not exempted them from the lockdown. While it might be amusing to joke about alcohol being essential to getting through the boredom of staying at home, there is a more serious side, because closing the stores leaves addicts in those states desperate.

Someone I know is a physician in a state that did not exempt alcohol stores from the lockdown and he said that they have seen a influx of addicts coming to the emergency rooms because of severe withdrawal symptoms. Since they need the emergency room capacity to deal with the coronavirus cases, the addicts have been turned away untreated. While support groups for alcoholics have shifted, like so much else, to the online mode, they have their problems and may not be enough for some people trying to be sober.

That made me think about people who are addicted to harder, illegal drugs, who may have even more severe withdrawal symptoms. What will happen to them? Are their dealers still in business? Are the addicts still going out just to get their drugs? Addiction can make people do desperate things.

Coffee and caffeine and addiction

A have drunk coffee and tea all my life from the time even before I reached my teens. Nowadays I drink one cup of coffee in the morning and one cup of tea in the afternoon. That is not a lot but I am a caffeine addict in the sense that I look forward to a cup of coffee in the morning and feel somewhat uneasy if I don’t get one. I will even drink coffee that I know will taste bad just in order to get that morning caffeine fix. Is that addiction something to be concerned about?

In this transcript of a Fresh Air interview with food writer Michael Pollan about his new book that looks at how caffeine affects the daily rhythms of our lives, he quotes a researcher on addictions who says that that word is very leaded with negative connotations and that all addictions are not equal and some are harmless.
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Understanding the Covid-19 virus

I found this article in the April 13, 2020 issue of The New Yorker to be very informative about why fighting viruses is so much harder than fighting bacterial infections, especially those viruses like Covid-19 with a genome of RNA, because they evolve faster than those with DNA.

Furthermore while we have antibiotics that are effective against a whole array of bacterial infections, viruses require specialized, highly targeted treatments and we do not have them for most viruses. What is most effective against viruses are vaccines to prevent the onset of the disease. At the moment we do not have an antiviral drug effective against Covid-19 nor do we have a vaccine. Since these viruses also mutate easily, a treatment and vaccine that is developed for one may not work against the next virus that comes along. This is the same problem faced with flu vaccines, where they cannot be sure what type of virus will emerge the next year.
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The coronavirus will create many natural experiments

There are many theories about society and human behavior that cannot be experimentally tested because of ethical reasons or impracticality. On occasion, there will occur conditions that allow for what are called natural experiments, where social conditions or governmental actions create situations that are suitable for large scale experimental studies that could not have been created by the researchers.

One such case I recall is where a state did not have the funds to expand Medicaid health insurance to everyone in the state who qualified so that they doled it out randomly. This enabled researchers later to study what benefits, if any, access to heath insurance provided, since they now had a large scale test group and a control group. I recall another study that looked into whether raising taxes encouraged people to move to a lower tax state, something rich people often threaten to do when their state is thinking of raising taxes. Researchers were able to study this when one state raised its taxes. They studied a large metropolitan area that was very close to that state’s boundary with a lower tax state to see if people moved a short distance to avoid paying the taxes.
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The role of YouTube in spreading coronavirus and other hoaxes

I received a text from a friend in Sri Lanka who forwarded a link to a YouTube video and asked for my ‘professional opinion’ on whether it was credible, even though I am not a professional when it comes to analyzing such things. Even without looking at it I suspected that it was not credible because like many people, my friend is pretty credulous about things that are passed around on Facebook, and other social media, and gets easily alarmed. His last query to me a year ago was about the miracle of fish falling from the sky which consisted of a doctored video that was obviously fake. (He is also very religious.)
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The “nobody could have predicted” excuse blows up

Just yesterday, I wrote that the Trump administration is using the “nobody knew” excuse to explain away their incompetence, claiming that nobody could have predicted the scale of the pandemic. That was false but today comes news that really undercuts it. Newly revealed memos from way back on January 29 and on February 23 reveal that people in the Trump administration were warned by chief economic advisor Larry Kudlow that the pandemic could have devastating consequences. This blows up the “nobody could have predicted” excuse of the Trump administration for their lack of prompt action.
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“It is better not to have the country run by sociopaths”

That is the lesson derived by Seth Meyers as he looks at the non-stop flow of nonsense and dangerous false information peddled by Trump and the people in his administration, including his odious son-in-law Jared Kushner. He points to the fact that Trump actually brags at his press conferences about how successfully Mike Pence, the vice-president and the head of the coronavirus task force, avoids answering questions posed to him by journalists.
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Challenging the pandemic skeptics

If you are a credentialed academic in any field at all, then if you espouse policies that are favored by the libertarian, free-market, right wing, you can be assured of a platform for your views in think tanks and the media, even if the subject you are pontificating on are not the ones in which you are credentialed.

Richard Epstein is a good example of that. He is a professor of law. In a recent interview, Isaac Chotiner of The New Yorker questioned him about some contrarian claims that he had made about the coronavirus epidemic. Epstein is one of those who believes that we are over-reacting to the pandemic and that the danger to the economy is greater than the danger to people and we should not be having these tough social distancing rule, views that the Trump administration is anxious to believe, and so his views have been influential and received considerable publicity.
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