What we can learn from the great flu pandemic of 1918

The current Covid-19 pandemic has drawn many references to the great flu pandemic of 1918. One of the natural experiments that emerged from that event is how different measures adopted by different cities led to significantly different outcomes, with those taking action more quickly effectively flattening the curve and having better outcomes than those that delayed doing so. While multiple non-pharmaceutical interventions such as reducing contacts among people were effective in reducing transmission of the virus, relaxation of those restrictions also resulted in renewing the spread of the virus.
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The rich are different from you and me

The title of this post is a commonly used paraphrase of what F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in his 1926 short story Rich Boy.

“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.”

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Making a face mask at home

Earlier people were told that ordinary facemasks were only effective at preventing those who were infected from spreading it, but did not do anything for those who were not already infected from getting infected. For that one needed the more sophisticated N95 masks. We were also told that we should reserve the existing supply of facemasks for those in the medical profession and other essential service personnel. That sounded reasonable and so I did not try to get any masks for myself

That advice seems to be changing. Now all people in certain areas are being urged to wear facemasks when they go outside. But how does one get hold of one now? I have not been inside a pharmacy or any other store for a month. Do they now have masks on the shelves?

For those who want one and can’t get one, there are various do-it-yourself options. This one (via Carla Sinclair) seems pretty straightforward to make though I have not tried it. I will do so if it becomes absolutely necessary.

False negatives in coronavirus testing

When I last checked the Covid-19 trend line, it showed an encouraging flattening in the rate of growth of new cases in the US. China and South Korea had brought things under control much earlier and it looks like Hong Kong and Australia are also doing well. France, Italy, and Germany are definitely showing signs that they have passed the peak and slowing down the rate of growth.

But one of the concerns with the US data is that due to the massive incompetence of the Trump administration in rolling out testing and collecting data, testing is nowhere near a widespread as it should be.
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Arguments for and against free will

I came across this interesting debate between two professors of philosophy Gregg Caruso and Daniel Dennett on the endlessly fascinating and controversial question of whether we have free will or not. The topic is fascinating because what exactly we mean by the term ‘free will’ is difficult to pin down and controversial because many people find it hard to give up the idea that they have free will and respond very strongly against arguments that deny it exists. (For those who want to go into it in some detail, back in 2010 I wrote a multipart series of blog posts on this very topic. It is better to read them in sequence but do not follow the links at the top of each post to ‘previous posts’ because that link takes you to when the posts were published on a site before I moved to FtB and that site no longer exists.)
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Trump is increasingly behaving like a cornered wild animal

At the best of times Donald Trump does not present a picture of coherence and maturity. But lately he seems to have plumbed even greater depths of irrationality and I think that it is because his dysfunctional White House and his utter lack of a measured response to the Covid-19 crisis is being recognized and he is being called out on it. So far he has been able to overcome the dysfunctional nature of his administration by sheer bombast and demagoguery but in this virus he has met something that does not care about him in the least, affects everyone, and cannot be ignored or belittled, and he does not know how to respond.

Trump is a narcissist and is utterly incapable of taking responsibility for anything bad that happens but in this crisis, his patented efforts to lash out at critics and blame others are looking increasingly desperate. He is clearly looking like a cornered wild animal and losing it, though he never had much of it to lose. So we see him lashing out at one target after another. His favorite targets are of course the media, the Democratic party, and the ‘deep state’, all of whom he thinks are trying to discredit him.
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A very stable genius discusses combating the pandemic

At the eight-minute mark in this segment from Seth Meyers, we find Trump saying antibiotics used to be able to combat all kinds of diseases but that Covid-19 is such a “brilliant enemy” that is so “very smart and invisible” that antibiotics do not work against it.

Yes folks, the person who has described himself as a “very stable genius” does not know that antibiotics only work against bacteria and that the coronavirus is, you know, a virus.

Trump is a textbook case of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

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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