Author: cogiddo

Osprey

~ cogiddo ~ Leave a comment
Captured in Branford, CT, July 16, 2022

I made many efforts to get sharp images of birds last week on my trip to CT, and a few came out well, such as this one.

The new versions of COVID-19 are no joke

~ cogiddo ~ Leave a comment

This is worrisome and everybody should know about it.

Tweet posted yesterday by Dr. Farid Jalali. Text: “To borrow an infamous phrase: I don’t know how to put this in a half-acceptable way. New Omicron variants are actively killing vaccinated and recently boosted 60-70 year-olds with very average comorbidites, as we speak. It’s a bog-standard medical reality in our hospitals.”

A good Twitter thread on COVID-19, inequality, morbidity, and vaccines

~ cogiddo ~ Leave a comment

I just read the thread that starts with this tweet: https://twitter.com/thrasherxy/status/1524780425847181312?s=21&t=g7F-ikgMkS9so5zKI7PbHQ by Dr. Thrasher.

When I read the first tweet, I immediately saw “base-rate fallacy” flash in front of my eyes. It turned out not to be this at all. I recommend the thread, all of it, and some thinking about the malignant combination of inequality with the COVID-19 pandemic. (Others have discussed the insidious effects of inequality on the pandemic, of course. I am putting together some of those discussions and research for my materials for the economic inequality course I teach and the book on it I am drafting.)

I fear that our society, here in the U.S., is so committed to ignoring the importance of public goods, such as public health measures that mitigate infectious-disease transmission, that it is simply unable to deal with this pandemic effectively. As a result, we will probably see years of mutating Coronaviruses of the SARS-COVID variety, and will be consistently responding the wrong way to their emergence.

(I could of course have responded on Twitter, but I have decided to use this blog more and Twitter less for discussions like this. I am letting this be auto-tweeted, though. I may cease contributing to Twitter at all, depending of how big a mess EM makes of it once it is under his control.)