Tag: Coronavirus

Bookmarked It’s Gotten Awkward to Wear a Mask (theatlantic.com)

“It’s like showing up in a weird hat.”

Katherine Wu reports on the changing nature of mask wearing in America. Even though the virus continues to spread and evolve, many have discarded mask wearing as a bad memory, instead seeking out a sense of normalcy.

High-filtration masks are one of the few measures that can reliably tamp down on infection and transmission across populations, and they’re still embraced by many parents of newborns too young for vaccines, by people who are immunocompromised and those who care for them, and by those who want to minimize their risk of developing long COVID, which can’t be staved off by vaccines and treatments alone. Theresa Chapple-McGruder, a Chicago-area epidemiologist, plans to keep her family masking at least until her baby son is old enough to receive his first COVID shots. In the meantime, though, they’ve certainly been feeling the pressure to conform. “People often tell me, ‘It’s okay, you can take your mask off here,’” Chapple-McGruder told me; teachers at the local elementary school have said similar things to her young daughters. Meghan McCoy, a former doctor in New Hampshire who takes immunosuppressive medications for psoriatic arthritis and has ME/CFS, has also been feeling “the pressure to take the mask off,” she told me—at her kid’s Girl Scout troop meetings, during trips to the eye doctor. “You can feel when you’re the only one doing something,” McCoy said. “It’s noticeable.”

I am not sure that Australia is much better in regards to the stigma associated with masks. Personally, I wear a mask on public transport and simply try to limit being in questionable spaces. However, where I feel strange is at work. I can accept that there are limitations to mask wearing, but if this is the case I wonder if more will be done over time to improve ventilation?

Bookmarked Permanent Pandemic, by Justin E. H. Smith (Harper’s Magazine )

No matter what happens with the virus—whether or not it keeps evolving in ways that legitimate new drastic measures—the technologies it has ushered in are largely here to stay. These technologies will continue to have applications in industry, commerce, dating, and other affective strategizing; some might even hold out the promise of “fun.” But the principal application will be in the domain of what Michel Foucault called “governmentality”: the set of techniques and strategies, preferably deployed in the form of under-the-radar nudges, by which a population is caused to do what those in power want.

Justin E.H. Smith questions whether the controls brought in during COVID will in fact keep controlling us long after the threat has passed. For Smith, this past few years have laid the ground work for a new regime that is as much about technology as it is about the pandemic.

The new regime is as much a technological regime as it is a pandemic regime. It has as much to do with apps and trackers, and governmental and corporate interests in controlling them, as it does with viruses and aerosols and nasal swabs. Fluids and microbes combined with touchscreens and lithium batteries to form a vast apparatus of control, which will almost certainly survive beyond the end date of any epidemiological rationale for the state of exception that began in early 2020.

The consequence to questioning COVID maximalism has been to risk being ostracised.

Dissenters risk being labeled not only conspiracy theorists, but eugenicists or even advocates of genocide, should they venture any reflection on the costs and benefits of public health policy other than what we might call “COVID maximalism”: the view that we must keep social-distancing restrictions in place wherever there is any risk of harm to the elderly or immunocompromised, no matter what other risks such restrictions cause, whack-a-mole-like, to pop up in turn. But as anyone who is familiar with the literature in medical ethics, or who served on hospital ethics boards before the pandemic, can tell you: there has always been prioritization and triage, and this is not necessarily a reflection of injustice, though of course it can be that.

This has had the consequence of creating a new fringe.

Dissenters risk being labeled not only conspiracy theorists, but eugenicists or even advocates of genocide, should they venture any reflection on the costs and benefits of public health policy other than what we might call “COVID maximalism”: the view that we must keep social-distancing restrictions in place wherever there is any risk of harm to the elderly or immunocompromised, no matter what other risks such restrictions cause, whack-a-mole-like, to pop up in turn. But as anyone who is familiar with the literature in medical ethics, or who served on hospital ethics boards before the pandemic, can tell you: there has always been prioritization and triage, and this is not necessarily a reflection of injustice, though of course it can be that.

For Smith, we have subsequently stepped into a future leading to “digitally and algorithmically calculated social credit, and the demise of most forms of community life outside the lens of the state and its corporate subcontractors.”

In short, even if you are not leaving your house and scanning your QR codes at cafés and museums, you are still furnishing data about yourself near-constantly. There are no immediate signs that this data is going to be used for anything other than inane microtargeted advertising, but once the technological structure is in place to make social credit scoring possible, it does not seem far-fetched to imagine a world where our standing as citizens is determined, say, by the eco-rating of our online purchases.

I have read before how the current pandemic is a political one, but looking at it the way Smith does, I guess all pandemics are political (or biopolitical) as he suggests. I am just left wondering what the actual solution is if as Smith suggests that he is ‘broken’ by it all?

Bookmarked Why the WHO took two years to say COVID is airborne (nature.com)

Early in the pandemic, the World Health Organization stated that SARS-CoV-2 was not transmitted through the air. That mistake and the prolonged process of correcting it sowed confusion and raises questions about what will happen in the next pandemic.

This lengthy piece unpacking why it took the World Health Organisation so long to recognise that COVID is airborne is a demonstration of how this is very much a political pandemic.
Liked Are we at a point where Australians tolerate people dying from COVID-19? by Matt Wordsworth (ABC News)

We could do more — wearing masks at all times, investing in air filtration to remove airborne virus particles, or reinstating restrictions on the unvaccinated – but we seem more interested in getting life “back to normal”.

It is like our acceptance of influenza, which claimed 1,080 Australian lives in 2019.

Or the road toll — we could eliminate almost all deaths on our roads if only we reduced the speed limit to 10 kilometres per hour — but we wouldn’t.

It sounds like a pretty ruthless calculation on our part, and one that some were condemned for expressing earlier in the pandemic.

It seems though that many have come around to that way of thinking.

Replied to

Deb, I dived back into my archive and found the following:

Just not sure when ‘post’-COVID begins?

Liked Why You Should Think Twice Before Sharing a Covid Diagnosis by Amy Gajda (WIRED)

Based on the data that’s made available about any one of us—information from social media posts about our diagnoses or information from credit card companies about what we like to buy or information from geolocation data about where we like to go—data that could be shared with would-be employers and life insurance companies to name two, it’s not too much of a stretch to say that there are many who would be interested in such a diagnosis, perhaps now but maybe even especially later. Why hire someone who may have a brain abnormality? Why insure that person?

Liked Is society coming apart? (theguardian.com)

Liberalism didn’t kill society. And conservatism didn’t kill society. Because society isn’t dead. But it is pallid and fretful, like a shut-in staring all day long at nothing but a screen, mistaking a mirror for a window. Inside, online, there is no society, only the simulation of it. But, outside, on the grass and the pavement, in the woods and on the streets, in playgrounds and schoolyards and ballparks, in council flats and shops and pubs and agricultural fairs and libraries and union halls, society hums along, if not with the deafening thrum of a steam-driven machine, then with the hand-oiled, creaking clatter of an antwacky wooden loom.

Bookmarked Is mandatory COVID-19 vaccination ethical? (ABC Religion & Ethics)

What weight should be given to the arguments of “anti-vaxxers” who oppose mandatory vaccination? If the sole purpose of the vaccination were to protect the vaccinated person, that person would have the right to decide for themselves about vaccination and it should not be mandatory. But the consequences of COVID-19 can go far beyond the direct health effect of the virus on the person infected.

Margaret Somerville explores the ethics associated with mandatory vaccination.

It is not just other people in general who are placed at risk by a person’s refusal to be vaccinated; it can be particular people — for example, the person’s fellow workers. An employee who needs a job to support her family must choose between the risk of contracting COVID-19 incurred by going to work with unvaccinated people and losing her job. I propose that she has a stronger ethical claim to a requirement for the mandatory vaccination of her fellow employees, than does the “anti-vaxxer” who loses their job in the same workplace because they refuse vaccination. They have a far less risky unwanted choice — namely, that of vaccination — than does the woman who makes the unwanted choice to work in a workplace of unvaccinated fellow workers.

Read The Plague

The Plague (French: La Peste) is a novel by Albert Camus. Published in 1947, it tells the story from the point of view of a narrator of a plague sweeping the French Algerian city of Oran. The narrator remains unknown until the start of the last chapter, chapter 5 of part 5. The novel presents a snapshot of life in Oran as seen through the author’s distinctive absurdist point of view.[1]

Camus used as source material the cholera epidemic that killed a large proportion of Oran’s population in 1849, but situated the novel in the 1940s.[2] Oran and its surroundings were struck by disease several times before Camus published his novel. According to an academic study, Oran was decimated by the bubonic plague in 1556 and 1678, but all later outbreaks (in 1921: 185 cases; 1931: 76 cases; and 1944: 95 cases) were very far from the scale of the epidemic described in the novel.[3]

The Plague is considered an existentialist classic despite Camus’ objection to the label.[4][5] The novel stresses the powerlessness of the individual characters to affect their destinies. The narrative tone is similar to Kafka’s, especially in The Trial, whose individual sentences potentially have multiple meanings; the material often pointedly resonating as stark allegory of phenomenal consciousness and the human condition.

I finally got around to reading (or listening to) Albert Camus’ The Plague. What stood out to me about Camus’ account was the way in which he captures the everyday. As Matthew Sharpe captures:

Camus became increasingly sceptical about glorious ideals of superhumanity, heroism or sainthood. It is the capacity of ordinary people to do extraordinary things that The Plague lauds.

Another interesting point was the idea that ‘the plague’ is as much about a disease as it is about politics and life itself. As Tarrou asserts, “each of us has the plague within him; no one, no one on earth is free from it.” This reminds me of Norman Swan’s discussion of COVID-19 being a political pandemic.

I am glad that I waited to read this as it was interesting to reflect and consider everything that has occurred.

Marginalia

“The plague.” “Ah!” Rieux exclaimed. “No, you haven’t understood that it means exactly that—the same thing over and over and over again.” (Page 151)

“To make things simpler, Rieux, let me begin by saying I had plague already, long before I came to this town and encountered it here. Which is tantamount to saying I’m like everybody else. Only there are some people who don’t know it, or feel at ease in that condition; others know and want to get out of it. Personally, I’ve always wanted to get out of it. (Page 226)

I know positively—yes, Rieux, I can say I know the world inside out, as you may see—that each of us has the plague within him; no one, no one on earth is free from it. And I know, too, that we must keep endless watch on ourselves lest in a careless moment we breathe in somebody’s face and fasten the infection on him. What’s natural is the microbe. All the rest—health, integrity, purity (if you like)—is a product of the human will, of a vigilance that must never falter. The good man, the man who infects hardly anyone, is the man who has the fewest lapses of attention. And it needs tremendous will-power, a never ending tension of the mind, to avoid such lapses. Yes, Rieux, it’s a wearying business, being plague-stricken. But it’s still more wearying to refuse to be it. That’s why everybody in the world today looks so tired; everyone is more or less sick of plague. But that is also why some of us, those who want to get the plague out of their systems, feel such desperate weariness, a weariness from which nothing remains to set us free except death. (Page 233)

“Oh, for no particular reason. Only—well, he never talked just for talking’s sake. I’d rather cottoned to him. But there you are! All those folks are saying: ‘It was plague. We’ve had the plague here.’ You’d almost think they expected to be given medals for it. But what does that mean—‘plague’? Just life, no more than that.” (Page 282)

He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city. (Page 283)

Replied to

Dale, Norman Swan estimated that 5-11 would become eligible in the new year on the Coronacast on 22/10. Our youngest daughter lasted two days this week until told to stay home from school as their was an outbreak, seems a pertinent question to me.
Liked The Lab-Leak Debate Just Got Even Messier (theatlantic.com)

Two weeks ago, The Intercept published 528 pages of documents, obtained only after a litigated FOIA request to the National Institutes of Health and a 12-month delay, that describe experiments on hybrid coronaviruses that some experts consider risky, carried out in Wuhan with the support of EcoHealth and the U.S. government. (These experiments could not have led directly to the pandemic. A spokesperson for the NIH told The Intercept that the agency had reviewed data from the experiments and determined that they were not dangerous.) In June, Bloom, the Seattle computational biologist, discovered that several hundred genetic sequences drawn from very early COVID-19 patients had been mysteriously deleted from a public database. (They’ve since been restored.) Other facts that could be relevant to the origins debate have trickled out from obscure student work and other surprising sources.

Liked Are the Melbourne protests Australia’s own Capitol riots? (ABC Religion & Ethics)

It’s time for those who produce and those who consume the media to find new frames through which to represent and attempt to understand the can of social unrest we’ve seen in Melbourne. These new frames would attempt to understand how government policies and pronouncements (no matter how well-intentioned) can ostracise and alienate certain groups (such as tradespeople), and make their particular grievances vulnerable to co-option by nefarious actors. To put it bluntly, if we want to stem the rise of the far right, it’s advisable not to push people into their arms.

Framing the Melbourne protests as our very own Capitol riots is inappropriate. Such framing misrepresents the participants and the issues at stake in the Melbourne events, and thus stands in the way of knowing how to reduce the likelihood of repeat performances.

Liked ‘Waiting for Godot’ and the Agony of the Delta Era by Joe Pinsker (theatlantic.com)

Early in the pandemic, readers in lockdown made Albert Camus’ novel The Plague a best seller because it helped to explain something about living in a plague, even though it was a novel that was really an allegory about Nazism and the French Resistance during World War II. If Camus was a good touchstone for the beginning of the pandemic, then Waiting for Godot seems like an excellent one for the era of the Delta variant.

Bookmarked Brilliance and Blind Luck: How Did Medieval Europe Invent the Concept of Quarantine? (Literary Hub)

A merchant in 15th-century Ragusa wanted to bring his goods into the city as quickly as possible, rather than sit for a month on a rocky island. The sick of 17th-century Venice would rather stay in their homes than be shipped off to a plague hospital. Plenty of Americans chose to party in August at South Dakota’s Sturgis Motorcycle Rally rather than shelter in place. Quarantine was as successful as it was only because the governments of both Venice and Ragusa were among the most competent of their day. In fact, in many ways they look better than the US or UK government did at the outbreak of COVID-19. When governments are less capable, quarantine and social distancing are harder to enforce.

Edward Glaeser and David Cutler discuss the roll of quarantine in managing disease carried via trade.

The Ragusans didn’t just establish Europe’s first quarantine. They created a shared strength to protect the city: elected public health officials were empowered with broad authority to enforce these and other rules. In 1390, the city appointed officiales contra venientes de locis pestiferis (officials against travelers from places of plague). After 1397, these health officers were elected annually and, after 1426, they served without pay. Ragusa, like Venice, was an aristocratic republic, and its leadership positions, including the plague fighters, were almost exclusively patricians. Venice followed Ragusa’s lead in 1486, and “by the middle of the 16th century all the major cities of Northern Italy had permanent Magistracies of public health.”

It is a reminder of the political nature of the response.

Liked When kids cave under the pressure of COVID lockdowns, it turns out skateboarding can help by Virginia Trioli (ABC News)

As far as I can tell, no jurisdiction has yet put proper thought and effort into ventilation, air filtration, and priority teacher vaccination at our schools not only to mitigate against future outbreaks but to find a way to keep schools open safely during lockdown and protect our children’s mental health and educational future.

There was important, challenging but not impossible engineering and construction work to be done to make schools safer for students, teachers and the families they go home to, but we haven’t done it. And we still refuse to see it as a high priority.

Replied to https://twitter.com/Capitan_Typo/status/1431797618418470917 (Twitter)
Thoughts with you Cameron. Sadly, this seems to be the new gold standard:

“We are approaching 1 million jabs a week and for a population of 8 million people, that is outstanding,” the Premier said.

“Thank you. It is making a difference. We are going to show the way in Australia as to how you can live with COVID.”

Always leading the way?