A musing Beam

I believe that lack of consistent and effective leadership during the pandemic has caused the most severe consequences, both in the economy and in health. Let's discuss leadership in this 10th, and last , installment in my series about COVID-19 . How are we doing? The pandemic itself is the real culprit Okay, before this goes off the rails, let's just note that the pandemic itself is the real culprit. This is a natural event, generally known to occur periodically and predicted by several to be imminent , and nobody "caused" it. (That includes China, though it would have been more helpful if they had been transparent earlier .) So, the virus  is the bad actor here. Everyone is trying to respond to that microscopic antagonist -- some did better than others, but in general the vast majority of people and leaders were trying to do something .  It is important to realize that a pandemic means the world economy was going to tank and that many people would die. There are so

Divisiveness has only increased in this pandemic, and it has undoubtedly cost lives. This is the 9th installment in my series about COVID-19 . Photo from https://news.usc.edu/177963/election-2020-twitter-social-media-bots-foreign-interference-usc-study/ People are extremely divided The United States is at a historical level of political division . Identity plays an increasing role , where people are more concerned with being part of Team Red or Team Blue, and being against the other side, than has historically been true.  People on the other side are not just wrong, they are bad. There are multiple reasonable approaches to handling the pandemic No leaders knew exactly what to do at the beginning of the pandemic. Some Asian countries, with recent experiences with MIRS and SARS, immediately masked up and used their cultures' larger social distance to their advantage. New Zealand found the island and people amenable to a lockdown, and that has obviously been pretty effective. Sweden w

Let's chat about living together during COVID-19.  This is my eighth installment in my series about COVID-19 .  We know quite a bit more about how to live together than we did at the beginning, so this will likely be shorter than other entries. We've missed our opportunities to get this under control through social distancing, masking, testing, contact tracing, and quarantining  -- we will not follow the path of New Zealand .  But, while solving it that way is basically off the table ( Fauci's statement notwithstanding ), this is still the best pathway to keeping it from getting worse.  Surely we don't need references for that now, right?  Fine, here , and here , and here . Vaccines are on their way from Pfizer, Moderna, and AstroZenica.  But who will take them?  We need about 3/4ths of the population to take it to reach herd immunity , at the 90-95% efficacy reported (for Pfizer and Moderna).  So, take the vaccine , even if you already had, or think you had , COVID .