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 . 

This is the 7th post in my series on the current state of knowledge around COVID-19 . My last installment was about death and primary impacts, while in this one I'm focusing on economic and other secondary impacts.  Like I noted last time, we know that current treatment in countries with good healthcare infrastructure leads to a mortality rate of about 2 deaths per 300 infections, and if left to itself would result in about 1.5 million deaths in the US ... if natural herd immunity is a thing, which is a big unknown. But what about secondary impacts, including deaths and other illness caused by the response to the pandemic?  And what positive developments might come from this worldwide tragedy? Negative impacts Deaths indirectly caused by the pandemic and responses People were terrified at the beginning of the pandemic, and that led to many not seeking healthcare until it was too late.  Of course, it's hard to say exactly how many deaths fall into this category.  You can take

Let's discuss mortality and long-term primary impacts caused by the pandemic. This is the 6th installment is a series about COVID-19 . We'll save economic and other secondary impacts for next time. World deaths per million (As always, Our World in Data is a great site for finding info.) Sorry for the long break between entries -- I've had a couple things going on, and this one took longer than some of the others to put together. Original reported death rates On March 1, 2020,  China was reporting ~4.1% of known cases ended in death . Italy was reporting over 7% around the same time, and by mid-March Italy was shutdown and recommending others do the same, though they were reporting closer to China's 4% by then.  With a US population of ~310,000,000, a 4% death rate would have resulted in possibly over 12 million dead. For good reason, the whole world was apprehensive. As you likely recall, there was a great push to "bend the curve."  The most immediate need f

Let's not bury the lead:  When you can't social distance, yes, you should wear a mask, almost definitely. Some of that is for you, but mainly it's for everyone else. If you struggle breathing while wearing a mask, you definitely will struggle much more with COVID. This is another entry in my series on COVID . How COVID-19 spreads The virus is more likely to infect someone when there is a lot of the virus .  There are 3 general ways that it appears to spread : contact,  aerosol, and  droplets . (There's a 4th that is difficult to study and seems less likely to be a major channel: fecal to oral.) For contact, you should not touch others, wash your hands a lot, and avoid touching your face. For aerosolized virus, you should avoid situations where a significant amount of virus might gather together, like an un-ventilated room or a large gathering of people. For droplets, the easiest population measure is masks.  Droplets from singing, coughing, sneezing, yelling, yodeling,

This is the fourth installment in a series about COVID-19 .  Here's the summary on vaccines:  If things go as well as possible, we'll have some vaccines available in the US around the beginning of 2021, they will likely require two shots, and they will probably work well enough.  Lots of people won't get the vaccine, though, so there may still be many more preventable deaths.  And the timelines could definitely be pushed to the middle of 2021. Here is a decent FAQ-style primer with lots of links if you want deeper dives. What is a vaccine and how does it work? A vaccine is a medicine that, unlike most others, actually prevents you from getting sick .  The major pathway for a vaccine to achieve this is through stimulating your immune system to produce antibodies that are ready in case you are exposed in the future.  Basically, your body thinks it was already sick and is able to fight the disease off. More specifically , vaccines usually have particles called antigens that t