A musing Beam

This is the second in a series of posts about the COVID-19 pandemic . This installment is discussing why COVID-19 is much, much worse than the seasonal flu. Here it is, in a nutshell : COVID-19 is more contagious, more deadly, already has more known long-term impacts, has no vaccine or truly effective treatments, and has no apparent seasonality. Contagion SARS-COV-2 is much more contagious. The median R0 (average number of people infected by each person when nobody is immune) is 5.7 , or more optimistically 2.5 . For the pandemic to go away, R0 would need to effectively be less than 1.  The estimate of the 1918 novel flu was between 1.2 and 2.4 .  (An R0 of 5.7 means we need over 80% of the population to be immune to reach effective herd immunity .) Beyond that, the incubation period is long, and the number of transmissions before symptoms begin hovers near half those infected . And the duration of being contagious is longer, up to 10 days after the first symptoms. That means ...

It's easy to find thoughts on COVID-19, but hard to parse through it all.  This series is my attempt to give my view of the state of knowledge about COVID-19, as of late July and early August  through late 2020. Here are the entries (these will become links as I post the others): Finding facts and data about COVID-19 (this one) Why COVID-19 is much worse than the seasonal flu Testing, contact tracing, and quarantining The path to vaccines To wear a mask or not Deaths and long-term impacts Economic and secondary impacts Safely co-existing Bots and divisiveness Leadership You need to find reputable sources for data.  People are rightly skeptical of what they see online.  In fact, the World Health Organization has declared that, beyond the pandemic, there is an Infodemic, which is “a surge of information about COVID-19 that has made it hard for people to know which news and guidance about the virus is accurate.” If you are actually interested in how to find the best new...

George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Philando Castile, Botham Jean, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Rayshard Brooks, Sean Monterrosa ... I haven't blogged in over two years, but after the world blew up on May 25, 2020, I decided I should start again.  My issue is that I am not particularly good at raising up other people's voices, and I don't think my own voice is as cogent right now.  I'm going to make one overarching point, and then include just a few links to the voices and stories of people of color, and why I think each one is worth you giving your attention for a few minutes. My overarching point is compounding interest. A common argument by those who find the term "white privilege" to be offensive is that slavery ended a century and a half ago, Jim Crow last century, etc.  The underlying premise seems to be if someone isn't getting lynched or enslaved, and if the laws are not explicitly against them, then black people...

This is the eighth and final installment of a series of posts on lessons we progressives should take on the Presidential election. The overview is here . Okay, so this last installment is about tactics, not policy.  Progressives need to start telling better stories.  Facts are important and all, but … well, most people obviously don’t really care about them .  It doesn’t matter that NAFTA probably was a net positive on the economy as a whole as long as the opposition has a story of a factory closing. Global consensus among people that have spent their lives on studying climate is irrelevant when we have scandalous emails that show peer review processes are not perfect . Saying you had one position on the Iraq invasion even when there is demonstrable proof you had another  is irrelevant if you have a cool narrative about a secret conversation with a TV personality. Note that I’m NOT being snarky here.  I’m being absolutely serious that, as far as elections ...

This is the seventh installment of a series of posts on lessons we progressives should take on the election. The overview is here . Simple economics says that if you pay more for something, you get more of that thing. If I had to choose one area where I most commonly believe my progressive brethren go wrong, it is in not seeming to understand this truth.  They understand it for some areas: Want more hybrid cars? Subsidize them. Want more foster parents? Pay more! Why are we having trouble getting good teachers? They aren’t paid enough! But when you turn to other areas …. For instance, do we want more single mothers? We should pay for them. Do we want more people claiming poverty or disability? Do we want more poor children (or just children in general, for that matter)? Want more unemployed people? And we can verify that this happens, if that is needed – look, for instance, at the dramatic increase in disability claims after the reduction to welfare . Of course, I would di...

This is the sixth installment of a series of posts on lessons we progressives should take on the election. The overview is here . We really need to stop trying to control speech.   I get it: Free speech is tough, and it always has been. We don’t make speech free because it is weak – we make it free because it is strong, and “bad” speech can be really hurtful.   But one of our societal values has been that we learn to have thick skin, and we don’t try to exercise control over what others say. This doesn’t mean that we don’t have counter-speech. Free speech isn’t speech without consequences , it’s speech without control .   So if you say something that is jerky, the correct response is for someone to say you are being a jerk, and that’s completely within the spirit of free speech, which goes both ways.   What is not okay is to say that the person cannot speak AT ALL. We should let people say hateful and hurtful things, and then get good people to denounce ...

This is the fifth installment of a series of posts on lessons we progressives should take on the election. The overview is here . As I mentioned in the original post, though there were many factors that led to the Democrats not retaining the White House in 2017, one major factor was losing the Rust Belt. The Democrats have not found a solution to the problem of union manufacturing jobs disappearing, and candidate Trump flipped the Republican script and went anti-free trade .   Somebody was listening to the working class, and it wasn’t the Democrats, and that was possibly the deciding factor.   Ignoring this constituency and trying to placate blue-collar factory workers with training grants was insulting, most importantly because it simply doesn’t work.   They believe that NAFTA and free trade let foreigners steal their jobs. Of course, the jobs didn’t go to Mexico or China, and it wasn’t free trade that created the problems. Protectionism might create a small up...