A musing Beam

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 calle...

Testing, contact tracing, and quarantining This is the third installment in a series on COVID-19 . How do you deal with an epidemic? A respiratory disease epidemic ends after each person consistently spreads it to fewer than 1 person, on average.  That can happen in many ways . Y ou can choose not to try to stop it, depending on factors like its severity and method of spreading.  If it isn't bad enough and there is no immunity from getting it, it might be reasonable to just let it keep going, and just get used to it. Or maybe it is really bad, but still there is no immunity, so you still just get used to it and treat the symptoms, like with HIV . You might also let it keep going if it isn't that deadly and people become immune once they get it.  Reaching so-called "herd immunity" takes enough people in the population having it that the remaining carriers have almost nobody to spread it to.  Current speculation is that COVID-19 would need 70% to 90%  of people to...

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...