Sure, Velociraptors are Still on the Loose, But That's No Reason Not to Reopen Jurassic Park

Hello, Peter Ludlow here, CEO of InGen, the company behind the wildly successful dinosaur-themed amusement park, Jurassic Park. As you’re all aware, after an unprecedented storm hit the park, we lost power and the velociraptors escaped their enclosure and killed hundreds of park visitors, prompting a two-month shutdown of the park. Well, I’m pleased to announce that, even though the velociraptors are still on the loose, we will be opening Jurassic Park back up to the public!

As some of you know, Dr. Ian Malcolm, our lead safety consultant, had recommended that we wait until the velociraptors have been located and contained before reopening the park, so he wasn’t thrilled when we told him the news. I believe his exact words were “you were so preoccupied with whether you could reopen the park, you didn’t stop to think whether you should.” Talk about a guy on a high horse.

That said, you’ll be pleased to know that, rather than double down on our containment efforts, we’ve decided to dissolve the velociraptor containment task force altogether, and focus instead on how we can get people back into the park as quickly as possible. So rather than concentrating on so-called life-saving measures like “staying in designated safe areas” or “masking your scent,” we’ll be focusing on the details that will get our customers really excited, like a wider selection of fun hats, a pterodactyl-shaped gondola ride to the top of the island, and a brand new Gordon Ramsay designed menu at the Cretaceous Cafe.

In addition to satisfying our customers, the decision to reopen the park is also about allowing the furloughed employees of Jurassic Park to get back to the work they love. Could we have continued to pay their salaries for several months until we got the velociraptor situation under control? Definitely. We’re the wealthiest nature preserve on the planet after all. And will some of the employees returning to work have their limbs torn off and tossed into the air like a juggler tossing bowling pins? Undoubtedly. But we’re confident that with a few safety precautions put in place, we’ll be able to keep the level of workplace injuries and deaths just below levels that would elicit widespread public outrage. And keeping things just below widespread public outrage levels is our gold standard for all of the decisions we make here at Jurassic Park.

And speaking of injuries, I want to take a moment to thank our Jurassic Park EMTs. They’re the real heroes here, am I right? In the process of responding to velociraptor attacks, many of our EMTs get mauled and dismembered by velociraptors themselves. That’s why, as a sign of appreciation, we will be repainting the Jurassic Park ambulance with the words “Hero Mobile” in big bubble letters. We think this is a far more meaningful token of gratitude than the salary increase they requested.

by Carlos Greaves, McSweeny's |  Read more:

Image: Jurassic Park/Universal Pictures

Mikhail Baryshnikov & Ana Laguna, Choreographer

via:

via:

The Problem With Bluetooth for Virus Contact Tracing

The Problem With Bluetooth for Virus Contact Tracing (The Intercept)
Image: Soohee Cho/The Intercept, Getty Images

America's Crowded Prisons are About to Create a Coronoavirus Crisis in Rural America

For the past several decades, rural America’s economic lifeline has been the construction and operation of prisons and immigrant detention centers, both public and for-profit. The 1980s saw the collapse of American manufacturing and a farm crisis that ripped through the countryside. Mass incarceration was well-timed to fill the gap, producing jobs where they were needed.

But those lifelines have transformed into vectors for coronavirus, putting rural communities at risk of outbreaks. For many Americans, the plight of prisoners produces little sympathy. But in a twist on JFK — “Freedom is indivisible, and when one man is enslaved, all are not free” — those outside the prison walls are not immune from what goes on inside them. Those jobs that made the campuses so attractive to local communities are staffed by people who go in and out each day — and what they bring with them could make all the difference in communities where hospitals were already shutting down, a trend exacerbated by Covid-19.

It’s next to impossible to social distance in jails and prisons. “Correctional facilities are overcrowded, often badly,” explained Aaron Littman, a UCLA School of Law professor who focuses on jail conditions. “It’s important to remember that when we say overcrowded, we mean dozens of people sleeping inches within each other’s faces. They’re using the same toilets. Most don’t have access to liquid hand soap. In short, they are ideal sites for incubating respiratory viruses.”

Guards and other jail staff have to share tight spaces and physically handle the prisoners — and then they go home at night. In some rural areas, there are not many other career choices beyond working in a jail or prison. The average national salary for a prison correctional officer is $47,013.

In an essay titled “Building a Prison Economy in Rural America,” public policy researcher Tracy Huling points out that there are more prisoners than farmers in some swaths of the United States. She notes that in the 1990s, a new prison or jail sprung up in a rural area at a rate equivalent to every 15 days. So it’s not surprising that there have been outbreaks in areas that don’t otherwise have risk factors, such as crowded public transportation in densely populated urban centers. Marion County, Ohio, has 2,332 confirmed cases, in a population of 66,501. The Marion County prison is currently the top cluster site in the country by far, according to a New York Times analysis.

“When I read about institutions like in Ohio that are able to test a lot of people, of the positive, most are asymptomatic,” Cheshire County jail superintendent Richard Van Wickler said. “My god, how do you possibly protect other inmates and staff?”

Last week, PBS reported that of federal prisoners who had been tested, 70 percent were found to have the coronavirus. A breakdown of New York Times data tracking Covid-19 cluster sites on April 26 revealed that out of 100 top cluster sites, 35 were tied to correctional facilities. In comparison, 28 percent of infections were linked to nursing homes. Those numbers are astounding when you consider that nursing home residents are at much higher risk of serious infection because of their age, while incarcerated people and prison staff vary in age. Seven of the top 10 cluster sites are linked to American prisons or jails. As the Marshall Project reported, so-called prison towns like Palestine, Texas, where correctional facilities are a community’s primary employer, have already seen an explosion of cases. An ACLU report released last week estimates that 100,000 more people will die because of America’s crowded jails. “The United States’ unique obsession with incarceration has become our Achilles heel when it comes to combating the spread of COVID-19,” the ACLU concluded.

When politicians like New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo hail the heroism of America’s “essential workers”— be they doctors, police officers, EMTs, grocery workers, or bus drivers— prison and jail staff go unmentioned. It’s a strange lapse, but perhaps an unsurprising one, given that the solution — large scale decarceration — remains politically difficult.

by Tana Ganeve, The Intercept |  Read more:

Image: Alex Kormann/Star Tribune/Getty Images

People and Jobs? Or Wealth?

Yves here. I wish I had written this must-read post. Richard Murphy lays out the case for whose interests need to be sacrificed for the economy to have any hope of surviving under the conditions being imposed on businesses to keep workers and customers safe. Unfortunately, his well-reasoned recommendation, that landlords, banks, and pensioners need to take hits to save jobs and businesses, is not likely to find support in official circles. But Murphy’s argument, in essence, is that these groups are toast under any scenario, and they can’t be allowed to weigh down the productive sectors of the economy.

By Richard Murphy... Originally published at Tax Research UK

Summary

This blog post is, in effect, an essay of almost four thousand words. I did not intend that when I started to write it. If I had known it would be that long I might have used a different style. But as I wrote it just kept growing. That is because what I think it is about is vital, in the sense that the issues I address cannot be avoided.

What I am suggesting is that whatever we think or do we are heading for the most almighty economic crash. The things that we have treated as stores of value – which are mainly shares and both commercial and residential property – are massively overvalued now. And there is nothing we can do to prevent the value of them crashing because the Ponzi style financialisation that has gripped western economies – and those of the US and UK in particular – for the last forty years was always heading for a massive crash, and now it has arrived. The genie is out of the bottle and it will not go back in again.

But that is not to say that our government (and other governments) are left powerless in the face of this. They are not. They can still make a decision about which factor of production – labour, business (enterprise), banks (capital) or landlords they wish to favour in the crisis to come.

If they favour people and business and sacrifice landlords (whos assets will survive, come what may, albeit at considerably less worth) and banks (which will inevitably need to be nationalised) then more people and many more businesses might make it through the coming crisis. If they favour landlords and banks – as the UK government is at present – then the chance that much business at all will survive this is pretty remote. And in the end, nor will the banks or the landlords either. That’s my bleak prognosis. And either way, pension funds and pensioners are in deep trouble: most will now be dependent on the state, which means much more generous provision has to be thought about now than we have ever previously imagined.

I didn’t enjoy writing this post. I’m not suggesting it’s a fun read. It is not. And yet, I do see hope. Our economies have been blighted by the curse of financialisation. I would not have chosen to end it the way that it’s going to happen. But wise governments will realise that the end of financialisation is now nigh, and act accordingly.

And some won’t.

On that decision rests the fate of millions of people.

I wish I thought I could rely on our government to make the right choice. Time alone will tell if they will. 

The lockdown threat to business viability

At the beginning of May 2020 it is very apparent that life is not returning to normal. Plans to end lockdown do, according to the Financial Times, include staggered working hours; rules to require social distancing in the workplace and shops; a ban on workplace canteens; a requirement that employers provide extra car parks (seemingly overnight) so that employees need not share lifts to work; a reduction in the number of people allowed to share lifts and a great deal more that makes it apparent that whatever work might be like after lockdown it will be nothing like what it was before it.

It is easy for the government to say this. And the rules could, possibly, be enforced. But the consequences need to be thought through, because they are staggering.

Of course it is theoretically possible that some companies could actually survive the substantial new costs that this way of working will impose. But I stress that the word ‘theoretically’ is doing a lot of work in that sentence. That is because the reality is that in all likelihood almost none can, or will. Our economy is not geared to work in this way. And by geared I do not mean physically, where it is apparent that our capacity for adaptation is already quite phenomenal. Instead I refer to financial gearing, interpreted broadly.

The financial burden on business

Like many households, a great many businesses are massively debt-burdened. They have both significant financial borrowings and / or substantial rent payment commitments. That is because they are both under-capitalised in many cases and do not own their own properties, with rent in that case pretty much representing interest on an expensive loan that they might have had to take if they were to have bought their property instead.

Importantly, these obligations are fixed at present. The government might have shrunk official interest rates to near enough zero, but the reality is that in the actual economy that is not the case. The burden on businesses to repay loans, interest on those loans, and rents, might have been subject to some minor concessions for strictly limited periods at present, and then only for some lucky businesses, but for many the obligations will be ongoing. And there has been not a hint, so far, of long term support on these issues. Instead new government-backed loans under coronavirus schemes will just add to these debt mountains.

What this will mean is that companies working with reduced efficiency and increased costs in markets where demand will be reduced will be under enormous stress. They will, absolutely inevitably, suffer reduced profitability from their trading activities, but will nonetheless be facing fixed financial obligations created in an entirely different era and market and, quite crucially, legally these obligations are not re-negotiable in most cases.

It does not take a financial genius to realise that this is a situation that literally cannot work. The vast majority of businesses cannot now survive if they are to meet those financial obligations. We are seeing this on High Streets already, where refusal to pay rents is becoming commonplace, but the problem will now extend to every industrial estate, office block and workshop in the country.

The tiny minority of businesses with no borrowings and their own, paid for, freehold premises might make it through this crisis. In addition, micro-enterprises working at home and with almost no employees might also do so. But with the lockdown conditions that are going to be imposed, the rest cannot. It will be as simple as that. I cannot be more blunt: on this occasion comments based on the extrapolation of obvious heuristically derived conclusions that reduce analysis of a situation to its barest essentials are both necessary and true.

The choice the government has to make

In that case it is also true that in the economy to come some fairly stark decisions have to be made if it is the plan of the government that we survive this crisis. Of these the most important (as ever when the reality of these situations is faced) is whose interests are to be prioritised?

Is it labour, and the need to preserve jobs, that has the highest priority?

Or is it enterprise, meaning that the preservation of trading entities becomes the core goal?

Alternatively, assuming that this can be done, is banking to be pre-eminent to prevent a crash? In other words, is capital preserved?

Finally, might instead the interests of landlords feature most highly?

To go right back to this most basic of economic questions, which factor of production is to have priority? Unavoidably, that question does, of course, have implicit class connotations attached to it.

Right now it seems quite clear that the government is setting its priorities in the reverse ordering of the above list.

To be precise, landlords have not really been asked to make any sacrifices to date: their interests and income streams appear to have survived almost unscathed to date.

Banks on the other hand are already subject to massive support for which they did not pay and are also now enjoying significant effective additional funding for loans from which they will make money. Quantitative easing has also helped them, and it’s back on the agenda.

Business loans, most especially to larger companies are getting through, but as loan capital those funds simply defer the day of reckoning that is to come because, as yet, the government is quite unable to differentiate cash flow, liquidity and solvency, let alone loans from capital. As such the wrong support is being provided, and the stress is growing as a result.

And furlough just disguises the fact that more than 6 million people are now likely to be unemployed in the UK. When the self-employed whose businesses have failed are added in it could be much higher.

My point is that this ranking of priorities – so natural to a political party established to support the interests of unearned wealth – is fundamentally misjudged now.

by Richard Murphy, Tax Research UK via Naked Capitalism | Read more:

[ed. Comments section is worth a read as well. See also: Federal Funds Must Go to State and Local Governments (Ian Welsh).]

photo: markk

via:

Party On

Some people are intentionally flouting health recommendations by exposing themselves and others to COVID-19 in Walla Walla County, officials said.

Meghan DeBolt, director of the county’s Department of Community Health, told the Union-Bulletin that contact tracing has revealed that some are attending parties with the idea that it is better to get sick with the virus and get it over with.

New positive test results in the county have resulted from such gatherings, she said.

“We ask about contacts, and there are 25 people because: ‘We were at a COVID party,’ ” DeBolt said.

She called the parties irresponsible and unacceptable.

Walla Walla Police Chief Scott Bieber noted that disobeying Gov. Jay Inslee’s March 23 “Stay Home, Stay Healthy” order is illegal.

“We’re not going to overreact,” he said. “But we’re going to contact people who tested positive and follow up with a phone call, making them aware of the potential gross misdemeanor offense of disobeying the governor’s orders. If we find intentional violations, we will refer them to the city attorney.”

by AP/Seattle Times |  Read more:
Image: via
[ed. No shortage of nominees for this year's Darwin awards.]

Seattle Abandoned

McConnell Protégé Takes Center Stage

In March, after Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh took time off from his Supreme Court duties to swear in Justin Walker to the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Kentucky in Louisville, the newly minted judge recognized how he had gotten there at the age of 37, with zero trial experience but a pedigree in conservatism.

His mother had supported a rising Republican star named Mitch McConnell when her son was just 8, Judge Walker recalled: “I’ve got to hand it to you, Mom. It has been extremely important to me that Kentucky’s senior senator is Mitch McConnell.”

Then he turned to Justice Kavanaugh as he addressed the justice’s liberal opponents: “What can I say that I haven’t already said on Fox News?” said Judge Walker, who gave 119 interviews to the news media and several speeches paid for by the Federalist Society rebutting Kavanaugh critics. “In Brett Kavanaugh’s America,” he said, “we will not surrender while you wage war on our work, or our cause, or our hope, or our dream.”

He closed with a broadside against the American Bar Association, which had given him a rare “Not Qualified” rating for his absence of courtroom work, categorizing the professional organization among his “opponents.” “Although we are winning we have not won. Although we celebrate today, we cannot take for granted tomorrow — or we will lose our courts and our country to critics who call us terrifying and who describe us as deplorable.”

Barely two months later, Judge Walker will appear Wednesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee as Mr. McConnell’s handpicked nominee to a new seat: the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, long seen as the second-most powerful court in the land and a potential springboard to the most powerful, the Supreme Court.

In his quest to remake the American judiciary, Mr. McConnell is not done with his protégé, Judge Walker, the grandson of a millionaire power broker in Kentucky and a soldier in the Senate majority leader’s judicial push. Calling senators back to Washington amid a pandemic, Mr. McConnell plans a swift confirmation for the youngest nominee to the District of Columbia appellate court since 1983 to replace the retiring Judge Thomas B. Griffith.

The appellate court’s chief judge, Sri Srinivasan, opened the door to an inquiry into whether Mr. McConnell had improperly pressured Judge Griffith to retire so he could replace him with a young conservative in case President Trump loses re-election. But in a statement late Tuesday, Judge Griffith cited his wife’s chronic illness as the reason for his departure, saying, “My decision was driven entirely by personal concerns and involved no discussions with the White House or the Senate.”

Republicans promote Judge Walker as a “drain the swamp” Washington outsider, who triumphed over a hardscrabble upbringing in Kentucky to reach the heights of American jurisprudence 11 years out of law school.

“He’s young, brilliant and conservative,” said Mike Davis, who leads the Article III Project, a judicial advocacy group that has pushed President Trump’s appointments to the federal bench.

Democrats see the appointment differently. “I don’t think Mitch cares much about who is appointed to these spots as long as it’s someone he knows and he has confidence will be a conservative,” said Representative John Yarmuth, a Democrat who represents Mr. McConnell’s hometown, Louisville, and who has known Mr. McConnell for decades.

“It’s the ultimate wielding of power,” he added, “and that’s what Mitch lives for.”

Judge Walker’s biography has received something of a makeover during his judicial ascent. Last year, he described his mother, Deborah Walker, as “a single working mom” who “made indescribable sacrifices to provide me, the first in my family to graduate from college, with the opportunities she didn’t have herself.”

But his maternal grandfather, Frank R. Metts, was a millionaire real estate developer and a Kentucky transportation secretary who was one of the state’s most powerful officials in the early 1980s.

by Elizabeth Williamson and Rebecca R. Ruiz, NY Times | Read more:

Image: Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times

Reflections on a Disaster (Update - 5/4/2020)

From the initial Duck Soup post: Reflections on a Disaster (4/1/2020). Updated occasionally to see how closely we're following the script.

Update (4/7/2020): I forgot to add the main issue of conflict once the response/execution process is in full swing (actually, the main issue right from the beginning): More Harm Than Good. At the time of this writing we're closing in on what experts hope will be peak contagion/recorded deaths. Expect to see an escalating struggle between health experts/politicians/others vs. economists/politicians/business leaders/others on the issue of when to ease up on social distancing measures (basically, defining "success"). I'm already seeing calls to isolate the most vulnerable (old, underlying health conditions, etc.) and letting everyone else take their chances (possibly developing 'herd immunity' in the process). In other words, pitting numbers of deaths against numbers of unemployed and the health of the economy - which itself is on life-support at the moment.

***

Ok folks, here we are a week and a half later (4/16/2020). How are things going? (I'm not doing millions of links, so Google them yourselves): Well, the President is pushing some vague authority to reopen the economy (even though he never shut it down in the first place, and governors are pushing back, forming regional coalitions). The small business stimulus program has already run out of money (some businesses never seeing a dollar). No money for individuals yet. The financial sector is a black hole and could blow up at any time on any number of issues including over-leveraged and inter-connected risk, and things like loan defaults on car and house payments (some kind of cascading failure process, like 2008). Rent and mortgage payment relief proposals are mired in the weeds. No widespread virus/antibody testing yet (still several weeks off at best). No expansive contact tracing. No widespread availablility of masks. No killer vaccine on the horizon, maybe new year at the earliest (and no clear leading candidate). Respiratory intubation procedures should be avoided if at all possible. Secondary infections and virus mutations reported (!), a significant setback for vaccine production if true. More to come. See original post.] 

***

Update 5/4/2020. More than half the country is now 're-opening' in various phases (still without adequate testing and contact tracing in place). What 're-opening' means - practically, economically, medically will be revealed in the next couple of weeks. Deaths continue to rise in many of the re-opened states. Also a sense that a lot of people are nearing the breaking point, saying "if I get it, I get it", just to remove the uncertainty of living in limbo for some indeterminate time (even with indications that other organs might be at risk, like heart functions; and immunity possibly a fleeting/temporary benefit). It's the uncertainty of everything from broken supply chains to school schedules, shelter in place restrictions to testing and vaccine development, massive unemployment and housing insecurity - basically everything - that's driving a lot of frustration. Also an emerging debate on what an "acceptable" number of deaths might be, both to get the economy going again and developing "herd immunity". Finally, hard to imagine a health threat being politicized, but here we are. If there's a resurgence of infections and re-imposition of lockdowns, the country could be in for some serious civil unrest. Scary times.

[... also, I don't know about you but all the tv commercials and emails from corporations and businesses telling me how much "we're all in this together" (while cutting back on, or trying to sell me more services) are really beginning to get on my nerves.]

[ed. See also: Everything is Broken (Bob Dylan)]

Ben Edge, Pink Hare Moon, 2019
via:

Horace Parlan Trio ft. Staffan William-Olsson

Nannies Tell the Truth About Working During the Coronavirus

I’m a live-in nanny for an ultrahigh-net-worth Manhattan family. I have a degree in early-childhood education and decades of professional nanny experience. The family I work for is pretty high profile. These people could afford to keep a full staff on furlough for months on end with benefits, but they choose not to. They’ve had people quit on them because of safety reasons. They told them, “Okay. Well, then, you’re not getting a reference. How dare you let us down.” But most of the people who they employ are foreign-born like me and would have a hard time sticking up for themselves.

During the week, I stay with them at their outrageously large Hamptons house, so of course they need an outrageously large staff. There wasn’t really a conversation about moving up to the Hamptons with them; it was basically just “This is how it’s going to be.” For the first time since working there, I had a sort of Are you kidding me? reaction. Normally, I’m a “yes, ma’am” type of person. And that quickly escalated to her screaming that I had better come in or else. But then she was like, “I’ll make it worth your while.” I don’t know if that’s going to come to fruition.

There’s so many people coming in and out of the house. There’s a sports coach for the kids, and he goes to other people’s houses and works with their kids, too. And then they have the chef that goes to the grocery store every day. There’s people who come in to do hair blow-dries a few days a week, a manicurist, a personal trainer. The other housekeepers and nannies are like, This is really ridiculous. They haven’t asked any of the workers to stop coming in. Why don’t they care? One of my co-workers, she has just been washing the clothes of the kids nonstop every time they come in contact with a new person. And if I’ve ordered anything on Amazon, like school supplies, I quarantine the boxes in the pool house for two days. I get met with a lot of rolled eyes from my employers.

They don’t seem to be worried, even though when I started coming into the Hamptons, I had a cough. The dad seems to be a germophobe. He’s freaking out all the time about my kids washing their hands, but if we’re FaceTiming someone and I’m coughing in the background, he’ll say, “Oh, it’s just the nanny.”

They have been sending me and my co-workers back to Manhattan on weekends in a private car together. But the driver doesn’t work exclusively with them, so there’s other people that go in this car at other times. One of my co-workers has a big family, they’re elderly, and also one of my co-workers’ husbands is really sick and is one of the delicate people that should not be exposed at all. Our employers probably don’t even know she has a family. It’s not one of the things they would wonder about.

The dad sits on the couch all day on the phone doing business. But then he has the gall to tell people, “Oh, it’s so hard being with my kids. They’re doing all this homeschooling.” And I’m like, You haven’t done one thing with that! It’s me! They’ve never taken care of their own kids for more than an hour.

One of my colleagues, whenever she is in the city, has to shop around for specialty items for them: things the chef needs that they can’t find in the Hamptons, and obviously they can’t use any old kind of toilet paper; they have to use their nice toilet paper, so she has to go to a few different shops to try and find it. There’s lots of specific items that they have become accustomed to and that they can’t go without. Just like the people. We are like items to them; they can’t go without us.

by Anna Silman, The Cut |  Read more:

Image: Patrick Leger

via:
[ed. See also: I Spent a Month Learning Guitar on the Internet and It Actually Worked; and YouTube Guitar Teachers You Might Want to Check Out (Duck Soup).]

via:

Why the Coronavirus Is So Confusing

On march 27, as the U.S. topped 100,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19, Donald Trump stood at the lectern of the White House press-briefing room and was asked what he’d say about the pandemic to a child. Amid a meandering answer, Trump remarked, “You can call it a germ, you can call it a flu, you can call it a virus. You know, you can call it many different names. I’m not sure anybody even knows what it is.”

That was neither the most consequential statement from the White House, nor the most egregious. But it was perhaps the most ironic. In a pandemic characterized by extreme uncertainty, one of the few things experts know for sure is the identity of the pathogen responsible: a virus called SARS-CoV-2 that is closely related to the original SARS virus. Both are members of the coronavirus family, which is entirely distinct from the family that includes influenza viruses. Scientists know the shape of proteins on the new coronavirus’s surface down to the position of individual atoms. Give me two hours, and I can do a dramatic reading of its entire genome.

But much else about the pandemic is still maddeningly unclear. Why do some people get really sick, but others do not? Are the models too optimistic or too pessimistic? Exactly how transmissible and deadly is the virus? How many people have actually been infected? How long must social restrictions go on for? Why are so many questions still unanswered?

The confusion partly arises from the pandemic’s scale and pace. Worldwide, at least 3.1 million people have been infected in less than four months. Economies have nose-dived. Societies have paused. In most people’s living memory, no crisis has caused so much upheaval so broadly and so quickly. “We’ve never faced a pandemic like this before, so we don’t know what is likely to happen or what would have happened,” says Zoë McLaren, a health-policy professor at the University of Maryland at Baltimore County. “That makes it even more difficult in terms of the uncertainty.”

But beyond its vast scope and sui generis nature, there are other reasons the pandemic continues to be so befuddling—a slew of forces scientific and societal, epidemiological and epistemological. What follows is an analysis of those forces, and a guide to making sense of a problem that is now too big for any one person to fully comprehend.

I. The Virus

Because coronavirus wasn’t part of the popular lexicon until SARS-CoV-2 ran amok this year, earlier instances of the term are readily misconstrued. When people learned about a meeting in which global leaders role-played through a fictional coronavirus pandemic, some wrongly argued that the actual pandemic had been planned. When people noticed mentions of “human coronavirus” on old cleaning products, some wrongly assumed that manufacturers had somehow received advance warning.

There isn’t just one coronavirus. Besides SARS-CoV-2, six others are known to infect humans—four are mild and common, causing a third of colds, while two are rare but severe, causing MERS and the original SARS. But scientists have also identified about 500 other coronaviruses among China’s many bat species. “There will be many more—I think it’s safe to say tens of thousands,” says Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance, who has led that work. Laboratory experiments show that some of these new viruses could potentially infect humans. SARS-CoV-2 likely came from a bat, too.

It seems unlikely that a random bat virus should somehow jump into a susceptible human. But when you consider millions of people, in regular contact with millions of bats, which carry tens of thousands of new viruses, vanishingly improbable events become probable ones. In 2015, Daszak’s team found that 3 percent of people from four Chinese villages that are close to bat caves had antibodies that indicated a previous encounter with SARS-like coronaviruses. “Bats fly out every night over their houses. Some of them shelter from rain in caves, or collect guano for fertilizer,” Daszak says. “If you extrapolate up to the rural population, across the region where the bats that carry these viruses live, you’re talking 1 [million] to 7 million people a year exposed.” Most of these infections likely go nowhere. It takes just one to trigger an epidemic.

Once that happens, uncertainties abound as scientists race to characterize the new pathogen. That task is always hard, but especially so when the pathogen is a coronavirus. “They’re very hard to work with; they don’t grow very well in cell cultures; and it’s been hard to get funding,” says Vineet Menachery of the University of Texas Medical Branch. He is one of just a few dozen virologists in the world who specialize in coronaviruses, which have attracted comparatively little attention compared with more prominent threats like flu. The field swelled slightly after the SARS epidemic of 2003, but then shrunk as interest and funding dwindled. “It wasn’t ’til MERS came along [in 2012] that I even thought I could have an academic career on coronaviruses,” Menachery says.

The tight group of coronavirologists is now racing to make up for years of absent research—a tall order in the middle of a pandemic. “We’re working as hard as possible,” says Lisa Gralinski, a virologist at the University of North Carolina. “Our space is so intermingled that we can’t socially distance among ourselves much.”

One small mercy, she notes, is that SARS-CoV-2 isn’t changing dramatically. Scientists are tracking its evolution in real time, and despite some hype about the existence of different strains, the virologists I’ve spoken with largely feel that the virus is changing at a steady and predictable pace. There are no signs of “an alarming mutation we need to be worried about,” Gralinski says. For now, the world is facing just one threat. But that threat can manifest in many ways.

II. The Disease (...)

III. The Research (...)

IV. The Experts (...)

V. The Messaging (...)

VI. The Information (...)

VII. The Numbers (...)

VIII. The Narrative (...)

by Ed Yong, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Joan Wong
[ed. Important. Ed Yong has to be the best science journalist working today.]

Who Will Control North Korea

Whatever the condition of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un at the moment—and supposedly informed speculation ranges from dead, to comatose, to just chilling at his personal resort in Wonsan—his absence from public view for more than two weeks now is a reminder that his demise could plunge his country and the region, maybe even the world, into a huge new geopolitical crisis.

For now his younger sister, Kim Yo Jong, looks like the understudy waiting in the wings to take the lead if her brother cannot function. He’s positioned her for that role, and groomed her for it. But if Kim Jong Un dies, it’s fair to say all hell could break loose.

Many analysts believe China would move swiftly to consolidate control over North Korea if Kim Jong Un is no longer able to govern effectively. Chinese concerns, like those of the U.S. and just about every other country with a stake in the region, focus not only on who’s in charge of North Korea but more specifically on what happens to North Korea’s nukes. If there is a chaotic battle for succession, who will secure them?

A Chinese medical team known to be in the North right now presumably is looking after Kim, and looking out for Beijing’s interests. If Kim is indeed in grave condition, Chinese Leader Xi Jinping will be the first to know.

And then what?

“I’m very sure the Chinese will send their army into North Korea,” says defector Ken Eom, who served 10 years in Pyongyang's military and is now a prominent analyst in the South. “They have already planned what they will do.”

Chinese concern about Korea goes deep into history, and was never more evident than in the Korean War, when half a million Chinese died driving U.S. and South Korean troops out of North Korea after they reached the Yalu River border between Korea and China in the early months of the war in 1950.

It’s not as though North Korea would threaten China, the source of all its oil and half its food, but the Chinese want to be sure the Americans don’t get there first in the confusion of a power vacuum if Kim is no longer around, factions compete to succeed him, and the fate of his nuclear missile arsenal hangs in the balance.

by Donald Kirk, Yahoo News/Daily Beast |  Read more:

Image: The Daily Beast / Photos Getty
[ed. See also: Kim Jong-un Is Back. What Happens When He’s Really Gone? (NY Times).]

Three Potential Futures for Covid-19: Recurring Small Outbreaks, a Monster Wave, or a Persistent Crisis

As epidemiologists attempt to scope out what Covid-19 has in store for the U.S. this summer and beyond, they see several potential futures, differing by how often and how severely the no-longer-new coronavirus continues to wallop humankind. But while these scenarios diverge on key details — how much transmission will decrease over the summer, for instance, and how many people have already been infected (and possibly acquired immunity) — they almost unanimously foresee a world that, even when the current outbreak temporarily abates, looks and feels nothing like the world of just three months ago.

It is a world where, even in Western countries, wearing a face mask is no more unusual than carrying a cellphone. A world where even at small social gatherings a friend’s occasional cough feels threatening, where workplaces have the feel of hot zones, and where taking public transit is not as much environmentally correct as personally dangerous.

“October 2020,” said emerging diseases expert Amesh Adalja of the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security, “won’t look nothing like October 2019.”

And neither will October 2021, according to an analysis released on Thursday by epidemiologist Michael Osterholm of the University of Minnesota and his colleagues. They envision three possible futures, depicted as seascapes, their waves of different heights and widths approaching the unseen and unsuspecting beachcombers on a placid shore.

In one future, a monster wave hit in early 2020 (the current outbreak of millions of cases and a projected hundreds of thousands of deaths globally by August 1), but is followed by alternating mini-waves of much smaller outbreaks every few months with only a few (but never zero) cases in between.

In the second scenario, the current monster wave is followed later this year by one twice as fierce and even longer-lasting, as the outbreak rebounds after a summer when a significant drop in the number of cases and deaths led officials and individuals to let down their guard, relax physical distancing more than was safe, and fail to heed (or even detect) the early warning signs that a new outbreak was gathering force. After this doubly disastrous second wave, the sea is almost calm, marred only by an occasional wave of cases that number barely one-fifth of what the fall and spring of 2020 saw.

In the third possible future, the current wave creates a new normal, with Covid-19 outbreaks of nearly equal size and, in most cases, duration through the end of 2022. At that point, the best-case scenario is that an effective vaccine has arrived; if not, then the world experiences Covid-19 until at least half of the population has been infected, with or without becoming ill.

What all three scenarios agree on is this: There is virtually no chance Covid-19 will end when the world bids good riddance to a calamitous 2020. The reason is the same as why the disease has taken such a toll its first time through: No one had immunity to the new coronavirus.

“This pandemic is not going to settle down until there is sufficient population immunity,” slightly above 50%, epidemiologist Gabriel Leung of the University of Hong Kong told a New York Academy of Sciences briefing.

Since the world “is far from that level of immunity,” said Osterholm (he estimates that no more than 5% of the world population is immune to the new coronavirus as a result of surviving their infection), “this virus is going to keep finding people. It’s going to keep spreading through the population.” And that, he said, “means we’re in for a long haul.” (...)

Perhaps the greatest unknown involves human and social values. To put it bluntly, how many deaths can a particular country, city, or community tolerate? “Reducing infections to zero is not possible, and would come at too high a cost,” Leung said.

by Sharon Begley, STAT |  Read more:

Image: Hyacinth Empinado/STAT
[ed. See also: No, Sweden Isn’t a Miracle Coronavirus Model (Bloomberg).]