In The Shadows: The Hidden Deaths Of The COVID Pandemic

Sara Wittner had seemingly gotten her life back under control. After a December relapse in her battle with drug addiction, the 32-year-old completed a 30-day detox program and started taking a monthly injection to block her cravings for opioids. She was engaged to be married, working for a local health association and counseling others about drug addiction.

Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

The virus knocked down all the supports she had carefully built around her: no more in-person Narcotics Anonymous meetings, no talks over coffee with a trusted friend or her addiction recovery sponsor. As the virus stressed hospitals and clinics, her appointment to get the next monthly shot of medication was moved back from 30 days to 45 days.

As best her family could reconstruct from the messages on her phone, Wittner started using again on April 12, Easter Sunday, more than a week after her originally scheduled appointment, when she should have gotten her next injection. She couldn’t stave off the cravings any longer as she waited for her appointment that coming Friday. She used again that Tuesday and Wednesday.

“We kind of know her thought process was that ‘I can make it. I’ll go get my shot tomorrow,’” said her father, Leon Wittner. “‘I’ve just got to get through this one more day and then I’ll be OK.’”

But on Thursday morning, the day before her appointment, her sister Grace Sekera found her curled up in bed at her parents’ home in this Denver suburb, blood pooling on the right side of her body, foam on her lips, still clutching a syringe. Her father suspects she died of a fentanyl overdose.

However, he said, what really killed her was the coronavirus.

“Anybody that is struggling with a substance abuse disorder, anybody that has an alcohol issue and anybody with mental health issues, all of a sudden, whatever safety nets they had for the most part are gone,” he said. “And those are people that are living right on the edge of that razor.”

Sara Wittner’s death is just one example of how complicated it is to track the full impact of the coronavirus pandemic — and even what should be counted. Some people who get COVID-19 die of COVID-19. Some people who have COVID die of something else. And then there are people who die because of disruptions created by the pandemic.

While public health officials are trying to gather data on how many people test positive for the coronavirus and how many people die from the infection, the pandemic has left an untold number dying in the shadows, not directly because of the virus but still because of it. They are unaccounted for in the official tally, which, as of June 21, has topped 119,000 in the U.S.

But the lack of immediate clarity on the numbers of people actually dying from COVID-19 has some onlookers, ranging from conspiracy theorists on Twitter all the way to President Donald Trump, claiming the tallies are exaggerated — even before they include deaths like Wittner’s. That has undermined confidence in the accuracy of the death toll and made it harder for public health officials to implement infection prevention measures.

Yet experts are certain that a lack of widespread testing, variations in how the cause of death is recorded, and the economic and social disruption the virus has caused are hiding the full extent of its death toll.

by Markian Hawryluk, KVH | Read more:
Image: Leon Wittner

[ed. Do we even have a health care system now (that isn't focused primarily on the virus)? See the comments section here (Naked Captalism).]

The End of Tourism?

Of all the calamities that befell tourists as the coronavirus took hold, those involving cruise ships stood apart. Contagion at sea inspired a special horror, as pleasure palaces turned into prison hulks, and rumours of infection on board spread between fetid cabins via WhatsApp. Trapped in close proximity to their fellow passengers, holidaymakers experienced the distress of being both victims and agents of infection, as a succession of ports refused them entry.

When it began, the deadly situation at sea was seen as a freakish outgrowth of what many still thought of as a Chinese problem. The first ship to suffer a major outbreak was the Diamond Princess. By mid-February, 355 cases had been confirmed aboard, and the ship was held being in quarantine in the port of Yokohama. At the time, the ship accounted for more than half of reported cases outside China. Fourteen passengers on the Diamond Princess would die of the virus.

The nightmare at sea has not concluded. Even after passengers from more than 30 afflicted cruise ships were allowed to disembark, and flooded into hospitals, quarantine hotels or on to charter flights home, an estimated 100,000 crew and staff remained trapped at sea, some in quarantine, others blocked from disembarking until their employers could make onward travel arrangements. This second drama led to a mass hunger strike – by 15 Romanian crew in limbo off the coast of Florida – and a police intervention to quell disturbances on a ship quarantined in the German port of Cuxhaven. As recently as 1 June, crew and staff aboard 20-odd cruise ships marooned in Manila Bay were reportedly clamouring to be allowed ashore.

Cruises have become a symbol of the ravages that coronavirus has inflicted on tourism. A sector that until January was worth $150bn, by its own estimate, is shedding jobs, issuing debt and discounting furiously simply to survive. But even before the current crisis hit, cruising had become symptomatic of the damage that tourism wreaks on the world.

Tourism is an unusual industry in that the assets it monetises – a view, a reef, a cathedral – do not belong to it. The world’s dominant cruise companies – Carnival, Royal Caribbean and Norwegian – pay little towards the upkeep of the public goods they live off. By incorporating themselves in overseas tax havens with benign environmental and labour laws – respectively Panama, Liberia and Bermuda – cruising’s big three, which account for three-quarters of the industry, get to enjoy low taxes and avoid much irksome regulation, while polluting the air and sea, eroding coastlines and pouring tens of millions of people into picturesque ports of call that often cannot cope with them.

What goes for cruises goes for most of the travel industry. For decades, a small number of environmentally minded reformists in the sector have tried to develop sustainable tourism that creates enduring employment while minimising the damage it does. But most hotel groups, tour operators and national tourism authorities – whatever their stated commitment to sustainable tourism – continue to prioritise the economies of scale that inevitably lead to more tourists paying less money and heaping more pressure on those same assets. Before the pandemic, industry experts were forecasting that international arrivals would rise by between 3% and 4% in 2020. Chinese travellers, the largest and fastest-growing cohort in world tourism, were expected to make 160m trips abroad, a 27% increase on the 2015 figure.

The virus has given us a picture, at once frightening and beautiful, of a world without tourism. We see now what happens to our public goods when tourists aren’t clustering to exploit them. Shorelines enjoy a respite from the erosion caused by cruise ships the size of canyons. Walkers stuck at home cannot litter mountainsides. Intricate culinary cultures are no longer menaced by triangles of defrosted pizza. It is hard to imagine a better illustration of tourism’s effects than our current holiday away from it.

Coronavirus has also revealed the danger of overreliance on tourism, demonstrating in brutal fashion what happens when the industry supporting an entire community, at the expense of any other more sustainable activity, collapses. On 7 May, the UN World Tourism Organisation estimated that earnings from international tourism might be down 80% this year against last year’s figure of $1.7tn, and that 120m jobs could be lost. Since tourism relies on the same human mobility that spreads disease, and will be subject to the most stringent and lasting restrictions, it is likely to suffer more than almost any other economic activity.

by Christopher de Bellaigue, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Venice, 2019. Miguel Medina/AFP/Getty

Revenge of the Suburbs

U.S. cities have been growing at their edges for a century and a half. Country living of the Windy Corner sort evolved into the “streetcar suburbs” of the early 20th century, offering a comfortable life just a carriage ride from town. After World War II, mass-developed subdivisions followed, compelled by a housing crisis and emboldened by racist government-housing subsidies, white flight, and the sheer size of the North American continent. Like pornography, you know a suburb when you see it: large expanses of low-slung buildings, where residences are separated from commerce, where industry is mostly absent, where family life thrives inside detached homes that stipple meandering streets flanked by lawns and dotted with mailboxes. More than half of Americans, 175 million of us, live in communities like these now, most for the same reasons as our forebears.

Or we live in a slightly more urban version of them, because now, everywhere is the suburbs. Eighty-four percent of Americans live in cities, but most of them don’t live in the dense, modernist urban spaces that the name conjures—places like New York or Hong Kong. Instead, they occupy the greater metropolitan areas of Houston or Atlanta or Denver, which extend far beyond the city limits. All told, roughly three-quarters of the population live in single-family homes, a reminder that even the urban cores of big American cities, such as Dallas or Phoenix, wear the trappings of suburbia.

For decades, urbanists have sought to end America’s long marriage to sprawl. The architects Ellen Dunham-Jones and June Williamson have identified characteristics of suburban form worthy of retrofitting, including the dominance of low-density buildings, an emphasis on private spaces instead of public ones, the reliance on single-use rather than mixed-use zoning, an almost complete dependence on the automobile, and dead-end roads that make street networks less useful.

But after the anxious spring of 2020, these defects seem like new luxuries. There was always comfort to be found in a big house on a plot of land that’s your own. The relief is even more soothing with a pandemic bearing down on you. And as the novel coronavirus graduates from acute terror to long-term malaise, urbanites are trapped in small apartments with little or no outdoor space, reliant on mass transit that now seems less like a public service and more like a rolling petri dish. Meanwhile, suburbanites have protected their families amid the solace of sprawling homes on large, private plots, separated from the neighbors, and reachable only by the safety of private cars. Sheltered from the virus in their many bedrooms, they sleep soundly, dreaming the American dream with new confidence.

by Ian Bogost, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Celina Pereira

Rick Astley

[ed. Yes, THAT Rick Astley (Never Gonna Give You Up). Pretty good cover. See also: this interview with Dave Grohl about Rick's accidental guest appearance with Foo Fighters in London, 2017.]

Watney's Covid Case Raises Questions About PGA Tour's Pandemic Policy

Hours before the PGA Tour deemed coronavirus a sufficient threat to shunt its season into cold storage for three months, the front of the Sawgrass clubhouse provided a typical picture of serenity – until the arrival of Dustin Johnson. En route to the locker room, without so much as raising an eyelid, the former world No 1 spat directly into decorative hedging between myself, a player manager of my acquaintance and the footpath. As we shook heads, Johnson continued on his merry way.

Until Friday, Johnson’s disgusting propensity to yack all over courses – including greens – in the middle of a pandemic was arguably the biggest negative associated with the PGA Tour’s resumption.

Certain other matters did not look very smart – players and caddies fist bumping at the end of rounds, say – but the sense that could golf lead the United States into a Covid-free place was allowed to rise. News of Nick Watney’s positive test at the RBC Heritage in South Carolina stopped the happy clappers in their tracks. It’s real world stuff now.

That someone involved in the PGA Tour’s resumption would test positive for coronavirus was perhaps, on the law of averages alone, inevitable. It took until day two of tournament two.

“By the end of the year, there’s going to be 200,000 deaths in the US alone from Covid-19,’ said Rory McIlroy. “To think that on the PGA Tour, none of us were going to get it … I don’t think anyone thought that. I think the consensus was someone is going to get it at some point.”

McIlroy’s analysis is fair. It is a harsh reality that while Watney and his family face an anxious spell, focus elsewhere shifts towards the Tour’s response. Before it does, though, we are entitled to raise questions about events around the 39-year-old’s positive test.

To be fair to the PGA Tour, it switched approach from one where a positive Covid-19 test result would not be disclosed due to medical confidentiality restrictions. However, a bulletin confirming Watney’s status was soon cause for intrigue. “On Friday, prior to arriving at the tournament, he indicated he had symptoms consistent with the illness and after consulting with a physician, was administered a test and found to be positive,” said the Tour.

On completion of his second round, McIlroy said he was talking to Watney on the putting green before play. Watney felt suitably bad about the situation to send a message to the world No 1 after the bad news was confirmed. Brooks Koepka revealed he was “right next to” Watney “in the parking lot”. So, having indicated symptoms – the reddest of flags – not only did Watney see fit to travel to the tournament site but nobody in officialdom directed him against such a move. It is an astounding chain of events.

Equally baffling was the approach taken towards Luke List and Vaughn Taylor, Watney’s playing partners for the opening rounds. After starting out on day two seemingly none the wiser about Watney’s withdrawal, they were informed after nine holes of the true picture. “Heart started racing, got a little nervous,” said Taylor. No wonder. What purpose this mid-round intervention was supposed to serve is anyone’s guess.

Generally, competitors have lauded the Tour’s approach. Ian Poulter branded it exemplary. Jordan Spieth, though, unwittingly pointed towards one of many underlying problems. “South Carolina’s open,” said Spieth. “If you go anywhere to a restaurant, there’s a lot of people there right now. So I guess that’s probably best case is that he got it on his own outside.”

If the PGA Tour were operating a bubble in the truest sense, Watney would not be allowed anywhere near a public restaurant. If the PGA Tour were operating a bubble in the truest sense, on-site media wouldn’t be left to find their own hotels. And if the PGA Tour were operating a bubble in the truest sense, accommodation options for players and caddies wouldn’t only be “strongly recommended” as per paperwork issued last month.

by Ewan Murray, The Guardian |  Read more:
Image: Gerry Broome/AP

Soap Bubbles Pollinated a Pear Orchard Without Damaging Delicate Flowers

Soap bubbles facilitated the pollination of a pear orchard by delivering pollen grains to targeted flowers, demonstrating that this whimsical technique can successfully pollinate fruit-bearing plants. The study, from the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in Nomi, Japan, and published June 17 in the journal iScience, suggests that soap bubbles may present a low-tech complement to robotic pollination technology designed to supplement the work of vanishing bees.

"It sounds somewhat like fantasy, but the functional soap bubble allows effective pollination and assures that the quality of fruits is the same as with conventional hand pollination," says senior author Eijiro Miyako, an associate professor in the School of Materials Science at the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. "In comparison with other types of remote pollination, functional soap bubbles have innovative potentiality and unique properties, such as effective and convenient delivery of pollen grains to targeted flowers and high flexibility to avoid damaging them."

Miyako and colleagues previously published a study in the journal Chem, in which they used a tiny toy drone to pollinate blossoming flowers. But although the drone was only two centimeters long, the researchers struggled to prevent it from destroying the flowers as it bumped into them. While searching for a more flower-friendly artificial pollination technique, Miyako spent a day at the park blowing bubbles with his son. When one of the bubbles collided against his son's face—a predictably injury-free accident—Miyako found his inspiration.

After confirming through optical microscopy that soap bubbles could, in fact, carry pollen grains, Miyako and Xi Yang, his coauthor on the study, tested the effects of five commercially available surfactants on pollen activity and bubble formation. The neutralized surfactant lauramidopropyl betain (A-20AB) won out over its competitors, facilitating better pollen germination and growth of the tube that develops from each pollen grain after it is deposited on a flower. Based on a laboratory analysis of the most effective soap concentrations, the researchers tested the performance of pear pollen grains in a 0.4% A-20AB soap bubble solution with an optimized pH and added calcium and other ions to support germination. After three hours of pollination, the pollen activity mediated through the soap bubbles remained steady, while other methods such as pollination through powder or solution became less effective.

Miyako and Yang then loaded the solution into a bubble gun and released pollen-loaded bubbles into a pear orchard, finding that the technique distributed pollen grains (about 2,000 per bubble) to the flowers they targeted, producing fruit that demonstrated the pollination's success. Finally, the researchers loaded an autonomous, GPS-controlled drone with functionalized soap bubbles, which they used to direct soap bubbles at fake lilies (since flowers were no longer in bloom) from a height of two meters, hitting their targets at a 90% success rate when the machine moved at a velocity of two meters per second.

by Cell Press, Phys.Org |  Read more:

Image: Eijiro Miyako

When Antifa Hysteria Sweeps America

What can we possibly make of the crisis that unfolded in the remote Oregon seaside town of Coquille?

Coquille is a sleepy logging community of 3,800 people, almost all of them white. It is miles and miles from nowhere. Portland is 250 miles to the north. San Francisco is 500 miles to the south.

But Fox News is in a frenzy about rioters and looters, and President Donald Trump warns about the anti-fascist movement known as antifa. So early this month as a small group of local residents planned a peaceful “Black Lives Matter” protest in Coquille, word raced around that three busloads of antifa activists were headed to Coquille to bust up the town.

The sheriff and his deputies donned bulletproof vests, prepared their mine-resistant ambush protected armored vehicle and took up positions to fight off the invasion. Almost 200 local people, some shouldering rifles and others holding flags, gathered to protect their town (overshadowing the handful of people who had come to wave Black Lives Matter signs).

“I feel defensive and want to protect my home,” one man, Timothy Robinette, told the local newspaper, The World.

A sheriff from a nearby county, John Ward, warned citizens in a public Facebook post of rumors that the anti-fascists could rampage into his area as well.

“I was told they are looking for a fight,” he explained. Ward added that he had no problem with peaceful protests — a Black Lives Matter protest had been held peacefully in the local town of Brookings — but he hinted that citizens might want to help police fend off any antifa attack.

“Without asking,” he said, “I am sure we have a lot of local boys, too, with guns that will protect our citizens.”

Of course, no rampaging anarchists ever showed up. The Battle of Coquille ended without beginning.

Similar hysteria about antifa invasions has erupted across the country. I asked my followers on Facebook how earnest citizens could fall prey to such panics, and I was stunned by how many reported similar anxieties in their own towns — sometimes creating dangerous situations. (...)

Antifa, short for anti-fascists, hasn’t killed anyone and appears to have been only a marginal presence in Black Lives Matter protests. None of those arrested on serious federal charges related to the unrest have been linked to antifa.

Still, the movement has a mythic status in some right-wing narratives, and Trump and Fox News have hyped the threat. (The Seattle Times caught Fox faking photos to exaggerate unrest in Seattle.)

Race-baiting extremists have also tried to manipulate public fears. One Twitter account purportedly run by an antifa group, @Antifa_US, announced May 31 that “tonight’s the night … we move into the residential areas … the white hoods … and we take what’s ours.” But Twitter said that the account was actually run by white supremacists posing as antifa.

These antifa panics are where racism and hysteria intersect, in a nation that has more guns than people. They arise when a lying president takes every opportunity not to heal our national divisions but to stoke them, when people live in a news ecosystem that provides no reality check but inflames prejudices and feeds fears.

You might think that this kind of hysteria would be self-correcting: Citizens would see that no antifa people show up and then realize that they had been manipulated by people who treat them as dummies. But the narrative actually gaining traction in some quarters is that guns forced the antifa to back off.

NBC News, which has published excellent accounts of this hysteria, quoted one armed “defender” of the remote town of Klamath Falls, Oregon, as initially saying that antifa warriors were on the way “to burn everything and to kill white people.”

After none showed up, a local bar owner said on Facebook that he was proud of the armed turnout and boasted that antifa activists had been repelled because they “walked into a hornet’s nest.”

by Nicholas Kristof, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Amy Moss Strong/The World

[ed. What's with this whole antifa thing? Fascism is now somehow aligned with patriotism? I don't get it. This country has gone insane.]

John Divola, Zuma

via:

I’m Not a Dad, but I Rock Like One

The beginning is too banal to recall vividly: A familiar melody stuck in my head one morning last summer, leading to a streaming-service search, then a long afternoon lost listening to the entire record and its ambitious follow-up. From there, things snowballed. By the end of that week I had to accept it: I was going through a Steely Dan phase.

Like a lot of people, many of my earliest musical memories involve being a captive back-seat listener in my parents’ car during long road trips. It was there, on the upholstered bench seat of a Ford Taurus, that I first declared that the blandest, dullest, most excruciatingly monotonous music I’d ever heard in my nearly decade-long life was Steely Dan.

As a kid, the noodly, pristine sounds of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen signified nothing so much as my dad exerting oppressive control over the car stereo. Just infinite shades of sonic gray and songs that would never freaking end. Do it … again?! What else have you been doing for the last five and a half minutes of this song?

And then, all of a sudden, I was 32 and listening to “Pretzel Logic” intently in my best headphones, declaring myself an honorary resident of Barrytown. What had happened to me?

Like anyone seeking rational advice, I looked to Twitter. “Some personal news,” I posted last August, announcing my new infatuation. I was dumbfounded by the response: nearly 1,000 likes and a lively discussion among friends and followers reassuring me that I was not alone. “We’ll all meet you for dinner at Denny’s at 4:30,” my friend Rob wrote, which I assumed was a reference to an obscure Steely Dan lyric I didn’t yet recognize, but I now see was just his way of saying that we are both old. I am at once honored and chilled to my bones to tell you that, from the beyond, the Walter Becker Estate replied, “We’ve been expecting you.”

As I sighed and once again dropped the needle on my parents’ old copy of “Gaucho,” I started to see that my Steely Dan phase was not an aberration, but an inevitable if long-resisted final frontier of my musical taste.

One of my beloved car requests was Billy Joel’s “Storm Front.” As an annoyingly precocious and not even remotely popular preteen, I got very into Wilco circa its 1996 double-album, “Being There.” I am still not over the death of Tom Petty and cannot imagine a time when the opening chords of “Free Fallin’” playing unassumingly over a drugstore’s speakers will not bring me to public tears.

If anything, my recent embrace of Steely Dan has helped me settle into a newfound level of self-acceptance. I am a discerning, feminist-minded millennial woman. I also love dad rock.

At least in print, the phrase “dad rock” was coined in 2007 by the music critic Rob Mitchum — to his later regret. He used it in an unfavorable Pitchfork review of Wilco’s “Sky Blue Sky,” an album “of unapologetic straightforwardness,” he wrote, that “nakedly exposes the dad-rock gene Wilco has always carried but courageously attempted to disguise.”

The term stuck, not just to Wilco but to their more canonical and constitutionally laid-back classic rock influences. Several years later, in the introduction to a list of “20 Dad-Rock Albums You Should Learn to Love” (“The Dark Side of the Moon,” “Astral Weeks,” “The River,” etc.), the website Flavorwire defined the common usage of the term as “music made by old white dudes that somehow always ends up on the car stereo and/or being played on the hi-fi at various school friends’ houses.”

I was struck by this definition’s similarities with my own more personal recollections: dad rock’s numbing ubiquity and the childlike feeling that it is being chosen, absurdly, from on high by some unchecked authority figure behind the wheel of life. As I got older and started writing about music, though, I found that dad rock’s dominance was not just confined to the plush interior of a Taurus: What is “rockism” if not the larger cultural equivalent of the dad who just won’t relinquish control of the car stereo?

Last year, in Esquire, Mitchum wrote a mea culpa for originating what he believed to be a grievous insult. He was particularly apologetic that the phrase had become so closely associated with the Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy, who found the description “unflattering and hurtful” — even if that was something Tweedy said while promoting an album he’d made featuring his own son on drums. (“It almost feels like we’re trolling those people now,” he added.)

But in the past decade or so, Mitchum realized, the “dad rock” tag has become much less derisive than it was when he first used it. Its ethos of “middle-age contentment” and just liking what you like was now “something to aspire to.” “Calling a band dad-rock in 2019,” he concluded, “is just as likely to be a defiant re-appropriation of a hipster insult.”

How, in the span of a decade, did dad rock go from an insult to becoming … kind of a compliment? One important thing that happened in the 2010s was that rock music (especially the kind made by white, dad-aged men) drifted to the edges of mainstream popular culture. And though this shift has not yet made up for decades of erasure of more diverse voices, streaming has widened the array of easily accessible artists and perspectives.

by Lindsay Zoladz, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Stephanie Gonot for The New York Times
[ed. Good music is always good music. See also: Steely Dan (Duck Soup).]

Day-Afterthoughts: Reflections on a Post-Corona-Time

How will the pandemic change the world? What do you see as long-term consequences of the crisis?

A friend and I are exchanging emails. Our lenses polarize very differently. He says, “I’m moving to Sweden.” The “medieval method” of forcing businesses to close disgusts him. Never mind that Swedes are mostly staying home, or that their infection rate is the highest in Scandinavia: America’s ruin-the-economy approach is exactly the wrong one. A day later, I see a San Francisco Chronicle’s analysis showing the powerful effect of the Bay Area’s early closure. Seven jurisdictions coordinated a shelter-in-place order on March 17th, and the number of per-capita Covid cases has remained lower than in nearly every other U.S. metropolitan area. I want to tell my friend: “Better to move to San Francisco.”

The novel coronavirus has not eased the partisan divide here. If anything, it’s become even clearer how differently two friends can view the same article or proposal or analysis. We hardly speak the same language, because our news sources share almost no assumptions in common. Among loud partisans on the American right, this is a disease of the blood, strongly affecting the kidneys—hence Trump’s attachment, via Sean Hannity, via Dr. Oz, to hydroxychloroquine. Among respondents on the left, it’s a disease of the lungs, a pneumonia. Both of these may turn out to be correct as far as they go. But as researchers struggle to understand Covid, our president gins up the divide in our outlooks and conclusions. He doesn’t want national unity. He wants States’ Rights, more now than ever. Fifty Americas serve him better than one, because unifying isn’t a huckster’s schtick.

Nevertheless, my friend and I agree that the consequences of hiding out and shutting down could be grievous. He sees the hamstringing of businesses, I see the shedding of workers. He anticipates more deaths from economic devastation than from Covid, I expect one-off shops and restaurants to fail in high numbers as chains revive more easily and spread their sameness. Both of us foresee a protracted weakening of physical and mental health. We feel the beginnings of it in ourselves.

After the risk of Covid subsides, will people touch each other less? Will a generation grow up avoiding strangers on the street? Touch underwrites our health, even in the narrowest sense: by training and strengthening our immune systems. Yet a leading infectious-disease specialist has declared that the handshake should never return. Will those who are able to do so choose to stay in their digital caves? Commuting can be a curse—especially for those who live farthest away, many of whom are still have to commute during the pandemic. But seeing real people during the day, especially people we haven’t expressly chosen to spend time with, preserves a space in our lives for serendipities of caring and connection.

The incursion of technology had reached a tipping point before Covid. If we allow it to, this pandemic could be the boot that nudges us over the precipice—bringing, in the name of efficiency and health, an ill-advised sterility and a further, more permanent retreat from the material world, an abandonment of bricks and mortar and flesh. This is the bleak future the stock market seems to be predicting. Articles in the last few days have noted ruefully that U.S. stocks had their best month in decades even as the pandemic took deeper hold. But April’s rally wasn’t evenhanded: it centered on the digital behemoths.

My friend and I both fear, though he expresses it with a finality I don’t accept, that America’s response to the pandemic will permanently disempower the individual—that the large and faceless will cement its dominance over the quirky and singular. Fortunately, the post-Robber Baron history of the early twentieth century suggests there might be a different outcome—a return or resurgence of the people suppressed. The drying cement of this quarantine will preserve an impression of our haves and have-nots. Who can order in, and who has to deliver? Who stays in the dense city, and who escapes to a country house? Who complains of having nothing to do, and who, after each day’s work, sleeps in donated rooms to keep the virus away from family back home? Why are trained hospital staff being laid off in the U.S. even as hospitals become busier? Why are some workers without health insurance and paid leave, and therefore unable to stay home when sick? Why do so many who lack financial buffers earn historically less than the CEOs of the corporations their humble labor makes possible?

by William Pierce, The Goethe-Institut | Read more:
Image: William Pierce
[ed. From the series Day Afterthoughts: Reflections on a post-corona-time. See also: Schrödingers Virus, by Bina Shah.]

As America Reopens, Here’s How to Assess the Risk of Shopping and Dining Out

In most parts of the United States, you can now grab a drink with your friends at a bar, eat inside a restaurant, get your hair washed and cut in a salon, and try on clothes in a store.

Manicures and pedicures are generally allowed, as is working out in a gym and even getting a massage to soothe your stressed-out muscles.

It sounds like a dream come true after all those months cooped up at home — but at the same time, for many of us, something feels off.

Sure, we want the economy to reopen and do the things that used to bring us joy. But then we remember that the virus hasn't actually disappeared. In fact, in some parts of the country like California, Texas, Arizona and Florida, the number of people infected is still rising each day.

We also remember that in just five months, this virus has killed more than 116,000 Americans and infected more than 2.1 million.

And so we wonder: Is it really safe to be out and about? If I care about my own health and the health of my family and neighbors, should I be resisting the urge to patronize businesses in person even if my local government says I can?

The Los Angeles Times spoke with epidemiologists and physicians about what has changed since stay-at-home orders were first put in place, what remains the same, and what we can do to be responsible citizens as we move into the summer months.

And just so you know, this article is not going to address the risks associated with attending protests. Why? Because the risks you're willing to take to get your hair cut or eat at your favorite restaurant may not be the same as those you might take to fight systemic racism. That's a whole other story.

The first thing to remember is that the coronavirus is no less deadly or contagious now than it was three months ago, when the country all but shut down.

"It's still the same virus that has caused an average of 1,000 U.S. deaths a day and 4,000 around the world," said Dr. Tom Inglesby, director of the Center for Health Security at Johns Hopkins University. "I'm worried that people have accepted where we are as the new normal. This is not normal."

And it's not like we are nearing the end of the pandemic either, said Carolyn Cannuscio, director of research at the Center for Public Health Initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania. Far from it.

Studies suggest just 5% of the U.S. population has been infected with the virus thus far. To get herd immunity, 60% to 70% of the population will need to be infected.

"If you think about how many people have died in just the first few months of this crisis, we still have a lot of suffering ahead of us," Cannuscio said. "We should try to do all we can to contribute to slowing the pandemic to give us more time to establish effective treatments."

Even as coronavirus infections and fatalities continue to grow, some experts say it is safer to venture out into the world today than it was when most stay-at-home orders first went into effect.

"I would say it's a lot safer," said Gerardo Chowell, a professor of mathematical epidemiology at Georgia State University. "We have a lot more information about the enemy."

Back in March and April, we still did not know that the virus spread primarily through the droplets expressed when we cough, sneeze, shout or sing without wearing masks. We also didn't know about the potential for asymptomatic transmission, or the potential for presymptomatic transmission, he said.

"Now, assuming that the population at large has this information, we have the power to protect ourselves," he said.

Specifically, several studies have shown that wearing facemasks can drastically reduce the spread of the virus.

"Back in April, it was not yet clear how useful this tool was," he said. "Since then, the science has been overwhelming."

So, even if you live in a state where the virus is circulating more now than it was in March, we now know that your chances of becoming infected are relatively low if you are careful about wearing a mask, social distancing and washing your hands.

One of the reasons we all stayed at home for three months was to slow the outbreak's spread and give hospitals time to prepare for a surge in COVID-19 patients as the numbers of infections inevitably ticked up.

"We didn't eliminate the virus, but we pumped the brakes on it," said Dr. Armand Dorian, chief medical officer for Verdugo Hills Hospital of the University of Southern California in Glendale.

In the past few months, most hospitals have put that grace period to good use, Dorian said. Among other things, they've stocked up on personal protective equipment for medical professionals and obtained more ventilators.

Now, doctors know to consider therapeutics like dexamethasone, remdesivir, anti-inflammatories and rheumatoid arthritis medication. They've learned to have patients lie prone on their bellies and to not intubate them right away.

"Three years from now we'll look back at this treatment and say it was so primitive, but it is massive leaps from where we were a few months ago," Dorian said.

"I don't think we've had enough advances in treatment to make me feel this is an un-concerning infection," she said. "I still think this is a disease we want to prevent."

Where does this all leave us? Is it OK to go out to eat? Get your hair cut? Go shopping for something besides groceries?

All the experts say that to make the most responsible decision, you'll have to consider many factors.

by Deborah Netburn, Los Angeles Times | Read more: (paywalled)
Image:AP Photo/Mark Lennihan
[ed. See also: How Exactly Do You Catch Covid-19? There Is a Growing Consensus (WSJ).]

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[ed. Repost. See also: Tiny (D. Jr.)]

Study Examines The Lasting Effects Of Having — Or Being Denied — An Abortion

In The Turnaway Study, Diana Greene Foster shares research conducted over 10 years with about 1,000 women who had or were denied abortions, tracking impacts on mental, physical and economic health. (...)

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. When Mike Pence was running for vice president, he said, if we appoint strict constructionists to the Supreme Court, as Donald Trump intends to do, I believe we will see Roe v. Wade consigned to the ash heap of history where it belongs. Since then, Trump has appointed two conservative justices. The arguments used against abortion often refer to the medical risks of the procedure and the guilt and loss of self-esteem suffered by women who have abortions.

In order to explore what the impact of abortion is on women's health and women's lives, my guest, Diana Greene Foster, became the principal investigator of a 10-year study comparing women who had abortions at the end of the deadline allowed by the clinic and those who just missed the deadline and were turned away. The study focuses on the emotional health and socioeconomic outcomes for women who received a wanted abortion and those who were denied one.

Her goal is for judges and policymakers to understand what banning abortion would mean for women and children. The results of the study are published in Foster's new book "The Turnaway Study: Ten Years, A Thousand Women, And The Consequences Of Having - Or Being Denied - An Abortion." Turnaway refers to the women who were turned away from having an abortion. Foster is a professor at the University of California, San Francisco in the department of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences.

Diana Greene Foster, welcome to FRESH AIR. Before we get to the results of the study, what impact do you think the pandemic is having on access to abortion?

DIANA GREENE FOSTER: Thank you for having me. The pandemic has definitely made abortion a lot harder for women to access in certain states. There were a handful of states that tried to declare that abortion wasn't an essential service. And that shut down clinics. And then a judge would put a hold on that. And they would open. But then they would have too many people waiting. And they couldn't see everyone. It was, I think, particularly a nightmare in Texas, with a lot of people unable to be seen and people traveling hundreds of miles at a time when they should've been able to shelter in place.

GROSS: So why did you want to do this study comparing women who had abortions at the end of the deadline allowed by the clinic and women who just missed the deadline and were turned away?

FOSTER: The idea that abortion hurts women has been put forth by people who are opposed to abortion. And it really has resonated. So state governments have imposed restrictions in response to the idea that abortion hurts women, so telling clinics that they have to counsel women on the harms of abortion. And that idea made it all the way up to the Supreme Court so that Justice Kennedy, in 2007, used the idea that abortion hurts women as an excuse - or as a reason - for banning one procedure.

And what he said in 2007 was that while we find no reliable data to measure the phenomenon, it seems unexceptionable to conclude that some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained. Severe depression and loss of esteem can follow. And critics of this statement have said this is patronizing that women would need to be protected from their own decisions.

But the one thing I like about this quote is that he admits that there aren't reliable data. And so my goal with the Turnaway Study was to create reliable data, so have a scientific study where the two groups of women are similar. But their outcomes are different because one group received an abortion and one was denied.

by Terry Gross, NPR |  Read more:
Image: The Turnaway Study

Jon Stewart Is Back to Weigh In

For all the value Jon Stewart delivered as a political satirist and voice of reason during his 16-year-run as the host of ‘‘The Daily Show,’’ it’s quite plausible to suggest that the political and media Bizarro World in which we live — where skepticism is the default, news is often indistinguishable from entertainment and entertainers have usurped public authority from the country’s political leaders — is one that he and his show helped to usher in. ‘‘Look, we certainly were part of that ecosystem, but I don’t think that news became entertainment because they thought our show was a success,’’ Stewart says. ‘‘Twenty-four-hour news networks are built for one thing, and that’s 9/11. There are very few events that would justify being covered 24 hours a day, seven days a week. So in the absence of urgency, they have to create it. You create urgency through conflict.’’ That pervasive sense of political and social conflict has only grown since Stewart left the air in 2015. It has also made Stewart’s post-‘‘Daily Show’’ silence — apart from a few guest spots on his old friend and colleague Stephen Colbert’s show, he has been mostly out of the spotlight — more intriguing. What has he been thinking about this country while he has been gone? Now he has returned with some answers.

Stewart, who is 57, has written and directed ‘‘Irresistible,’’ a political satire about a small Wisconsin town that becomes engulfed in a political spectacle when a Democratic strategist and his Republican counterpart become fixated on the larger symbolic value and bellwether potential of the local mayoral race. The film, which will make its theatrical and video-on-demand premiere on June 26, is evidence that being away from the grind of a daily TV show has expanded rather than shrunk Stewart’s satirical powers. (...)

How strange is it, after having been basically out of the public eye for five years, to be coming back with something now? ‘‘The world is on fire, here’s my new movie’’ seems like an awkward spot to be in. It’s like showing up to a plane crash with a chocolate bar. There’s tragedy everywhere, and you’re like, ‘‘Uh, does anybody want chocolate?’’ It feels ridiculous. But what doesn’t feel ridiculous is to continue to fight for nuance and precision and solutions.

You know, I’ve been trying to think of some precise, encapsulating question to ask you about what we’ve been witnessing over the last few weeks, and everything I was coming up with felt forced or phony. Maybe it’s better, because you’ve been eloquent during times of crisis in the past, just to ask what you’ve been thinking about and seeing in the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing? I’d like to say I’m surprised by what happened to him, but I’m not. This is a cycle, and I feel that in some ways, the issue is that we’re addressing the wrong problem. We continue to make this about the police — the how of it. How can they police? Is it about sensitivity and de-escalation training and community policing? All that can make for a less-egregious relationship between the police and people of color. But the how isn’t as important as the why, which we never address. The police are a reflection of a society. They’re not a rogue alien organization that came down to torment the black community. They’re enforcing segregation. Segregation is legally over, but it never ended. The police are, in some respects, a border patrol, and they patrol the border between the two Americas. We have that so that the rest of us don’t have to deal with it. Then that situation erupts, and we express our shock and indignation. But if we don’t address the anguish of a people, the pain of being a people who built this country through forced labor — people say, ‘‘I’m tired of everything being about race.’’ Well, imagine how [expletive] exhausting it is to live that. (...)

Does the scale and intensity of the protests suggest some positive strides toward accountability? Maybe. Look, every advancement toward equality has come with the spilling of blood. Then, when that’s over, a defensiveness from the group that had been doing the oppressing. There’s always this begrudging sense that black people are being granted something, when it’s white people’s lack of being able to live up to the defining words of the birth of the country that is the problem. There’s a lack of recognition of the difference in our system. Chris Rock used to do a great bit: ‘‘No white person wants to change places with a black person. They don’t even want to exchange places with me, and I’m rich.’’ It’s true. There’s not a white person out there who would want to be treated like even a successful black person in this country. And if we don’t address the why of that treatment, the how is just window dressing. You know, we’re in a bizarre time of quarantine. White people lasted six weeks and then stormed a state building with rifles, shouting: ‘‘Give me liberty! This is causing economic distress! I’m not going to wear a mask, because that’s tyranny!’’ That’s six weeks versus 400 years of quarantining a race of people. The policing is an issue, but it’s the least of it. We use the police as surrogates to quarantine these racial and economic inequalities so that we don’t have to deal with them. (...)

We used to have news and we had entertainment. Now those categories are totally intertwined — to the extent that it’s not far-fetched to say that we just have varieties of entertainment. And similarly, people are looking at entertainers, rather than politicians, as political authorities. I don’t think it’s too far off base to suggest that, unintentionally or not, ‘‘The Daily Show’’ played a part in that transformation. What do you think about those changes and what they’ve wrought? I think you have to look at what incentivized the system. The news didn’t become ‘‘The Daily Show,’’ because at its core, ‘‘The Daily Show’’ was a critique of the news and a critique of those systems. If they’d taken in what we were saying, they wouldn’t be doing what they’re doing now: creating urgency through conflict. Conflict has become the catalyst for the economic model. The entire system functions that way now. We are two sides — in a country of 350 million people.

That reminds me of the old George Carlin joke about how in America you have 23 kinds of bagels to choose from but only two political parties. Politically in this country, you have Coke or Pepsi. Every now and again, Dr Pepper comes along and everybody is like, ‘‘You ruined this for everyone else.’’ Dr Pepper is Ralph Nader, let’s say. But getting back to your question — it plays into that scenario of looking for the scapegoat. ‘‘Well, it’s ‘The Daily Show.’ They popularized news-as-entertainment.’’ It’s the New York Times trend-piece thing of somebody getting hold of an idea and amplifying it even though it really has no breadth or depth to it.

What do you think of the news media’s handle on this political moment more generally? I don’t think it has ever had a good handle on a political moment. It’s not designed for that. It’s designed for engagement. It’s like YouTube and Facebook: an information-laundering perpetual-radicalization machine. It’s like porn. I don’t mean that to be flip. When you were pubescent, the mere hint of a bra strap could send you into ecstasy. I’m 57 now. If it’s not two nuns and a mule, I can’t even watch it. Do you understand my point? The algorithm is not designed for thoughtful engagement and clarity. It’s designed to make you look at it longer.

Have there been any positive changes, though? Let me give you an example of what might be one: When you were doing ‘‘The Daily Show,’’ part of what made you unique was your last-sane-man-in-Crazytown quality. You would actually say that someone in power was telling a lie when the nightly newscasters wouldn’t. Now they will say that. Is that a step in the right direction? The media’s job is to deconstruct the manipulation, not to just call it a lie. It’s about informing on how something works so that you understand the lie’s purpose. What are the structural issues underneath the lie? The media shouldn’t take the political system personally, or allow its own narcissism to rise to the narcissism of the politicians, or become offended that the politicians are lying — their job is to manipulate.

Are the controversial things that President Trump says structurally motivated? Do you believe he’s thinking on that level? I think he understands very well — and the right understands very well — that undermining the credibility of the institutions that people look to for help defining and making sense of reality is the key to bending reality to your will. It’s a wonderful rhetorical trick. He had a great one on Memorial Day Weekend: ‘‘We’re getting great reviews on our pandemic response. But of course, not getting credit for it.’’ The twisted logic of that: If you’re getting great reviews, I’m pretty sure that’s considered credit. It’s like saying, ‘‘I’m being praised, but of course I won’t be praised for it.’’ Language is utterly meaningless. Everything is placed into its category in the tribal war and who its real victims are: Donald Trump and his minions. Poor little billionaire president who can’t catch a break. It’s incredible. Are we all just extras in this guy’s movie? But I do feel as if his approach has worked for him his whole life.

by David Marchese, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Bobby Doherty

Coronavirus Shows Good Restaurants Can't Be Replaced

A Culinary Tragedy (Bloomberg)

Image: Howard Chua-Eoan

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Uniqlo Rolls Out Reusable Mask Line as Retailers Adapt to Virus

Asia’s largest retailer is betting that it has the right product at the right time: a Uniqlo face mask.

Fast Retailing Co., operator of the clothing stores, will begin selling reusable face masks in Japan this week. The masks, which will sold in sets of three and retail for 990 yen ($9), aim for both performance and comfort, the company said in a statement Monday.

Uniqlo joins a constellation of businesses seeking to offer new products and services as the coronavirus pandemic upends lifestyles around the globe, changing how people work, dress and eat. Companies are racing to adapt to that change; Fast Retailing said the decision to make and sell masks was due to customer demand.

Plans for sales of the Uniqlo masks outside of its home base of Japan will be announced as they are set, Fast Retailing said. With more than 2,000 stores globally and over $20 billion in annual sales, it would be one of the largest retailers to sell masks. Other large apparel makers such as Gap Inc., Madewell Inc. and Adidas AG have also recently introduced face masks.

Fast Retailing, which plans to produce 500,000 mask packs a week, will use its breathable AIRism fabric for the masks, which it developed with Japanese textile company Toray Industries Inc. The masks have a bacterial filtration efficiency of 99% which is retained even after 20 washes, according to the statement. AIRism is often used to market breathable summer clothing, which could boost its appeal ahead of the hot and humid summer in Japan, where authorities have begun issuing warnings of the increased danger of heat stroke when wearing a mask.

by Lisa Du and Grace Huang, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Fast Retailing Co

Elon Musk: The Man, The Myth, The Meme

Bloomberg via YouTube