Corona-zona

Hi all. Stepping out of retirement for a moment to say that the day has finally arrived. After four years of successfully avoiding COVID-19 infection I had a positive test yesterday. Symptoms are very mild—I've had worse colds. The provider at urgent care said almost all the cases they are seeing are the same. Mild symptoms may also be due to the fact that I had the original vaccine then the two boosters. All this time I thought I might be a NOVID —one of those people who never get the bug. But no, it must have been my assiduous mask wearing and avoidance of high-risk situations when things were bad. So here's double middle fingers to all the kooks who think masks don't work (I've not been wearing masks for months now). I don't know what variant I have but it's likely JN.1. It is said to be extraordinarily contagious and accounts for 60% of cases worldwide . It also tends to produce mild infections like the one I have.  This article claims that right now every...

  A team of 53 of the of the world’s best epidemiologists, pharmacologists, virologists, immunologists, and policy experts has released a report entitled "Getting to and Sustaining the Next Normal: A Roadmap for Living with COVID." The report is 129 pages comprising a comprehensive set of topics about how to get back to normal and prepare for next pandemic. If we follow standard operating procedure, then our political system will forget all about the COVID-19 pandemic as soon as possible once the case rates go down to endemic/background levels. Then something as bad as or worse than COVID-19 will come along, we will find ourselves in a  Don't Look Up situation, and we will endure another shitshow like the one we've just been through. The report offers recommendations in twelve categories for avoiding this. Here is a quick summary of the bottom-line recommendations: Shift our public health focus from just COVID-19 to respiratory viral illnesses to include influenza a...

  Almost a year ago I blogged about the governors failing a marshmallow test  by rushing to end pandemic restrictions.  It was a reference to a famous study  done Stanford about self-control in kids. Basically it looked at kids' ability to forego a small immediate reward for a double reward after a delay. For context, at that time we were coming off a third wave of the virus (graph via Google/NYT): For the most part it was the usual-suspect COVIDiot governors in places like Texas, Mississippi, and Arizona who took this as a green light to end all pandemic restrictions. But there were other liberal states like Massachusetts who did the same (maybe other places too). I compared this to failing the marshmallow test because public health officials were saying it was too soon . As you probably remember and can see from the graph, they were right. Later that year we encountered a new Delta wave, followed by an Omicron wave. Now history is repeating itself. Republicans are ...

Have you gotten used to working in your sweatpants? Grabbing a quick snack from your fridge before the Zoom meeting? Taking a quick break from that spreadsheet to play with the dog? Not driving in a traffic jam twice a day? Are you thinking you'd rather not give all that up?   If so, you're not alone. The reasons people don't want to go back to the office range from a loss of freedom and convenience to what seems like a form of agoraphobia .  According to an article in Newsweek, the leadership consulting firm Best Practices Institute (BPI) has done a study finding that 83 percent of CEOs want employees to return in person, while only 10 percent of employees want to do so.  The latter figure sounds low to me.  90% don't want to go back? I can't find this study anywhere, including the BPI website .  A  blog post , apparently by them, doesn't mention these numbers either. Pew pegs the number who want to keep working from home at 54% which sounds mo...