Corona-zona

  Last evening's PBS Newshour aired a story about why there are so many unfilled job openings, leaving unemployment at 50+ year lows. It focused on working-age people dropping out of the workforce.  As for why they are doing so, it gave a list that included some of the usual suspects. First, there is a hollowing-out of the labor market.  Mid-tier jobs—ones that had attractive salaries and benefits, including retirement—continue to be replaced by automation. This means there are a lot of low-tier jobs that are not attractive to workers and high-tier jobs they are not qualified for. Another factor cited was the large number of people with felony convictions, a result of our incarceration-happy culture. Yet another was government benefits, particularly disability payments. But the not-usual suspect was the COVID-19 pandemic. For one thing, the pandemic outright killed 217,978 people of working age , and most of those people occupied jobs.  But that's not all. Julia Pol...

  I used to do these roundup posts more frequently, when pandemic news was coming in so fast and furious that even my (then) daily posts couldn't keep up. As it happens, the last couple of weeks has produced several tidbits that are too limited for their own post, but still worthy of sharing.  One Cable News Outlet (Guess Which One) Causes Vaccine Hesitancy A recent study  published in in Nature looked at how watching a certain cable news outlet causes increased vaccine hesitancy. The researchers used exogenous (i.e. not study related) geographical variation in the channel lineup to tease out the causal effects. They controlled for differences in partisanship, local health policies, local COVID-19 infections/death rates, and consumption of other major television networks.  The network in question is—wait for it—Fox News. I for one am shocked. SHOCKED!  Every one additional hour watching Fox News per week for the average household reduced the number of vaccinati...

  During the pandemic, people who track such things noted an abrupt increase in early onset of puberty—a.k.a. idiopathic central precocious puberty —in girls. One study concluded that "girls diagnosed with idiopathic CPP during the one-year study period during the pandemic was more than double that of any of the previous three-years." That's quite a jump in a rare condition . Naturally, scientists wondered whether the SARS-CoV-2 virus could be at fault. Now a study just presented at a pediatric endocrinology conference has offered an explanation that may not have anything to do with the virus at all. They suggest the mechanism may be increased exposure to blue light from mobile devices. The researchers reckon that during the pandemic, kids had increased exposure to such light by virtue of being on their phones more. To test this idea, the researchers exposed young rats to double the amount of blue-shifted light they would normally get. Sure enough, the treated rats expe...