The last WFH post was a little snarky, for which I do not apologize, but it's a real question: will a significant portion of the workforce work from home in the new world? And if so, what will be the consequences, intended and unintended?
We all know that Twitter offered a permanent WFH option to all its employees, as did Square at about the same time; Google just announced that employees would have the choice of working remotely through July of 2021, and Facebook predicts that half of their employees will be remote in five years. Many more companies have operated remotely, and it is certain that more will join them as the pandemic - at least in the US - rages on, with no sign of abating.
In April, according to this study, a little more than one in three American workers had changed from office work to remote work because of the pandemic. Add to that the approximately 15% who already worked from home before the pandemic, and the result is: in April, about half the American workforce - a little over 80 million people - was virtual.
Is this a good thing? There are endless data and lots of opinions, and the opinions are all over the place. Really not more than speculation at this point. Even articles called "Work From Home is Here to Stay" don't even make the effort to prove that this is the case - they all go on and on, breezily, about the pros and cons, using almost entirely anecdotal evidence, and the occasional narrowly-focused study.
But most of the anecdotal evidence - and the results of actual research - suggests that in many, perhaps most - but not all - cases, productivity increased. Apparently, creative work is best done in the office; less creative work - call centers, for instance - are more productive at home. But with more virtual linking systems like Microsoft Meeting, the creative power of working together in a room is, apparently, more and more being replicated in virtual rooms supplied with everything a real room can offer.
When I went to my niece's graduation from UNH ("It's a great day to be a Wildcat!") just over a year ago, she told me she'd be going to work in Boston for a company called Zoom, which I had never heard of and assumed I never would hear of again. Last night I had a rehearsal for a virtual Oscar Wilde play on Zoom, and likewise a meeting of an advisory board I'm on this afternoon. We have a "Zoom corner," complete with dedicated laptop, in the dining room. Along with Google Meet and a gazillion other meeting/conferencing/productivity apps which have no doubt sprung up since February, it is hard to imagine this all going away by next summer, and everything being pre-COVID normal again.
If there is a vague picture emerging, which would be optimistic to say the least, we might put a few dollars on the proposition that a fair number of American workers who were working in offices in January will be working at home for good. How many? Anybody's guess, but after reading a whole lot of articles so you didn't have to, at this point I'd say the guess is around 20% of those at home now, with a huge standard deviation.
That's in the neighborhood of 16 million people. 16 million fewer commutes. 16 million fewer sandwiches at the corner deli. Some proportion of 16 million people not using public transport. Some portion of 16 million people who are less vulnerable to workplace harassment and abuse. 16 million people now depending on reliable digital technology to earn a living. 16 million people maybe cooking meals more than they used to. Some (probably large) proportion of 16 million people more comfortable in their working environment. 16 million people who are adjusting to being home, and all that means, for good or bad. 16 million people with an hour or two a day more than they had before, when they were commuting, that they can use for... what?
This will change the face of America, change the character of its people. Just a little bit, but probably much of it will be noticeable. I think it will be a good thing. People will be empowered to make choices, be flexible, gain a little control over the dials and levers that make work work. Fewer gasoline engines converting gasoline into poison. And, if we can believe those who claim to be paying attention now, more productivity.
We can say, probably, that the new world will be different. It's a big, big picture, and details will emerge slowly, over a long time.
Lots to watch for. Let's get up in the crow's nest and look around for a while.
NOTE: All this assumes that school will not remain virtual; that in the new world, after the vaccine, it's OK to have a bunch of active kids together in a classroom with a couple adults. WFH will be very, very different if even a small proportion of students go virtual for good.
Wednesday, July 29, 2020
Saturday, July 25, 2020
Finding New Gods
Wanna start a fight?
Get a whole bunch of relatively well-read, politically and culturally conscious folks in a room and say two words:
"Andrew Sullivan."
Step back and pop the popcorn.
I like reading Andrew Sullivan. He's smart and passionate, but he does paint with too broad a brush sometimes, and ends up over-generalizing, which sometimes looks like exaggeration. And he's a gay conservative with progressive tendencies, which makes just about everyone crazy.
But if you read a lot, you always need to consider your source, and adjust. Including here, at "The New World." No one's perfect.
Sully's swan song at "New York" magazine is a long essay about how plagues re-make the societies that survive them. In the sixth century, the plague was the final blow that doomed the Roman Empire and ushered in nearly a thousand years of regrowth and rebuilding. But the plague that devastated the fourteenth century in Europe ushered in the Renaissance, probably a couple hundred years early, and re-made the landscape of work, pay, and innovation. The plague outbreak in London in 1665, which killed one in five Londoners, and the Great Fire a year later, led to city-wide regulations that in turn led to a modern city that was prepared for both fires and plagues.
Toward the end, Sullivan surveys the impact that the current pandemic is having, and predicts some that have not yet appeared. He paints a somewhat extreme picture of the new world, where everyone wears masks always (because this is only the first of the post-globalized pandemics), populations are decentralized, climate change is everyone's top priority, and travel is substantially curtailed. You may not buy it all, but it's important that you read and digest it, and come to your own conclusions. It's all worth thinking about.
One of the common factors in massive-impact plagues is, according to Sullivan, a change in gods. When we don't understand how things work, we invent gods who do understand, and manipulate, the world around us. When a plague destroys everything, and our traditional gods aren't coming to our aid, we look elsewhere. In sixth century Rome, "Christianity showed itself able to assuage the existential angst of constant death in a way the old religions couldn't." In the fourteenth century, mystical sects appeared and challenged the institutional Church's response, probably hastening the Reformation. And the Native Americans living through generations of smallpox, finding their gods unresponsive, turned away, to new "healing ceremonies and rituals," and later to despair and suicide.*
Is this happening today? Have our gods failed us, and are we willing to try new ones? The pandemic is not bringing death and misery to most of us; no bloody pustules or "Bring out your dead!" (which was a real thing). However, we are experiencing a destruction of our economy and an expansion of infection and death due to catastrophic incompetence and greed, and our gods are those in control of these processes. Will we turn away from them? Will we find new gods, who will see fit to use their power to save us? And will the new gods actually do that - will we be saved?
And who exactly will those new gods be?
Stay tuned.
* - There's a robust discussion in the Comments section about this, for those who have the stomach for it.
Get a whole bunch of relatively well-read, politically and culturally conscious folks in a room and say two words:
"Andrew Sullivan."
Step back and pop the popcorn.
I like reading Andrew Sullivan. He's smart and passionate, but he does paint with too broad a brush sometimes, and ends up over-generalizing, which sometimes looks like exaggeration. And he's a gay conservative with progressive tendencies, which makes just about everyone crazy.
But if you read a lot, you always need to consider your source, and adjust. Including here, at "The New World." No one's perfect.
Sully's swan song at "New York" magazine is a long essay about how plagues re-make the societies that survive them. In the sixth century, the plague was the final blow that doomed the Roman Empire and ushered in nearly a thousand years of regrowth and rebuilding. But the plague that devastated the fourteenth century in Europe ushered in the Renaissance, probably a couple hundred years early, and re-made the landscape of work, pay, and innovation. The plague outbreak in London in 1665, which killed one in five Londoners, and the Great Fire a year later, led to city-wide regulations that in turn led to a modern city that was prepared for both fires and plagues.
Toward the end, Sullivan surveys the impact that the current pandemic is having, and predicts some that have not yet appeared. He paints a somewhat extreme picture of the new world, where everyone wears masks always (because this is only the first of the post-globalized pandemics), populations are decentralized, climate change is everyone's top priority, and travel is substantially curtailed. You may not buy it all, but it's important that you read and digest it, and come to your own conclusions. It's all worth thinking about.
One of the common factors in massive-impact plagues is, according to Sullivan, a change in gods. When we don't understand how things work, we invent gods who do understand, and manipulate, the world around us. When a plague destroys everything, and our traditional gods aren't coming to our aid, we look elsewhere. In sixth century Rome, "Christianity showed itself able to assuage the existential angst of constant death in a way the old religions couldn't." In the fourteenth century, mystical sects appeared and challenged the institutional Church's response, probably hastening the Reformation. And the Native Americans living through generations of smallpox, finding their gods unresponsive, turned away, to new "healing ceremonies and rituals," and later to despair and suicide.*
Is this happening today? Have our gods failed us, and are we willing to try new ones? The pandemic is not bringing death and misery to most of us; no bloody pustules or "Bring out your dead!" (which was a real thing). However, we are experiencing a destruction of our economy and an expansion of infection and death due to catastrophic incompetence and greed, and our gods are those in control of these processes. Will we turn away from them? Will we find new gods, who will see fit to use their power to save us? And will the new gods actually do that - will we be saved?
And who exactly will those new gods be?
Stay tuned.
* - There's a robust discussion in the Comments section about this, for those who have the stomach for it.
Friday, July 24, 2020
The WSJ Thinks You Should Be in the Office
The Wall Street Journal doesn't think that work-from-home is here to stay.
I don't know. The WSJ is aimed at a very precise sliver of the American reading public. They're not known for perceptive dives into the diverse soup that is the life of working Americans.
It would be interesting to know what companies they surveyed for this article. I'll bet they're the companies that their readers work at. I couldn't tell you, because the WSJ wouldn't let me read the article without paying for it. Not even if I promised to look at the ads.
If you also have not paid the WSJ enough money, here's a summary and reaction from Kevin Drum, who I've been reading for more than fifteen years. He also thinks WFH is dead after the virus, and I disagree with him*. His Comments section is always fun.
- * Geez, eliminating the commute is reward enough! Kevin lives in Orange County, CA, and should know better.
I don't know. The WSJ is aimed at a very precise sliver of the American reading public. They're not known for perceptive dives into the diverse soup that is the life of working Americans.
It would be interesting to know what companies they surveyed for this article. I'll bet they're the companies that their readers work at. I couldn't tell you, because the WSJ wouldn't let me read the article without paying for it. Not even if I promised to look at the ads.
If you also have not paid the WSJ enough money, here's a summary and reaction from Kevin Drum, who I've been reading for more than fifteen years. He also thinks WFH is dead after the virus, and I disagree with him*. His Comments section is always fun.
- * Geez, eliminating the commute is reward enough! Kevin lives in Orange County, CA, and should know better.
A to B and (Almost) Back Again
Remember ratchets?
A lot of the speculating about the new world involves systems and processes which had to make fundamental changes when the virus arrived, and whether they will return to normal once they can. Having moved from A to B, will they move all the way back to A, or will there be a good reason to retain some of the movement toward B? This would require that being at B, or being somewhere between A and B, works better than A. A lot of what's new in the new world will be the result of this discovery.
Take rice farming, for instance.
But it turns out that planting rice with seeding machines takes much less time, uses less water, and is cheaper than the traditional methods. Even so, rice farmers are waiting until October to see if yields improve. I find it interesting that, after improving time, water use and cost, they still won't accept the new technology unless it also increases yields.
There will probably be more planting machines in the rice fields next spring than there would have been had the virus not appeared. And a lot more unemployment, as well, although, cruel as it may sound, we would have to say "buggy whips," since automation was coming eventually.
So - probably not entirely back to pre-COVID systems and processes in the rice business. How about business travel, which has fallen off a cliff in the last few months? Surely corporations will have discovered that Zoom meetings, in many instances, have worked fine, and that at least some expensive business travel was unnecessary. My father, an executive in a public utility, refused a promotion because it would require him to travel a lot and be away from his family. Lots of reasons to limit business travel. Once again, from A to B, but not entirely back to A when it's all over.
Two examples of how the pandemic moved industry in a more efficient direction. This won't happen all the time - there are plenty of instances where A was always the better place - but when it does, we've got to understand that efficiency is rarely achieved without cost. In India, countless migrant workers will be out of work. The travel industry will take a big hit when business travel - it's most profitable sector - shrinks.
Looks like we need to be thinking and working on building a new, healthy economy based on different rules and realities. Imagine that.
A lot of the speculating about the new world involves systems and processes which had to make fundamental changes when the virus arrived, and whether they will return to normal once they can. Having moved from A to B, will they move all the way back to A, or will there be a good reason to retain some of the movement toward B? This would require that being at B, or being somewhere between A and B, works better than A. A lot of what's new in the new world will be the result of this discovery.
Take rice farming, for instance.
None of the world's major rice exporting nations - India, Vietnam and Thailand - makes significant use of seeding machines.
They have come into play in a big way in India this year because hundreds of thousands of migrant labourers... did not arrive in the northern grain belt for the 2020 planting season due to the coronavirus lockdown.
That pushed up the price of local workers and made it more economical for farmers to lease rice planting machines rather than pay for hired help.Rice farmers "...are still wary of the technology and overturning the time-honoured use of manual labor." They approached the idea of automation with "trepidation," as one farmer described it.
But it turns out that planting rice with seeding machines takes much less time, uses less water, and is cheaper than the traditional methods. Even so, rice farmers are waiting until October to see if yields improve. I find it interesting that, after improving time, water use and cost, they still won't accept the new technology unless it also increases yields.
There will probably be more planting machines in the rice fields next spring than there would have been had the virus not appeared. And a lot more unemployment, as well, although, cruel as it may sound, we would have to say "buggy whips," since automation was coming eventually.
So - probably not entirely back to pre-COVID systems and processes in the rice business. How about business travel, which has fallen off a cliff in the last few months? Surely corporations will have discovered that Zoom meetings, in many instances, have worked fine, and that at least some expensive business travel was unnecessary. My father, an executive in a public utility, refused a promotion because it would require him to travel a lot and be away from his family. Lots of reasons to limit business travel. Once again, from A to B, but not entirely back to A when it's all over.
Two examples of how the pandemic moved industry in a more efficient direction. This won't happen all the time - there are plenty of instances where A was always the better place - but when it does, we've got to understand that efficiency is rarely achieved without cost. In India, countless migrant workers will be out of work. The travel industry will take a big hit when business travel - it's most profitable sector - shrinks.
Looks like we need to be thinking and working on building a new, healthy economy based on different rules and realities. Imagine that.
Three Months
Three months.
Three months ago exactly, I said to myself, "Hey! Let's write a blog!" It looked like we'd be hunkered down for a few weeks, and it was something to do.
So I started by comparing our journey to the new world with Columbus's (actually, the Pinta's third mate's) voyage to his New World.
It took Columbus thirty six days to sail into history. A little over a month. Did you realize that? How short it was? A month.
Here we are, three months later, and no land in sight. Not even a land bird, lost at sea.
Three months.
Three months ago exactly, I said to myself, "Hey! Let's write a blog!" It looked like we'd be hunkered down for a few weeks, and it was something to do.
So I started by comparing our journey to the new world with Columbus's (actually, the Pinta's third mate's) voyage to his New World.
It took Columbus thirty six days to sail into history. A little over a month. Did you realize that? How short it was? A month.
Here we are, three months later, and no land in sight. Not even a land bird, lost at sea.
Three months.
Wednesday, July 22, 2020
Ain't It the Truth
"The apocalypse movies never mentioned all the sitting around."
The New Yorker, 7/22/2020
15 Minute Cities
Back in the old days, when we could still shake hands, back when we still had paper copies of "National Geographic" at the house, I saw a picture that got me excited. It was a picture of a small city, and it was, I thought, the future.
I've always been interested in thinking and reading about cities - how we design urban spaces so that those of us who live there can live, work, eat, socialize, exercise, raise families, and prosper. How do make a city that is healthy, efficient, egalitarian, active, and fiscally responsible. My interest was motivated specifically and particularly by the long term challenges of climate change and income inequality.
The picture (remember the picture?) was an aerial view of a circular city. A highway bisected the circle, disappearing in both directions. Streets were plotted in concentric circles around the center, and spokewise, as well, creating a sort of arced grid.
According to the caption, as I remember it, the center of the city was shopping, parks and schools. The next wide ring was residential, and further out were light industry and warehousing. Beyond that were farms, growing or raising a wide variety of crops and livestock appropriate to the local needs and climate. Light rail connected cities; each city was designed to be easily walkable and bikable.
I'm sure I've got some of the details wrong; it was a long time ago. But the idea of a well-organized, thought-out-before-building space for a lot of people to live well in was terrifically attractive to me then, and still is.
The C-40 Cities is an international coalition of cities that are "taking bold climate action, leading the way toward a healthier and more sustainable future." Now, we've all heard language like that before - for years and years - and we still don't seem to be making any real headway. But in response to the pandemic, C-40 Cities has issued its Mayors Agenda for a Green and Just Recovery.
As far as I can tell, C-40 Cities starts with the assumption that municipalities (as well as states and the Federal government) will need to provide stimulus programs to get the economy running again, and that the centerpiece of any stimulus would involve infrastructure upgrade.. Their Agenda suggests that every stimulus, at least in cities, should be a green stimulus, and that a major goal of a city's infrastructure upgrade should be to create 15-minute cities.
My fantasy city was a 15-minute city, but not exactly as C-40 Cities imagined it. They are re-designing existing cities. But in addition to the C-40 Cities Agenda, building thousands of smaller, purpose-built, nearly self-sufficient circle cities across the landscape is an approach to building back better that is worth talking about on the way to the new world.
I've always been interested in thinking and reading about cities - how we design urban spaces so that those of us who live there can live, work, eat, socialize, exercise, raise families, and prosper. How do make a city that is healthy, efficient, egalitarian, active, and fiscally responsible. My interest was motivated specifically and particularly by the long term challenges of climate change and income inequality.
The picture (remember the picture?) was an aerial view of a circular city. A highway bisected the circle, disappearing in both directions. Streets were plotted in concentric circles around the center, and spokewise, as well, creating a sort of arced grid.
According to the caption, as I remember it, the center of the city was shopping, parks and schools. The next wide ring was residential, and further out were light industry and warehousing. Beyond that were farms, growing or raising a wide variety of crops and livestock appropriate to the local needs and climate. Light rail connected cities; each city was designed to be easily walkable and bikable.
I'm sure I've got some of the details wrong; it was a long time ago. But the idea of a well-organized, thought-out-before-building space for a lot of people to live well in was terrifically attractive to me then, and still is.
The C-40 Cities is an international coalition of cities that are "taking bold climate action, leading the way toward a healthier and more sustainable future." Now, we've all heard language like that before - for years and years - and we still don't seem to be making any real headway. But in response to the pandemic, C-40 Cities has issued its Mayors Agenda for a Green and Just Recovery.
As far as I can tell, C-40 Cities starts with the assumption that municipalities (as well as states and the Federal government) will need to provide stimulus programs to get the economy running again, and that the centerpiece of any stimulus would involve infrastructure upgrade.. Their Agenda suggests that every stimulus, at least in cities, should be a green stimulus, and that a major goal of a city's infrastructure upgrade should be to create 15-minute cities.
In a '15-minute city,' all citizens are able to meet most or all of their needs within a short walk or bike ride from home.Apparently Paris is already doing this, and many other cities are close behind. Decentralization, and design that focuses on the daily life of actual human beings, is seen as the way to make the slow, difficult transit to the new world.
My fantasy city was a 15-minute city, but not exactly as C-40 Cities imagined it. They are re-designing existing cities. But in addition to the C-40 Cities Agenda, building thousands of smaller, purpose-built, nearly self-sufficient circle cities across the landscape is an approach to building back better that is worth talking about on the way to the new world.
Monday, July 20, 2020
Cancer in the New World
Dr. Anthony Fauci is, apparently, our newest rock star. He's so famous that he'll be throwing out the first pitch on Major League Baseball's opening day, whenever that will be.
He's also the bearer of grim news. Usually it's couched in very conditional language wrapped in carefully non-specific sentences, to avoid seeming like he's telling the truth. Not so this time:
In the new world, there will be a lot more cancer than in the old world.
He's also the bearer of grim news. Usually it's couched in very conditional language wrapped in carefully non-specific sentences, to avoid seeming like he's telling the truth. Not so this time:
“Covid-19-related reductions in cancer screening because of the total country lockdown that we and other nations have experienced … over the next decade could actually result in 10,000 or more excess deaths from breast and colorectal cancer because of the reductions in routine screening,” Fauci told an American Association for Cancer Research conference.Ten thousand cases of cancer that won't be caught in time because our hospitals are busy beating back the pandemic. That's 1,000 a year - nearly three times each day for the next ten years, someone will get a diagnosis they didn't have to get.
In the new world, there will be a lot more cancer than in the old world.
History is Negotiable
Part of my interest in the new world
has to do with how the pandemic will be treated by history.
Just because we are living this
historic event ourselves - watching, listening, reading, writing
things down, paying attention - does not mean that history will
record it accurately. And what does "accurately"
mean, anyway, after the facts and figures are taken care of?
Slavery happened, and Americans lived through it; the same with the
Civil War, and Jim Crow, and the civil rights movement. People
alive at the time saw, heard, read, wrote, paid attention - lived it
- and yet throughout the country, each of these is taught and written
about and talked about differently,
and each version has its adherents, who insist that theirs is the
true story.
Today I
came upon a
New Yorker article which described the way the story of the massacre of
8,000 Muslim citizens of Srebrenica, by Bosnian Serbs in 1995, in the
final days of the war in Bosnia, is being retold. Those of us who value facts
and evidence know that the bodies - thrown into mass graves - were all
found, and most of them have been identified, as a result of the
largest DNA-identification project in the world. The
perpetrators of the massacre have been convicted of war crimes by a
UN war crimes tribunal, after an agonizingly long and detailed trial
which is not for the faint-hearted.
And yet:
"Serb nationalists have increasingly denied what occurred... they flatly dismissed the findings of the... DNA identification project... The Bosnian Muslims listed as dead in the town's graveyard, where the remains of six thousand people are buried, were really still alive and living in Germany, a woman told me. Muslims had stolen the bodies of Serbs and falsely declared the massacre victims, a man said. Others called the reports of eight thousand dead a "farce," a "circus," and "make believe."
Despite global scientific data showing that Covid-19 is a deadly new strain of coronavirus, which has killed almost 600,000 people, if you publicly declare in Kenya that you have the virus then you are in danger of being castigated as a liar desperate for attention or a government stooge... Today, despite more than 11,000 cases of Covid-19 and 200 deaths in Kenya, there are those who still say that the virus does not exist - from the gentleman who cleaned my vehicle last week insisting that it is the biggest lie of our time to fellow journalists saying that it is nothing more than a prolonged flu.So when and if we get to the new world, we might not have a clear view of what we just went through. I had a sudden image of the third mate on the Pinta telling his friend the bos'n, "The Atlantic Ocean? Just a myth. I can't believe you've been duped by those elitist cartographers. Spain is actually just over the horizon."
Friday, July 17, 2020
Emergency Mode
I am a sucker for any article in a reputable publication called "We Can't Go Back To Normal: How Will Coronavirus Change the World?" However, I am usually disappointed, and generally, this one also falls into the "wouldn't it be great" category - more specifically, "Here's what I have wanted to happen in the world for a long time. Wouldn't it be great if the pandemic, in some unexplained way, somehow brought this dream to fruition?"
I was struck by this, however: emergency mode. The term came up in a comparison of the pandemic to the crisis of climate change:
I have never wondered why climate change has not triggered emergency mode. It's long-term, abstract, somehow connected with those environmental extremists. It's elitist intellectuals telling us what to do. And it's not going to make any difference here, anyway, as long as here isn't sea level in a third world country.
The problem with the pandemic, so far at least, is that it hasn't triggered emergency mode either. The President keeps forgetting about it; the Senate stalls "emergency" stimulus legislation; nobody's willing to tell anyone to put on a mask. In a bizarre and horrific conflation of the two crises, we are using the pandemic as an excuse to eliminate environmental regulations which are vital in our attempts to adapt to climate change.
Emergency mode means stopping everything and going full out against the danger, putting smaller differences aside in a cooperative effort to keep the river on the other side of the levee. We will certainly not get to the new world in any kind of shape to take on climate change unless we stop everything now and fill sandbags.
I was struck by this, however: emergency mode. The term came up in a comparison of the pandemic to the crisis of climate change:
“We’ve been trying for years to get people out of normal mode and into emergency mode,” said Margaret Klein Salamon, a former psychologist who now heads the advocacy group The Climate Mobilization. “What is possible politically is fundamentally different when lots of people get into emergency mode – when they fundamentally accept that there’s danger, and that if we want to be safe we need to do everything we can.Emergency mode is when the river is rising and the levees are crumbling. Emergency mode is what gets everyone - everyone - up on the levee, filling sandbags.
I have never wondered why climate change has not triggered emergency mode. It's long-term, abstract, somehow connected with those environmental extremists. It's elitist intellectuals telling us what to do. And it's not going to make any difference here, anyway, as long as here isn't sea level in a third world country.
The problem with the pandemic, so far at least, is that it hasn't triggered emergency mode either. The President keeps forgetting about it; the Senate stalls "emergency" stimulus legislation; nobody's willing to tell anyone to put on a mask. In a bizarre and horrific conflation of the two crises, we are using the pandemic as an excuse to eliminate environmental regulations which are vital in our attempts to adapt to climate change.
Emergency mode means stopping everything and going full out against the danger, putting smaller differences aside in a cooperative effort to keep the river on the other side of the levee. We will certainly not get to the new world in any kind of shape to take on climate change unless we stop everything now and fill sandbags.
Transition from Oil
OPEC just can't catch a break.
First it was climate change and its stimulating effect on renewable energy sources that competed with fossil fuels for market share. Then it was the Russia-Saudi oil price war (remember that? only four months ago? It even has its own Wikipedia page). Insanely complex, but oil prices went down. Now - well, we fill the tank on my car about once a month, and Abbey's car hasn't gone anywhere since the pandemic started. Gasoline use has gone off a cliff.
I used to read a lot about "peak oil," the point where all the easily-accessible oil has been pumped out of the ground, and worldwide production levels off, and then starts to decline. We don't hear about this much any more, perhaps because fracking's short-term stimulative impact has taken our mind off of decreasing oil production and rising prices.
But the oil producing states are feeling the pinch. They're not benefiting from the fracking boom, and we're certainly not the only ones with solar panels on our roofs and cars that get 50 mpg. In fact, they are nothing if not realists:
As oil prices continue to be low and go lower, most major Middle Eastern and other oil producing nations are living on savings and cannot meet expenses. The economies of many other nations are dependent on the remittances sent home from their citizens who emigrated to the oil fields and the big cities of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to find good-paying jobs - in some cases, these remittances represent 10% of GDP. Did you know that Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the UAE account for one third of global tourism spending? And so on.
The new world will experience much more instability in one of its most unstable regions, unless the countries involved can figure out how to transition to a non-oil future - fast. Either way, the economic shock waves will travel around the new world for quite some time.
First it was climate change and its stimulating effect on renewable energy sources that competed with fossil fuels for market share. Then it was the Russia-Saudi oil price war (remember that? only four months ago? It even has its own Wikipedia page). Insanely complex, but oil prices went down. Now - well, we fill the tank on my car about once a month, and Abbey's car hasn't gone anywhere since the pandemic started. Gasoline use has gone off a cliff.
I used to read a lot about "peak oil," the point where all the easily-accessible oil has been pumped out of the ground, and worldwide production levels off, and then starts to decline. We don't hear about this much any more, perhaps because fracking's short-term stimulative impact has taken our mind off of decreasing oil production and rising prices.
But the oil producing states are feeling the pinch. They're not benefiting from the fracking boom, and we're certainly not the only ones with solar panels on our roofs and cars that get 50 mpg. In fact, they are nothing if not realists:
Four years ago Muhammad bin Salman, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, produced a plan called "Vision 2030" that aimed to wean his economy off oil. Many of his neighbours have their own versions. But "2030 has become 2020," says a consultant to Prince Muhammad.Wean Saudi Arabia off oil? 2030 has become 2020? There are changes coming - have been coming - to the whole fabric of the Middle East - political, financial, social, cultural - that the pandemic has exacerbated. Changes that, apparently, are already here.
As oil prices continue to be low and go lower, most major Middle Eastern and other oil producing nations are living on savings and cannot meet expenses. The economies of many other nations are dependent on the remittances sent home from their citizens who emigrated to the oil fields and the big cities of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to find good-paying jobs - in some cases, these remittances represent 10% of GDP. Did you know that Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the UAE account for one third of global tourism spending? And so on.
The new world will experience much more instability in one of its most unstable regions, unless the countries involved can figure out how to transition to a non-oil future - fast. Either way, the economic shock waves will travel around the new world for quite some time.
Thursday, July 16, 2020
Dystopian New World
The gap in posting is not due to lack of interest. It's due to bewildered fatigue.
I'm reading and talking and writing about the new world, but it's looking less and less like we'll get there. That's a little hysterical, I know, but that's what it looks like. No one believes in a vaccine in 2020, and no one believes we can settle into a post-pandemic new world until there is a vaccine. Will that be too late?
Every day, my wife and I take a walk around the city park we live next to. Today, after we had listened to a particularly grim and depressing discussion on WAMC radio's Roundtable panel, we walked around the park and talked about the dystopian future which, as time goes on, seems less and less... well, hysterical.
We've been doing this for a long time, "this" being sheltering at home, avoiding the tangible aspects of the outside world, including everything that ordered our lives and got us out of the house; watching the numbers and reading the articles every day. This blog will be three months old next week. After all that, there is not a single clue about the new world resolving itself from the mists of the future.
However, time moves on, and each day contains more and more damage that will have to, one supposes, have an impact on the new world. Abbey spun a hypothetical tale that, for the first time, I found plausible:
Really dangerous and destructive decisions and actions continue to be made by some of our highest level leaders, decisions and actions which guarantee the growth of the virus. The economy and the schools open anyway, and continue to stay open. Vast numbers of Americans, goaded on in part by those same high level leaders, make choices that guarantee the spread of the virus. Eventually, things get bad enough that there is no choice but to shut down again - both the economy and the schools. But this is done with the same disregard for the science and for actual citizens, and the same unfathomable incompetence that we have seen already, and the virus continues to dominate the life of Americans. Rinse and repeat.
Everyone who knows anything about all this has been telling us that opening and then re-closing will be worse than biting the bullet and locking down the virus from the start. This turns out to be true (imagine that!) and what used to be an economy starts grinding to a halt. Workers have to stay home with their kids, and more and more companies, concerned about productivity, forbid their WFH employees to engage in childcare. Countless others lose their jobs entirely, or are furloughed without pay. Government money goes just so far, and that money is more and more authorized only on the condition that larger and larger tax breaks and other advantages be provided to the already-advantaged. Other than that money, none of the vast resources of the Federal government are brought into play.
Eviction freeze programs age out and rents come due. Homelessness increases, and becomes a significant problem for those who have managed to hold on to a place to live. Homelessness is treated as a crime, and homeless individuals as criminals. This takes them on a never-ending spiral downward: they emerge from prison with a record, so find it hard to find work (or somewhere to live); they have fees to pay, but with no job, they're back in prison. And so forth. This is a cycle already evident and repeating itself in our cities; imagine - oh, let's say ten times more homeless individuals, and let's also remember that over one third of them are children.
Those who find themselves still afloat at this point realize that they need protection from those who have not been so lucky. Walls begin to appear around neighborhoods; the police become even more militarized, and less accountable to the public at large. An entirely new kind of wealth inequality emerges, where the difference is a home and a relatively reliable income - or not. And even if you've got money, there are fewer and fewer things to buy, including the things you need.
We've all seen this film before. But tell me - which part is hysterical? Which part couldn't possibly happen, given where we are right now and where we're heading? We haven't even talked about the impact of the chaotic fall and winter of 2020, when, after unsuccessfully attempting to strip Americans of their right to vote, the current Administration destroys as much as possible before they leave.
Maybe this is why I'm seeing fewer and fewer articles speculating about the new world. It's just looking more and more dystopian. We're in a train, and when we look out the window, and see where we're heading...
Is it time to get out and start laying track?
I'm reading and talking and writing about the new world, but it's looking less and less like we'll get there. That's a little hysterical, I know, but that's what it looks like. No one believes in a vaccine in 2020, and no one believes we can settle into a post-pandemic new world until there is a vaccine. Will that be too late?
Every day, my wife and I take a walk around the city park we live next to. Today, after we had listened to a particularly grim and depressing discussion on WAMC radio's Roundtable panel, we walked around the park and talked about the dystopian future which, as time goes on, seems less and less... well, hysterical.
We've been doing this for a long time, "this" being sheltering at home, avoiding the tangible aspects of the outside world, including everything that ordered our lives and got us out of the house; watching the numbers and reading the articles every day. This blog will be three months old next week. After all that, there is not a single clue about the new world resolving itself from the mists of the future.
However, time moves on, and each day contains more and more damage that will have to, one supposes, have an impact on the new world. Abbey spun a hypothetical tale that, for the first time, I found plausible:
Really dangerous and destructive decisions and actions continue to be made by some of our highest level leaders, decisions and actions which guarantee the growth of the virus. The economy and the schools open anyway, and continue to stay open. Vast numbers of Americans, goaded on in part by those same high level leaders, make choices that guarantee the spread of the virus. Eventually, things get bad enough that there is no choice but to shut down again - both the economy and the schools. But this is done with the same disregard for the science and for actual citizens, and the same unfathomable incompetence that we have seen already, and the virus continues to dominate the life of Americans. Rinse and repeat.
Everyone who knows anything about all this has been telling us that opening and then re-closing will be worse than biting the bullet and locking down the virus from the start. This turns out to be true (imagine that!) and what used to be an economy starts grinding to a halt. Workers have to stay home with their kids, and more and more companies, concerned about productivity, forbid their WFH employees to engage in childcare. Countless others lose their jobs entirely, or are furloughed without pay. Government money goes just so far, and that money is more and more authorized only on the condition that larger and larger tax breaks and other advantages be provided to the already-advantaged. Other than that money, none of the vast resources of the Federal government are brought into play.
Eviction freeze programs age out and rents come due. Homelessness increases, and becomes a significant problem for those who have managed to hold on to a place to live. Homelessness is treated as a crime, and homeless individuals as criminals. This takes them on a never-ending spiral downward: they emerge from prison with a record, so find it hard to find work (or somewhere to live); they have fees to pay, but with no job, they're back in prison. And so forth. This is a cycle already evident and repeating itself in our cities; imagine - oh, let's say ten times more homeless individuals, and let's also remember that over one third of them are children.
Those who find themselves still afloat at this point realize that they need protection from those who have not been so lucky. Walls begin to appear around neighborhoods; the police become even more militarized, and less accountable to the public at large. An entirely new kind of wealth inequality emerges, where the difference is a home and a relatively reliable income - or not. And even if you've got money, there are fewer and fewer things to buy, including the things you need.
We've all seen this film before. But tell me - which part is hysterical? Which part couldn't possibly happen, given where we are right now and where we're heading? We haven't even talked about the impact of the chaotic fall and winter of 2020, when, after unsuccessfully attempting to strip Americans of their right to vote, the current Administration destroys as much as possible before they leave.
Maybe this is why I'm seeing fewer and fewer articles speculating about the new world. It's just looking more and more dystopian. We're in a train, and when we look out the window, and see where we're heading...
Is it time to get out and start laying track?
Monday, July 13, 2020
Numbers Can Wait
We all know that I love to quote myself. So here goes:
A couple days earlier, at a briefing involving DeVos, Dr. Deborah Birx and VP Mike Pence, Birx said (after DeVos had repeated her insistence that all schools open full time), "...most children probably won't die. Maybe 0.1%"
Well. That's a lot more than 0.02%. How much is that? Well, it's not clear whether Birx meant 0.1% of all school children, or just 0.1% of children who contracted the disease.
So here's the number that represents 0.1% of the 56.6 million children who will attend elementary, middle and high school this year:
56,600.
But wait - maybe it's just 0.1% of the children who contract the virus. Since we have no idea of what that number is, let's make one up! Some states are reporting a 33% positivity rate; it's much lower in other states. Let's say - 10%. Does that sound right?
5,600.
But wait! Was Birx assuming that schools would take a look at the CDC guidance for opening schools? One would guess that this would be the case, given that she's the Task Force's Coronavirus Response Coordinator and a medical doctor, specializing in immunology, vaccine research and global health. If they did, of course, they would not open full-time, because that would make social distancing impossible.
But Secretary DeVos has been insisting that when schools open in September (or, actually, in August in many states), that students go full time. No social distancing.
What's the number then?
Is it getting a bit ridiculously macabre? One, as a number representing children who die because we opened school too soon, or not wisely, is way to big.
This list of things we don't know about children and coronavirus is extensive, and includes all the important stuff. Numbers can wait. The new world will depend a whole very lot on whether we get this right.
When we're being honest and thoughtful, all conversations about re-opening anything are conversations about how many lives we're willing to sacrifice to achieve the opening goal... How many lives are we willing to sacrifice in order to have some semblance of school?We've found the number, I think. It's a simple number, but getting it was pretty bizarre. When I plugged in early this morning, the aggregators were full of a startling claim put forward in Twitter and Reddit, two highly reliable news sources:
Betsy DeVos says that "only" 0.02% of children will probably die as a result of schools re-opening.I spent all day, on and off, trying to find the source of this unbelievable faux pas. It showed up in a number of more reliable journals, including one for librarians, but Twitter and Reddit were always cited as the source. Finally, I found an explainer, and it turns out that, in an apparently dreadful interview, Secretary of Education DeVos did not say that, but instead, insisted that all public schools reopen full-time in September, without answering any questions about how, or how schools should integrate CDC recommendations.
A couple days earlier, at a briefing involving DeVos, Dr. Deborah Birx and VP Mike Pence, Birx said (after DeVos had repeated her insistence that all schools open full time), "...most children probably won't die. Maybe 0.1%"
Well. That's a lot more than 0.02%. How much is that? Well, it's not clear whether Birx meant 0.1% of all school children, or just 0.1% of children who contracted the disease.
So here's the number that represents 0.1% of the 56.6 million children who will attend elementary, middle and high school this year:
56,600.
But wait - maybe it's just 0.1% of the children who contract the virus. Since we have no idea of what that number is, let's make one up! Some states are reporting a 33% positivity rate; it's much lower in other states. Let's say - 10%. Does that sound right?
5,600.
But wait! Was Birx assuming that schools would take a look at the CDC guidance for opening schools? One would guess that this would be the case, given that she's the Task Force's Coronavirus Response Coordinator and a medical doctor, specializing in immunology, vaccine research and global health. If they did, of course, they would not open full-time, because that would make social distancing impossible.
But Secretary DeVos has been insisting that when schools open in September (or, actually, in August in many states), that students go full time. No social distancing.
What's the number then?
Is it getting a bit ridiculously macabre? One, as a number representing children who die because we opened school too soon, or not wisely, is way to big.
This list of things we don't know about children and coronavirus is extensive, and includes all the important stuff. Numbers can wait. The new world will depend a whole very lot on whether we get this right.
Saturday, July 11, 2020
Get There Healthy
JAMA study of 143 COVID-19 survivors in Italy, two months after onset: "Worsened quality of life was observed among 44.1% of patients." Also: "87.4% reported persistence of at least 1 symptom, particularly fatigue and dyspenea.*" Also: "fatigue (53.1%), dyspnea (43.4%), joint pain, (27.3%) and chest pain (21.7%)."
Nearly half. "Worsened quality of life."
The new world is out there somewhere. Get there healthy.
Don't get it.
* - difficult or labored breathing
Nearly half. "Worsened quality of life."
The new world is out there somewhere. Get there healthy.
Don't get it.
* - difficult or labored breathing
Friday, July 10, 2020
Not Nearly
The questions of whether, and how, to return to school in September are questions which will be answered to no one's satisfaction. It's mid-July, and no one has been able to put together what little we know, add it to what we want, mix in some consideration for personal choices, and come up with anything that doesn't resemble a rickety Rube-Goldberg tower of nonsense.
The debate has raged for the last month or two - it really has been astonishing how heated the discourse has been. There have been two sides - "Kids need to be in school" vs. "We can't keep enough people safe if kids are in school." Given the stakes, which are clearly articulated by both sides, you'd think that rational problem-solving would be universal. But, no. They've been going at it hammer and tongs.
At this point, it seems that most students in the US will be going back to school sometime around the normal start date. They'll be going part-time, for the most part, so we haven't solved the children-home-during-the-workday problem. We haven't come close to solving the how-the-adults-don't-get-the-virus problem, except that the grownups wear masks. We haven't solved the parents/teachers- objecting-to-exposing-their-children/themselves problem. Many colleges are re-opening, without having solved the depending-on-binge-drinkers-to-act-responsibly as the first line of defense problem. We certainly haven't solved the staying-safe-on-the-school-bus problem. And with most municipalities and state under water fiscally, and no Federal help on the horizon, we haven't solved the how-are-we-going-to-pay-for-all-this problem.
And so on.
From what I can tell - and I've read a mountain of stuff so you don't have to - school planners have thrown together masks (at least for the adults) and social distancing and split schedules and have hoped that everything turns out OK. Which puts public education about in the same place as professional sports. There's a plan, but it depends a lot on wishful thinking.
Part of the problem is that we don't know what we need to know. Just today CNN laid out "What We Know About Coronavirus Risks to School Age Children." What we know is... not much. Hardly anything. Go read it and see if you can take away anything really useful. And this is actually a pretty faithful summary of everything we've been reading for months.
All this is to say that I'm not sure things will work out the way the planners are laying out for us. Here in early July, positive cases are setting new records, and deaths are just beginning to rise. Unless things turn around quickly, we'll be reassessing our decisions about the structure of school openings, mostly because that "wishful thinking" component will begin to melt away.
So it's not nearly time for The Big One, the post about schools, learning and children in the new world. Not nearly.
The debate has raged for the last month or two - it really has been astonishing how heated the discourse has been. There have been two sides - "Kids need to be in school" vs. "We can't keep enough people safe if kids are in school." Given the stakes, which are clearly articulated by both sides, you'd think that rational problem-solving would be universal. But, no. They've been going at it hammer and tongs.
At this point, it seems that most students in the US will be going back to school sometime around the normal start date. They'll be going part-time, for the most part, so we haven't solved the children-home-during-the-workday problem. We haven't come close to solving the how-the-adults-don't-get-the-virus problem, except that the grownups wear masks. We haven't solved the parents/teachers- objecting-to-exposing-their-children/themselves problem. Many colleges are re-opening, without having solved the depending-on-binge-drinkers-to-act-responsibly as the first line of defense problem. We certainly haven't solved the staying-safe-on-the-school-bus problem. And with most municipalities and state under water fiscally, and no Federal help on the horizon, we haven't solved the how-are-we-going-to-pay-for-all-this problem.
And so on.
From what I can tell - and I've read a mountain of stuff so you don't have to - school planners have thrown together masks (at least for the adults) and social distancing and split schedules and have hoped that everything turns out OK. Which puts public education about in the same place as professional sports. There's a plan, but it depends a lot on wishful thinking.
Part of the problem is that we don't know what we need to know. Just today CNN laid out "What We Know About Coronavirus Risks to School Age Children." What we know is... not much. Hardly anything. Go read it and see if you can take away anything really useful. And this is actually a pretty faithful summary of everything we've been reading for months.
All this is to say that I'm not sure things will work out the way the planners are laying out for us. Here in early July, positive cases are setting new records, and deaths are just beginning to rise. Unless things turn around quickly, we'll be reassessing our decisions about the structure of school openings, mostly because that "wishful thinking" component will begin to melt away.
So it's not nearly time for The Big One, the post about schools, learning and children in the new world. Not nearly.
Stigmata
I really, really try to avoid politics here, partially because it's a respite from my politics-infused life, and partly because politics is not what we do here.
So I'm not going to talk politics. However, I feel I must say this: in this post, I will make a prediction about how things work. It is a prediction that is being made by every professional and academic who knows anything about the topic. It's a hard prediction to process, however, and it is being strongly opposed by political factions whose world-view will be damaged when it comes true. They have responded by calling this prediction "political." If politics is the last refuge of scoundrels, then this defense has always been the last refuge of scoundrel politicians. It is not political, it is true. I don't like it, the experts who assert it don't like it, no one likes it. But it's true.
Perhaps we will let Inigo Montoya 'splain it:
In this case, the complex but right answer is also painful and damaging in many ways. Here it is:
We will not reopen the economy successfully until we have firm control of the spread of the virus. Controlling the spread of the virus will require extreme measures which will severely damage the economy in the short term.
Sounds simple, no? Certainly, the reasons that it is true are complex and require some willingness to look at economics and epidemiology in a politics-free way. But the new world - both when we get there, and what we find when we do - will depend on us understanding this simple truth.
Right now, in the US at least, we are not acting as if this is true. We're turning left, and maybe you can imagine a cliff just out of the frame in that direction.
What is more human than doing the wrong thing to avoid short term pain? The new world will bear the stigmata of the decisions we are making today.
Thursday, July 9, 2020
Acceptable Sacrifices
You can't swing a cat these days without smacking into three arguments about opening schools. Not surprising, since September is coming very quickly, and there's a lot of thinking, talking, and especially working to be done.
I've been thinking and reading and listening and it's clear that there's still no good answer. But this post is just a distraction, a way of avoiding The Big One about school openings. It's about a tiny piece of a conversation I came across somewhere a couple of weeks ago, which I keep coming back to when I think of the more meta aspects of the school opening issue.
According to the CDC, about 700 American children aged 14 and under drown each year. About 3,500 go to the emergency room for non-fatal incidents.
So: Why do we let children swim?
Don't worry, this is not (entirely) a serious question - it's a thought experiment. We let children swim because, given the level of safety we have established, it is worth 700 lives and 3,500 injuries to keep American kids swimming.
When we're being honest and thoughtful, all conversations about re-opening anything are conversations about how many lives we're willing to sacrifice to achieve the opening goal. Because the only way to get that number to zero is to lock everybody down tighter than we can imagine.
So the question behind all of these conversations about reopening schools is: How many lives are we willing to sacrifice in order to have some semblance of school?
Watch out for that cat...
I've been thinking and reading and listening and it's clear that there's still no good answer. But this post is just a distraction, a way of avoiding The Big One about school openings. It's about a tiny piece of a conversation I came across somewhere a couple of weeks ago, which I keep coming back to when I think of the more meta aspects of the school opening issue.
According to the CDC, about 700 American children aged 14 and under drown each year. About 3,500 go to the emergency room for non-fatal incidents.
So: Why do we let children swim?
Don't worry, this is not (entirely) a serious question - it's a thought experiment. We let children swim because, given the level of safety we have established, it is worth 700 lives and 3,500 injuries to keep American kids swimming.
When we're being honest and thoughtful, all conversations about re-opening anything are conversations about how many lives we're willing to sacrifice to achieve the opening goal. Because the only way to get that number to zero is to lock everybody down tighter than we can imagine.
So the question behind all of these conversations about reopening schools is: How many lives are we willing to sacrifice in order to have some semblance of school?
Watch out for that cat...
Tuesday, July 7, 2020
Don't Get It
There has been a lot of talk - and writing - about getting the virus, getting over it, and getting on with your life. Especially if you're young and healthy. The conventional wisdom has flirted with the idea of herd immunity - everyone gets it; everyone's then immune; problem solved. This whole approach is a staggeringly bad idea, even thought it has been advocated by a wide variety of people, from just about every young adult on the beach to Sweden to the Lieutenant Governor of Texas.
Sometime tonight or tomorrow, the three millionth American case of COVID-19 will be registered. We all know that the real number is much higher. Most will survive. If, say, one percent of these survivors experience serious side effects of the kind that we are beginning to learn about, that's 30,000+ Americans with major permanent health impairments. If it's two or three percent... well, you can do the math.*
Worldwide, nearly 11 million humans have contracted the virus. And we're in, maybe, the third inning. A long way to go.
UPDATE - 7/9/20 - And as we learn more, it gets worse: "COVID-19 can lead to severe neurological complications, including inflammation, psychosis, and delerium."
Psychosis? Don't get it.
That's all off-topic here, where we talk about the new world. But the reason why pursuing herd immunity, or encouraging healthy young people to get it and get on with their lives, is a staggeringly bad idea, is because, unlike the flu viruses we're used to, COVID-19 comes with permanent side effects which will have an impact on the lives of individuals, and on our healthcare system, for the rest of the century. In addition, a new Spanish study is suggesting that this virus is... um... immune to herd immunity.
"The Guardian" has just published a chilling overview of what to expect if you contract this virus. You might want to just go read it all. And if you still feel like it's OK to get the virus and move on, you'll have the opportunity to join an online COVID-19 support group to help you manage your symptoms into the foreseeable future.
There is, at this point, little comprehensive research or record-keeping regarding the range of side effects, but there is enough anecdotal evidence to suggest strongly that you'd maybe want to think twice before relaxing quarantine. Evidence that survivors are experiencing fatigue, shortness of breath, and further respiratory distress and illness. In an early study of survivors in Wuhan, half the subjects "had lung function below the normal range." Half. Recently, a survivor needed a double lung transplant to replace lungs devastated by the disease. Survivors of all ages are experiencing minor and major strokes - even some who were asymptomatic.
And that's just the blood and lungs. There are reports of damage to a variety of organs, including the brain, the liver and the kidneys. Stories of cognitive impairment - memory issues, delirium, depression - are beginning to emerge. There's a lot this virus can do to you, even if you survive.
And then - if you've spent some time in the ICU on a ventilator, as Boris Johnson and our local State Senator did - there's Post Intensive Care Syndrome (PICS). Just being in the ICU and on a ventilator can leave you with another list of both temporary and permanent impairments:
- Physical limitations. After critical illness, some people are unable to return to work or to care for themselves without help.
- Cognitive impairment. People who survive critical illness may notice new problems with memory and complex decision making.
- Mental health issues. After an ICU stay, people are at risk for Post-Traumatic Stress symptoms, depression and anxiety as well as poor sleep.
- Underlying medical conditions. Chronic medical problems may be diagnosed while in the hospital or may be exacerbated by critical illness
Sometime tonight or tomorrow, the three millionth American case of COVID-19 will be registered. We all know that the real number is much higher. Most will survive. If, say, one percent of these survivors experience serious side effects of the kind that we are beginning to learn about, that's 30,000+ Americans with major permanent health impairments. If it's two or three percent... well, you can do the math.*
Worldwide, nearly 11 million humans have contracted the virus. And we're in, maybe, the third inning. A long way to go.
So - don't get it.
* - Remember the Wuhan study? Half the survivors had impaired lung function?
UPDATE - 7/9/20 - And as we learn more, it gets worse: "COVID-19 can lead to severe neurological complications, including inflammation, psychosis, and delerium."
Psychosis? Don't get it.
Why We Quarantine
My wife, our younger son and I spent a nice long Independence Day weekend at the home of our older son and daughter-in-law, admiring our baby granddaughter and helping celebrate her first birthday, which is on the day (which we don't celebrate) when the Continental Congress actually passed the Declaration of Independence. No writing while we were there, just making silly faces at the baby. She's at the point where she tries to copy them, and it is a genuine hoot. The baby's maternal grandparents came down for the day, and we all had a really nice time, almost exactly like everyone had done in the before.
All of us had observed a pretty strict quarantine for this exact reason: so we could all hang out together on a nice day and enjoy each others' company without worrying about anything pandemic. Except for each other, none of us has purposely been within six feet of another human being since early March, and have not been indoors with other people (except each other) except for careful grocery runs.
Of course, there was another reason why we took care to quarantine carefully. None of us wants to get the virus. Any of us, even the young, healthy ones. It's just not an option.
Will we make it safely to the new world? It's looking more and more like we are in for a very long haul. Stay tuned.
All of us had observed a pretty strict quarantine for this exact reason: so we could all hang out together on a nice day and enjoy each others' company without worrying about anything pandemic. Except for each other, none of us has purposely been within six feet of another human being since early March, and have not been indoors with other people (except each other) except for careful grocery runs.
Of course, there was another reason why we took care to quarantine carefully. None of us wants to get the virus. Any of us, even the young, healthy ones. It's just not an option.
Will we make it safely to the new world? It's looking more and more like we are in for a very long haul. Stay tuned.
Wednesday, July 1, 2020
Shaggy New World
I got my hair cut today, for the first time since before. It was a nice day and Abbey cut it out on the deck. She's been cutting my hair for maybe thirty years. Always looks great.
As various regions and states open back up, guys are starting to go to barbershops again, for the first time in maybe four months. I am reminded of a piece on NPR from a few weeks ago. I couldn't find it in the NPR archives, so you'll have to take my word for it.
A barber was talking about re-opening his shop and getting back to shaving and haircuts (which are no longer two bits). Most of his customers' hair was probably longer than it had ever been, guys who had been getting haircuts every two weeks for their whole lives.
Some of his customers had discovered that this was not a bad thing. "It turns out I like it longer," they'd say. "Just trim it a little, clean it up."
All over the world, guys* are, for the first time, getting to experiment with longer hair. Many will keep it. In the new world, hair will be longer.
* - I have no idea how this plays out for women in hair salons.
Emerson, DC
I got my weekly column from Garrison Keillor in the e-mail today. He wants to rename Washington DC. He wants to name it after Ralph Waldo Emerson, the New England transcendental thinker and essayist who had such an influence on Henry David Thoreau.
"Bad times have a scientific value," Emerson wrote a long time ago. "These are occasions a good learner would not miss... This time, like all times, is a very good one if we but know what to do with it."
Keillor says, "This year, we have seen the worst. Good. Now we know what it is. Now we can rise above it and join forces and work for what should be - equality, justice, prosperity and good sense."
In case you were wondering, this kind of sums up the whole point of this blog.
"Bad times have a scientific value," Emerson wrote a long time ago. "These are occasions a good learner would not miss... This time, like all times, is a very good one if we but know what to do with it."
Keillor says, "This year, we have seen the worst. Good. Now we know what it is. Now we can rise above it and join forces and work for what should be - equality, justice, prosperity and good sense."
In case you were wondering, this kind of sums up the whole point of this blog.
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